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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10676 ***
+
+
+
+
+                           THE REIGN OF GREED
+
+                     A Complete English Version of
+                 El Filibusterismo from the Spanish of
+
+                               José Rizal
+
+                                   By
+
+                           Charles Derbyshire
+
+
+                                 Manila
+                      Philippine Education Company
+                                  1912
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
+
+
+El Filibusterismo, the second of José Rizal’s novels of Philippine
+life, is a story of the last days of the Spanish régime in the
+Philippines. Under the name of The Reign of Greed it is for the first
+time translated into English. Written some four or five years after
+Noli Me Tangere, the book represents Rizal’s more mature judgment on
+political and social conditions in the islands, and in its graver and
+less hopeful tone reflects the disappointments and discouragements
+which he had encountered in his efforts to lead the way to reform.
+Rizal’s dedication to the first edition is of special interest, as the
+writing of it was one of the grounds of accusation against him when he
+was condemned to death in 1896. It reads:
+
+
+    “To the memory of the priests, Don Mariano Gomez (85 years old),
+    Don José Burgos (30 years old), and Don Jacinto Zamora (35 years
+    old). Executed in Bagumbayan Field on the 28th of February, 1872.
+
+    “The Church, by refusing to degrade you, has placed in doubt the
+    crime that has been imputed to you; the Government, by surrounding
+    your trials with mystery and shadows, causes the belief that there
+    was some error, committed in fatal moments; and all the
+    Philippines, by worshiping your memory and calling you martyrs, in
+    no sense recognizes your culpability. In so far, therefore, as your
+    complicity in the Cavite mutiny is not clearly proved, as you may
+    or may not have been patriots, and as you may or may not have
+    cherished sentiments for justice and for liberty, I have the right
+    to dedicate my work to you as victims of the evil which I undertake
+    to combat. And while we await expectantly upon Spain some day to
+    restore your good name and cease to be answerable for your death,
+    let these pages serve as a tardy wreath of dried leaves over your
+    unknown tombs, and let it be understood that every one who without
+    clear proofs attacks your memory stains his hands in your blood!
+
+        J. Rizal.”
+
+
+A brief recapitulation of the story in Noli Me Tangere (The Social
+Cancer) is essential to an understanding of such plot as there is in
+the present work, which the author called a “continuation” of the first
+story.
+
+Juan Crisostomo Ibarra is a young Filipino, who, after studying for
+seven years in Europe, returns to his native land to find that his
+father, a wealthy landowner, has died in prison as the result of a
+quarrel with the parish curate, a Franciscan friar named Padre Damaso.
+Ibarra is engaged to a beautiful and accomplished girl, Maria Clara,
+the supposed daughter and only child of the rich Don Santiago de los
+Santos, commonly known as “Capitan Tiago,” a typical Filipino cacique,
+the predominant character fostered by the friar régime.
+
+Ibarra resolves to forego all quarrels and to work for the betterment
+of his people. To show his good intentions, he seeks to establish, at
+his own expense, a public school in his native town. He meets with
+ostensible support from all, especially Padre Damaso’s successor, a
+young and gloomy Franciscan named Padre Salvi, for whom Maria Clara
+confesses to an instinctive dread.
+
+At the laying of the corner-stone for the new schoolhouse a suspicious
+accident, apparently aimed at Ibarra’s life, occurs, but the
+festivities proceed until the dinner, where Ibarra is grossly and
+wantonly insulted over the memory of his father by Fray Damaso. The
+young man loses control of himself and is about to kill the friar, who
+is saved by the intervention of Maria Clara.
+
+Ibarra is excommunicated, and Capitan Tiago, through his fear of the
+friars, is forced to break the engagement and agree to the marriage of
+Maria Clara with a young and inoffensive Spaniard provided by Padre
+Damaso. Obedient to her reputed father’s command and influenced by her
+mysterious dread of Padre Salvi, Maria Clara consents to this
+arrangement, but becomes seriously ill, only to be saved by medicines
+sent secretly by Ibarra and clandestinely administered by a girl
+friend.
+
+Ibarra succeeds in having the excommunication removed, but before he
+can explain matters an uprising against the Civil Guard is secretly
+brought about through agents of Padre Salvi, and the leadership is
+ascribed to Ibarra to ruin him. He is warned by a mysterious friend, an
+outlaw called Elias, whose life he had accidentally saved; but desiring
+first to see Maria Clara, he refuses to make his escape, and when the
+outbreak occurs he is arrested as the instigator of it and thrown into
+prison in Manila.
+
+On the evening when Capitan Tiago gives a ball in his Manila house to
+celebrate his supposed daughter’s engagement, Ibarra makes his escape
+from prison and succeeds in seeing Maria Clara alone. He begins to
+reproach her because it is a letter written to her before he went to
+Europe which forms the basis of the charge against him, but she clears
+herself of treachery to him. The letter had been secured from her by
+false representations and in exchange for two others written by her
+mother just before her birth, which prove that Padre Damaso is her real
+father. These letters had been accidentally discovered in the convento
+by Padre Salvi, who made use of them to intimidate the girl and get
+possession of Ibarra’s letter, from which he forged others to
+incriminate the young man. She tells him that she will marry the young
+Spaniard, sacrificing herself thus to save her mother’s name and
+Capitan Tiago’s honor and to prevent a public scandal, but that she
+will always remain true to him.
+
+Ibarra’s escape had been effected by Elias, who conveys him in a banka
+up the Pasig to the Lake, where they are so closely beset by the Civil
+Guard that Elias leaps into the water and draws the pursuers away from
+the boat, in which Ibarra lies concealed.
+
+On Christmas Eve, at the tomb of the Ibarras in a gloomy wood, Elias
+appears, wounded and dying, to find there a boy named Basilio beside
+the corpse of his mother, a poor woman who had been driven to insanity
+by her husband’s neglect and abuses on the part of the Civil Guard, her
+younger son having disappeared some time before in the convento, where
+he was a sacristan. Basilio, who is ignorant of Elias’s identity, helps
+him to build a funeral pyre, on which his corpse and the madwoman’s are
+to be burned.
+
+Upon learning of the reported death of Ibarra in the chase on the Lake,
+Maria Clara becomes disconsolate and begs her supposed godfather, Fray
+Damaso, to put her in a nunnery. Unconscious of her knowledge of their
+true relationship, the friar breaks down and confesses that all the
+trouble he has stirred up with the Ibarras has been to prevent her from
+marrying a native, which would condemn her and her children to the
+oppressed and enslaved class. He finally yields to her entreaties and
+she enters the nunnery of St. Clara, to which Padre Salvi is soon
+assigned in a ministerial capacity.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+        O masters, lords, and rulers in all lands,
+        Is this the handiwork you give to God,
+        This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?
+        How will you ever straighten up this shape-;
+        Touch it again with immortality;
+        Give back the upward looking and the light;
+        Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
+        Make right the immemorial infamies,
+        Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?
+
+        O masters, lords, and rulers in all lands,
+        How will the future reckon with this man?
+        How answer his brute question in that hour
+        When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
+        How will it be with kingdoms and with kings—
+        With those who shaped him to the thing he is—
+        When this dumb terror shall reply to God,
+        After the silence of the centuries?
+
+                                                Edwin Markham
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+        I.         On the Upper Deck
+        II.        On the Lower Deck
+        III.       Legends
+        IV.        Cabesang Tales
+        V.         A Cochero’s Christmas Eve
+        VI.        Basilio
+        VII.       Simoun
+        VIII.      Merry Christmas
+        IX.        Pilates
+        X.         Wealth and Want
+        XI.        Los Baños
+        XII.       Placido Penitente
+        XIII.      The Class in Physics
+        XIV.       In the House of the Students
+        XV.        Señor Pasta
+        XVI.       The Tribulations of a Chinese
+        XVII.      The Quiapo Pair
+        XVIII.     Legerdemain
+        XIX.       The Fuse
+        XX.        The Arbiter
+        XXI.       Manila Types
+        XXII.      The Performance
+        XXIII.     A Corpse
+        XXIV.      Dreams
+        XXV.       Smiles and Tears
+        XXVI.      Pasquinades
+        XXVII.     The Friar and the Filipino
+        XXVIII.    Tatakut
+        XXIX.      Exit Capitan Tiago
+        XXX.       Juli
+        XXXI.      The High Official
+        XXXII.     Effect of the Pasquinades
+        XXXIII.    La Ultima Razón
+        XXXIV.     The Wedding
+        XXXV.      The Fiesta
+        XXXVI.     Ben-Zayb’s Afflictions
+        XXXVII.    The Mystery
+        XXXVIII.   Fatality
+        XXXIX.     Conclusion
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+ON THE UPPER DECK
+
+                                                     Sic itur ad astra.
+
+
+One morning in December the steamer Tabo was laboriously ascending the
+tortuous course of the Pasig, carrying a large crowd of passengers
+toward the province of La Laguna. She was a heavily built steamer,
+almost round, like the tabú from which she derived her name, quite
+dirty in spite of her pretensions to whiteness, majestic and grave from
+her leisurely motion. Altogether, she was held in great affection in
+that region, perhaps from her Tagalog name, or from the fact that she
+bore the characteristic impress of things in the country, representing
+something like a triumph over progress, a steamer that was not a
+steamer at all, an organism, stolid, imperfect yet unimpeachable,
+which, when it wished to pose as being rankly progressive, proudly
+contented itself with putting on a fresh coat of paint. Indeed, the
+happy steamer was genuinely Filipino! If a person were only reasonably
+considerate, she might even have been taken for the Ship of State,
+constructed, as she had been, under the inspection of Reverendos and
+Ilustrísimos....
+
+Bathed in the sunlight of a morning that made the waters of the river
+sparkle and the breezes rustle in the bending bamboo on its banks,
+there she goes with her white silhouette throwing out great clouds of
+smoke—the Ship of State, so the joke runs, also has the vice of
+smoking! The whistle shrieks at every moment, hoarse and commanding
+like a tyrant who would rule by shouting, so that no one on board can
+hear his own thoughts. She menaces everything she meets: now she looks
+as though she would grind to bits the salambaw, insecure fishing
+apparatus which in their movements resemble skeletons of giants
+saluting an antediluvian tortoise; now she speeds straight toward the
+clumps of bamboo or against the amphibian structures, karihan, or
+wayside lunch-stands, which, amid gumamelas and other flowers, look
+like indecisive bathers who with their feet already in the water cannot
+bring themselves to make the final plunge; at times, following a sort
+of channel marked out in the river by tree-trunks, she moves along with
+a satisfied air, except when a sudden shock disturbs the passengers and
+throws them off their balance, all the result of a collision with a
+sand-bar which no one dreamed was there.
+
+Moreover, if the comparison with the Ship of State is not yet complete,
+note the arrangement of the passengers. On the lower deck appear brown
+faces and black heads, types of Indians, [1] Chinese, and mestizos,
+wedged in between bales of merchandise and boxes, while there on the
+upper deck, beneath an awning that protects them from the sun, are
+seated in comfortable chairs a few passengers dressed in the fashion of
+Europeans, friars, and government clerks, each with his puro cigar, and
+gazing at the landscape apparently without heeding the efforts of the
+captain and the sailors to overcome the obstacles in the river.
+
+The captain was a man of kindly aspect, well along in years, an old
+sailor who in his youth had plunged into far vaster seas, but who now
+in his age had to exercise much greater attention, care, and vigilance
+to avoid dangers of a trivial character. And they were the same for
+each day: the same sand-bars, the same hulk of unwieldy steamer wedged
+into the same curves, like a corpulent dame in a jammed throng. So, at
+each moment, the good man had to stop, to back up, to go forward at
+half speed, sending—now to port, now to starboard—the five sailors
+equipped with long bamboo poles to give force to the turn the rudder
+had suggested. He was like a veteran who, after leading men through
+hazardous campaigns, had in his age become the tutor of a capricious,
+disobedient, and lazy boy.
+
+Doña Victorina, the only lady seated in the European group, could say
+whether the Tabo was not lazy, disobedient, and capricious—Doña
+Victorina, who, nervous as ever, was hurling invectives against the
+cascos, bankas, rafts of coconuts, the Indians paddling about, and even
+the washerwomen and bathers, who fretted her with their mirth and
+chatter. Yes, the Tabo would move along very well if there were no
+Indians in the river, no Indians in the country, yes, if there were not
+a single Indian in the world—regardless of the fact that the helmsmen
+were Indians, the sailors Indians, Indians the engineers, Indians
+ninety-nine per cent, of the passengers, and she herself also an Indian
+if the rouge were scratched off and her pretentious gown removed. That
+morning Doña Victorina was more irritated than usual because the
+members of the group took very little notice of her, reason for which
+was not lacking; for just consider—there could be found three friars,
+convinced that the world would move backwards the very day they should
+take a single step to the right; an indefatigable Don Custodio who was
+sleeping peacefully, satisfied with his projects; a prolific writer
+like Ben-Zayb (anagram of Ibañez), who believed that the people of
+Manila thought because he, Ben-Zayb, was a thinker; a canon like Padre
+Irene, who added luster to the clergy with his rubicund face, carefully
+shaven, from which towered a beautiful Jewish nose, and his silken
+cassock of neat cut and small buttons; and a wealthy jeweler like
+Simoun, who was reputed to be the adviser and inspirer of all the acts
+of his Excellency, the Captain-General—just consider the presence there
+of these pillars sine quibus non of the country, seated there in
+agreeable discourse, showing little sympathy for a renegade Filipina
+who dyed her hair red! Now wasn’t this enough to exhaust the patience
+of a female Job—a sobriquet Doña Victorina always applied to herself
+when put out with any one!
+
+The ill-humor of the señora increased every time the captain shouted
+“Port,” “Starboard” to the sailors, who then hastily seized their poles
+and thrust them against the banks, thus with the strength of their legs
+and shoulders preventing the steamer from shoving its hull ashore at
+that particular point. Seen under these circumstances the Ship of State
+might be said to have been converted from a tortoise into a crab every
+time any danger threatened.
+
+“But, captain, why don’t your stupid steersmen go in that direction?”
+asked the lady with great indignation.
+
+“Because it’s very shallow in the other, señora,” answered the captain,
+deliberately, slowly winking one eye, a little habit which he had
+cultivated as if to say to his words on their way out, “Slowly,
+slowly!”
+
+“Half speed! Botheration, half speed!” protested Doña Victorina
+disdainfully. “Why not full?”
+
+“Because we should then be traveling over those ricefields, señora,”
+replied the imperturbable captain, pursing his lips to indicate the
+cultivated fields and indulging in two circumspect winks.
+
+This Doña Victorina was well known in the country for her caprices and
+extravagances. She was often seen in society, where she was tolerated
+whenever she appeared in the company of her niece, Paulita Gomez, a
+very beautiful and wealthy orphan, to whom she was a kind of guardian.
+At a rather advanced age she had married a poor wretch named Don
+Tiburcio de Espadaña, and at the time we now see her, carried upon
+herself fifteen years of wedded life, false frizzes, and a
+half-European costume—for her whole ambition had been to Europeanize
+herself, with the result that from the ill-omened day of her wedding
+she had gradually, thanks to her criminal attempts, succeeded in so
+transforming herself that at the present time Quatrefages and Virchow
+together could not have told where to classify her among the known
+races.
+
+Her husband, who had borne all her impositions with the resignation of
+a fakir through so many years of married life, at last on one luckless
+day had had his bad half-hour and administered to her a superb whack
+with his crutch. The surprise of Madam Job at such an inconsistency of
+character made her insensible to the immediate effects, and only after
+she had recovered from her astonishment and her husband had fled did
+she take notice of the pain, then remaining in bed for several days, to
+the great delight of Paulita, who was very fond of joking and laughing
+at her aunt. As for her husband, horrified at the impiety of what
+appeared to him to be a terrific parricide, he took to flight, pursued
+by the matrimonial furies (two curs and a parrot), with all the speed
+his lameness permitted, climbed into the first carriage he encountered,
+jumped into the first banka he saw on the river, and, a Philippine
+Ulysses, began to wander from town to town, from province to province,
+from island to island, pursued and persecuted by his bespectacled
+Calypso, who bored every one that had the misfortune to travel in her
+company. She had received a report of his being in the province of La
+Laguna, concealed in one of the towns, so thither she was bound to
+seduce him back with her dyed frizzes.
+
+Her fellow travelers had taken measures of defense by keeping up among
+themselves a lively conversation on any topic whatsoever. At that
+moment the windings and turnings of the river led them to talk about
+straightening the channel and, as a matter of course, about the port
+works. Ben-Zayb, the journalist with the countenance of a friar, was
+disputing with a young friar who in turn had the countenance of an
+artilleryman. Both were shouting, gesticulating, waving their arms,
+spreading out their hands, stamping their feet, talking of levels,
+fish-corrals, the San Mateo River, [2] of cascos, of Indians, and so
+on, to the great satisfaction of their listeners and the undisguised
+disgust of an elderly Franciscan, remarkably thin and withered, and a
+handsome Dominican about whose lips flitted constantly a scornful
+smile.
+
+The thin Franciscan, understanding the Dominican’s smile, decided to
+intervene and stop the argument. He was undoubtedly respected, for with
+a wave of his hand he cut short the speech of both at the moment when
+the friar-artilleryman was talking about experience and the
+journalist-friar about scientists.
+
+“Scientists, Ben-Zayb—do you know what they are?” asked the Franciscan
+in a hollow voice, scarcely stirring in his seat and making only a
+faint gesture with his skinny hand. “Here you have in the province a
+bridge, constructed by a brother of ours, which was not completed
+because the scientists, relying on their theories, condemned it as weak
+and scarcely safe—yet look, it is the bridge that has withstood all the
+floods and earthquakes!” [3]
+
+“That’s it, puñales, that very thing, that was exactly what I was going
+to say!” exclaimed the friar-artilleryman, thumping his fists down on
+the arms of his bamboo chair. “That’s it, that bridge and the
+scientists! That was just what I was going to mention, Padre
+Salvi—puñales!”
+
+Ben-Zayb remained silent, half smiling, either out of respect or
+because he really did not know what to reply, and yet his was the only
+thinking head in the Philippines! Padre Irene nodded his approval as he
+rubbed his long nose.
+
+Padre Salvi, the thin and withered cleric, appeared to be satisfied
+with such submissiveness and went on in the midst of the silence: “But
+this does not mean that you may not be as near right as Padre Camorra”
+(the friar-artilleryman). “The trouble is in the lake—”
+
+“The fact is there isn’t a single decent lake in this country,”
+interrupted Doña Victorina, highly indignant, and getting ready for a
+return to the assault upon the citadel.
+
+The besieged gazed at one another in terror, but with the promptitude
+of a general, the jeweler Simoun rushed in to the rescue. “The remedy
+is very simple,” he said in a strange accent, a mixture of English and
+South American. “And I really don’t understand why it hasn’t occurred
+to somebody.”
+
+All turned to give him careful attention, even the Dominican. The
+jeweler was a tall, meager, nervous man, very dark, dressed in the
+English fashion and wearing a pith helmet. Remarkable about him was his
+long white hair contrasted with a sparse black beard, indicating a
+mestizo origin. To avoid the glare of the sun he wore constantly a pair
+of enormous blue goggles, which completely hid his eyes and a portion
+of his cheeks, thus giving him the aspect of a blind or weak-sighted
+person. He was standing with his legs apart as if to maintain his
+balance, with his hands thrust into the pockets of his coat.
+
+“The remedy is very simple,” he repeated, “and wouldn’t cost a cuarto.”
+
+The attention now redoubled, for it was whispered in Manila that this
+man controlled the Captain-General, and all saw the remedy in process
+of execution. Even Don Custodio himself turned to listen.
+
+“Dig a canal straight from the source to the mouth of the river,
+passing through Manila; that is, make a new river-channel and fill up
+the old Pasig. That would save land, shorten communication, and prevent
+the formation of sandbars.”
+
+The project left all his hearers astounded, accustomed as they were to
+palliative measures.
+
+“It’s a Yankee plan!” observed Ben-Zayb, to ingratiate himself with
+Simoun, who had spent a long time in North America.
+
+All considered the plan wonderful and so indicated by the movements of
+their heads. Only Don Custodio, the liberal Don Custodio, owing to his
+independent position and his high offices, thought it his duty to
+attack a project that did not emanate from himself—that was a
+usurpation! He coughed, stroked the ends of his mustache, and with a
+voice as important as though he were at a formal session of the
+Ayuntamiento, said, “Excuse me, Señor Simoun, my respected friend, if I
+should say that I am not of your opinion. It would cost a great deal of
+money and might perhaps destroy some towns.”
+
+“Then destroy them!” rejoined Simoun coldly.
+
+“And the money to pay the laborers?”
+
+“Don’t pay them! Use the prisoners and convicts!”
+
+“But there aren’t enough, Señor Simoun!”
+
+“Then, if there aren’t enough, let all the villagers, the old men, the
+youths, the boys, work. Instead of the fifteen days of obligatory
+service, let them work three, four, five months for the State, with the
+additional obligation that each one provide his own food and tools.”
+
+The startled Don Custodio turned his head to see if there was any
+Indian within ear-shot, but fortunately those nearby were rustics, and
+the two helmsmen seemed to be very much occupied with the windings of
+the river.
+
+“But, Señor Simoun—”
+
+“Don’t fool yourself, Don Custodio,” continued Simoun dryly, “only in
+this way are great enterprises carried out with small means. Thus were
+constructed the Pyramids, Lake Moeris, and the Colosseum in Rome.
+Entire provinces came in from the desert, bringing their tubers to feed
+on. Old men, youths, and boys labored in transporting stones, hewing
+them, and carrying them on their shoulders under the direction of the
+official lash, and afterwards, the survivors returned to their homes or
+perished in the sands of the desert. Then came other provinces, then
+others, succeeding one another in the work during years. Thus the task
+was finished, and now we admire them, we travel, we go to Egypt and to
+Home, we extol the Pharaohs and the Antonines. Don’t fool yourself—the
+dead remain dead, and might only is considered right by posterity.”
+
+“But, Señor Simoun, such measures might provoke uprisings,” objected
+Don Custodio, rather uneasy over the turn the affair had taken.
+
+“Uprisings, ha, ha! Did the Egyptian people ever rebel, I wonder? Did
+the Jewish prisoners rebel against the pious Titus? Man, I thought you
+were better informed in history!”
+
+Clearly Simoun was either very presumptuous or disregarded
+conventionalities! To say to Don Custodio’s face that he did not know
+history! It was enough to make any one lose his temper! So it seemed,
+for Don Custodio forgot himself and retorted, “But the fact is that
+you’re not among Egyptians or Jews!”
+
+“And these people have rebelled more than once,” added the Dominican,
+somewhat timidly. “In the times when they were forced to transport
+heavy timbers for the construction of ships, if it hadn’t been for the
+clerics—”
+
+“Those times are far away,” answered Simoun, with a laugh even drier
+than usual. “These islands will never again rebel, no matter how much
+work and taxes they have. Haven’t you lauded to me, Padre Salvi,” he
+added, turning to the Franciscan, “the house and hospital at Los Baños,
+where his Excellency is at present?”
+
+Padre Salvi gave a nod and looked up, evading the question.
+
+“Well, didn’t you tell me that both buildings were constructed by
+forcing the people to work on them under the whip of a lay-brother?
+Perhaps that wonderful bridge was built in the same way. Now tell me,
+did these people rebel?”
+
+“The fact is—they have rebelled before,” replied the Dominican, “and ab
+actu ad posse valet illatio!”
+
+“No, no, nothing of the kind,” continued Simoun, starting down a
+hatchway to the cabin. “What’s said, is said! And you, Padre Sibyla,
+don’t talk either Latin or nonsense. What are you friars good for if
+the people can rebel?”
+
+Taking no notice of the replies and protests, Simoun descended the
+small companionway that led below, repeating disdainfully, “Bosh,
+bosh!”
+
+Padre Sibyla turned pale; this was the first time that he, Vice-Rector
+of the University, had ever been credited with nonsense. Don Custodio
+turned green; at no meeting in which he had ever found himself had he
+encountered such an adversary.
+
+“An American mulatto!” he fumed.
+
+“A British Indian,” observed Ben-Zayb in a low tone.
+
+“An American, I tell you, and shouldn’t I know?” retorted Don Custodio
+in ill-humor. “His Excellency has told me so. He’s a jeweler whom the
+latter knew in Havana, and, as I suspect, the one who got him
+advancement by lending him money. So to repay him he has had him come
+here to let him have a chance and increase his fortune by selling
+diamonds—imitations, who knows? And he’s so ungrateful, that, after
+getting money from the Indians, he wishes—huh!” The sentence was
+concluded by a significant wave of the hand.
+
+No one dared to join in this diatribe. Don Custodio could discredit
+himself with his Excellency, if he wished, but neither Ben-Zayb, nor
+Padre Irene, nor Padre Salvi, nor the offended Padre Sibyla had any
+confidence in the discretion of the others.
+
+“The fact is that this man, being an American, thinks no doubt that we
+are dealing with the redskins. To talk of these matters on a steamer!
+Compel, force the people! And he’s the very person who advised the
+expedition to the Carolines and the campaign in Mindanao, which is
+going to bring us to disgraceful ruin. He’s the one who has offered to
+superintend the building of the cruiser, and I say, what does a
+jeweler, no matter how rich and learned he may be, know about naval
+construction?”
+
+All this was spoken by Don Custodio in a guttural tone to his neighbor
+Ben-Zayb, while he gesticulated, shrugged his shoulders, and from time
+to time with his looks consulted the others, who were nodding their
+heads ambiguously. The Canon Irene indulged in a rather equivocal
+smile, which he half hid with his hand as he rubbed his nose.
+
+“I tell you, Ben-Zayb,” continued Don Custodio, slapping the journalist
+on the arm, “all the trouble comes from not consulting the old-timers
+here. A project in fine words, and especially with a big appropriation,
+with an appropriation in round numbers, dazzles, meets with acceptance
+at once, for this!” Here, in further explanation, he rubbed the tip of
+his thumb against his middle and forefinger. [4]
+
+“There’s something in that, there’s something in that,” Ben-Zayb
+thought it his duty to remark, since in his capacity of journalist he
+had to be informed about everything.
+
+“Now look here, before the port works I presented a project, original,
+simple, useful, economical, and practicable, for clearing away the bar
+in the lake, and it hasn’t been accepted because there wasn’t any of
+that in it.” He repeated the movement of his fingers, shrugged his
+shoulders, and gazed at the others as though to say, “Have you ever
+heard of such a misfortune?”
+
+“May we know what it was?” asked several, drawing nearer and giving him
+their attention. The projects of Don Custodio were as renowned as
+quacks’ specifics.
+
+Don Custodio was on the point of refusing to explain it from resentment
+at not having found any supporters in his diatribe against Simoun.
+“When there’s no danger, you want me to talk, eh? And when there is,
+you keep quiet!” he was going to say, but that would cause the loss of
+a good opportunity, and his project, now that it could not be carried
+out, might at least be known and admired.
+
+After blowing out two or three puffs of smoke, coughing, and spitting
+through a scupper, he slapped Ben-Zayb on the thigh and asked, “You’ve
+seen ducks?”
+
+“I rather think so—we’ve hunted them on the lake,” answered the
+surprised journalist.
+
+“No, I’m not talking about wild ducks, I’m talking of the domestic
+ones, of those that are raised in Pateros and Pasig. Do you know what
+they feed on?”
+
+Ben-Zayb, the only thinking head, did not know—he was not engaged in
+that business.
+
+“On snails, man, on snails!” exclaimed Padre Camorra. “One doesn’t have
+to be an Indian to know that; it’s sufficient to have eyes!”
+
+“Exactly so, on snails!” repeated Don Custodio, flourishing his
+forefinger. “And do you know where they get them?”
+
+Again the thinking head did not know.
+
+“Well, if you had been in the country as many years as I have, you
+would know that they fish them out of the bar itself, where they
+abound, mixed with the sand.”
+
+“Then your project?”
+
+“Well, I’m coming to that. My idea was to compel all the towns round
+about, near the bar, to raise ducks, and you’ll see how they, all by
+themselves, will deepen the channel by fishing for the snails—no more
+and no less, no more and no less!”
+
+Here Don Custodio extended his arms and gazed triumphantly at the
+stupefaction of his hearers—to none of them had occurred such an
+original idea.
+
+“Will you allow me to write an article about that?” asked Ben-Zayb. “In
+this country there is so little thinking done—”
+
+“But, Don Custodio,” exclaimed Doña Victorina with smirks and grimaces,
+“if everybody takes to raising ducks the balot [5] eggs will become
+abundant. Ugh, how nasty! Rather, let the bar close up entirely!”
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+ON THE LOWER DECK
+
+
+There, below, other scenes were being enacted. Seated on benches or
+small wooden stools among valises, boxes, and baskets, a few feet from
+the engines, in the heat of the boilers, amid the human smells and the
+pestilential odor of oil, were to be seen the great majority of the
+passengers. Some were silently gazing at the changing scenes along the
+banks, others were playing cards or conversing in the midst of the
+scraping of shovels, the roar of the engine, the hiss of escaping
+steam, the swash of disturbed waters, and the shrieks of the whistle.
+In one corner, heaped up like corpses, slept, or tried to sleep, a
+number of Chinese pedlers, seasick, pale, frothing through half-opened
+lips, and bathed in their copious perspiration. Only a few youths,
+students for the most part, easily recognizable from their white
+garments and their confident bearing, made bold to move about from
+stern to bow, leaping over baskets and boxes, happy in the prospect of
+the approaching vacation. Now they commented on the movements of the
+engines, endeavoring to recall forgotten notions of physics, now they
+surrounded the young schoolgirl or the red-lipped buyera with her
+collar of sampaguitas, whispering into their ears words that made them
+smile and cover their faces with their fans.
+
+Nevertheless, two of them, instead of engaging in these fleeting
+gallantries, stood in the bow talking with a man, advanced in years,
+but still vigorous and erect. Both these youths seemed to be well known
+and respected, to judge from the deference shown them by their fellow
+passengers. The elder, who was dressed in complete black, was the
+medical student, Basilio, famous for his successful cures and
+extraordinary treatments, while the other, taller and more robust,
+although much younger, was Isagani, one of the poets, or at least
+rimesters, who that year came from the Ateneo, [6] a curious character,
+ordinarily quite taciturn and uncommunicative. The man talking with
+them was the rich Capitan Basilio, who was returning from a business
+trip to Manila.
+
+“Capitan Tiago is getting along about the same as usual, yes, sir,”
+said the student Basilio, shaking his head. “He won’t submit to any
+treatment. At the advice of a certain person he is sending me to San
+Diego under the pretext of looking after his property, but in reality
+so that he may be left to smoke his opium with complete liberty.”
+
+When the student said a certain person, he really meant Padre Irene, a
+great friend and adviser of Capitan Tiago in his last days.
+
+“Opium is one of the plagues of modern times,” replied the capitan with
+the disdain and indignation of a Roman senator. “The ancients knew
+about it but never abused it. While the addiction to classical studies
+lasted—mark this well, young men—opium was used solely as a medicine;
+and besides, tell me who smoke it the most?—Chinamen, Chinamen who
+don’t understand a word of Latin! Ah, if Capitan Tiago had only devoted
+himself to Cicero—” Here the most classical disgust painted itself on
+his carefully-shaven Epicurean face. Isagani regarded him with
+attention: that gentleman was suffering from nostalgia for antiquity.
+
+“But to get back to this academy of Castilian,” Capitan Basilio
+continued, “I assure you, gentlemen, that you won’t materialize it.”
+
+“Yes, sir, from day to day we’re expecting the permit,” replied
+Isagani. “Padre Irene, whom you may have noticed above, and to whom
+we’ve presented a team of bays, has promised it to us. He’s on his way
+now to confer with the General.”
+
+“That doesn’t matter. Padre Sibyla is opposed to it.”
+
+“Let him oppose it! That’s why he’s here on the steamer, in order to—at
+Los Baños before the General.”
+
+And the student Basilio filled out his meaning by going through the
+pantomime of striking his fists together.
+
+“That’s understood,” observed Capitan Basilio, smiling. “But even
+though you get the permit, where’ll you get the funds?”
+
+“We have them, sir. Each student has contributed a real.”
+
+“But what about the professors?”
+
+“We have them: half Filipinos and half Peninsulars.” [7]
+
+“And the house?”
+
+“Makaraig, the wealthy Makaraig, has offered one of his.”
+
+Capitan Basilio had to give in; these young men had everything
+arranged.
+
+“For the rest,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders, “it’s not
+altogether bad, it’s not a bad idea, and now that you can’t know Latin
+at least you may know Castilian. Here you have another instance,
+namesake, of how we are going backwards. In our times we learned Latin
+because our books were in Latin; now you study Latin a little but have
+no Latin books. On the other hand, your books are in Castilian and that
+language is not taught—aetas parentum pejor avis tulit nos nequiores!
+as Horace said.” With this quotation he moved away majestically, like a
+Roman emperor.
+
+The youths smiled at each other. “These men of the past,” remarked
+Isagani, “find obstacles for everything. Propose a thing to them and
+instead of seeing its advantages they only fix their attention on the
+difficulties. They want everything to come smooth and round as a
+billiard ball.”
+
+“He’s right at home with your uncle,” observed Basilio.
+
+“They talk of past times. But listen—speaking of uncles, what does
+yours say about Paulita?”
+
+Isagani blushed. “He preached me a sermon about the choosing of a wife.
+I answered him that there wasn’t in Manila another like her—beautiful,
+well-bred, an orphan—”
+
+“Very wealthy, elegant, charming, with no defect other than a
+ridiculous aunt,” added Basilio, at which both smiled.
+
+“In regard to the aunt, do you know that she has charged me to look for
+her husband?”
+
+“Doña Victorina? And you’ve promised, in order to keep your
+sweetheart.”
+
+“Naturally! But the fact is that her husband is actually hidden—in my
+uncle’s house!”
+
+Both burst into a laugh at this, while Isagani continued: “That’s why
+my uncle, being a conscientious man, won’t go on the upper deck,
+fearful that Doña Victorina will ask him about Don Tiburcio. Just
+imagine, when Doña Victorina learned that I was a steerage passenger
+she gazed at me with a disdain that—”
+
+At that moment Simoun came down and, catching sight of the two young
+men, greeted Basilio in a patronizing tone: “Hello, Don Basilio, you’re
+off for the vacation? Is the gentleman a townsman of yours?”
+
+Basilio introduced Isagani with the remark that he was not a townsman,
+but that their homes were not very far apart. Isagani lived on the
+seashore of the opposite coast. Simoun examined him with such marked
+attention that he was annoyed, turned squarely around, and faced the
+jeweler with a provoking stare.
+
+“Well, what is the province like?” the latter asked, turning again to
+Basilio.
+
+“Why, aren’t you familiar with it?”
+
+“How the devil am I to know it when I’ve never set foot in it? I’ve
+been told that it’s very poor and doesn’t buy jewels.”
+
+“We don’t buy jewels, because we don’t need them,” rejoined Isagani
+dryly, piqued in his provincial pride.
+
+A smile played over Simoun’s pallid lips. “Don’t be offended, young
+man,” he replied. “I had no bad intentions, but as I’ve been assured
+that nearly all the money is in the hands of the native priests, I said
+to myself: the friars are dying for curacies and the Franciscans are
+satisfied with the poorest, so when they give them up to the native
+priests the truth must be that the king’s profile is unknown there. But
+enough of that! Come and have a beer with me and we’ll drink to the
+prosperity of your province.”
+
+The youths thanked him, but declined the offer.
+
+“You do wrong,” Simoun said to them, visibly taken aback. “Beer is a
+good thing, and I heard Padre Camorra say this morning that the lack of
+energy noticeable in this country is due to the great amount of water
+the inhabitants drink.”
+
+Isagani was almost as tall as the jeweler, and at this he drew himself
+up.
+
+“Then tell Padre Camorra,” Basilio hastened to say, while he nudged
+Isagani slyly, “tell him that if he would drink water instead of wine
+or beer, perhaps we might all be the gainers and he would not give rise
+to so much talk.”
+
+“And tell him, also,” added Isagani, paying no attention to his
+friend’s nudges, “that water is very mild and can be drunk, but that it
+drowns out the wine and beer and puts out the fire, that heated it
+becomes steam, and that ruffled it is the ocean, that it once destroyed
+mankind and made the earth tremble to its foundations!” [8]
+
+Simoun raised his head. Although his looks could not be read through
+the blue goggles, on the rest of his face surprise might be seen.
+“Rather a good answer,” he said. “But I fear that he might get
+facetious and ask me when the water will be converted into steam and
+when into an ocean. Padre Camorra is rather incredulous and is a great
+wag.”
+
+“When the fire heats it, when the rivulets that are now scattered
+through the steep valleys, forced by fatality, rush together in the
+abyss that men are digging,” replied Isagani.
+
+“No, Señor Simoun,” interposed Basilio, changing to a jesting tone,
+“rather keep in mind the verses of my friend Isagani himself:
+
+
+       ‘Fire you, you say, and water we,
+        Then as you wish, so let it be;
+        But let us live in peace and right,
+        Nor shall the fire e’er see us fight;
+        So joined by wisdom’s glowing flame,
+        That without anger, hate, or blame,
+        We form the steam, the fifth element,
+        Progress and light, life and movement.’”
+
+
+“Utopia, Utopia!” responded Simoun dryly. “The engine is about to
+meet—in the meantime, I’ll drink my beer.” So, without any word of
+excuse, he left the two friends.
+
+“But what’s the matter with you today that you’re so quarrelsome?”
+asked Basilio.
+
+“Nothing. I don’t know why, but that man fills me with horror, fear
+almost.”
+
+“I was nudging you with my elbow. Don’t you know that he’s called the
+Brown Cardinal?”
+
+“The Brown Cardinal?”
+
+“Or Black Eminence, as you wish.”
+
+“I don’t understand.”
+
+“Richelieu had a Capuchin adviser who was called the Gray Eminence;
+well, that’s what this man is to the General.”
+
+“Really?”
+
+“That’s what I’ve heard from a certain person,—who always speaks ill of
+him behind his back and flatters him to his face.”
+
+“Does he also visit Capitan Tiago?”
+
+“From the first day after his arrival, and I’m sure that a certain
+person looks upon him as a rival—in the inheritance. I believe that
+he’s going to see the General about the question of instruction in
+Castilian.”
+
+At that moment Isagani was called away by a servant to his uncle.
+
+On one of the benches at the stern, huddled in among the other
+passengers, sat a native priest gazing at the landscapes that were
+successively unfolded to his view. His neighbors made room for him, the
+men on passing taking off their hats, and the gamblers not daring to
+set their table near where he was. He said little, but neither smoked
+nor assumed arrogant airs, nor did he disdain to mingle with the other
+men, returning the salutes with courtesy and affability as if he felt
+much honored and very grateful. Although advanced in years, with hair
+almost completely gray, he appeared to be in vigorous health, and even
+when seated held his body straight and his head erect, but without
+pride or arrogance. He differed from the ordinary native priests, few
+enough indeed, who at that period served merely as coadjutors or
+administered some curacies temporarily, in a certain self-possession
+and gravity, like one who was conscious of his personal dignity and the
+sacredness of his office. A superficial examination of his appearance,
+if not his white hair, revealed at once that he belonged to another
+epoch, another generation, when the better young men were not afraid to
+risk their dignity by becoming priests, when the native clergy looked
+any friar at all in the face, and when their class, not yet degraded
+and vilified, called for free men and not slaves, superior
+intelligences and not servile wills. In his sad and serious features
+was to be read the serenity of a soul fortified by study and
+meditation, perhaps tried out by deep moral suffering. This priest was
+Padre Florentino, Isagani’s uncle, and his story is easily told.
+
+Scion of a wealthy and influential family of Manila, of agreeable
+appearance and cheerful disposition, suited to shine in the world, he
+had never felt any call to the sacerdotal profession, but by reason of
+some promises or vows, his mother, after not a few struggles and
+violent disputes, compelled him to enter the seminary. She was a great
+friend of the Archbishop, had a will of iron, and was as inexorable as
+is every devout woman who believes that she is interpreting the will of
+God. Vainly the young Florentine offered resistance, vainly he begged,
+vainly he pleaded his love affairs, even provoking scandals: priest he
+had to become at twenty-five years of age, and priest he became. The
+Archbishop ordained him, his first mass was celebrated with great pomp,
+three days were given over to feasting, and his mother died happy and
+content, leaving him all her fortune.
+
+But in that struggle Florentine received a wound from which he never
+recovered. Weeks before his first mass the woman he loved, in
+desperation, married a nobody—a blow the rudest he had ever
+experienced. He lost his moral energy, life became dull and
+insupportable. If not his virtue and the respect for his office, that
+unfortunate love affair saved him from the depths into which the
+regular orders and secular clergymen both fall in the Philippines. He
+devoted himself to his parishioners as a duty, and by inclination to
+the natural sciences.
+
+When the events of seventy-two occurred, [9] he feared that the large
+income his curacy yielded him would attract attention to him, so,
+desiring peace above everything, he sought and secured his release,
+living thereafter as a private individual on his patrimonial estate
+situated on the Pacific coast. He there adopted his nephew, Isagani,
+who was reported by the malicious to be his own son by his old
+sweetheart when she became a widow, and by the more serious and better
+informed, the natural child of a cousin, a lady in Manila.
+
+The captain of the steamer caught sight of the old priest and insisted
+that he go to the upper deck, saying, “If you don’t do so, the friars
+will think that you don’t want to associate with them.”
+
+Padre Florentino had no recourse but to accept, so he summoned his
+nephew in order to let him know where he was going, and to charge him
+not to come near the upper deck while he was there. “If the captain
+notices you, he’ll invite you also, and we should then be abusing his
+kindness.”
+
+“My uncle’s way!” thought Isagani. “All so that I won’t have any reason
+for talking with Doña Victorina.”
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+LEGENDS
+
+                                   Ich weiss nicht was soil es bedeuten
+                                   Dass ich so traurig bin!
+
+
+When Padre Florentino joined the group above, the bad humor provoked by
+the previous discussion had entirely disappeared. Perhaps their spirits
+had been raised by the attractive houses of the town of Pasig, or the
+glasses of sherry they had drunk in preparation for the coming meal, or
+the prospect of a good breakfast. Whatever the cause, the fact was that
+they were all laughing and joking, even including the lean Franciscan,
+although he made little noise and his smiles looked like death-grins.
+
+“Evil times, evil times!” said Padre Sibyla with a laugh.
+
+“Get out, don’t say that, Vice-Rector!” responded the Canon Irene,
+giving the other’s chair a shove. “In Hongkong you’re doing a fine
+business, putting up every building that—ha, ha!”
+
+“Tut, tut!” was the reply; “you don’t see our expenses, and the tenants
+on our estates are beginning to complain—”
+
+“Here, enough of complaints, puñales, else I’ll fall to weeping!” cried
+Padre Camorra gleefully. “We’re not complaining, and we haven’t either
+estates or banking-houses. You know that my Indians are beginning to
+haggle over the fees and to flash schedules on me! Just look how they
+cite schedules to me now, and none other than those of the Archbishop
+Basilio Sancho, [10] as if from his time up to now prices had not
+risen. Ha, ha, ha! Why should a baptism cost less than a chicken? But I
+play the deaf man, collect what I can, and never complain. We’re not
+avaricious, are we, Padre Salvi?”
+
+At that moment Simoun’s head appeared above the hatchway.
+
+“Well, where’ve you been keeping yourself?” Don Custodio called to him,
+having forgotten all about their dispute. “You’re missing the prettiest
+part of the trip!”
+
+“Pshaw!” retorted Simoun, as he ascended, “I’ve seen so many rivers and
+landscapes that I’m only interested in those that call up legends.”
+
+“As for legends, the Pasig has a few,” observed the captain, who did
+not relish any depreciation of the river where he navigated and earned
+his livelihood. “Here you have that of Malapad-na-bato, a rock sacred
+before the coming of the Spaniards as the abode of spirits. Afterwards,
+when the superstition had been dissipated and the rock profaned, it was
+converted into a nest of tulisanes, since from its crest they easily
+captured the luckless bankas, which had to contend against both the
+currents and men. Later, in our time, in spite of human interference,
+there are still told stories about wrecked bankas, and if on rounding
+it I didn’t steer with my six senses, I’d be smashed against its sides.
+Then you have another legend, that of Doña Jeronima’s cave, which Padre
+Florentino can relate to you.”
+
+“Everybody knows that,” remarked Padre Sibyla disdainfully.
+
+But neither Simoun, nor Ben-Zayb, nor Padre Irene, nor Padre Camorra
+knew it, so they begged for the story, some in jest and others from
+genuine curiosity. The priest, adopting the tone of burlesque with
+which some had made their request, began like an old tutor relating a
+story to children.
+
+“Once upon a time there was a student who had made a promise of
+marriage to a young woman in his country, but it seems that he failed
+to remember her. She waited for him faithfully year after year, her
+youth passed, she grew into middle age, and then one day she heard a
+report that her old sweetheart was the Archbishop of Manila. Disguising
+herself as a man, she came round the Cape and presented herself before
+his grace, demanding the fulfilment of his promise. What she asked was
+of course impossible, so the Archbishop ordered the preparation of the
+cave that you may have noticed with its entrance covered and decorated
+with a curtain of vines. There she lived and died and there she is
+buried. The legend states that Doña Jeronima was so fat that she had to
+turn sidewise to get into it. Her fame as an enchantress sprung from
+her custom of throwing into the river the silver dishes which she used
+in the sumptuous banquets that were attended by crowds of gentlemen. A
+net was spread under the water to hold the dishes and thus they were
+cleaned. It hasn’t been twenty years since the river washed the very
+entrance of the cave, but it has gradually been receding, just as the
+memory of her is dying out among the people.”
+
+“A beautiful legend!” exclaimed Ben-Zayb. “I’m going to write an
+article about it. It’s sentimental!”
+
+Doña Victorina thought of dwelling in such a cave and was about to say
+so, when Simoun took the floor instead.
+
+“But what’s your opinion about that, Padre Salvi?” he asked the
+Franciscan, who seemed to be absorbed in thought. “Doesn’t it seem to
+you as though his Grace, instead of giving her a cave, ought to have
+placed her in a nunnery—in St. Clara’s, for example? What do you say?”
+
+There was a start of surprise on Padre Sibyla’s part to notice that
+Padre Salvi shuddered and looked askance at Simoun.
+
+“Because it’s not a very gallant act,” continued Simoun quite
+naturally, “to give a rocky cliff as a home to one with whose hopes we
+have trifled. It’s hardly religious to expose her thus to temptation,
+in a cave on the banks of a river—it smacks of nymphs and dryads. It
+would have been more gallant, more pious, more romantic, more in
+keeping with the customs of this country, to shut her up in St.
+Clara’s, like a new Eloise, in order to visit and console her from time
+to time.”
+
+“I neither can nor should pass judgment upon the conduct of
+archbishops,” replied the Franciscan sourly.
+
+“But you, who are the ecclesiastical governor, acting in the place of
+our Archbishop, what would you do if such a case should arise?”
+
+Padre Salvi shrugged his shoulders and calmly responded, “It’s not
+worth while thinking about what can’t happen. But speaking of legends,
+don’t overlook the most beautiful, since it is the truest: that of the
+miracle of St. Nicholas, the ruins of whose church you may have
+noticed. I’m going to relate it to Señor Simoun, as he probably hasn’t
+heard it. It seems that formerly the river, as well as the lake, was
+infested with caymans, so huge and voracious that they attacked bankas
+and upset them with a slap of the tail. Our chronicles relate that one
+day an infidel Chinaman, who up to that time had refused to be
+converted, was passing in front of the church, when suddenly the devil
+presented himself to him in the form of a cayman and upset the banka,
+in order to devour him and carry him off to hell. Inspired by God, the
+Chinaman at that moment called upon St. Nicholas and instantly the
+cayman was changed into a stone. The old people say that in their time
+the monster could easily be recognized in the pieces of stone that were
+left, and, for my part, I can assure you that I have clearly made out
+the head, to judge from which the monster must have been enormously
+large.”
+
+“Marvelous, a marvelous legend!” exclaimed Ben-Zayb. “It’s good for an
+article—the description of the monster, the terror of the Chinaman, the
+waters of the river, the bamboo brakes. Also, it’ll do for a study of
+comparative religions; because, look you, an infidel Chinaman in great
+distress invoked exactly the saint that he must know only by hearsay
+and in whom he did not believe. Here there’s no room for the proverb
+that ‘a known evil is preferable to an unknown good.’ If I should find
+myself in China and get caught in such a difficulty, I would invoke the
+obscurest saint in the calendar before Confucius or Buddha. Whether
+this is due to the manifest superiority of Catholicism or to the
+inconsequential and illogical inconsistency in the brains of the yellow
+race, a profound study of anthropology alone will be able to
+elucidate.”
+
+Ben-Zayb had adopted the tone of a lecturer and was describing circles
+in the air with his forefinger, priding himself on his imagination,
+which from the most insignificant facts could deduce so many
+applications and inferences. But noticing that Simoun was preoccupied
+and thinking that he was pondering over what he, Ben-Zayb, had just
+said, he inquired what the jeweler was meditating about.
+
+“About two very important questions,” answered Simoun; “two questions
+that you might add to your article. First, what may have become of the
+devil on seeing himself suddenly confined within a stone? Did he
+escape? Did he stay there? Was he crushed? Second, if the petrified
+animals that I have seen in various European museums may not have been
+the victims of some antediluvian saint?”
+
+The tone in which the jeweler spoke was so serious, while he rested his
+forehead on the tip of his forefinger in an attitude of deep
+meditation, that Padre Camorra responded very gravely, “Who knows, who
+knows?”
+
+“Since we’re busy with legends and are now entering the lake,” remarked
+Padre Sibyla, “the captain must know many—”
+
+At that moment the steamer crossed the bar and the panorama spread out
+before their eyes was so truly magnificent that all were impressed. In
+front extended the beautiful lake bordered by green shores and blue
+mountains, like a huge mirror, framed in emeralds and sapphires,
+reflecting the sky in its glass. On the right were spread out the low
+shores, forming bays with graceful curves, and dim there in the
+distance the crags of Sungay, while in the background rose Makiling,
+imposing and majestic, crowned with fleecy clouds. On the left lay
+Talim Island with its curious sweep of hills. A fresh breeze rippled
+over the wide plain of water.
+
+“By the way, captain,” said Ben-Zayb, turning around, “do you know in
+what part of the lake a certain Guevara, Navarra, or Ibarra, was
+killed?”
+
+The group looked toward the captain, with the exception of Simoun, who
+had turned away his head as though to look for something on the shore.
+
+“Ah, yes!” exclaimed Doña Victorina. “Where, captain? Did he leave any
+tracks in the water?”
+
+The good captain winked several times, an indication that he was
+annoyed, but reading the request in the eyes of all, took a few steps
+toward the bow and scanned the shore.
+
+“Look over there,” he said in a scarcely audible voice, after making
+sure that no strangers were near. “According to the officer who
+conducted the pursuit, Ibarra, upon finding himself surrounded, jumped
+out of his banka there near the Kinabutasan [11] and, swimming under
+water, covered all that distance of more than two miles, saluted by
+bullets every time that he raised his head to breathe. Over yonder is
+where they lost track of him, and a little farther on near the shore
+they discovered something like the color of blood. And now I think of
+it, it’s just thirteen years, day for day, since this happened.”
+
+“So that his corpse—” began Ben-Zayb.
+
+“Went to join his father’s,” replied Padre Sibyla. “Wasn’t he also
+another filibuster, Padre Salvi?”
+
+“That’s what might be called cheap funerals, Padre Camorra, eh?”
+remarked Ben-Zayb.
+
+“I’ve always said that those who won’t pay for expensive funerals are
+filibusters,” rejoined the person addressed, with a merry laugh.
+
+“But what’s the matter with you, Señor Simoun?” inquired Ben-Zayb,
+seeing that the jeweler was motionless and thoughtful. “Are you
+seasick—an old traveler like you? On such a drop of water as this!”
+
+“I want to tell you,” broke in the captain, who had come to hold all
+those places in great affection, “that you can’t call this a drop of
+water. It’s larger than any lake in Switzerland and all those in Spain
+put together. I’ve seen old sailors who got seasick here.”
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+CABESANG TALES
+
+
+Those who have read the first part of this story will perhaps remember
+an old wood-cutter who lived in the depths of the forest. [12] Tandang
+Selo is still alive, and though his hair has turned completely white,
+he yet preserves his good health. He no longer hunts or cuts firewood,
+for his fortunes have improved and he works only at making brooms.
+
+His son Tales (abbreviation of Telesforo) had worked at first on shares
+on the lands of a capitalist, but later, having become the owner of two
+carabaos and several hundred pesos, determined to work on his own
+account, aided by his father, his wife, and his three children. So they
+cut down and cleared away some thick woods which were situated on the
+borders of the town and which they believed belonged to no one. During
+the labors of cleaning and cultivating the new land, the whole family
+fell ill with malaria and the mother died, along with the eldest
+daughter, Lucia, in the flower of her age. This, which was the natural
+consequence of breaking up new soil infested with various kinds of
+bacteria, they attributed to the anger of the woodland spirit, so they
+were resigned and went on with their labor, believing him pacified.
+
+But when they began to harvest their first crop a religious
+corporation, which owned land in the neighboring town, laid claim to
+the fields, alleging that they fell within their boundaries, and to
+prove it they at once started to set up their marks. However, the
+administrator of the religious order left to them, for humanity’s sake,
+the usufruct of the land on condition that they pay a small sum
+annually—a mere bagatelle, twenty or thirty pesos. Tales, as peaceful a
+man as could be found, was as much opposed to lawsuits as any one and
+more submissive to the friars than most people; so, in order not to
+smash a palyok against a kawali (as he said, for to him the friars were
+iron pots and he a clay jar), he had the weakness to yield to their
+claim, remembering that he did not know Spanish and had no money to pay
+lawyers.
+
+Besides, Tandang Selo said to him, “Patience! You would spend more in
+one year of litigation than in ten years of paying what the white
+padres demand. And perhaps they’ll pay you back in masses! Pretend that
+those thirty pesos had been lost in gambling or had fallen into the
+water and been swallowed by a cayman.”
+
+The harvest was abundant and sold well, so Tales planned to build a
+wooden house in the barrio of Sagpang, of the town of Tiani, which
+adjoined San Diego.
+
+Another year passed, bringing another good crop, and for this reason
+the friars raised the rent to fifty pesos, which Tales paid in order
+not to quarrel and because he expected to sell his sugar at a good
+price.
+
+“Patience! Pretend that the cayman has grown some,” old Selo consoled
+him.
+
+That year he at last saw his dream realized: to live in the barrio of
+Sagpang in a wooden house. The father and grandfather then thought of
+providing some education for the two children, especially the daughter
+Juliana, or Juli, as they called her, for she gave promise of being
+accomplished and beautiful. A boy who was a friend of the family,
+Basilio, was studying in Manila, and he was of as lowly origin as they.
+
+But this dream seemed destined not to be realized. The first care the
+community took when they saw the family prospering was to appoint as
+cabeza de barangay its most industrious member, which left only Tano,
+the son, who was only fourteen years old. The father was therefore
+called Cabesang Tales and had to order a sack coat, buy a felt hat, and
+prepare to spend his money. In order to avoid any quarrel with the
+curate or the government, he settled from his own pocket the shortages
+in the tax-lists, paying for those who had died or moved away, and he
+lost considerable time in making the collections and on his trips to
+the capital.
+
+“Patience! Pretend that the cayman’s relatives have joined him,”
+advised Tandang Selo, smiling placidly.
+
+“Next year you’ll put on a long skirt and go to Manila to study like
+the young ladies of the town,” Cabesang Tales told his daughter every
+time he heard her talking of Basilio’s progress.
+
+But that next year did not come, and in its stead there was another
+increase in the rent. Cabesang Tales became serious and scratched his
+head. The clay jar was giving up all its rice to the iron pot.
+
+When the rent had risen to two hundred pesos, Tales was not content
+with scratching his head and sighing; he murmured and protested. The
+friar-administrator then told him that if he could not pay, some one
+else would be assigned to cultivate that land—many who desired it had
+offered themselves.
+
+He thought at first that the friar was joking, but the friar was
+talking seriously, and indicated a servant of his to take possession of
+the land. Poor Tales turned pale, he felt a buzzing in his ears, he saw
+in the red mist that rose before his eyes his wife and daughter,
+pallid, emaciated, dying, victims of the intermittent fevers—then he
+saw the thick forest converted into productive fields, he saw the
+stream of sweat watering its furrows, he saw himself plowing under the
+hot sun, bruising his feet against the stones and roots, while this
+friar had been driving about in his carriage with the wretch who was to
+get the land following like a slave behind his master. No, a thousand
+times, no! First let the fields sink into the depths of the earth and
+bury them all! Who was this intruder that he should have any right to
+his land? Had he brought from his own country a single handful of that
+soil? Had he crooked a single one of his fingers to pull up the roots
+that ran through it?
+
+Exasperated by the threats of the friar, who tried to uphold his
+authority at any cost in the presence of the other tenants, Cabesang
+Tales rebelled and refused to pay a single cuarto, having ever before
+himself that red mist, saying that he would give up his fields to the
+first man who could irrigate it with blood drawn from his own veins.
+
+Old Selo, on looking at his son’s face, did not dare to mention the
+cayman, but tried to calm him by talking of clay jars, reminding him
+that the winner in a lawsuit was left without a shirt to his back.
+
+“We shall all be turned to clay, father, and without shirts we were
+born,” was the reply.
+
+So he resolutely refused to pay or to give up a single span of his land
+unless the friars should first prove the legality of their claim by
+exhibiting a title-deed of some kind. As they had none, a lawsuit
+followed, and Cabesang Tales entered into it, confiding that some at
+least, if not all, were lovers of justice and respecters of the law.
+
+“I serve and have been serving the King with my money and my services,”
+he said to those who remonstrated with him. “I’m asking for justice and
+he is obliged to give it to me.”
+
+Drawn on by fatality, and as if he had put into play in the lawsuit the
+whole future of himself and his children, he went on spending his
+savings to pay lawyers, notaries, and solicitors, not to mention the
+officials and clerks who exploited his ignorance and his needs. He
+moved to and fro between the village and the capital, passed his days
+without eating and his nights without sleeping, while his talk was
+always about briefs, exhibits, and appeals. There was then seen a
+struggle such as was never before carried on under the skies of the
+Philippines: that of a poor Indian, ignorant and friendless, confiding
+in the justness and righteousness of his cause, fighting against a
+powerful corporation before which Justice bowed her head, while the
+judges let fall the scales and surrendered the sword. He fought as
+tenaciously as the ant which bites when it knows that it is going to be
+crushed, as does the fly which looks into space only through a pane of
+glass. Yet the clay jar defying the iron pot and smashing itself into a
+thousand pieces bad in it something impressive—it had the sublimeness
+of desperation!
+
+On the days when his journeys left him free he patrolled his fields
+armed with a shotgun, saying that the tulisanes were hovering around
+and he had need of defending himself in order not to fall into their
+hands and thus lose his lawsuit. As if to improve his marksmanship, he
+shot at birds and fruits, even the butterflies, with such accurate aim
+that the friar-administrator did not dare to go to Sagpang without an
+escort of civil-guards, while the friar’s hireling, who gazed from afar
+at the threatening figure of Tales wandering over the fields like a
+sentinel upon the walls, was terror stricken and refused to take the
+property away from him.
+
+But the local judges and those at the capital, warned by the experience
+of one of their number who had been summarily dismissed, dared not give
+him the decision, fearing their own dismissal. Yet they were not really
+bad men, those judges, they were upright and conscientious, good
+citizens, excellent fathers, dutiful sons—and they were able to
+appreciate poor Tales’ situation better than Tales himself could. Many
+of them were versed in the scientific and historical basis of property,
+they knew that the friars by their own statutes could not own property,
+but they also knew that to come from far across the sea with an
+appointment secured with great difficulty, to undertake the duties of
+the position with the best intentions, and now to lose it because an
+Indian fancied that justice had to be done on earth as in heaven—that
+surely was an idea! They had their families and greater needs surely
+than that Indian: one had a mother to provide for, and what duty is
+more sacred than that of caring for a mother? Another had sisters, all
+of marriageable age; that other there had many little children who
+expected their daily bread and who, like fledglings in a nest, would
+surely die of hunger the day he was out of a job; even the very least
+of them had there, far away, a wife who would be in distress if the
+monthly remittance failed. All these moral and conscientious judges
+tried everything in their power in the way of counsel, advising
+Cabesang Tales to pay the rent demanded. But Tales, like all simple
+souls, once he had seen what was just, went straight toward it. He
+demanded proofs, documents, papers, title-deeds, but the friars had
+none of these, resting their case on his concessions in the past.
+
+Cabesang Tales’ constant reply was: “If every day I give alms to a
+beggar to escape annoyance, who will oblige me to continue my gifts if
+he abuses my generosity?”
+
+From this stand no one could draw him, nor were there any threats that
+could intimidate him. In vain Governor M—— made a trip expressly to
+talk to him and frighten him. His reply to it all was: “You may do what
+you like, Mr. Governor, I’m ignorant and powerless. But I’ve cultivated
+those fields, my wife and daughter died while helping me clear them,
+and I won’t give them up to any one but him who can do more with them
+than I’ve done. Let him first irrigate them with his blood and bury in
+them his wife and daughter!”
+
+The upshot of this obstinacy was that the honorable judges gave the
+decision to the friars, and everybody laughed at him, saying that
+lawsuits are not won by justice. But Cabesang Tales appealed, loaded
+his shotgun, and patrolled his fields with deliberation.
+
+During this period his life seemed to be a wild dream. His son, Tano, a
+youth as tall as his father and as good as his sister, was conscripted,
+but he let the boy go rather than purchase a substitute.
+
+“I have to pay the lawyers,” he told his weeping daughter. “If I win
+the case I’ll find a way to get him back, and if I lose it I won’t have
+any need for sons.”
+
+So the son went away and nothing more was heard of him except that his
+hair had been cropped and that he slept under a cart. Six months later
+it was rumored that he had been seen embarking for the Carolines;
+another report was that he had been seen in the uniform of the Civil
+Guard.
+
+“Tano in the Civil Guard! ’Susmariosep!” exclaimed several, clasping
+their hands. “Tano, who was so good and so honest! Requimternam!”
+
+The grandfather went many days without speaking to the father, Juli
+fell sick, but Cabesang Tales did not shed a single tear, although for
+two days he never left the house, as if he feared the looks of reproach
+from the whole village or that he would be called the executioner of
+his son. But on the third day he again sallied forth with his shotgun.
+
+Murderous intentions were attributed to him, and there were
+well-meaning persons who whispered about that he had been heard to
+threaten that he would bury the friar-administrator in the furrows of
+his fields, whereat the friar was frightened at him in earnest. As a
+result of this, there came a decree from the Captain-General forbidding
+the use of firearms and ordering that they be taken up. Cabesang Tales
+had to hand over his shotgun but he continued his rounds armed with a
+long bolo.
+
+“What are you going to do with that bolo when the tulisanes have
+firearms?” old Selo asked him.
+
+“I must watch my crops,” was the answer. “Every stalk of cane growing
+there is one of my wife’s bones.”
+
+The bolo was taken up on the pretext that it was too long. He then took
+his father’s old ax and with it on his shoulder continued his sullen
+rounds.
+
+Every time he left the house Tandang Selo and Juli trembled for his
+life. The latter would get up from her loom, go to the window, pray,
+make vows to the saints, and recite novenas. The grandfather was at
+times unable to finish the handle of a broom and talked of returning to
+the forest—life in that house was unbearable.
+
+At last their fears were realized. As the fields were some distance
+from the village, Cabesang Tales, in spite of his ax, fell into the
+hands of tulisanes who had revolvers and rifles. They told him that
+since he had money to pay judges and lawyers he must have some also for
+the outcasts and the hunted. They therefore demanded a ransom of five
+hundred pesos through the medium of a rustic, with the warning that if
+anything happened to their messenger, the captive would pay for it with
+his life. Two days of grace were allowed.
+
+This news threw the poor family into the wildest terror, which was
+augmented when they learned that the Civil Guard was going out in
+pursuit of the bandits. In case of an encounter, the first victim would
+be the captive—this they all knew. The old man was paralyzed, while the
+pale and frightened daughter tried often to talk but could not. Still,
+another thought more terrible, an idea more cruel, roused them from
+their stupor. The rustic sent by the tulisanes said that the band would
+probably have to move on, and if they were slow in sending the ransom
+the two days would elapse and Cabesang Tales would have his throat cut.
+
+This drove those two beings to madness, weak and powerless as they
+were. Tandang Selo got up, sat down, went outside, came back again,
+knowing not where to go, where to seek aid. Juli appealed to her
+images, counted and recounted her money, but her two hundred pesos did
+not increase or multiply. Soon she dressed herself, gathered together
+all her jewels, and asked the advice of her grandfather, if she should
+go to see the gobernadorcillo, the judge, the notary, the lieutenant of
+the Civil Guard. The old man said yes to everything, or when she said
+no, he too said no. At length came the neighbors, their relatives and
+friends, some poorer than others, in their simplicity magnifying the
+fears. The most active of all was Sister Bali, a great panguinguera,
+who had been to Manila to practise religious exercises in the nunnery
+of the Sodality.
+
+Juli was willing to sell all her jewels, except a locket set with
+diamonds and emeralds which Basilio had given her, for this locket had
+a history: a nun, the daughter of Capitan Tiago, had given it to a
+leper, who, in return for professional treatment, had made a present of
+it to Basilio. So she could not sell it without first consulting him.
+
+Quickly the shell-combs and earrings were sold, as well as Juli’s
+rosary, to their richest neighbor, and thus fifty pesos were added, but
+two hundred and fifty were still lacking. The locket might be pawned,
+but Juli shook her head. A neighbor suggested that the house be sold
+and Tandang Selo approved the idea, satisfied to return to the forest
+and cut firewood as of old, but Sister Bali observed that this could
+not be done because the owner was not present.
+
+“The judge’s wife once sold me her tapis for a peso, but her husband
+said that the sale did not hold because it hadn’t received his
+approval. Abá! He took back the tapis and she hasn’t returned the peso
+yet, but I don’t pay her when she wins at panguingui, abá! In that way
+I’ve collected twelve cuartos, and for that alone I’m going to play
+with her. I can’t bear to have people fail to pay what they owe me,
+abá!”
+
+Another neighbor was going to ask Sister Bali why then did not she
+settle a little account with her, but the quick panguinguera suspected
+this and added at once: “Do you know, Juli, what you can do? Borrow two
+hundred and fifty pesos on the house, payable when the lawsuit is won.”
+
+This seemed to be the best proposition, so they decided to act upon it
+that same day. Sister Bali offered to accompany her, and together they
+visited the houses of all the rich folks in Tiani, but no one would
+accept the proposal. The case, they said, was already lost, and to show
+favors to an enemy of the friars was to expose themselves to their
+vengeance. At last a pious woman took pity on the girl and lent the
+money on condition that Juli should remain with her as a servant until
+the debt was paid. Juli would not have so very much to do: sew, pray,
+accompany her to mass, and fast for her now and then. The girl accepted
+with tears in her eyes, received the money, and promised to enter her
+service on the following day, Christmas.
+
+When the grandfather heard of that sale he fell to weeping like a
+child. What, that granddaughter whom he had not allowed to walk in the
+sun lest her skin should be burned, Juli, she of the delicate fingers
+and rosy feet! What, that girl, the prettiest in the village and
+perhaps in the whole town, before whose window many gallants had vainly
+passed the night playing and singing! What, his only granddaughter, the
+sole joy of his fading eyes, she whom he had dreamed of seeing dressed
+in a long skirt, talking Spanish, and holding herself erect waving a
+painted fan like the daughters of the wealthy—she to become a servant,
+to be scolded and reprimanded, to ruin her fingers, to sleep anywhere,
+to rise in any manner whatsoever!
+
+So the old grandfather wept and talked of hanging or starving himself
+to death. “If you go,” he declared, “I’m going back to the forest and
+will never set foot in the town.”
+
+Juli soothed him by saying that it was necessary for her father to
+return, that the suit would be won, and they could then ransom her from
+her servitude.
+
+The night was a sad one. Neither of the two could taste a bite and the
+old man refused to lie down, passing the whole night seated in a
+corner, silent and motionless. Juli on her part tried to sleep, but for
+a long time could not close her eyes. Somewhat relieved about her
+father’s fate, she now thought of herself and fell to weeping, but
+stifled her sobs so that the old man might not hear them. The next day
+she would be a servant, and it was the very day Basilio was accustomed
+to come from Manila with presents for her. Henceforward she would have
+to give up that love; Basilio, who was going to be a doctor, couldn’t
+marry a pauper. In fancy she saw him going to the church in company
+with the prettiest and richest girl in the town, both well-dressed,
+happy and smiling, while she, Juli, followed her mistress, carrying
+novenas, buyos, and the cuspidor. Here the girl felt a lump rise in her
+throat, a sinking at her heart, and begged the Virgin to let her die
+first.
+
+But—said her conscience—he will at least know that I preferred to pawn
+myself rather than the locket he gave me.
+
+This thought consoled her a little and brought on empty dreams. Who
+knows but that a miracle might happen? She might find the two hundred
+and fifty pesos under the image of the Virgin—she had read of many
+similar miracles. The sun might not rise nor morning come, and
+meanwhile the suit would be won. Her father might return, or Basilio
+put in his appearance, she might find a bag of gold in the garden, the
+tulisanes would send the bag of gold, the curate, Padre Camorra, who
+was always teasing her, would come with the tulisanes. So her ideas
+became more and more confused, until at length, worn out by fatigue and
+sorrow, she went to sleep with dreams of her childhood in the depths of
+the forest: she was bathing in the torrent along with her two brothers,
+there were little fishes of all colors that let themselves be caught
+like fools, and she became impatient because she found no pleasure in
+catchnig such foolish little fishes! Basilio was under the water, but
+Basilio for some reason had the face of her brother Tano. Her new
+mistress was watching them from the bank.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+A COCHERO’S CHRISTMAS EVE
+
+
+Basilio reached San Diego just as the Christmas Eve procession was
+passing through the streets. He had been delayed on the road for
+several hours because the cochero, having forgotten his cedula, was
+held up by the Civil Guard, had his memory jogged by a few blows from a
+rifle-butt, and afterwards was taken before the commandant. Now the
+carromata was again detained to let the procession pass, while the
+abused cochero took off his hat reverently and recited a paternoster to
+the first image that came along, which seemed to be that of a great
+saint. It was the figure of an old man with an exceptionally long
+beard, seated at the edge of a grave under a tree filled with all kinds
+of stuffed birds. A kalan with a clay jar, a mortar, and a kalikut for
+mashing buyo were his only utensils, as if to indicate that he lived on
+the border of the tomb and was doing his cooking there. This was the
+Methuselah of the religious iconography of the Philippines; his
+colleague and perhaps contemporary is called in Europe Santa Claus, and
+is still more smiling and agreeable.
+
+“In the time of the saints,” thought the cochero, “surely there were no
+civil-guards, because one can’t live long on blows from rifle-butts.”
+
+Behind the great old man came the three Magian Kings on ponies that
+were capering about, especially that of the negro Melchior, which
+seemed to be about to trample its companions.
+
+“No, there couldn’t have been any civil-guards,” decided the cochero,
+secretly envying those fortunate times, “because if there had been,
+that negro who is cutting up such capers beside those two
+Spaniards”—Gaspar and Balthazar—“would have gone to jail.”
+
+Then, observing that the negro wore a crown and was a king, like the
+other two, the Spaniards, his thoughts naturally turned to the king of
+the Indians, and he sighed. “Do you know, sir,” he asked Basilio
+respectfully, “if his right foot is loose yet?”
+
+Basilio had him repeat the question. “Whose right foot?”
+
+“The King’s!” whispered the cochero mysteriously.
+
+“What King’s?”
+
+“Our King’s, the King of the Indians.”
+
+Basilio smiled and shrugged his shoulders, while the cochero again
+sighed. The Indians in the country places preserve the legend that
+their king, imprisoned and chained in the cave of San Mateo, will come
+some day to free them. Every hundredth year he breaks one of his
+chains, so that he now has his hands and his left foot loose—only the
+right foot remains bound. This king causes the earthquakes when he
+struggles or stirs himself, and he is so strong that in shaking hands
+with him it is necessary to extend to him a bone, which he crushes in
+his grasp. For some unexplainable reason the Indians call him King
+Bernardo, perhaps by confusing him with Bernardo del Carpio. [13]
+
+“When he gets his right foot loose,” muttered the cochero, stifling
+another sigh, “I’ll give him my horses, and offer him my services even
+to death, for he’ll free us from the Civil Guard.” With a melancholy
+gaze he watched the Three Kings move on.
+
+The boys came behind in two files, sad and serious as though they were
+there under compulsion. They lighted their way, some with torches,
+others with tapers, and others with paper lanterns on bamboo poles,
+while they recited the rosary at the top of their voices, as though
+quarreling with somebody. Afterwards came St. Joseph on a modest float,
+with a look of sadness and resignation on his face, carrying his stalk
+of lilies, as he moved along between two civil-guards as though he were
+a prisoner. This enabled the cochero to understand the expression on
+the saint’s face, but whether the sight of the guards troubled him or
+he had no great respect for a saint who would travel in such company,
+he did not recite a single requiem.
+
+Behind St. Joseph came the girls bearing lights, their heads covered
+with handkerchiefs knotted under their chins, also reciting the rosary,
+but with less wrath than the boys. In their midst were to be seen
+several lads dragging along little rabbits made of Japanese paper,
+lighted by red candles, with their short paper tails erect. The lads
+brought those toys into the procession to enliven the birth of the
+Messiah. The little animals, fat and round as eggs, seemed to be so
+pleased that at times they would take a leap, lose their balance, fall,
+and catch fire. The owner would then hasten to extinguish such burning
+enthusiasm, puffing and blowing until he finally beat out the fire, and
+then, seeing his toy destroyed, would fall to weeping. The cochero
+observed with sadness that the race of little paper animals disappeared
+each year, as if they had been attacked by the pest like the living
+animals. He, the abused Sinong, remembered his two magnificent horses,
+which, at the advice of the curate, he had caused to be blessed to save
+them from plague, spending therefor ten pesos—for neither the
+government nor the curates have found any better remedy for the
+epizootic—and they had died after all. Yet he consoled himself by
+remembering also that after the shower of holy water, the Latin phrases
+of the padre, and the ceremonies, the horses had become so vain and
+self-important that they would not even allow him, Sinong, a good
+Christian, to put them in harness, and he had not dared to whip them,
+because a tertiary sister had said that they were sanctified.
+
+The procession was closed by the Virgin dressed as the Divine Shepherd,
+with a pilgrim’s hat of wide brim and long plumes to indicate the
+journey to Jerusalem. That the birth might be made more explicable, the
+curate had ordered her figure to be stuffed with rags and cotton under
+her skirt, so that no one could be in any doubt as to her condition. It
+was a very beautiful image, with the same sad expression of all the
+images that the Filipinos make, and a mien somewhat ashamed, doubtless
+at the way in which the curate had arranged her. In front came several
+singers and behind, some musicians with the usual civil-guards. The
+curate, as was to be expected after what he had done, was not in his
+place, for that year he was greatly displeased at having to use all his
+diplomacy and shrewdness to convince the townspeople that they should
+pay thirty pesos for each Christmas mass instead of the usual twenty.
+“You’re turning filibusters!” he had said to them.
+
+The cochero must have been greatly preoccupied with the sights of the
+procession, for when it had passed and Basilio ordered him to go on, he
+did not notice that the lamp on his carromata had gone out. Neither did
+Basilio notice it, his attention being devoted to gazing at the houses,
+which were illuminated inside and out with little paper lanterns of
+fantastic shapes and colors, stars surrounded by hoops with long
+streamers which produced a pleasant murmur when shaken by the wind, and
+fishes of movable heads and tails, having a glass of oil inside,
+suspended from the eaves of the windows in the delightful fashion of a
+happy and homelike fiesta. But he also noticed that the lights were
+flickering, that the stars were being eclipsed, that this year had
+fewer ornaments and hangings than the former, which in turn had had
+even fewer than the year preceding it. There was scarcely any music in
+the streets, while the agreeable noises of the kitchen were not to be
+heard in all the houses, which the youth ascribed to the fact that for
+some time things had been going badly, the sugar did not bring a good
+price, the rice crops had failed, over half the live stock had died,
+but the taxes rose and increased for some inexplicable reason, while
+the abuses of the Civil Guard became more frequent to kill off the
+happiness of the people in the towns.
+
+He was just pondering over this when an energetic “Halt!” resounded.
+They were passing in front of the barracks and one of the guards had
+noticed the extinguished lamp of the carromata, which could not go on
+without it. A hail of insults fell about the poor cochero, who vainly
+excused himself with the length of the procession. He would be arrested
+for violating the ordinances and afterwards advertised in the
+newspapers, so the peaceful and prudent Basilio left the carromata and
+went his way on foot, carrying his valise. This was San Diego, his
+native town, where he had not a single relative.
+
+The only, house wherein there seemed to be any mirth was Capitan
+Basilio’s. Hens and chickens cackled their death chant to the
+accompaniment of dry and repeated strokes, as of meat pounded on a
+chopping-block, and the sizzling of grease in the frying-pans. A feast
+was going on in the house, and even into the street there passed a
+certain draught of air, saturated with the succulent odors of stews and
+confections. In the entresol Basilio saw Sinang, as small as when our
+readers knew her before, [14] although a little rounder and plumper
+since her marriage. Then to his great surprise he made out, further in
+at the back of the room, chatting with Capitan Basilio, the curate, and
+the alferez of the Civil Guard, no less than the jeweler Simoun, as
+ever with his blue goggles and his nonchalant air.
+
+“It’s understood, Señor Simoun,” Capitan Basilio was saying, “that
+we’ll go to Tiani to see your jewels.”
+
+“I would also go,” remarked the alferez, “because I need a watch-chain,
+but I’m so busy—if Capitan Basilio would undertake—”
+
+Capitan Basilio would do so with the greatest pleasure, and as he
+wished to propitiate the soldier in order that he might not be molested
+in the persons of his laborers, he refused to accept the money which
+the alferez was trying to get out of his pocket.
+
+“It’s my Christmas gift!”
+
+“I can’t allow you, Capitan, I can’t permit it!”
+
+“All right! We’ll settle up afterwards,” replied Capitan Basilio with a
+lordly gesture.
+
+Also, the curate wanted a pair of lady’s earrings and requested the
+capitan to buy them for him. “I want them first class. Later we’ll fix
+up the account.”
+
+“Don’t worry about that, Padre,” said the good man, who wished to be at
+peace with the Church also. An unfavorable report on the curate’s part
+could do him great damage and cause him double the expense, for those
+earrings were a forced present. Simoun in the meantime was praising his
+jewels.
+
+“That fellow is fierce!” mused the student. “He does business
+everywhere. And if I can believe a certain person, he buys from some
+gentlemen for a half of their value the same jewels that he himself has
+sold for presents. Everybody in this country prospers but us!”
+
+He made his way to his house, or rather Capitan Tiago’s, now occupied
+by a trustworthy man who had held him in great esteem since the day
+when he had seen him perform a surgical operation with the same
+coolness that he would cut up a chicken. This man was now waiting to
+give him the news. Two of the laborers were prisoners, one was to be
+deported, and a number of carabaos had died.
+
+“The same old story,” exclaimed Basilio, in a bad humor. “You always
+receive me with the same complaints.” The youth was not overbearing,
+but as he was at times scolded by Capitan Tiago, he liked in his turn
+to chide those under his orders.
+
+The old man cast about for something new. “One of our tenants has died,
+the old fellow who took care of the woods, and the curate refused to
+bury him as a pauper, saying that his master is a rich man.”
+
+“What did he die of?”
+
+“Of old age.”
+
+“Get out! To die of old age! It must at least have been some disease.”
+Basilio in his zeal for making autopsies wanted diseases.
+
+“Haven’t you anything new to tell me? You take away my appetite
+relating the same old things. Do you know anything of Sagpang?”
+
+The old man then told him about the kidnapping of Cabesang Tales.
+Basilio became thoughtful and said nothing more—his appetite had
+completely left him.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+BASILIO
+
+
+When the bells began their chimes for the midnight mass and those who
+preferred a good sleep to fiestas and ceremonies arose grumbling at the
+noise and movement, Basilio cautiously left the house, took two or
+three turns through the streets to see that he was not watched or
+followed, and then made his way by unfrequented paths to the road that
+led to the ancient wood of the Ibarras, which had been acquired by
+Capitan Tiago when their property was confiscated and sold. As
+Christmas fell under the waning moon that year, the place was wrapped
+in darkness. The chimes had ceased, and only the tolling sounded
+through the darkness of the night amid the murmur of the breeze-stirred
+branches and the measured roar of the waves on the neighboring lake,
+like the deep respiration of nature sunk in profound sleep.
+
+Awed by the time and place, the youth moved along with his head down,
+as if endeavoring to see through the darkness. But from time to time he
+raised it to gaze at the stars through the open spaces between the
+treetops and went forward parting the bushes or tearing away the lianas
+that obstructed his path. At times he retraced his steps, his foot
+would get caught among the plants, he stumbled over a projecting root
+or a fallen log. At the end of a half-hour he reached a small brook on
+the opposite side of which arose a hillock, a black and shapeless mass
+that in the darkness took on the proportions of a mountain. Basilio
+crossed the brook on the stones that showed black against the shining
+surface of the water, ascended the hill, and made his way to a small
+space enclosed by old and crumbling walls. He approached the balete
+tree that rose in the center, huge, mysterious, venerable, formed of
+roots that extended up and down among the confusedly-interlaced trunks.
+
+Pausing before a heap of stones he took off his hat and seemed to be
+praying. There his mother was buried, and every time he came to the
+town his first visit was to that neglected and unknown grave. Since he
+must visit Cabesang Tales’ family the next day, he had taken advantage
+of the night to perform this duty. Seated on a stone, he seemed to fall
+into deep thought. His past rose before him like a long black film,
+rosy at first, then shadowy with spots of blood, then black, black,
+gray, and then light, ever lighter. The end could not be seen, hidden
+as it was by a cloud through which shone lights and the hues of dawn.
+
+Thirteen years before to the day, almost to the hour, his mother had
+died there in the deepest distress, on a glorious night when the moon
+shone brightly and the Christians of the world were engaged in
+rejoicing. Wounded and limping, he had reached there in pursuit of
+her—she mad and terrified, fleeing from her son as from a ghost. There
+she had died, and there had come a stranger who had commanded him to
+build a funeral pyre. He had obeyed mechanically and when he returned
+he found a second stranger by the side of the other’s corpse. What a
+night and what a morning those were! The stranger helped him raise the
+pyre, whereon they burned the corpse of the first, dug the grave in
+which they buried his mother, and then after giving him some pieces of
+money told him to leave the place. It was the first time that he had
+seen that man—tall, with blood-shot eyes, pale lips, and a sharp nose.
+
+Entirely alone in the world, without parents or brothers and sisters,
+he left the town whose authorities inspired in him such great fear and
+went to Manila to work in some rich house and study at the same time,
+as many do. His journey was an Odyssey of sleeplessness and startling
+surprises, in which hunger counted for little, for he ate the fruits in
+the woods, whither he retreated whenever he made out from afar the
+uniform of the Civil Guard, a sight that recalled the origin of all his
+misfortunes. Once in Manila, ragged and sick, he went from door to door
+offering his services. A boy from the provinces who knew not a single
+word of Spanish, and sickly besides! Discouraged, hungry, and
+miserable, he wandered about the streets, attracting attention by the
+wretchedness of his clothing. How often was he tempted to throw himself
+under the feet of the horses that flashed by, drawing carriages shining
+with silver and varnish, thus to end his misery at once! Fortunately,
+he saw Capitan Tiago, accompanied by Aunt Isabel. He had known them
+since the days in San Diego, and in his joy believed that in them he
+saw almost fellow-townsfolk. He followed the carriage until he lost
+sight of it, and then made inquiries for the house. As it was the very
+day that Maria Clara entered the nunnery and Capitan Tiago was
+accordingly depressed, he was admitted as a servant, without pay, but
+instead with leave to study, if he so wished, in San Juan de Letran.
+[15]
+
+Dirty, poorly dressed, with only a pair of clogs for footwear, at the
+end of several months’ stay in Manila, he entered the first year of
+Latin. On seeing his clothes, his classmates drew away from him, and
+the professor, a handsome Dominican, never asked him a question, but
+frowned every time he looked at him. In the eight months that the class
+continued, the only words that passed between them were his name read
+from the roll and the daily adsum with which the student responded.
+With what bitterness he left the class each day, and, guessing the
+reason for the treatment accorded him, what tears sprang into his eyes
+and what complaints were stifled in his heart! How he had wept and
+sobbed over the grave of his mother, relating to her his hidden
+sorrows, humiliations, and affronts, when at the approach of Christmas
+Capitan Tiago had taken him back to San Diego! Yet he memorized the
+lessons without omitting a comma, although he understood scarcely any
+part of them. But at length he became resigned, noticing that among the
+three or four hundred in his class only about forty merited the honor
+of being questioned, because they attracted the professor’s attention
+by their appearance, some prank, comicality, or other cause. The
+greater part of the students congratulated themselves that they thus
+escaped the work of thinking and understanding the subject. “One goes
+to college, not to learn and study, but to gain credit for the course,
+so if the book can be memorized, what more can be asked—the year is
+thus gained.” [16]
+
+Basilio passed the examinations by answering the solitary question
+asked him, like a machine, without stopping or breathing, and in the
+amusement of the examiners won the passing certificate. His nine
+companions—they were examined in batches of ten in order to save
+time—did not have such good luck, but were condemned to repeat the year
+of brutalization.
+
+In the second year the game-cock that he tended won a large sum and he
+received from Capitan Tiago a big tip, which he immediately invested in
+the purchase of shoes and a felt hat. With these and the clothes given
+him by his employer, which he made over to fit his person, his
+appearance became more decent, but did not get beyond that. In such a
+large class a great deal was needed to attract the professor’s
+attention, and the student who in the first year did not make himself
+known by some special quality, or did not capture the good-will of the
+professors, could with difficulty make himself known in the rest of his
+school-days. But Basilio kept on, for perseverance was his chief trait.
+
+His fortune seemed to change somewhat when he entered the third year.
+His professor happened to be a very jolly fellow, fond of jokes and of
+making the students laugh, complacent enough in that he almost always
+had his favorites recite the lessons—in fact, he was satisfied with
+anything. At this time Basilio now wore shoes and a clean and
+well-ironed camisa. As his professor noticed that he laughed very
+little at the jokes and that his large eyes seemed to be asking
+something like an eternal question, he took him for a fool, and one day
+decided to make him conspicuous by calling on him for the lesson.
+Basilio recited it from beginning to end, without hesitating over a
+single letter, so the professor called him a parrot and told a story to
+make the class laugh. Then to increase the hilarity and justify the
+epithet he asked several questions, at the same time winking to his
+favorites, as if to say to them, “You’ll see how we’re going to amuse
+ourselves.”
+
+Basilio now understood Spanish and answered the questions with the
+plain intention of making no one laugh. This disgusted everybody, the
+expected absurdity did not materialize, no one could laugh, and the
+good friar never pardoned him for having defrauded the hopes of the
+class and disappointed his own prophecies. But who would expect
+anything worth while to come from a head so badly combed and placed on
+an Indian poorly shod, classified until recently among the arboreal
+animals? As in other centers of learning, where the teachers are
+honestly desirous that the students should learn, such discoveries
+usually delight the instructors, so in a college managed by men
+convinced that for the most part knowledge is an evil, at least for the
+students, the episode of Basilio produced a bad impression and he was
+not questioned again during the year. Why should he be, when he made no
+one laugh?
+
+Quite discouraged and thinking of abandoning his studies, he passed to
+the fourth year of Latin. Why study at all, why not sleep like the
+others and trust to luck?
+
+One of the two professors was very popular, beloved by all, passing for
+a sage, a great poet, and a man of advanced ideas. One day when he
+accompanied the collegians on their walk, he had a dispute with some
+cadets, which resulted in a skirmish and a challenge. No doubt
+recalling his brilliant youth, the professor preached a crusade and
+promised good marks to all who during the promenade on the following
+Sunday would take part in the fray. The week was a lively one—there
+were occasional encounters in which canes and sabers were crossed, and
+in one of these Basilio distinguished himself. Borne in triumph by the
+students and presented to the professor, he thus became known to him
+and came to be his favorite. Partly for this reason and partly from his
+diligence, that year he received the highest marks, medals included, in
+view of which Capitan Tiago, who, since his daughter had become a nun,
+exhibited some aversion to the friars, in a fit of good humor induced
+him to transfer to the Ateneo Municipal, the fame of which was then in
+its apogee.
+
+Here a new world opened before his eyes—a system of instruction that he
+had never dreamed of. Except for a few superfluities and some childish
+things, he was filled with admiration for the methods there used and
+with gratitude for the zeal of the instructors. His eyes at times
+filled with tears when he thought of the four previous years during
+which, from lack of means, he had been unable to study at that center.
+He had to make extraordinary efforts to get himself to the level of
+those who had had a good preparatory course, and it might be said that
+in that one year he learned the whole five of the secondary curricula.
+He received his bachelor’s degree, to the great satisfaction of his
+instructors, who in the examinations showed themselves to be proud of
+him before the Dominican examiners sent there to inspect the school.
+One of these, as if to dampen such great enthusiasm a little, asked him
+where he had studied the first years of Latin.
+
+“In San Juan de Letran, Padre,” answered Basilio.
+
+“Aha! Of course! He’s not bad,—in Latin,” the Dominican then remarked
+with a slight smile.
+
+From choice and temperament he selected the course in medicine. Capitan
+Tiago preferred the law, in order that he might have a lawyer free, but
+knowledge of the laws is not sufficient to secure clientage in the
+Philippines—it is necessary to win the cases, and for this friendships
+are required, influence in certain spheres, a good deal of astuteness.
+Capitan Tiago finally gave in, remembering that medical students get on
+intimate terms with corpses, and for some time he had been seeking a
+poison to put on the gaffs of his game-cocks, the best he had been able
+to secure thus far being the blood of a Chinaman who had died of
+syphilis.
+
+With equal diligence, or more if possible, the young man continued this
+course, and after the third year began to render medical services with
+such great success that he was not only preparing a brilliant future
+for himself but also earning enough to dress well and save some money.
+This was the last year of the course and in two months he would be a
+physician; he would come back to the town, he would marry Juliana, and
+they would be happy. The granting of his licentiateship was not only
+assured, but he expected it to be the crowning act of his school-days,
+for he had been designated to deliver the valedictory at the
+graduation, and already he saw himself in the rostrum, before the whole
+faculty, the object of public attention. All those heads, leaders of
+Manila science, half-hidden in their colored capes; all the women who
+came there out of curiosity and who years before had gazed at him, if
+not with disdain, at least with indifference; all those men whose
+carriages had once been about to crush him down in the mud like a dog:
+they would listen attentively, and he was going to say something to
+them that would not be trivial, something that had never before
+resounded in that place, he was going to forget himself in order to aid
+the poor students of the future—and he would make his entrance on his
+work in the world with that speech.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+SIMOUN
+
+
+Over these matters Basilio was pondering as he visited his mother’s
+grave. He was about to start back to the town when he thought he saw a
+light flickering among the trees and heard the snapping of twigs, the
+sound of feet, and rustling of leaves. The light disappeared but the
+noises became more distinct, coming directly toward where he was.
+Basilio was not naturally superstitious, especially after having carved
+up so many corpses and watched beside so many death-beds, but the old
+legends about that ghostly spot, the hour, the darkness, the melancholy
+sighing of the wind, and certain tales heard in his childhood, asserted
+their influence over his mind and made his heart beat violently.
+
+The figure stopped on the other side of the balete, but the youth could
+see it through an open space between two roots that had grown in the
+course of time to the proportions of tree-trunks. It produced from
+under its coat a lantern with a powerful reflecting lens, which it
+placed on the ground, thereby lighting up a pair of riding-boots, the
+rest of the figure remaining concealed in the darkness. The figure
+seemed to search its pockets and then bent over to fix a shovel-blade
+on the end of a stout cane. To his great surprise Basilio thought he
+could make out some of the features of the jeweler Simoun, who indeed
+it was.
+
+The jeweler dug in the ground and from time to time the lantern
+illuminated his face, on which were not now the blue goggles that so
+completely disguised him. Basilio shuddered: that was the same stranger
+who thirteen years before had dug his mother’s grave there, only now he
+had aged somewhat, his hair had turned white, he wore a beard and a
+mustache, but yet his look was the same, the bitter expression, the
+same cloud on his brow, the same muscular arms, though somewhat thinner
+now, the same violent energy. Old impressions were stirred in the boy:
+he seemed to feel the heat of the fire, the hunger, the weariness of
+that time, the smell of freshly turned earth. Yet his discovery
+terrified him—that jeweler Simoun, who passed for a British Indian, a
+Portuguese, an American, a mulatto, the Brown Cardinal, his Black
+Eminence, the evil genius of the Captain-General as many called him,
+was no other than the mysterious stranger whose appearance and
+disappearance coincided with the death of the heir to that land! But of
+the two strangers who had appeared, which was Ibarra, the living or the
+dead?
+
+This question, which he had often asked himself whenever Ibarra’s death
+was mentioned, again came into his mind in the presence of the human
+enigma he now saw before him. The dead man had had two wounds, which
+must have been made by firearms, as he knew from what he had since
+studied, and which would be the result of the chase on the lake. Then
+the dead man must have been Ibarra, who had come to die at the tomb of
+his forefathers, his desire to be cremated being explained by his
+residence in Europe, where cremation is practised. Then who was the
+other, the living, this jeweler Simoun, at that time with such an
+appearance of poverty and wretchedness, but who had now returned loaded
+with gold and a friend of the authorities? There was the mystery, and
+the student, with his characteristic cold-bloodedness, determined to
+clear it up at the first opportunity.
+
+Simoun dug away for some time, but Basilio noticed that his old vigor
+had declined—he panted and had to rest every few moments. Fearing that
+he might be discovered, the boy made a sudden resolution. Rising from
+his seat and issuing from his hiding-place, he asked in the most
+matter-of-fact tone, “Can I help you, sir?”
+
+Simoun straightened up with the spring of a tiger attacked at his prey,
+thrust his hand in his coat pocket, and stared at the student with a
+pale and lowering gaze.
+
+“Thirteen years ago you rendered me a great service, sir,” went on
+Basilio unmoved, “in this very place, by burying my mother, and I
+should consider myself happy if I could serve you now.”
+
+Without taking his eyes off the youth Simoun drew a revolver from his
+pocket and the click of a hammer being cocked was heard. “For whom do
+you take me?” he asked, retreating a few paces.
+
+“For a person who is sacred to me,” replied Basilio with some emotion,
+for he thought his last moment had come. “For a person whom all, except
+me, believe to be dead, and whose misfortunes I have always lamented.”
+
+An impressive silence followed these words, a silence that to the youth
+seemed to suggest eternity. But Simoun, after some hesitation,
+approached him and placing a hand on his shoulder said in a moving
+tone: “Basilio, you possess a secret that can ruin me and now you have
+just surprised me in another, which puts me completely in your hands,
+the divulging of which would upset all my plans. For my own security
+and for the good of the cause in which I labor, I ought to seal your
+lips forever, for what is the life of one man compared to the end I
+seek? The occasion is fitting; no one knows that I have come here; I am
+armed; you are defenceless; your death would be attributed to the
+outlaws, if not to more supernatural causes—yet I’ll let you live and
+trust that I shall not regret it. You have toiled, you have struggled
+with energetic perseverance, and like myself, you have your scores to
+settle with society. Your brother was murdered, your mother driven to
+insanity, and society has prosecuted neither the assassin nor the
+executioner. You and I are the dregs of justice and instead of
+destroying we ought to aid each other.”
+
+Simoun paused with a repressed sigh, and then slowly resumed, while his
+gaze wandered about: “Yes, I am he who came here thirteen years ago,
+sick and wretched, to pay the last tribute to a great and noble soul
+that was willing to die for me. The victim of a vicious system, I have
+wandered over the world, working night and day to amass a fortune and
+carry out my plan. Now I have returned to destroy that system, to
+precipitate its downfall, to hurl it into the abyss toward which it is
+senselessly rushing, even though I may have to shed oceans of tears and
+blood. It has condemned itself, it stands condemned, and I don’t want
+to die before I have seen it in fragments at the foot of the
+precipice!”
+
+Simoun extended both his arms toward the earth, as if with that gesture
+he would like to hold there the broken remains. His voice took on a
+sinister, even lugubrious tone, which made the student shudder.
+
+“Called by the vices of the rulers, I have returned to these islands,
+and under the cloak of a merchant have visited the towns. My gold has
+opened a way for me and wheresoever I have beheld greed in the most
+execrable forms, sometimes hypocritical, sometimes shameless, sometimes
+cruel, fatten on the dead organism, like a vulture on a corpse, I have
+asked myself—why was there not, festering in its vitals, the
+corruption, the ptomaine, the poison of the tombs, to kill the foul
+bird? The corpse was letting itself be consumed, the vulture was
+gorging itself with meat, and because it was not possible for me to
+give it life so that it might turn against its destroyer, and because
+the corruption developed slowly, I have stimulated greed, I have
+abetted it. The cases of injustice and the abuses multiplied
+themselves; I have instigated crime and acts of cruelty, so that the
+people might become accustomed to the idea of death. I have stirred up
+trouble so that to escape from it some remedy might be found; I have
+placed obstacles in the way of trade so that the country, impoverished
+and reduced to misery, might no longer be afraid of anything; I have
+excited desires to plunder the treasury, and as this has not been
+enough to bring about a popular uprising, I have wounded the people in
+their most sensitive fiber; I have made the vulture itself insult the
+very corpse that it feeds upon and hasten the corruption.
+
+“Now, when I was about to get the supreme rottenness, the supreme
+filth, the mixture of such foul products brewing poison, when the greed
+was beginning to irritate, in its folly hastening to seize whatever
+came to hand, like an old woman caught in a conflagration, here you
+come with your cries of Hispanism, with chants of confidence in the
+government, in what cannot come to pass, here you have a body
+palpitating with heat and life, young, pure, vigorous, throbbing with
+blood, with enthusiasm, suddenly come forth to offer itself again as
+fresh food!
+
+“Ah, youth is ever inexperienced and dreamy, always running after the
+butterflies and flowers! You have united, so that by your efforts you
+may bind your fatherland to Spain with garlands of roses when in
+reality you are forging upon it chains harder than the diamond! You ask
+for equal rights, the Hispanization of your customs, and you don’t see
+that what you are begging for is suicide, the destruction of your
+nationality, the annihilation of your fatherland, the consecration of
+tyranny! What will you be in the future? A people without character, a
+nation without liberty—everything you have will be borrowed, even your
+very defects! You beg for Hispanization, and do not pale with shame
+when they deny it you! And even if they should grant it to you, what
+then—what have you gained? At best, a country of pronunciamentos, a
+land of civil wars, a republic of the greedy and the malcontents, like
+some of the republics of South America! To what are you tending now,
+with your instruction in Castilian, a pretension that would be
+ridiculous were it not for its deplorable consequences! You wish to add
+one more language to the forty odd that are spoken in the islands, so
+that you may understand one another less and less.”
+
+“On the contrary,” replied Basilio, “if the knowledge of Castilian may
+bind us to the government, in exchange it may also unite the islands
+among themselves.”
+
+“A gross error!” rejoined Simoun. “You are letting yourselves be
+deceived by big words and never go to the bottom of things to examine
+the results in their final analysis. Spanish will never be the general
+language of the country, the people will never talk it, because the
+conceptions of their brains and the feelings of their hearts cannot be
+expressed in that language—each people has its own tongue, as it has
+its own way of thinking! What are you going to do with Castilian, the
+few of you who will speak it? Kill off your own originality,
+subordinate your thoughts to other brains, and instead of freeing
+yourselves, make yourselves slaves indeed! Nine-tenths of those of you
+who pretend to be enlightened are renegades to your country! He among
+you who talks that language neglects his own in such a way that he
+neither writes nor understands it, and how many have I not seen who
+pretended not to know a single word of it! But fortunately, you have an
+imbecile government! While Russia enslaves Poland by forcing the
+Russian language upon it, while Germany prohibits French in the
+conquered provinces, your government strives to preserve yours, and you
+in return, a remarkable people under an incredible government, you are
+trying to despoil yourselves of your own nationality! One and all you
+forget that while a people preserves its language, it preserves the
+marks of its liberty, as a man preserves his independence while he
+holds to his own way of thinking. Language is the thought of the
+peoples. Luckily, your independence is assured; human passions are
+looking out for that!”
+
+Simoun paused and rubbed his hand over his forehead. The waning moon
+was rising and sent its faint light down through the branches of the
+trees, and with his white locks and severe features, illuminated from
+below by the lantern, the jeweler appeared to be the fateful spirit of
+the wood planning some evil.
+
+Basilio was silent before such bitter reproaches and listened with
+bowed head, while Simoun resumed: “I saw this movement started and have
+passed whole nights of anguish, because I understood that among those
+youths there were exceptional minds and hearts, sacrificing themselves
+for what they thought to be a good cause, when in reality they were
+working against their own country. How many times have I wished to
+speak to you young men, to reveal myself and undeceive you! But in view
+of the reputation I enjoy, my words would have been wrongly interpreted
+and would perhaps have had a counter effect. How many times have I not
+longed to approach your Makaraig, your Isagani! Sometimes I thought of
+their death, I wished to destroy them—”
+
+Simoun checked himself.
+
+“Here’s why I let you live, Basilio, and by such imprudence I expose
+myself to the risk of being some day betrayed by you. But you know who
+I am, you know how much I must have suffered—then believe in me! You
+are not of the common crowd, which sees in the jeweler Simoun the
+trader who incites the authorities to commit abuses in order that the
+abused may buy jewels. I am the Judge who wishes to castigate this
+system by making use of its own defects, to make war on it by
+flattering it. I need your help, your influence among the youth, to
+combat these senseless desires for Hispanization, for assimilation, for
+equal rights. By that road you will become only a poor copy, and the
+people should look higher. It is madness to attempt to influence the
+thoughts of the rulers—they have their plan outlined, the bandage
+covers their eyes, and besides losing time uselessly, you are deceiving
+the people with vain hopes and are helping to bend their necks before
+the tyrant. What you should do is to take advantage of their prejudices
+to serve your needs. Are they unwilling that you be assimilated with
+the Spanish people? Good enough! Distinguish yourselves then by
+revealing yourselves in your own character, try to lay the foundations
+of the Philippine fatherland! Do they deny you hope? Good! Don’t depend
+on them, depend upon yourselves and work! Do they deny you
+representation in their Cortes? So much the better! Even should you
+succeed in sending representatives of your own choice, what are you
+going to accomplish there except to be overwhelmed among so many
+voices, and sanction with your presence the abuses and wrongs that are
+afterwards perpetrated? The fewer rights they allow you, the more
+reason you will have later to throw off the yoke, and return evil for
+evil. If they are unwilling to teach you their language, cultivate your
+own, extend it, preserve to the people their own way of thinking, and
+instead of aspiring to be a province, aspire to be a nation! Instead of
+subordinate thoughts, think independently, to the end that neither by
+right, nor custom, nor language, the Spaniard can be considered the
+master here, nor even be looked upon as a part of the country, but ever
+as an invader, a foreigner, and sooner or later you will have your
+liberty! Here’s why I let you live!”
+
+Basilio breathed freely, as though a great weight had been lifted from
+him, and after a brief pause, replied: “Sir, the honor you do me in
+confiding your plans to me is too great for me not to be frank with
+you, and tell you that what you ask of me is beyond my power. I am no
+politician, and if I have signed the petition for instruction in
+Castilian it has been because I saw in it an advantage to our studies
+and nothing more. My destiny is different; my aspiration reduces itself
+to alleviating the physical sufferings of my fellow men.”
+
+The jeweler smiled. “What are physical sufferings compared to moral
+tortures? What is the death of a man in the presence of the death of a
+society? Some day you will perhaps be a great physician, if they let
+you go your way in peace, but greater yet will be he who can inject a
+new idea into this anemic people! You, what are you doing for the land
+that gave you existence, that supports your life, that affords you
+knowledge? Don’t you realize that that is a useless life which is not
+consecrated to a great idea? It is a stone wasted in the fields without
+becoming a part of any edifice.”
+
+“No, no, sir!” replied Basilio modestly, “I’m not folding my arms, I’m
+working like all the rest to raise up from the ruins of the past a
+people whose units will be bound together—that each one may feel in
+himself the conscience and the life of the whole. But however
+enthusiastic our generation may be, we understand that in this great
+social fabric there must be a division of labor. I have chosen my task
+and will devote myself to science.”
+
+“Science is not the end of man,” declared Simoun.
+
+“The most civilized nations are tending toward it.”
+
+“Yes, but only as a means of seeking their welfare.”
+
+“Science is more eternal, it’s more human, it’s more universal!”
+exclaimed the youth in a transport of enthusiasm. “Within a few
+centuries, when humanity has become redeemed and enlightened, when
+there are no races, when all peoples are free, when there are neither
+tyrants nor slaves, colonies nor mother countries, when justice rules
+and man is a citizen of the world, the pursuit of science alone will
+remain, the word patriotism will be equivalent to fanaticism, and he
+who prides himself on patriotic ideas will doubtless be isolated as a
+dangerous disease, as a menace to the social order.”
+
+Simoun smiled sadly. “Yes, yes,” he said with a shake of his head, “yet
+to reach that condition it is necessary that there be no tyrannical and
+no enslaved peoples, it is necessary that man go about freely, that he
+know how to respect the rights of others in their own individuality,
+and for this there is yet much blood to be shed, the struggle forces
+itself forward. To overcome the ancient fanaticism that bound
+consciences it was necessary that many should perish in the holocausts,
+so that the social conscience in horror declared the individual
+conscience free. It is also necessary that all answer the question
+which with each day the fatherland asks them, with its fettered hands
+extended! Patriotism can only be a crime in a tyrannical people,
+because then it is rapine under a beautiful name, but however perfect
+humanity may become, patriotism will always be a virtue among oppressed
+peoples, because it will at all times mean love of justice, of liberty,
+of personal dignity—nothing of chimerical dreams, of effeminate idyls!
+The greatness of a man is not in living before his time, a thing almost
+impossible, but in understanding its desires, in responding to its
+needs, and in guiding it on its forward way. The geniuses that are
+commonly believed to have existed before their time, only appear so
+because those who judge them see from a great distance, or take as
+representative of the age the line of stragglers!”
+
+Simoun fell silent. Seeing that he could awake no enthusiasm in that
+unresponsive mind, he turned to another subject and asked with a change
+of tone: “And what are you doing for the memory of your mother and your
+brother? Is it enough that you come here every year, to weep like a
+woman over a grave?” And he smiled sarcastically.
+
+The shot hit the mark. Basilio changed color and advanced a step.
+
+“What do you want me to do?” he asked angrily.
+
+“Without means, without social position, how may I bring their
+murderers to justice? I would merely be another victim, shattered like
+a piece of glass hurled against a rock. Ah, you do ill to recall this
+to me, since it is wantonly reopening a wound!”
+
+“But what if I should offer you my aid?”
+
+Basilio shook his head and remained pensive. “All the tardy
+vindications of justice, all the revenge in the world, will not restore
+a single hair of my mother’s head, or recall a smile to my brother’s
+lips. Let them rest in peace—what should I gain now by avenging them?”
+
+“Prevent others from suffering what you have suffered, that in the
+future there be no brothers murdered or mothers driven to madness.
+Resignation is not always a virtue; it is a crime when it encourages
+tyrants: there are no despots where there are no slaves! Man is in his
+own nature so wicked that he always abuses complaisance. I thought as
+you do, and you know what my fate was. Those who caused your
+misfortunes are watching you day and night, they suspect that you are
+only biding your time, they take your eagerness to learn, your love of
+study, your very complaisance, for burning desires for revenge. The day
+they can get rid of you they will do with you as they did with me, and
+they will not let you grow to manhood, because they fear and hate you!”
+
+“Hate me? Still hate me after the wrong they have done me?” asked the
+youth in surprise.
+
+Simoun burst into a laugh. “‘It is natural for man to hate those whom
+he has wronged,’ said Tacitus, confirming the quos laeserunt et oderunt
+of Seneca. When you wish to gauge the evil or the good that one people
+has done to another, you have only to observe whether it hates or
+loves. Thus is explained the reason why many who have enriched
+themselves here in the high offices they have filled, on their return
+to the Peninsula relieve themselves by slanders and insults against
+those who have been their victims. Proprium humani ingenii est odisse
+quern laeseris!”
+
+“But if the world is large, if one leaves them to the peaceful
+enjoyment of power, if I ask only to be allowed to work, to live—”
+
+“And to rear meek-natured sons to send them afterwards to submit to the
+yoke,” continued Simoun, cruelly mimicking Basilio’s tone. “A fine
+future you prepare for them, and they have to thank you for a life of
+humiliation and suffering! Good enough, young man! When a body is
+inert, it is useless to galvanize it. Twenty years of continuous
+slavery, of systematic humiliation, of constant prostration, finally
+create in the mind a twist that cannot be straightened by the labor of
+a day. Good and evil instincts are inherited and transmitted from
+father to son. Then let your idylic ideas live, your dreams of a slave
+who asks only for a bandage to wrap the chain so that it may rattle
+less and not ulcerate his skin! You hope for a little home and some
+ease, a wife and a handful of rice—here is your ideal man of the
+Philippines! Well, if they give it to you, consider yourself
+fortunate.”
+
+Basilio, accustomed to obey and bear with the caprices and humors of
+Capitan Tiago. was now dominated by Simoun, who appeared to him
+terrible and sinister on a background bathed in tears and blood. He
+tried to explain himself by saying that he did not consider himself fit
+to mix in politics, that he had no political opinions because he had
+never studied the question, but that he was always ready to lend his
+services the day they might be needed, that for the moment he saw only
+one need, the enlightenment of the people.
+
+Simoun stopped him with a gesture, and, as the dawn was coming, said to
+him: “Young man, I am not warning you to keep my secret, because I know
+that discretion is one of your good qualities, and even though you
+might wish to sell me, the jeweler Simoun, the friend of the
+authorities and of the religious corporations, will always be given
+more credit than the student Basilio, already suspected of
+filibusterism, and, being a native, so much the more marked and
+watched, and because in the profession you are entering upon you will
+encounter powerful rivals. After all, even though you have not
+corresponded to my hopes, the day on which you change your mind, look
+me up at my house in the Escolta, and I’ll be glad to help you.”
+
+Basilio thanked him briefly and went away.
+
+“Have I really made a mistake?” mused Simoun, when he found himself
+alone. “Is it that he doubts me and meditates his plan of revenge so
+secretly that he fears to tell it even in the solitude of the night? Or
+can it be that the years of servitude have extinguished in his heart
+every human sentiment and there remain only the animal desires to live
+and reproduce? In that case the type is deformed and will have to be
+cast over again. Then the hecatomb is preparing: let the unfit perish
+and only the strongest survive!”
+
+Then he added sadly, as if apostrophizing some one: “Have patience, you
+who left me a name and a home, have patience! I have lost all—country,
+future, prosperity, your very tomb, but have patience! And thou, noble
+spirit, great soul, generous heart, who didst live with only one
+thought and didst sacrifice thy life without asking the gratitude or
+applause of any one, have patience, have patience! The methods that I
+use may perhaps not be thine, but they are the most direct. The day is
+coming, and when it brightens I myself will come to announce it to you
+who are now indifferent. Have patience!”
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+MERRY CHRISTMAS!
+
+
+When Juli opened her sorrowing eyes, she saw that the house was still
+dark, but the cocks were crowing. Her first thought was that perhaps
+the Virgin had performed the miracle and the sun was not going to rise,
+in spite of the invocations of the cocks. She rose, crossed herself,
+recited her morning prayers with great devotion, and with as little
+noise as possible went out on the batalan.
+
+There was no miracle—the sun was rising and promised a magnificent
+morning, the breeze was delightfully cool, the stars were paling in the
+east, and the cocks were crowing as if to see who could crow best and
+loudest. That had been too much to ask—it were much easier to request
+the Virgin to send the two hundred and fifty pesos. What would it cost
+the Mother of the Lord to give them? But underneath the image she found
+only the letter of her father asking for the ransom of five hundred
+pesos. There was nothing to do but go, so, seeing that her grandfather
+was not stirring, she thought him asleep and began to prepare
+breakfast. Strange, she was calm, she even had a desire to laugh! What
+had she had last night to afflict her so? She was not going very far,
+she could come every second day to visit the house, her grandfather
+could see her, and as for Basilio, he had known for some time the bad
+turn her father’s affairs had taken, since he had often said to her,
+“When I’m a physician and we are married, your father won’t need his
+fields.”
+
+“What a fool I was to cry so much,” she said to herself as she packed
+her tampipi. Her fingers struck against the locket and she pressed it
+to her lips, but immediately wiped them from fear of contagion, for
+that locket set with diamonds and emeralds had come from a leper. Ah,
+then, if she should catch that disease she could not get married.
+
+As it became lighter, she could see her grandfather seated in a corner,
+following all her movements with his eyes, so she caught up her tampipi
+of clothes and approached him smilingly to kiss his hand. The old man
+blessed her silently, while she tried to appear merry. “When father
+comes back, tell him that I have at last gone to college—my mistress
+talks Spanish. It’s the cheapest college I could find.”
+
+Seeing the old man’s eyes fill with tears, she placed the tampipi on
+her head and hastily went downstairs, her slippers slapping merrily on
+the wooden steps. But when she turned her head to look again at the
+house, the house wherein had faded her childhood dreams and her maiden
+illusions, when she saw it sad, lonely, deserted, with the windows half
+closed, vacant and dark like a dead man’s eyes, when she heard the low
+rustling of the bamboos, and saw them nodding in the fresh morning
+breeze as though bidding her farewell, then her vivacity disappeared;
+she stopped, her eyes filled with tears, and letting herself fall in a
+sitting posture on a log by the wayside she broke out into disconsolate
+tears.
+
+Juli had been gone several hours and the sun was quite high overhead
+when Tandang Selo gazed from the window at the people in their festival
+garments going to the town to attend the high mass. Nearly all led by
+the hand or carried in their arms a little boy or girl decked out as if
+for a fiesta.
+
+Christmas day in the Philippines is, according to the elders, a fiesta
+for the children, who are perhaps not of the same opinion and who, it
+may be supposed, have for it an instinctive dread. They are roused
+early, washed, dressed, and decked out with everything new, dear, and
+precious that they possess—high silk shoes, big hats, woolen or velvet
+suits, without overlooking four or five scapularies, which contain
+texts from St. John, and thus burdened they are carried to the high
+mass, where for almost an hour they are subjected to the heat and the
+human smells from so many crowding, perspiring people, and if they are
+not made to recite the rosary they must remain quiet, bored, or asleep.
+At each movement or antic that may soil their clothing they are pinched
+and scolded, so the fact is that they do not laugh or feel happy, while
+in their round eyes can be read a protest against so much embroidery
+and a longing for the old shirt of week-days.
+
+Afterwards, they are dragged from house to house to kiss their
+relatives’ hands. There they have to dance, sing, and recite all the
+amusing things they know, whether in the humor or not, whether
+comfortable or not in their fine clothes, with the eternal pinchings
+and scoldings if they play any of their tricks. Their relatives give
+them cuartos which their parents seize upon and of which they hear
+nothing more. The only positive results they are accustomed to get from
+the fiesta are the marks of the aforesaid pinchings, the vexations, and
+at best an attack of indigestion from gorging themselves with candy and
+cake in the houses of kind relatives. But such is the custom, and
+Filipino children enter the world through these ordeals, which
+afterwards prove the least sad, the least hard, of their lives.
+
+Adult persons who live independently also share in this fiesta, by
+visiting their parents and their parents’ relatives, crooking their
+knees, and wishing them a merry Christmas. Their Christmas gift
+consists of a sweetmeat, some fruit, a glass of water, or some
+insignificant present.
+
+Tandang Selo saw all his friends pass and thought sadly that this year
+he had no Christmas gift for anybody, while his granddaughter had gone
+without hers, without wishing him a merry Christinas. Was it delicacy
+on Juli’s part or pure forgetfulness?
+
+When he tried to greet the relatives who called on him, bringing their
+children, he found to his great surprise that he could not articulate a
+word. Vainly he tried, but no sound could he utter. He placed his hands
+on his throat, shook his head, but without effect. When he tried to
+laugh, his lips trembled convulsively and the only noise produced was a
+hoarse wheeze like the blowing of bellows.
+
+The women gazed at him in consternation. “He’s dumb, he’s dumb!” they
+cried in astonishment, raising at once a literal pandemonium.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+PILATES
+
+
+When the news of this misfortune became known in the town, some
+lamented it and others shrugged their shoulders. No one was to blame,
+and no one need lay it on his conscience.
+
+The lieutenant of the Civil Guard gave no sign: he had received an
+order to take up all the arms and he had performed his duty. He had
+chased the tulisanes whenever he could, and when they captured Cabesang
+Tales he had organized an expedition and brought into the town, with
+their arms bound behind them, five or six rustics who looked
+suspicious, so if Cabesang Tales did not show up it was because he was
+not in the pockets or under the skins of the prisoners, who were
+thoroughly shaken out.
+
+The friar-administrator shrugged his shoulders: he had nothing to do
+with it, it was a matter of tulisanes and he had merely done his duty.
+True it was that if he had not entered the complaint, perhaps the arms
+would not have been taken up, and poor Tales would not have been
+captured; but he, Fray Clemente, had to look after his own safety, and
+that Tales had a way of staring at him as if picking out a good target
+in some part of his body. Self-defense is natural. If there are
+tulisanes, the fault is not his, it is not his duty to run them
+down—that belongs to the Civil Guard. If Cabesang Tales, instead of
+wandering about his fields, had stayed at home, he would not have been
+captured. In short, that was a punishment from heaven upon those who
+resisted the demands of his corporation.
+
+When Sister Penchang, the pious old woman in whose service Juli had
+entered, learned of it, she ejaculated several ’Susmarioseps, crossed
+herself, and remarked, “Often God sends these trials because we are
+sinners or have sinning relatives, to whom we should have taught piety
+and we haven’t done so.”
+
+Those sinning relatives referred to Juliana, for to this pious woman
+Juli was a great sinner. “Think of a girl of marriageable age who
+doesn’t yet know how to pray! Jesús, how scandalous! If the wretch
+doesn’t say the Diós te salve María without stopping at es contigo, and
+the Santa María without a pause after pecadores, as every good
+Christian who fears God ought to do! She doesn’t know the oremus
+gratiam, and says mentíbus for méntibus. Anybody hearing her would
+think she was talking about something else. ’Susmariosep!”
+
+Greatly scandalized, she made the sign of the cross and thanked God,
+who had permitted the capture of the father in order that the daughter
+might be snatched from sin and learn the virtues which, according to
+the curates, should adorn every Christian woman. She therefore kept the
+girl constantly at work, not allowing her to return to the village to
+look after her grandfather. Juli had to learn how to pray, to read the
+books distributed by the friars, and to work until the two hundred and
+fifty pesos should be paid.
+
+When she learned that Basilio had gone to Manila to get his savings and
+ransom Juli from her servitude, the good woman believed that the girl
+was forever lost and that the devil had presented himself in the guise
+of the student. Dreadful as it all was, how true was that little book
+the curate had given her! Youths who go to Manila to study are ruined
+and then ruin the others. Thinking to rescue Juli, she made her read
+and re-read the book called Tandang Basio Macunat, [17] charging her
+always to go and see the curate in the convento, [18] as did the
+heroine, who is so praised by the author, a friar.
+
+Meanwhile, the friars had gained their point. They had certainly won
+the suit, so they took advantage of Cabesang Tales’ captivity to turn
+the fields over to the one who had asked for them, without the least
+thought of honor or the faintest twinge of shame. When the former owner
+returned and learned what had happened, when he saw his fields in
+another’s possession,—those fields that had cost the lives of his wife
+and daughter,—when he saw his father dumb and his daughter working as a
+servant, and when he himself received an order from the town council,
+transmitted through the headman of the village, to move out of the
+house within three days, he said nothing; he sat down at his father’s
+side and spoke scarcely once during the whole day.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+WEALTH AND WANT
+
+
+On the following day, to the great surprise of the village, the jeweler
+Simoun, followed by two servants, each carrying a canvas-covered chest,
+requested the hospitality of Cabesang Tales, who even in the midst of
+his wretchedness did not forget the good Filipino customs—rather, he
+was troubled to think that he had no way of properly entertaining the
+stranger. But Simoun brought everything with him, servants and
+provisions, and merely wished to spend the day and night in the house
+because it was the largest in the village and was situated between San
+Diego and Tiani, towns where he hoped to find many customers.
+
+Simoun secured information about the condition of the roads and asked
+Cabesang Tales if his revolver was a sufficient protection against the
+tulisanes.
+
+“They have rifles that shoot a long way,” was the rather absent-minded
+reply.
+
+“This revolver does no less,” remarked Simoun, firing at an areca-palm
+some two hundred paces away.
+
+Cabesang Tales noticed that some nuts fell, but remained silent and
+thoughtful.
+
+Gradually the families, drawn by the fame of the jeweler’s wares, began
+to collect. They wished one another merry Christmas, they talked of
+masses, saints, poor crops, but still were there to spend their savings
+for jewels and trinkets brought from Europe. It was known that the
+jeweler was the friend of the Captain-General, so it wasn’t lost labor
+to get on good terms with him, and thus be prepared for contingencies.
+
+Capitan Basilio came with his wife, daughter, and son-in-law, prepared
+to spend at least three thousand pesos. Sister Penchang was there to
+buy a diamond ring she had promised to the Virgin of Antipolo. She had
+left Juli at home memorizing a booklet the curate had sold her for four
+cuartos, with forty days of indulgence granted by the Archbishop to
+every one who read it or listened to it read.
+
+“Jesús!” said the pious woman to Capitana Tika, “that poor girl has
+grown up like a mushroom planted by the tikbalang. I’ve made her read
+the book at the top of her voice at least fifty times and she doesn’t
+remember a single word of it. She has a head like a sieve—full when
+it’s in the water. All of us hearing her, even the dogs and cats, have
+won at least twenty years of indulgence.”
+
+Simoun arranged his two chests on the table, one being somewhat larger
+than the other. “You don’t want plated jewelry or imitation gems. This
+lady,” turning to Sinang, “wants real diamonds.”
+
+“That’s it, yes, sir, diamonds, old diamonds, antique stones, you
+know,” she responded. “Papa will pay for them, because he likes antique
+things, antique stones.” Sinang was accustomed to joke about the great
+deal of Latin her father understood and the little her husband knew.
+
+“It just happens that I have some antique jewels,” replied Simoun,
+taking the canvas cover from the smaller chest, a polished steel case
+with bronze trimmings and stout locks. “I have necklaces of
+Cleopatra’s, real and genuine, discovered in the Pyramids; rings of
+Roman senators and knights, found in the ruins of Carthage.”
+
+“Probably those that Hannibal sent back after the battle of Cannae!”
+exclaimed Capitan Basilio seriously, while he trembled with pleasure.
+The good man, thought he had read much about the ancients, had never,
+by reason of the lack of museums in Filipinas, seen any of the objects
+of those times.
+
+“I have brought besides costly earrings of Roman ladies, discovered in
+the villa of Annius Mucius Papilinus in Pompeii.”
+
+Capitan Easilio nodded to show that he understood and was eager to see
+such precious relics. The women remarked that they also wanted things
+from Rome, such as rosaries blessed by the Pope, holy relics that would
+take away sins without the need of confessions, and so on.
+
+When the chest was opened and the cotton packing removed, there was
+exposed a tray filled with rings, reliquaries, lockets, crucifixes,
+brooches, and such like. The diamonds set in among variously colored
+stones flashed out brightly and shimmered among golden flowers of
+varied hues, with petals of enamel, all of peculiar designs and rare
+Arabesque workmanship.
+
+Simoun lifted the tray and exhibited another filled with quaint jewels
+that would have satisfied the imaginations of seven débutantes on the
+eves of the balls in their honor. Designs, one more fantastic than the
+other, combinations of precious stones and pearls worked into the
+figures of insects with azure backs and transparent forewings,
+sapphires, emeralds, rubies, turquoises, diamonds, joined to form
+dragon-flies, wasps, bees, butterflies, beetles, serpents, lizards,
+fishes, sprays of flowers. There were diadems, necklaces of pearls and
+diamonds, so that some of the girls could not withhold a nakú of
+admiration, and Sinang gave a cluck with her tongue, whereupon her
+mother pinched her to prevent her from encouraging the jeweler to raise
+his prices, for Capitana Tika still pinched her daughter even after the
+latter was married.
+
+“Here you have some old diamonds,” explained the jeweler. “This ring
+belonged to the Princess Lamballe and those earrings to one of Marie
+Antoinette’s ladies.” They consisted of some beautiful solitaire
+diamonds, as large as grains of corn, with somewhat bluish lights, and
+pervaded with a severe elegance, as though they still reflected in
+their sparkles the shuddering of the Reign of Terror.
+
+“Those two earrings!” exclaimed Sinang, looking at her father and
+instinctively covering the arm next to her mother.
+
+“Something more ancient yet, something Roman,” said Capitan Basilio
+with a wink.
+
+The pious Sister Penchang thought that with such a gift the Virgin of
+Antipolo would be softened and grant her her most vehement desire: for
+some time she had begged for a wonderful miracle to which her name
+would be attached, so that her name might be immortalized on earth and
+she then ascend into heaven, like the Capitana Ines of the curates. She
+inquired the price and Simoun asked three thousand pesos, which made
+the good woman cross herself—’Susmariosep!
+
+Simoun now exposed the third tray, which was filled with watches,
+cigar- and match-cases decorated with the rarest enamels, reliquaries
+set with diamonds and containing the most elegant miniatures.
+
+The fourth tray, containing loose gems, stirred a murmur of admiration.
+Sinang again clucked with her tongue, her mother again pinched her,
+although at the same time herself emitting a ’Susmaría of wonder.
+
+No one there had ever before seen so much wealth. In that chest lined
+with dark-blue velvet, arranged in trays, were the wonders of the
+Arabian Nights, the dreams of Oriental fantasies. Diamonds as large as
+peas glittered there, throwing out attractive rays as if they were
+about to melt or burn with all the hues of the spectrum; emeralds from
+Peru, of varied forms and shapes; rubies from India, red as drops of
+blood; sapphires from Ceylon, blue and white; turquoises from Persia;
+Oriental pearls, some rosy, some lead-colored, others black. Those who
+have at night seen a great rocket burst in the azure darkness of the
+sky into thousands of colored lights, so bright that they make the
+eternal stars look dim, can imagine the aspect the tray presented.
+
+As if to increase the admiration of the beholders, Simoun took the
+stones out with his tapering brown fingers, gloating over their
+crystalline hardness, their luminous stream, as they poured from his
+hands like drops of water reflecting the tints of the rainbow. The
+reflections from so many facets, the thought of their great value,
+fascinated the gaze of every one.
+
+Cabesang Tales, who had approached out of curiosity, closed his eyes
+and drew back hurriedly, as if to drive away an evil thought. Such
+great riches were an insult to his misfortunes; that man had come there
+to make an exhibition of his immense wealth on the very day that he,
+Tales, for lack of money, for lack of protectors, had to abandon the
+house raised by his own hands.
+
+“Here you have two black diamonds, among the largest in existence,”
+explained the jeweler. “They’re very difficult to cut because they’re
+the very hardest. This somewhat rosy stone is also a diamond, as is
+this green one that many take for an emerald. Quiroga the Chinaman
+offered me six thousand pesos for it in order to present it to a very
+influential lady, and yet it is not the green ones that are the most
+valuable, but these blue ones.”
+
+He selected three stones of no great size, but thick and well-cut, of a
+delicate azure tint.
+
+“For all that they are smaller than the green,” he continued, “they
+cost twice as much. Look at this one, the smallest of all, weighing not
+more than two carats, which cost me twenty thousand pesos and which I
+won’t sell for less than thirty. I had to make a special trip to buy
+it. This other one, from the mines of Golconda, weighs three and a half
+carats and is worth over seventy thousand. The Viceroy of India, in a
+letter I received the day before yesterday, offers me twelve thousand
+pounds sterling for it.”
+
+Before such great wealth, all under the power of that man who talked so
+unaffectedly, the spectators felt a kind of awe mingled with dread.
+Sinang clucked several times and her mother did not pinch her, perhaps
+because she too was overcome, or perhaps because she reflected that a
+jeweler like Simoun was not going to try to gain five pesos more or
+less as a result of an exclamation more or less indiscreet. All gazed
+at the gems, but no one showed any desire to handle them, they were so
+awe-inspiring. Curiosity was blunted by wonder. Cabesang Tales stared
+out into the field, thinking that with a single diamond, perhaps the
+very smallest there, he could recover his daughter, keep his house, and
+perhaps rent another farm. Could it be that those gems were worth more
+than a man’s home, the safety of a maiden, the peace of an old man in
+his declining days?
+
+As if he guessed the thought, Simoun remarked to those about him: “Look
+here—with one of these little blue stones, which appear so innocent and
+inoffensive, pure as sparks scattered over the arch of heaven, with one
+of these, seasonably presented, a man was able to have his enemy
+deported, the father of a family, as a disturber of the peace; and with
+this other little one like it, red as one’s heart-blood, as the feeling
+of revenge, and bright as an orphan’s tears, he was restored to
+liberty, the man was returned to his home, the father to his children,
+the husband to the wife, and a whole family saved from a wretched
+future.”
+
+He slapped the chest and went on in a loud tone in bad Tagalog: “Here I
+have, as in a medicine-chest, life and death, poison and balm, and with
+this handful I can drive to tears all the inhabitants of the
+Philippines!”
+
+The listeners gazed at him awe-struck, knowing him to be right. In his
+voice there could be detected a strange ring, while sinister flashes
+seemed to issue from behind the blue goggles.
+
+Then as if to relieve the strain of the impression made by the gems on
+such simple folk, he lifted up the tray and exposed at the bottom the
+sanctum sanctorum. Cases of Russian leather, separated by layers of
+cotton, covered a bottom lined with gray velvet. All expected wonders,
+and Sinang’s husband thought he saw carbuncles, gems that flashed fire
+and shone in the midst of the shadows. Capitan Basilio was on the
+threshold of immortality: he was going to behold something real,
+something beyond his dreams.
+
+“This was a necklace of Cleopatra’s,” said Simoun, taking out carefully
+a flat case in the shape of a half-moon. “It’s a jewel that can’t be
+appraised, an object for a museum, only for a rich government.”
+
+It was a necklace fashioned of bits of gold representing little idols
+among green and blue beetles, with a vulture’s head made from a single
+piece of rare jasper at the center between two extended wings—the
+symbol and decoration of Egyptian queens.
+
+Sinang turned up her nose and made a grimace of childish depreciation,
+while Capitan Basilio, with all his love for antiquity, could not
+restrain an exclamation of disappointment.
+
+“It’s a magnificent jewel, well-preserved, almost two thousand years
+old.”
+
+“Pshaw!” Sinang made haste to exclaim, to prevent her father’s falling
+into temptation.
+
+“Fool!” he chided her, after overcoming his first disappointment. “How
+do you know but that to this necklace is due the present condition of
+the world? With this Cleopatra may have captivated Caesar, Mark Antony!
+This has heard the burning declarations of love from the greatest
+warriors of their time, it has listened to speeches in the purest and
+most elegant Latin, and yet you would want to wear it!”
+
+“I? I wouldn’t give three pesos for it.”
+
+“You could give twenty, silly,” said Capitana Tika in a judicial tone.
+“The gold is good and melted down would serve for other jewelry.”
+
+“This is a ring that must have belonged to Sulla,” continued Simoun,
+exhibiting a heavy ring of solid gold with a seal on it.
+
+“With that he must have signed the death-wrarrants during his
+dictatorship!” exclaimed Capitan Basilio, pale with emotion. He
+examined it and tried to decipher the seal, but though he turned it
+over and over he did not understand paleography, so he could not read
+it.
+
+“What a finger Sulla had!” he observed finally. “This would fit two of
+ours—as I’ve said, we’re degenerating!”
+
+“I still have many other jewels—”
+
+“If they’re all that kind, never mind!” interrupted Sinang. “I think I
+prefer the modern.”
+
+Each one selected some piece of jewelry, one a ring, another a watch,
+another a locket. Capitana Tika bought a reliquary that contained a
+fragment of the stone on which Our Saviour rested at his third fall;
+Sinang a pair of earrings; and Capitan Basilio the watch-chain for the
+alferez, the lady’s earrings for the curate, and other gifts. The
+families from the town of Tiani, not to be outdone by those of San
+Diego, in like manner emptied their purses.
+
+Simoun bought or exchanged old jewelry, brought there by economical
+mothers, to whom it was no longer of use.
+
+“You, haven’t you something to sell?” he asked Cabesang Tales, noticing
+the latter watching the sales and exchanges with covetous eyes, but the
+reply was that all his daughter’s jewels had been sold, nothing of
+value remained.
+
+“What about Maria Clara’s locket?” inquired Sinang.
+
+“True!” the man exclaimed, and his eyes blazed for a moment.
+
+“It’s a locket set with diamonds and emeralds,” Sinang told the
+jeweler. “My old friend wore it before she became a nun.”
+
+Simoun said nothing, but anxiously watched Cabesang Tales, who, after
+opening several boxes, found the locket. He examined it carefully,
+opening and shutting it repeatedly. It was the same locket that Maria
+Clara had worn during the fiesta in San Diego and which she had in a
+moment of compassion given to a leper.
+
+“I like the design,” said Simoun. “How much do you want for it?”
+
+Cabesang Tales scratched his head in perplexity, then his ear, then
+looked at the women.
+
+“I’ve taken a fancy to this locket,” Simoun went on. “Will you take a
+hundred, five hundred pesos? Do you want to exchange it for something
+else? Take your choice here!”
+
+Tales stared foolishly at Simoun, as if in doubt of what he heard.
+“Five hundred pesos?” he murmured.
+
+“Five hundred,” repeated the jeweler in a voice shaking with emotion.
+
+Cabesang Tales took the locket and made several turns about the room,
+with his heart beating violently and his hands trembling. Dared he ask
+more? That locket could save him, this was an excellent opportunity,
+such as might not again present itself.
+
+The women winked at him to encourage him to make the sale, excepting
+Penchang, who, fearing that Juli would be ransomed, observed piously:
+“I would keep it as a relic. Those who have seen Maria Clara in the
+nunnery say she has got so thin and weak that she can scarcely talk and
+it’s thought that she’ll die a saint. Padre Salvi speaks very highly of
+her and he’s her confessor. That’s why Juli didn’t want ito give it up,
+but rather preferred to pawn herself.”
+
+This speech had its effect—the thought of his daughter restrained
+Tales. “If you will allow me,” he said, “I’ll go to the town to consult
+my daughter. I’ll be back before night.”
+
+This was agreed upon and Tales set out at once. But when he found
+himself outside of the village, he made out at a distance, on a path,
+that entered the woods, the friar-administrator and a man whom he
+recognized as the usurper of his land. A husband seeing his wife enter
+a private room with another man could not feel more wrath or jealousy
+than Cabesang Tales experienced when he saw them moving over his
+fields, the fields cleared by him, which he had thought to leave to his
+children. It seemed to him that they were mocking him, laughing at his
+powerlessness. There flashed into his memory what he had said about
+never giving up his fields except to him who irrigated them with his
+own blood and buried in them his wife and daughter.
+
+He stopped, rubbed his hand over his forehead, and shut his eyes. When
+he again opened them, he saw that the man had turned to laugh and that
+the friar had caught his sides as though to save himself from bursting
+with merriment, then he saw them point toward his house and laugh
+again.
+
+A buzz sounded in his ears, he felt the crack of a whip around his
+chest, the red mist reappeared before his eyes, he again saw the
+corpses of his wife and daughter, and beside them the usurper with the
+friar laughing and holding his sides. Forgetting everything else, he
+turned aside into the path they had taken, the one leading to his
+fields.
+
+Simoun waited in vain for Cabesang Tales to return that night. But the
+next morning when he arose he noticed that the leather holster of his
+revolver was empty. Opening it he found inside a scrap of paper wrapped
+around the locket set with emeralds and diamonds, with these few lines
+written on it in Tagalog:
+
+
+   “Pardon, sir, that in my own house I relieve you of what belongs to
+    you, but necessity drives me to it. In exchange for your revolver I
+    leave the locket you desired so much. I need the weapon, for I am
+    going out to join the tulisanes.
+
+   “I advise you not to keep on your present road, because if you fall
+    into our power, not then being my guest, we will require of you a
+    large ransom.
+
+        Telesforo Juan de Dios.”
+
+
+“At last I’ve found my man!” muttered Simoun with a deep breath. “He’s
+somewhat scrupulous, but so much the better—he’ll keep his promises.”
+
+He then ordered a servant to go by boat over the lake to Los Baños with
+the larger chest and await him there. He would go on overland, taking
+the smaller chest, the one containing his famous jewels. The arrival of
+four civil-guards completed his good humor. They came to arrest
+Cabesang Tales and not finding him took Tandang Selo away instead.
+
+Three murders had been committed during the night. The
+friar-administrator and the new tenant of Cabesang Tales’ land had been
+found dead, with their heads split open and their mouths full of earth,
+on the border of the fields. In the town the wife of the usurper was
+found dead at dawn, her mouth also filled with earth and her throat
+cut, with a fragment of paper beside her, on which was the name Tales,
+written in blood as though traced by a finger.
+
+Calm yourselves, peaceful inhabitants of Kalamba! None of you are named
+Tales, none of you have committed any crime! You are called Luis
+Habaña, Matías Belarmino, Nicasio Eigasani, Cayetano de Jesús, Mateo
+Elejorde, Leandro Lopez, Antonino Lopez, Silvestre Ubaldo, Manuel
+Hidalgo, Paciano Mercado, your name is the whole village of Kalamba.
+[19] You cleared your fields, on them you have spent the labor of your
+whole lives, your savings, your vigils and privations, and you have
+been despoiled of them, driven from your homes, with the rest forbidden
+to show you hospitality! Not content with outraging justice, they [20]
+have trampled upon the sacred traditions of your country! You have
+served Spain and the King, and when in their name you have asked for
+justice, you were banished without trial, torn from your wives’ arms
+and your children’s caresses! Any one of you has suffered more than
+Cabesang Tales, and yet none, not one of you, has received justice!
+Neither pity nor humanity has been shown you—you have been persecuted
+beyond the tomb, as was Mariano Herbosa! [21] Weep or laugh, there in
+those lonely isles where you wander vaguely, uncertain of the future!
+Spain, the generous Spain, is watching over you, and sooner or later
+you will have justice!
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+LOS BAÑOS
+
+
+His Excellency, the Captain-General and Governor of the Philippine
+Islands, had been hunting in Bosoboso. But as he had to be accompanied
+by a band of music,—since such an exalted personage was not to be
+esteemed less than the wooden images carried in the processions,—and as
+devotion to the divine art of St. Cecilia has not yet been popularized
+among the deer and wild boars of Bosoboso, his Excellency, with the
+band of music and train of friars, soldiers, and clerks, had not been
+able to catch a single rat or a solitary bird.
+
+The provincial authorities foresaw dismissals and transfers, the poor
+gobernadorcillos and cabezas de barangay were restless and sleepless,
+fearing that the mighty hunter in his wrath might have a notion to make
+up with their persons for the lack of submissiveness on the part of the
+beasts of the forest, as had been done years before by an alcalde who
+had traveled on the shoulders of impressed porters because he found no
+horses gentle enough to guarantee his safety. There was not lacking an
+evil rumor that his Excellency had decided to take some action, since
+in this he saw the first symptoms of a rebellion which should be
+strangled in its infancy, that a fruitless hunt hurt the prestige of
+the Spanish name, that he already had his eye on a wretch to be dressed
+up as a deer, when his Excellency, with clemency that Ben-Zayb lacked
+words to extol sufficiently, dispelled all the fears by declaring that
+it pained him to sacrifice to his pleasure the beasts of the forest.
+
+But to tell the truth, his Excellency was secretly very well satisfied,
+for what would have happened had he missed a shot at a deer, one of
+those not familiar with political etiquette? What would the prestige of
+the sovereign power have come to then? A Captain-General of the
+Philippines missing a shot, like a raw hunter? What would have been
+said by the Indians, among whom there were some fair huntsmen? The
+integrity of the fatherland would have been endangered.
+
+So it was that his Excellency, with a sheepish smile, and posing as a
+disappointed hunter, ordered an immediate return to Los Baños. During
+the journey he related with an indifferent air his hunting exploits in
+this or that forest of the Peninsula, adopting a tone somewhat
+depreciative, as suited the case, toward hunting in Filipinas. The bath
+in Dampalit, the hot springs on the shore of the lake, card-games in
+the palace, with an occasional excursion to some neighboring waterfall,
+or the lake infested with caymans, offered more attractions and fewer
+risks to the integrity of the fatherland.
+
+Thus on one of the last days of December, his Excellency found himself
+in the sala, taking a hand at cards while he awaited the breakfast
+hour. He had come from the bath, with the usual glass of coconut-milk
+and its soft meat, so he was in the best of humors for granting favors
+and privileges. His good humor was increased by his winning a good many
+hands, for Padre Irene and Padre Sibyla, with whom he was playing, were
+exercising all their skill in secretly trying to lose, to the great
+irritation of Padre Camorra, who on account of his late arrival only
+that morning was not informed as to the game they were playing on the
+General. The friar-artilleryman was playing in good faith and with
+great care, so he turned red and bit his lip every time Padre Sibyla
+seemed inattentive or blundered, but he dared not say a word by reason
+of the respect he felt for the Dominican. In exchange he took his
+revenge out on Padre Irene, whom he looked upon as a base fawner and
+despised for his coarseness. Padre Sibyla let him scold, while the
+humbler Padre Irene tried to excuse himself by rubbing his long nose.
+His Excellency was enjoying it and took advantage, like the good
+tactician that the Canon hinted he was, of all the mistakes of his
+opponents. Padre Camorra was ignorant of the fact that across the table
+they were playing for the intellectual development of the Filipinos,
+the instruction in Castilian, but had he known it he would doubtless
+have joyfully entered into that game.
+
+The open balcony admitted the fresh, pure breeze and revealed the lake,
+whose waters murmured sweetly around the base of the edifice, as if
+rendering homage. On the right, at a distance, appeared Talim Island, a
+deep blue in the midst of the lake, while almost in front lay the green
+and deserted islet of Kalamba, in the shape of a half-moon. To the left
+the picturesque shores were fringed with clumps of bamboo, then a hill
+overlooking the lake, with wide ricefields beyond, then red roofs amid
+the deep green of the trees,—the town of Kalamba,—and beyond the
+shore-line fading into the distance, with the horizon at the back
+closing down over the water, giving the lake the appearance of a sea
+and justifying the name the Indians give it of dagat na tabang, or
+fresh-water sea.
+
+At the end of the sala, seated before a table covered with documents,
+was the secretary. His Excellency was a great worker and did not like
+to lose time, so he attended to business in the intervals of the game
+or while dealing the cards. Meanwhile, the bored secretary yawned and
+despaired. That morning he had worked, as usual, over transfers,
+suspensions of employees, deportations, pardons, and the like, but had
+not yet touched the great question that had stirred so much
+interest—the petition of the students requesting permission to
+establish an academy of Castilian. Pacing from one end of the room to
+the other and conversing animatedly but in low tones were to be seen
+Don Custodio, a high official, and a friar named Padre Fernandez, who
+hung his head with an air either of meditation or annoyance. From an
+adjoining room issued the click of balls striking together and bursts
+of laughter, amid which might be heard the sharp, dry voice of Simoun,
+who was playing billiards with Ben-Zayb.
+
+Suddenly Padre Camorra arose. “The devil with this game, puñales!” he
+exclaimed, throwing his cards at Padre Irene’s head. “Puñales, that
+trick, if not all the others, was assured and we lost by default!
+Puñales! The devil with this game!”
+
+He explained the situation angrily to all the occupants of the sala,
+addressing himself especially to the three walking about, as if he had
+selected them for judges. The general played thus, he replied with such
+a card, Padre Irene had a certain card; he led, and then that fool of a
+Padre Irene didn’t play his card! Padre Irene was giving the game away!
+It was a devil of a way to play! His mother’s son had not come here to
+rack his brains for nothing and lose his money!
+
+Then he added, turning very red, “If the booby thinks my money grows on
+every bush!... On top of the fact that my Indians are beginning to
+haggle over payments!” Fuming, and disregarding the excuses of Padre
+Irene, who tried to explain while he rubbed the tip of his beak in
+order to conceal his sly smile, he went into the billiardroom.
+
+“Padre Fernandez, would you like to take a hand?” asked Fray Sibyla.
+
+“I’m a very poor player,” replied the friar with a grimace.
+
+“Then get Simoun,” said the General. “Eh, Simoun! Eh, Mister, won’t you
+try a hand?”
+
+“What is your disposition concerning the arms for sporting purposes?”
+asked the secretary, taking advantage of the pause.
+
+Simoun thrust his head through the doorway.
+
+“Don’t you want to take Padre Camorra’s place, Señor Sindbad?” inquired
+Padre Irene. “You can bet diamonds instead of chips.”
+
+“I don’t care if I do,” replied Simoun, advancing while he brushed the
+chalk from his hands. “What will you bet?”
+
+“What should we bet?” returned Padre Sibyla. “The General can bet what
+he likes, but we priests, clerics—”
+
+“Bah!” interrupted Simoun ironically. “You and Padre Irene can pay with
+deeds of charity, prayers, and virtues, eh?”
+
+“You know that the virtues a person may possess,” gravely argued Padre
+Sibyla, “are not like the diamonds that may pass from hand to hand, to
+be sold and resold. They are inherent in the being, they are essential
+attributes of the subject—”
+
+“I’ll be satisfied then if you pay me with promises,” replied Simoun
+jestingly. “You, Padre Sibyla, instead of paying me five something or
+other in money, will say, for example: for five days I renounce
+poverty, humility, and obedience. You, Padre Irene: I renounce
+chastity, liberality, and so on. Those are small matters, and I’m
+putting up my diamonds.”
+
+“What a peculiar man this Simoun is, what notions he has!” exclaimed
+Padre Irene with a smile.
+
+“And he,” continued Simoun, slapping his Excellency familiarly on the
+shoulder, “he will pay me with an order for five days in prison, or
+five months, or an order of deportation made out in blank, or let us
+say a summary execution by the Civil Guard while my man is being
+conducted from one town to another.”
+
+This was a strange proposition, so the three who had been pacing about
+gathered around.
+
+“But, Señor Simoun,” asked the high official, “what good will you get
+out of winning promises of virtues, or lives and deportations and
+summary executions?”
+
+“A great deal! I’m tired of hearing virtues talked about and would like
+to have the whole of them, all there are in the world, tied up in a
+sack, in order to throw them into the sea, even though I had to use my
+diamonds for sinkers.”
+
+“What an idea!” exclaimed Padre Irene with another smile. “And the
+deportations and executions, what of them?”
+
+“Well, to clean the country and destroy every evil seed.”
+
+“Get out! You’re still sore at the tulisanes. But you were lucky that
+they didn’t demand a larger ransom or keep all your jewels. Man, don’t
+be ungrateful!”
+
+Simoun proceeded to relate how he had been intercepted by a band of
+tulisanes, who, after entertaining him for a day, had let him go on his
+way without exacting other ransom than his two fine revolvers and the
+two boxes of cartridges he carried with him. He added that the
+tulisanes had charged him with many kind regards for his Excellency,
+the Captain-General.
+
+As a result of this, and as Simoun reported that the tulisanes were
+well provided with shotguns, rifles, and revolvers, and against such
+persons one man alone, no matter how well armed, could not defend
+himself, his Excellency, to prevent the tulisanes from getting weapons
+in the future, was about to dictate a new decree forbidding the
+introduction of sporting arms.
+
+“On the contrary, on the contrary!” protested Simoun, “for me the
+tulisanes are the most respectable men in the country, they’re the only
+ones who earn their living honestly. Suppose I had fallen into the
+hands—well, of you yourselves, for example, would you have let me
+escape without taking half of my jewels, at least?”
+
+Don Custodio was on the point of protesting; that Simoun was really a
+rude American mulatto taking advantage of his friendship with the
+Captain-General to insult Padre Irene, although it may be true also
+that Padre Irene would hardly have set him free for so little.
+
+“The evil is not,” went on Simoun, “in that there are tulisanes in the
+mountains and uninhabited parts—the evil lies in the tulisanes in the
+towns and cities.”
+
+“Like yourself,” put in the Canon with a smile.
+
+“Yes, like myself, like all of us! Let’s be frank, for no Indian is
+listening to us here,” continued the jeweler. “The evil is that we’re
+not all openly declared tulisanes. When that happens and we all take to
+the woods, on that day the country will be saved, on that day will rise
+a new social order which will take care of itself, and his Excellency
+will be able to play his game in peace, without the necessity of having
+his attention diverted by his secretary.”
+
+The person mentioned at that moment yawned, extending his folded arms
+above his head and stretching his crossed legs under the table as far
+as possible, upon noticing which all laughed. His Excellency wished to
+change the course of the conversation, so, throwing down the cards he
+had been shuffling, he said half seriously: “Come, come, enough of
+jokes and cards! Let’s get to work, to work in earnest, since we still
+have a half-hour before breakfast. Are there many matters to be got
+through with?”
+
+All now gave their attention. That was the day for joining battle over
+the question of instruction in Castilian, for which purpose Padre
+Sibyla and Padre Irene had been there several days. It was known that
+the former, as Vice-Rector, was opposed to the project and that the
+latter supported it, and his activity was in turn supported by the
+Countess.
+
+“What is there, what is there?” asked his Excellency impatiently.
+
+“The petition about sporting arms,” replied the secretary with a
+stifled yawn.
+
+“Forbidden!”
+
+“Pardon, General,” said the high official gravely, “your Excellency
+will permit me to invite your attention to the fact that the use of
+sporting arms is permitted in all the countries of the world.”
+
+The General shrugged his shoulders and remarked dryly, “We are not
+imitating any nation in the world.”
+
+Between his Excellency and the high official there was always a
+difference of opinion, so it was sufficient that the latter offer any
+suggestion whatsoever to have the former remain stubborn.
+
+The high official tried another tack. “Sporting arms can harm only rats
+and chickens. They’ll say—”
+
+“But are we chickens?” interrupted the General, again shrugging his
+shoulders. “Am I? I’ve demonstrated that I’m not.”
+
+“But there’s another thing,” observed the secretary. “Four months ago,
+when the possession of arms was prohibited, the foreign importers were
+assured that sporting arms would be admitted.”
+
+His Excellency knitted his brows.
+
+“That can be arranged,” suggested Simoun.
+
+“How?”
+
+“Very simply. Sporting arms nearly all have a caliber of six
+millimeters, at least those now in the market. Authorize only the sale
+of those that haven’t these six millimeters.”
+
+All approved this idea of Simoun’s, except the high official, who
+muttered into Padre Fernandez’s ear that this was not dignified, nor
+was it the way to govern.
+
+“The schoolmaster of Tiani,” proceeded the secretary, shuffling some
+papers about, “asks for a better location for—”
+
+“What better location can he want than the storehouse that he has all
+to himself?” interrupted Padre Camorra, who had returned, having
+forgotten about the card-game.
+
+“He says that it’s roofless,” replied the secretary, “and that having
+purchased out of his own pocket some maps and pictures, he doesn’t want
+to expose them to the weather.”
+
+“But I haven’t anything to do with that,” muttered his Excellency. “He
+should address the head secretary, [22] the governor of the province,
+or the nuncio.”
+
+“I want to tell you,” declared Padre Camorra, “that this little
+schoolmaster is a discontented filibuster. Just imagine—the heretic
+teaches that corpses rot just the same, whether buried with great pomp
+or without any! Some day I’m going to punch him!” Here he doubled up
+his fists.
+
+“To tell the truth,” observed Padre Sibyla, as if speaking only to
+Padre Irene, “he who wishes to teach, teaches everywhere, in the open
+air. Socrates taught in the public streets, Plato in the gardens of the
+Academy, even Christ among the mountains and lakes.”
+
+“I’ve heard several complaints against this schoolmaster,” said his
+Excellency, exchanging a glance with Simoun. “I think the best thing
+would be to suspend him.”
+
+“Suspended!” repeated the secretary.
+
+The luck of that unfortunate, who had asked for help and received his
+dismissal, pained the high official and he tried to do something for
+him.
+
+“It’s certain,” he insinuated rather timidly, “that education is not at
+all well provided for—”
+
+“I’ve already decreed large sums for the purchase of supplies,”
+exclaimed his Excellency haughtily, as if to say, “I’ve done more than
+I ought to have done.”
+
+“But since suitable locations are lacking, the supplies purchased get
+ruined.”
+
+“Everything can’t be done at once,” said his Excellency dryly. “The
+schoolmasters here are doing wrong in asking for buildings when those
+in Spain starve to death. It’s great presumption to be better off here
+than in the mother country itself!”
+
+“Filibusterism—”
+
+“Before everything the fatherland! Before everything else we are
+Spaniards!” added Ben-Zayb, his eyes glowing with patriotism, but he
+blushed somewhat when he noticed that he was speaking alone.
+
+“In the future,” decided the General, “all who complain will be
+suspended.”
+
+“If my project were accepted—” Don Custodio ventured to remark, as if
+talking to himself.
+
+“For the construction of schoolhouses?”
+
+“It’s simple, practical, economical, and, like all my projects, derived
+from long experience and knowledge of the country. The towns would have
+schools without costing the government a cuarto.”
+
+“That’s easy,” observed the secretary sarcastically. “Compel the towns
+to construct them at their own expense,” whereupon all laughed.
+
+“No, sir! No, sir!” cried the exasperated Don Custodio, turning very
+red. “The buildings are already constructed and only wait to be
+utilized. Hygienic, unsurpassable, spacious—”
+
+The friars looked at one another uneasily. Would Don Custodio propose
+that the churches and conventos be converted into schoolhouses?
+
+“Let’s hear it,” said the General with a frown.
+
+“Well, General, it’s very simple,” replied Don Custodio, drawing
+himself up and assuming his hollow voice of ceremony. “The schools are
+open only on week-days and the cockpits on holidays. Then convert these
+into schoolhouses, at least during the week.”
+
+“Man, man, man!”
+
+“What a lovely idea!”
+
+“What’s the matter with you, Don Custodio?”
+
+“That’s a grand suggestion!”
+
+“That beats them all!”
+
+“But, gentlemen,” cried Don Custodio, in answer to so many
+exclamations, “let’s be practical—what places are more suitable than
+the cockpits? They’re large, well constructed, and under a curse for
+the use to which they are put during the week-days. From a moral
+standpoint my project would be acceptable, by serving as a kind of
+expiation and weekly purification of the temple of chance, as we might
+say.”
+
+“But the fact remains that sometimes there are cockfights during the
+week,” objected Padre Camorra, “and it wouldn’t be right when the
+contractors of the cockpits pay the government—” [23]
+
+“Well, on those days close the school!”
+
+“Man, man!” exclaimed the scandalized Captain-General. “Such an outrage
+shall never be perpetrated while I govern! To close the schools in
+order to gamble! Man, man, I’ll resign first!” His Excellency was
+really horrified.
+
+“But, General, it’s better to close them for a few days than for
+months.”
+
+“It would be immoral,” observed Padre Irene, more indignant even than
+his Excellency.
+
+“It’s more immoral that vice has good buildings and learning none.
+Let’s be practical, gentlemen, and not be carried away by sentiment. In
+politics there’s nothing worse than sentiment. While from humane
+considerations we forbid the cultivation of opium in our colonies, we
+tolerate the smoking of it, and the result is that we do not combat the
+vice but impoverish ourselves.”
+
+“But remember that it yields to the government, without any effort,
+more than four hundred and fifty thousand pesos,” objected Padre Irene,
+who was getting more and more on the governmental side.
+
+“Enough, enough, enough!” exclaimed his Excellency, to end the
+discussion. “I have my own plans in this regard and will devote special
+attention to the matter of public instruction. Is there anything else?”
+
+The secretary looked uneasily toward Padre Sibyla and Padre Irene. The
+cat was about to come out of the bag. Both prepared themselves.
+
+“The petition of the students requesting authorization to open an
+academy of Castilian,” answered the secretary.
+
+A general movement was noted among those in the room. After glancing at
+one another they fixed their eyes on the General to learn what his
+disposition would be. For six months the petition had lain there
+awaiting a decision and had become converted into a kind of casus belli
+in certain circles. His Excellency had lowered his eyes, as if to keep
+his thoughts from being read.
+
+The silence became embarrassing, as the General understood, so he asked
+the high official, “What do you think?”
+
+“What should I think, General?” responded the person addressed, with a
+shrug of his shoulders and a bitter smile. “What should I think but
+that the petition is just, very just, and that I am surprised that six
+months should have been taken to consider it.”
+
+“The fact is that it involves other considerations,” said Padre Sibyla
+coldly, as he half closed his eyes.
+
+The high official again shrugged his shoulders, like one who did not
+comprehend what those considerations could be.
+
+“Besides the intemperateness of the demand,” went on the Dominican,
+“besides the fact that it is in the nature of an infringement on our
+prerogatives—”
+
+Padre Sibyla dared not go on, but looked at Simoun.
+
+“The petition has a somewhat suspicious character,” corroborated that
+individual, exchanging a look with the Dominican, who winked several
+times.
+
+Padre Irene noticed these things and realized that his cause was almost
+lost—Simoun was against him.
+
+“It’s a peaceful rebellion, a revolution on stamped paper,” added Padre
+Sibyla.
+
+“Revolution? Rebellion?” inquired the high official, staring from one
+to the other as if he did not understand what they could mean.
+
+“It’s headed by some young men charged with being too radical and too
+much interested in reforms, not to use stronger terms,” remarked the
+secretary, with a look at the Dominican. “Among them is a certain
+Isagani, a poorly balanced head, nephew of a native priest—”
+
+“He’s a pupil of mine,” put in Padre Fernandez, “and I’m much pleased
+with him.”
+
+“Puñales, I like your taste!” exclaimed Padre Camorra. “On the steamer
+we nearly had a fight. He’s so insolent that when I gave him a shove
+aside he returned it.”
+
+“There’s also one Makaragui or Makarai—”
+
+“Makaraig,” Padre Irene joined in. “A very pleasant and agreeable young
+man.”
+
+Then he murmured into the General’s ear, “He’s the one I’ve talked to
+you about, he’s very rich. The Countess recommends him strongly.”
+
+“Ah!”
+
+“A medical student, one Basilio—”
+
+“Of that Basilio, I’ll say nothing,” observed Padre Irene, raising his
+hands and opening them, as if to say Dominus vobiscum. “He’s too deep
+for me. I’ve never succeeded in fathoming what he wants or what he is
+thinking about. It’s a pity that Padre Salvi isn’t present to tell us
+something about his antecedents. I believe that I’ve heard that when a
+boy he got into trouble with the Civil Guard. His father was killed
+in—I don’t remember what disturbance.”
+
+Simoun smiled faintly, silently, showing his sharp white teeth.
+
+“Aha! Aha!” said his Excellency nodding. “That’s the kind we have! Make
+a note of that name.”
+
+“But, General,” objected the high official, seeing that the matter was
+taking a bad turn, “up to now nothing positive is known against these
+young men. Their position is a very just one, and we have no right to
+deny it on the ground of mere conjectures. My opinion is that the
+government, by exhibiting confidence in the people and in its own
+stability, should grant what is asked, then it could freely revoke the
+permission when it saw that its kindness was being abused—reasons and
+pretexts would not be wanting, we can watch them. Why cause
+disaffection among some young men, who later on may feel resentment,
+when what they ask is commanded by royal decrees?”
+
+Padre Irene, Don Custodio, and Padre Fernandez nodded in agreement.
+
+“But the Indians must not understand Castilian, you know,” cried Padre
+Camorra. “They mustn’t learn it, for then they’ll enter into arguments
+with us, and the Indians must not argue, but obey and pay. They mustn’t
+try to interpret the meaning of the laws and the books, they’re so
+tricky and pettifogish! Just as soon as they learn Castilian they
+become enemies of God and of Spain. Just read the Tandang Basio
+Macunat—that’s a book! It tells truths like this!” And he held up his
+clenched fists.
+
+Padre Sibyla rubbed his hand over his tonsure in sign of impatience.
+“One word,” he began in the most conciliatory tone, though fuming with
+irritation, “here we’re not dealing with the instruction in Castilian
+alone. Here there is an underhand fight between the students and the
+University of Santo Tomas. If the students win this, our prestige will
+be trampled in the dirt, they will say that they’ve beaten us and will
+exult accordingly. Then, good-by to moral strength, good-by to
+everything! The first dike broken down, who will restrain this youth?
+With our fall we do no more than signal your own. After us, the
+government!”
+
+“Puñales, that’s not so!” exclaimed Padre Camorra. “We’ll see first who
+has the biggest fists!”
+
+At this point Padre Fernandez, who thus far in the discussion had
+merely contented himself with smiling, began to talk. All gave him
+their attention, for they knew him to be a thoughtful man.
+
+“Don’t take it ill of me, Padre Sibyla, if I differ from your view of
+the affair, but it’s my peculiar fate to be almost always in opposition
+to my brethren. I say, then, that we ought not to be so pessimistic.
+The instruction in Castilian can be allowed without any risk whatever,
+and in order that it may not appear to be a defeat of the University,
+we Dominicans ought to put forth our efforts and be the first to
+rejoice over it—that should be our policy. To what end are we to be
+engaged in an everlasting struggle with the people, when after all we
+are the few and they are the many, when we need them and they do not
+need us? Wait, Padre Camorra, wait! Admit that now the people may be
+weak and ignorant—I also believe that—but it will not be true tomorrow
+or the day after. Tomorrow and the next day they will be the stronger,
+they will know what is good for them, and we cannot keep it from them,
+just as it is not possible to keep from children the knowledge of many
+things when they reach a certain age. I say, then, why should we not
+take advantage of this condition of ignorance to change our policy
+completely, to place it upon a basis solid and enduring—on the basis of
+justice, for example, instead of on the basis of ignorance? There’s
+nothing like being just; that I’ve always said to my brethren, but they
+won’t believe me. The Indian idolizes justice, like every race in its
+youth; he asks for punishment when he has done wrong, just as he is
+exasperated when he has not deserved it. Is theirs a just desire? Then
+grant it! Let’s give them all the schools they want, until they are
+tired of them. Youth is lazy, and what urges them to activity is our
+opposition. Our bond of prestige, Padre Sibyla, is about worn out, so
+let’s prepare another, the bond of gratitude, for example. Let’s not be
+fools, let’s do as the crafty Jesuits—”
+
+“Padre Fernandez!” Anything could be tolerated by Padre Sibyla except
+to propose the Jesuits to him as a model. Pale and trembling, he broke
+out into bitter recrimination. “A Franciscan first! Anything before a
+Jesuit!” He was beside himself.
+
+“Oh, oh!”
+
+“Eh, Padre—”
+
+A general discussion broke out, regardless of the Captain-General. All
+talked at once, they yelled, they misunderstood and contradicted one
+another. Ben-Zayb and Padre Camorra shook their fists in each other’s
+faces, one talking of simpletons and the other of ink-slingers, Padre
+Sibyla kept harping on the Capitulum, and Padre Fernandez on the Summa
+of St. Thomas, until the curate of Los Baños entered to announce that
+breakfast was served.
+
+His Excellency arose and so ended the discussion. “Well, gentlemen,” he
+said, “we’ve worked like niggers and yet we’re on a vacation. Some one
+has said that grave matters should be considered at dessert. I’m
+entirely of that opinion.”
+
+“We might get indigestion,” remarked the secretary, alluding to the
+heat of the discussion.
+
+“Then we’ll lay it aside until tomorrow.”
+
+As they rose the high official whispered to the General, “Your
+Excellency, the daughter of Cabesang Tales has been here again begging
+for the release of her sick grandfather, who was arrested in place of
+her father.”
+
+His Excellency looked at him with an expression of impatience and
+rubbed his hand across his broad forehead. “Carambas! Can’t one be left
+to eat his breakfast in peace?”
+
+“This is the third day she has come. She’s a poor girl—”
+
+“Oh, the devil!” exclaimed Padre Camorra. “I’ve just thought of it. I
+have something to say to the General about that—that’s what I came over
+for—to support that girl’s petition.”
+
+The General scratched the back of his ear and said, “Oh, go along! Have
+the secretary make out an order to the lieutenant of the Civil Guard
+for the old man’s release. They sha’n’t say that we’re not clement and
+merciful.”
+
+He looked at Ben-Zayb. The journalist winked.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+PLACIDO PENITENTE
+
+
+Reluctantly, and almost with tearful eyes, Placido Penitente was going
+along the Escolta on his way to the University of Santo Tomas. It had
+hardly been a week since he had come from his town, yet he had already
+written to his mother twice, reiterating his desire to abandon his
+studies and go back there to work. His mother answered that he should
+have patience, that at the least he must be graduated as a bachelor of
+arts, since it would be unwise to desert his books after four years of
+expense and sacrifices on both their parts.
+
+Whence came to Penitente this aversion to study, when he had been one
+of the most diligent in the famous college conducted by Padre Valerio
+in Tanawan? There Penitente had been considered one of the best
+Latinists and the subtlest disputants, one who could tangle or untangle
+the simplest as well as the most abstruse questions. His townspeople
+considered him very clever, and his curate, influenced by that opinion,
+already classified him as a filibuster—a sure proof that he was neither
+foolish nor incapable. His friends could not explain those desires for
+abandoning his studies and returning: he had no sweethearts, was not a
+gambler, hardly knew anything about hunkían and rarely tried his luck
+at the more familiar revesino. He did not believe in the advice of the
+curates, laughed at Tandang Basio Macunat, had plenty of money and good
+clothes, yet he went to school reluctantly and looked with repugnance
+on his books.
+
+On the Bridge of Spain, a bridge whose name alone came from Spain,
+since even its ironwork came from foreign countries, he fell in with
+the long procession of young men on their way to the Walled City to
+their respective schools. Some were dressed in the European fashion and
+walked rapidly, carrying books and notes, absorbed in thoughts of their
+lessons and essays—these were the students of the Ateneo. Those from
+San Juan de Letran were nearly all dressed in the Filipino costume, but
+were more numerous and carried fewer books. Those from the University
+are dressed more carefully and elegantly and saunter along carrying
+canes instead of books. The collegians of the Philippines are not very
+noisy or turbulent. They move along in a preoccupied manner, such that
+upon seeing them one would say that before their eyes shone no hope, no
+smiling future. Even though here and there the line is brightened by
+the attractive appearance of the schoolgirls of the Escuela Municipal,
+[24] with their sashes across their shoulders and their books in their
+hands, followed by their servants, yet scarcely a laugh resounds or a
+joke can be heard—nothing of song or jest, at best a few heavy jokes or
+scuffles among the smaller boys. The older ones nearly always proceed
+seriously and composedly, like the German students.
+
+Placido was proceeding along the Paseo de Magallanes toward the
+breach—formerly the gate—of Santo Domingo, when he suddenly felt a slap
+on the shoulder, which made him turn quickly in ill humor.
+
+“Hello, Penitente! Hello, Penitente!”
+
+It was his schoolmate Juanito Pelaez, the barbero or pet of the
+professors, as big a rascal as he could be, with a roguish look and a
+clownish smile. The son of a Spanish mestizo—a rich merchant in one of
+the suburbs, who based all his hopes and joys on the boy’s talent—he
+promised well with his roguery, and, thanks to his custom of playing
+tricks on every one and then hiding behind his companions, he had
+acquired a peculiar hump, which grew larger whenever he was laughing
+over his deviltry.
+
+“What kind of time did you have, Penitente?” was his question as he
+again slapped him on the shoulder.
+
+“So, so,” answered Placido, rather bored. “And you?”
+
+“Well, it was great! Just imagine—the curate of Tiani invited me to
+spend the vacation in his town, and I went. Old man, you know Padre
+Camorra, I suppose? Well, he’s a liberal curate, very jolly, frank,
+very frank, one of those like Padre Paco. As there were pretty girls,
+we serenaded them all, he with his guitar and songs and I with my
+violin. I tell you, old man, we had a great time—there wasn’t a house
+we didn’t try!”
+
+He whispered a few words in Placido’s ear and then broke out into
+laughter. As the latter exhibited some surprise, he resumed: “I’ll
+swear to it! They can’t help themselves, because with a governmental
+order you get rid of the father, husband, or brother, and then—merry
+Christmas! However, we did run up against a little fool, the
+sweetheart, I believe, of Basilio, you know? Look, what a fool this
+Basilio is! To have a sweetheart who doesn’t know a word of Spanish,
+who hasn’t any money, and who has been a servant! She’s as shy as she
+can be, but pretty. Padre Camorra one night started to club two fellows
+who were serenading her and I don’t know how it was he didn’t kill
+them, yet with all that she was just as shy as ever. But it’ll result
+for her as it does with all the women, all of them!”
+
+Juanito Pelaez laughed with a full mouth, as though he thought this a
+glorious thing, while Placido stared at him in disgust.
+
+“Listen, what did the professor explain yesterday?” asked Juanito,
+changing the conversation.
+
+“Yesterday there was no class.”
+
+“Oho, and the day before yesterday?”
+
+“Man, it was Thursday!”
+
+“Right! What an ass I am! Don’t you know, Placido, that I’m getting to
+be a regular ass? What about Wednesday?”
+
+“Wednesday? Wait—Wednesday, it was a little wet.”
+
+“Fine! What about Tuesday, old man?”
+
+“Tuesday was the professor’s nameday and we went to entertain him with
+an orchestra, present him flowers and some gifts.”
+
+“Ah, carambas!” exclaimed Juanito, “that I should have forgotten about
+it! What an ass I am! Listen, did he ask for me?”
+
+Penitente shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know, but they gave him a
+list of his entertainers.”
+
+“Carambas! Listen—Monday, what happened?”
+
+“As it was the first school-day, he called the roll and assigned the
+lesson—about mirrors. Look, from here to here, by memory, word for
+word. We jump all this section, we take that.” He was pointing out with
+his finger in the “Physics” the portions that were to be learned, when
+suddenly the book flew through the air, as a result of the slap Juanito
+gave it from below.
+
+“Thunder, let the lessons go! Let’s have a dia pichido!”
+
+The students in Manila call dia pichido a school-day that falls between
+two holidays and is consequently suppressed, as though forced out by
+their wish.
+
+“Do you know that you really are an ass?” exclaimed Placido, picking up
+his book and papers.
+
+“Let’s have a dia pichido!” repeated Juanito.
+
+Placido was unwilling, since for only two the authorities were hardly
+going to suspend a class of more than a hundred and fifty. He recalled
+the struggles and privations his mother was suffering in order to keep
+him in Manila, while she went without even the necessities of life.
+
+They were just passing through the breach of Santo Domingo, and
+Juanito, gazing across the little plaza [25] in front of the old
+Customs building, exclaimed, “Now I think of it, I’m appointed to take
+up the collection.”
+
+“What collection?”
+
+“For the monument.”
+
+“What monument?”
+
+“Get out! For Padre Balthazar, you know.”
+
+“And who was Padre Balthazar?”
+
+“Fool! A Dominican, of course—that’s why the padres call on the
+students. Come on now, loosen up with three or four pesos, so that they
+may see we are sports. Don’t let them say afterwards that in order to
+erect a statue they had to dig down into their own pockets. Do,
+Placido, it’s not money thrown away.”
+
+He accompanied these words with a significant wink. Placido recalled
+the case of a student who had passed through the entire course by
+presenting canary-birds, so he subscribed three pesos.
+
+“Look now, I’ll write your name plainly so that the professor will read
+it, you see—Placido Penitente, three pesos. Ah, listen! In a couple of
+weeks comes the nameday of the professor of natural history. You know
+that he’s a good fellow, never marks absences or asks about the lesson.
+Man, we must show our appreciation!”
+
+“That’s right!”
+
+“Then don’t you think that we ought to give him a celebration? The
+orchestra must not be smaller than the one you had for the professor of
+physics.”
+
+“That’s right!”
+
+“What do you think about making the contribution two pesos? Come,
+Placido, you start it, so you’ll be at the head of the list.”
+
+Then, seeing that Placido gave the two pesos without hesitation, he
+added, “Listen, put up four, and afterwards I’ll return you two.
+They’ll serve as a decoy.”
+
+“Well, if you’re going to return them to me, why give them to you?
+It’ll be sufficient, for you to write four.”
+
+“Ah, that’s right! What an ass I am! Do you know, I’m getting to be a
+regular ass! But let me have them anyhow, so that I can show them.”
+
+Placido, in order not to give the lie to the priest who christened him,
+gave what was asked, just as they reached the University.
+
+In the entrance and along the walks on each side of it were gathered
+the students, awaiting the appearance of the professors. Students of
+the preparatory year of law, of the fifth of the secondary course, of
+the preparatory in medicine, formed lively groups. The latter were
+easily distinguished by their clothing and by a certain air that was
+lacking in the others, since the greater part of them came from the
+Ateneo Municipal. Among them could be seen the poet Isagani, explaining
+to a companion the theory of the refraction of light. In another group
+they were talking, disputing, citing the statements of the professor,
+the text-books, and scholastic principles; in yet another they were
+gesticulating and waving their books in the air or making
+demonstrations with their canes by drawing diagrams on the ground;
+farther on, they were entertaining themselves in watching the pious
+women go into the neighboring church, all the students making facetious
+remarks. An old woman leaning on a young girl limped piously, while the
+girl moved along with downcast eyes, timid and abashed to pass before
+so many curious eyes. The old lady, catching up her coffee-colored
+skirt, of the Sisterhood of St. Rita, to reveal her big feet and white
+stockings, scolded her companion and shot furious glances at the
+staring bystanders.
+
+“The rascals!” she grunted. “Don’t look at them, keep your eyes down.”
+
+Everything was noticed; everything called forth jokes and comments. Now
+it was a magnificent victoria which stopped at the door to set down a
+family of votaries on their way to visit the Virgin of the Rosary [26]
+on her favorite day, while the inquisitive sharpened their eyes to get
+a glimpse of the shape and size of the young ladies’ feet as they got
+out of the carriages; now it was a student who came out of the door
+with devotion still shining in his eyes, for he had passed through the
+church to beg the Virgin’s help in understanding his lesson and to see
+if his sweetheart was there, to exchange a few glances with her and go
+on to his class with the recollection of her loving eyes.
+
+Soon there was noticed some movement in the groups, a certain air of
+expectancy, while Isagani paused and turned pale. A carriage drawn by a
+pair of well-known white horses had stopped at the door. It was that of
+Paulita Gomez, and she had already jumped down, light as a bird,
+without giving the rascals time to see her foot. With a bewitching
+whirl of her body and a sweep of her hand she arranged the folds of her
+skirt, shot a rapid and apparently careless glance toward Isagani,
+spoke to him and smiled. Doña Victorina descended in her turn, gazed
+over her spectacles, saw Juanito Pelaez, smiled, and bowed to him
+affably.
+
+Isagani, flushed with excitement, returned a timid salute, while
+Juanito bowed profoundly, took off his hat, and made the same gesture
+as the celebrated clown and caricaturist Panza when he received
+applause.
+
+“Heavens, what a girl!” exclaimed one of the students, starting
+forward. “Tell the professor that I’m seriously ill.” So Tadeo, as this
+invalid youth was known, entered the church to follow the girl.
+
+Tadeo went to the University every day to ask if the classes would be
+held and each time seemed to be more and more astonished that they
+would. He had a fixed idea of a latent and eternal holiday, and
+expected it to come any day. So each morning, after vainly proposing
+that they play truant, he would go away alleging important business, an
+appointment, or illness, just at the very moment when his companions
+were going to their classes. But by some occult, thaumaturgic art Tadeo
+passed the examinations, was beloved by the professors, and had before
+him a promising future.
+
+Meanwhile, the groups began to move inside, for the professor of
+physics and chemistry had put in his appearance. The students appeared
+to be cheated in their hopes and went toward the interior of the
+building with exclamations of discontent. Placido went along with the
+crowd.
+
+“Penitente, Penitente!” called a student with a certain mysterious air.
+“Sign this!”
+
+“What is it?”
+
+“Never mind—sign it!”
+
+It seemed to Placido that some one was twitching his ears. He recalled
+the story of a cabeza de barangay in his town who, for having signed a
+document that he did not understand, was kept a prisoner for months and
+months, and came near to deportation. An uncle of Placido’s, in order
+to fix the lesson in his memory, had given him a severe ear-pulling, so
+that always whenever he heard signatures spoken of, his ears reproduced
+the sensation.
+
+“Excuse me, but I can’t sign anything without first understanding what
+it’s about.”
+
+“What a fool you are! If two celestial carbineers have signed it, what
+have you to fear?”
+
+The name of celestial carbineers inspired confidence, being, as it was,
+a sacred company created to aid God in the warfare against the evil
+spirit and to prevent the smuggling of heretical contraband into the
+markets of the New Zion. [27]
+
+Placido was about to sign to make an end of it, because he was in a
+hurry,—already his classmates were reciting the O Thoma,—but again his
+ears twitched, so he said, “After the class! I want to read it first.”
+
+“It’s very long, don’t you see? It concerns the presentation of a
+counter-petition, or rather, a protest. Don’t you understand? Makaraig
+and some others have asked that an academy of Castilian be opened,
+which is a piece of genuine foolishness—”
+
+“All right, all right, after awhile. They’re already beginning,”
+answered Placido, trying to get away.
+
+“But your professor may not call the roll—”
+
+“Yes, yes; but he calls it sometimes. Later on, later on! Besides, I
+don’t want to put myself in opposition to Makaraig.”
+
+“But it’s not putting yourself in opposition, it’s only—”
+
+Placido heard no more, for he was already far away, hurrying to his
+class. He heard the different voices—adsum, adsum—the roll was being
+called! Hastening his steps he got to the door just as the letter Q was
+reached.
+
+“Tinamáan ñg—!” [28] he muttered, biting his lips.
+
+He hesitated about entering, for the mark was already down against him
+and was not to be erased. One did not go to the class to learn but in
+order not to get this absence mark, for the class was reduced to
+reciting the lesson from memory, reading the book, and at the most
+answering a few abstract, profound, captious, enigmatic questions.
+True, the usual preachment was never lacking—the same as ever, about
+humility, submission, and respect to the clerics, and he, Placido, was
+humble, submissive, and respectful. So he was about to turn away when
+he remembered that the examinations were approaching and his professor
+had not yet asked him a question nor appeared to notice him—this would
+be a good opportunity to attract his attention and become known! To be
+known was to gain a year, for if it cost nothing to suspend one who was
+not known, it required a hard heart not to be touched by the sight of a
+youth who by his daily presence was a reproach over a year of his life
+wasted.
+
+So Placido went in, not on tiptoe as was his custom, but noisily on his
+heels, and only too well did he succeed in his intent! The professor
+stared at him, knitted his brows, and shook his head, as though to say,
+“Ah, little impudence, you’ll pay for that!”
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE CLASS IN PHYSICS
+
+
+The classroom was a spacious rectangular hall with large grated windows
+that admitted an abundance of light and air. Along the two sides
+extended three wide tiers of stone covered with wood, filled with
+students arranged in alphabetical order. At the end opposite the
+entrance, under a print of St. Thomas Aquinas, rose the professor’s
+chair on an elevated platform with a little stairway on each side. With
+the exception of a beautiful blackboard in a narra frame, scarcely ever
+used, since there was still written on it the viva that had appeared on
+the opening day, no furniture, either useful or useless, was to be
+seen. The walls, painted white and covered with glazed tiles to prevent
+scratches, were entirely bare, having neither a drawing nor a picture,
+nor even an outline of any physical apparatus. The students had no need
+of any, no one missed the practical instruction in an extremely
+experimental science; for years and years it has been so taught and the
+country has not been upset, but continues just as ever. Now and then
+some little instrument descended from heaven and was exhibited to the
+class from a distance, like the monstrance to the prostrate
+worshipers—look, but touch not! From time to time, when some complacent
+professor appeared, one day in the year was set aside for visiting the
+mysterious laboratory and gazing from without at the puzzling apparatus
+arranged in glass cases. No one could complain, for on that day there
+were to be seen quantities of brass and glassware, tubes, disks,
+wheels, bells, and the like—the exhibition did not get beyond that, and
+the country was not upset.
+
+Besides, the students were convinced that those instruments had not
+been purchased for them—the friars would be fools! The laboratory was
+intended to be shown to the visitors and the high officials who came
+from the Peninsula, so that upon seeing it they would nod their heads
+with satisfaction, while their guide would smile, as if to say, “Eh,
+you thought you were going to find some backward monks! Well, we’re
+right up with the times—we have a laboratory!”
+
+The visitors and high officials, after being handsomely entertained,
+would then write in their Travels or Memoirs: “The Royal and Pontifical
+University of Santo Tomas of Manila, in charge of the enlightened
+Dominican Order, possesses a magnificent physical laboratory for the
+instruction of youth. Some two hundred and fifty students annually
+study this subject, but whether from apathy, indolence, the limited
+capacity of the Indian, or some other ethnological or incomprehensible
+reason, up to now there has not developed a Lavoisier, a Secchi, or a
+Tyndall, not even in miniature, in the Malay-Filipino race.”
+
+Yet, to be exact, we will say that in this laboratory are held the
+classes of thirty or forty advanced students, under the direction of an
+instructor who performs his duties well enough, but as the greater part
+of these students come from the Ateneo of the Jesuits, where science is
+taught practically in the laboratory itself, its utility does not come
+to be so great as it would be if it could be utilized by the two
+hundred and fifty who pay their matriculation fees, buy their books,
+memorize them, and waste a year to know nothing afterwards. As a
+result, with the exception of some rare usher or janitor who has had
+charge of the museum for years, no one has ever been known to get any
+advantage from the lessons memorized with so great effort.
+
+But let us return to the class. The professor was a young Dominican,
+who had filled several chairs in San Juan de Letran with zeal and good
+repute. He had the reputation of being a great logician as well as a
+profound philosopher, and was one of the most promising in his clique.
+His elders treated him with consideration, while the younger men envied
+him, for there were also cliques among them. This was the third year of
+his professorship and, although the first in which he had taught
+physics and chemistry, he already passed for a sage, not only with the
+complaisant students but also among the other nomadic professors. Padre
+Millon did not belong to the common crowd who each year change their
+subject in order to acquire scientific knowledge, students among other
+students, with the difference only that they follow a single course,
+that they quiz instead of being quizzed, that they have a better
+knowledge of Castilian, and that they are not examined at the
+completion of the course. Padre Millon went deeply into science, knew
+the physics of Aristotle and Padre Amat, read carefully his “Ramos,”
+and sometimes glanced at “Ganot.” With all that, he would often shake
+his head with an air of doubt, as he smiled and murmured: “transeat.”
+In regard to chemistry, no common knowledge was attributed to him after
+he had taken as a premise the statement of St. Thomas that water is a
+mixture and proved plainly that the Angelic Doctor had long forestalled
+Berzelius, Gay-Lussac, Bunsen, and other more or less presumptuous
+materialists. Moreover, in spite of having been an instructor in
+geography, he still entertained certain doubts as to the rotundity of
+the earth and smiled maliciously when its rotation and revolution
+around the sun were mentioned, as he recited the verses
+
+
+       “El mentir de las estrellas
+        Es un cómodo mentir.” [29]
+
+
+He also smiled maliciously in the presence of certain physical theories
+and considered visionary, if not actually insane, the Jesuit Secchi, to
+whom he imputed the making of triangulations on the host as a result of
+his astronomical mania, for which reason it was said that he had been
+forbidden to celebrate mass. Many persons also noticed in him some
+aversion to the sciences that he taught, but these vagaries were
+trifles, scholarly and religious prejudices that were easily explained,
+not only by the fact that the physical sciences were eminently
+practical, of pure observation and deduction, while his forte was
+philosophy, purely speculative, of abstraction and induction, but also
+because, like any good Dominican, jealous of the fame of his order, he
+could hardly feel any affection for a science in which none of his
+brethren had excelled—he was the first who did not accept the chemistry
+of St. Thomas Aquinas—and in which so much renown had been acquired by
+hostile, or rather, let us say, rival orders.
+
+This was the professor who that morning called the roll and directed
+many of the students to recite the lesson from memory, word for word.
+The phonographs got into operation, some well, some ill, some
+stammering, and received their grades. He who recited without an error
+earned a good mark and he who made more than three mistakes a bad mark.
+
+A fat boy with a sleepy face and hair as stiff and hard as the bristles
+of a brush yawned until he seemed to be about to dislocate his jaws,
+and stretched himself with his arms extended as though he were in his
+bed. The professor saw this and wished to startle him.
+
+“Eh, there, sleepy-head! What’s this? Lazy, too, so it’s sure you [30]
+don’t know the lesson, ha?”
+
+Padre Millon not only used the depreciative tu with the students, like
+a good friar, but he also addressed them in the slang of the markets, a
+practise that he had acquired from the professor of canonical law:
+whether that reverend gentleman wished to humble the students or the
+sacred decrees of the councils is a question not yet settled, in spite
+of the great attention that has been given to it.
+
+This question, instead of offending the class, amused them, and many
+laughed—it was a daily occurrence. But the sleeper did not laugh; he
+arose with a bound, rubbed his eyes, and, as though a steam-engine were
+turning the phonograph, began to recite.
+
+“The name of mirror is applied to all polished surfaces intended to
+produce by the reflection of light the images of the objects placed
+before said surfaces. From the substances that form these surfaces,
+they are divided into metallic mirrors and glass mirrors—”
+
+“Stop, stop, stop!” interrupted the professor. “Heavens, what a rattle!
+We are at the point where the mirrors are divided into metallic and
+glass, eh? Now if I should present to you a block of wood, a piece of
+kamagon for instance, well polished and varnished, or a slab of black
+marble well burnished, or a square of jet, which would reflect the
+images of objects placed before them, how would you classify those
+mirrors?”
+
+Whether he did not know what to answer or did not understand the
+question, the student tried to get out of the difficulty by
+demonstrating that he knew the lesson, so he rushed on like a torrent.
+
+“The first are composed of brass or an alloy of different metals and
+the second of a sheet of glass, with its two sides well polished, one
+of which has an amalgam of tin adhering to it.”
+
+“Tut, tut, tut! That’s not it! I say to you ‘Dominus vobiscum,’ and you
+answer me with ‘Requiescat in pace!’ ”
+
+The worthy professor then repeated the question in the vernacular of
+the markets, interspersed with cosas and abás at every moment.
+
+The poor youth did not know how to get out of the quandary: he doubted
+whether to include the kamagon with the metals, or the marble with
+glasses, and leave the jet as a neutral substance, until Juanito Pelaez
+maliciously prompted him:
+
+“The mirror of kamagon among the wooden mirrors.”
+
+The incautious youth repeated this aloud and half the class was
+convulsed with laughter.
+
+“A good sample of wood you are yourself!” exclaimed the professor,
+laughing in spite of himself. “Let’s see from what you would define a
+mirror—from a surface per se, in quantum est superficies, or from a
+substance that forms the surface, or from the substance upon which the
+surface rests, the raw material, modified by the attribute ‘surface,’
+since it is clear that, surface being an accidental property of bodies,
+it cannot exist without substance. Let’s see now—what do you say?”
+
+“I? Nothing!” the wretched boy was about to reply, for he did not
+understand what it was all about, confused as he was by so many
+surfaces and so many accidents that smote cruelly on his ears, but a
+sense of shame restrained him. Filled with anguish and breaking into a
+cold perspiration, he began to repeat between his teeth: “The name of
+mirror is applied to all polished surfaces—”
+
+“Ergo, per te, the mirror is the surface,” angled the professor. “Well,
+then, clear up this difficulty. If the surface is the mirror, it must
+be of no consequence to the ‘essence’ of the mirror what may be found
+behind this surface, since what is behind it does not affect the
+‘essence’ that is before it, id est, the surface, quae super faciem
+est, quia vocatur superficies, facies ea quae supra videtur. Do you
+admit that or do you not admit it?”
+
+The poor youth’s hair stood up straighter than ever, as though acted
+upon by some magnetic force.
+
+“Do you admit it or do you not admit it?”
+
+“Anything! Whatever you wish, Padre,” was his thought, but he did not
+dare to express it from fear of ridicule. That was a dilemma indeed,
+and he had never been in a worse one. He had a vague idea that the most
+innocent thing could not be admitted to the friars but that they, or
+rather their estates and curacies, would get out of it all the results
+and advantages imaginable. So his good angel prompted him to deny
+everything with all the energy of his soul and refractoriness of his
+hair, and he was about to shout a proud nego, for the reason that he
+who denies everything does not compromise himself in anything, as a
+certain lawyer had once told him; but the evil habit of disregarding
+the dictates of one’s own conscience, of having little faith in legal
+folk, and of seeking aid from others where one is sufficient unto
+himself, was his undoing. His companions, especially Juanito Pelaez,
+were making signs to him to admit it, so he let himself be carried away
+by his evil destiny and exclaimed, “Concedo, Padre,” in a voice as
+faltering as though he were saying, “In manus tuas commendo spiritum
+meum.”
+
+“Concedo antecedentum,” echoed the professor, smiling maliciously.
+“Ergo, I can scratch the mercury off a looking-glass, put in its place
+a piece of bibinka, and we shall still have a mirror, eh? Now what
+shall we have?”
+
+The youth gazed at his prompters, but seeing them surprised and
+speechless, contracted his features into an expression of bitterest
+reproach. “Deus meus, Deus meus, quare dereliquiste me,” said his
+troubled eyes, while his lips muttered “Linintikan!” Vainly he coughed,
+fumbled at his shirt-bosom, stood first on one foot and then on the
+other, but found no answer.
+
+“Come now, what have we?” urged the professor, enjoying the effect of
+his reasoning.
+
+“Bibinka!” whispered Juanito Pelaez. “Bibinka!”
+
+“Shut up, you fool!” cried the desperate youth, hoping to get out of
+the difficulty by turning it into a complaint.
+
+“Let’s see, Juanito, if you can answer the question for me,” the
+professor then said to Pelaez, who was one of his pets.
+
+The latter rose slowly, not without first giving Penitente, who
+followed him on the roll, a nudge that meant, “Don’t forget to prompt
+me.”
+
+“Nego consequentiam, Padre,” he replied resolutely.
+
+“Aha, then probo consequentiam! Per te, the polished surface
+constitutes the ‘essence’ of the mirror—”
+
+“Nego suppositum!” interrupted Juanito, as he felt Placido pulling at
+his coat.
+
+“How? Per te—”
+
+“Nego!”
+
+“Ergo, you believe that what is behind affects what is in front?”
+
+“Nego!” the student cried with still more ardor, feeling another jerk
+at his coat.
+
+Juanito, or rather Placido, who was prompting him, was unconsciously
+adopting Chinese tactics: not to admit the most inoffensive foreigner
+in order not to be invaded.
+
+“Then where are we?” asked the professor, somewhat disconcerted, and
+looking uneasily at the refractory student. “Does the substance behind
+affect, or does it not affect, the surface?”
+
+To this precise and categorical question, a kind of ultimatum, Juanito
+did not know what to reply and his coat offered no suggestions. In vain
+he made signs to Placido, but Placido himself was in doubt. Juanito
+then took advantage of a moment in which the professor was staring at a
+student who was cautiously and secretly taking off the shoes that hurt
+his feet, to step heavily on Placido’s toes and whisper, “Tell me,
+hurry up, tell me!”
+
+“I distinguish—Get out! What an ass you are!” yelled Placido
+unreservedly, as he stared with angry eyes and rubbed his hand over his
+patent-leather shoe.
+
+The professor heard the cry, stared at the pair, and guessed what had
+happened.
+
+“Listen, you meddler,” he addressed Placido, “I wasn’t questioning you,
+but since you think you can save others, let’s see if you can save
+yourself, salva te ipsum, and decide this question.”
+
+Juanito sat down in content, and as a mark of gratitude stuck out his
+tongue at his prompter, who had arisen blushing with shame and
+muttering incoherent excuses.
+
+For a moment Padre Millon regarded him as one gloating over a favorite
+dish. What a good thing it would be to humiliate and hold up to
+ridicule that dudish boy, always smartly dressed, with head erect and
+serene look! It would be a deed of charity, so the charitable professor
+applied himself to it with all his heart, slowly repeating the
+question.
+
+“The book says that the metallic mirrors are made of brass and an alloy
+of different metals—is that true or is it not true?”
+
+“So the book says, Padre.”
+
+“Liber dixit, ergo ita est. Don’t pretend that you know more than the
+book does. It then adds that the glass mirrors are made of a sheet of
+glass whose two surfaces are well polished, one of them having applied
+to it an amalgam of tin, nota bene, an amalgam of tin! Is that true?”
+
+“If the book says so, Padre.”
+
+“Is tin a metal?”
+
+“It seems so, Padre. The book says so.”
+
+“It is, it is, and the word amalgam means that it is compounded with
+mercury, which is also a metal. Ergo, a glass mirror is a metallic
+mirror; ergo, the terms of the distinction are confused; ergo, the
+classification is imperfect—how do you explain that, meddler?”
+
+He emphasized the ergos and the familiar “you’s” with indescribable
+relish, at the same time winking, as though to say, “You’re done for.”
+
+“It means that, it means that—” stammered Placido.
+
+“It means that you haven’t learned the lesson, you petty meddler, you
+don’t understand it yourself, and yet you prompt your neighbor!”
+
+The class took no offense, but on the contrary many thought the epithet
+funny and laughed. Placido bit his lips.
+
+“What’s your name?” the professor asked him.
+
+“Placido,” was the curt reply.
+
+“Aha! Placido Penitente, although you look more like Placido the
+Prompter—or the Prompted. But, Penitent, I’m going to impose some
+penance on you for your promptings.”
+
+Pleased with his play on words, he ordered the youth to recite the
+lesson, and the latter, in the state of mind to which he was reduced,
+made more than three mistakes. Shaking his head up and down, the
+professor slowly opened the register and slowly scanned it while he
+called off the names in a low voice.
+
+“Palencia—Palomo—Panganiban—Pedraza—Pelado—Pelaez—Penitents, aha!
+Placido Penitente, fifteen unexcused absences—”
+
+Placido started up. “Fifteen absences, Padre?”
+
+“Fifteen unexcused absences,” continued the professor, “so that you
+only lack one to be dropped from the roll.”
+
+“Fifteen absences, fifteen absences,” repeated Placido in amazement.
+“I’ve never been absent more than four times, and with today, perhaps
+five.”
+
+“Jesso, jesso, monseer,” [31] replied the professor, examining the
+youth over his gold eye-glasses. “You confess that you have missed five
+times, and God knows if you may have missed oftener. Atqui, as I rarely
+call the roll, every time I catch any one I put five marks against him;
+ergo, how many are five times five? Have you forgotten the
+multiplication table? Five times five?”
+
+“Twenty-five.”
+
+“Correct, correct! Thus you’ve still got away with ten, because I have
+caught you only three times. Huh, if I had caught you every time—Now,
+how many are three times five?”
+
+“Fifteen.”
+
+“Fifteen, right you are!” concluded the professor, closing the
+register. “If you miss once more—out of doors with you, get out! Ah,
+now a mark for the failure in the daily lesson.”
+
+He again opened the register, sought out the name, and entered the
+mark. “Come, only one mark,” he said, “since you hadn’t any before.”
+
+“But, Padre,” exclaimed Placido, restraining himself, “if your
+Reverence puts a mark against me for failing in the lesson, your
+Reverence owes it to me to erase the one for absence that you have put
+against me for today.”
+
+His Reverence made no answer. First he slowly entered the mark, then
+contemplated it with his head on one side,—the mark must be
+artistic,—closed the register, and asked with great sarcasm, “Abá, and
+why so, sir?”
+
+“Because I can’t conceive, Padre, how one can be absent from the class
+and at the same time recite the lesson in it. Your Reverence is saying
+that to be is not to be.”
+
+“Nakú, a metaphysician, but a rather premature one! So you can’t
+conceive of it, eh? Sed patet experientia and contra experientiam
+negantem, fusilibus est arguendum, do you understand? And can’t you
+conceive, with your philosophical head, that one can be absent from the
+class and not know the lesson at the same time? Is it a fact that
+absence necessarily implies knowledge? What do you say to that,
+philosophaster?”
+
+This last epithet was the drop of water that made the full cup
+overflow. Placido enjoyed among his friends the reputation of being a
+philosopher, so he lost his patience, threw down his book, arose, and
+faced the professor.
+
+“Enough, Padre, enough! Your Reverence can put all the marks against me
+that you wish, but you haven’t the right to insult me. Your Reverence
+may stay with the class, I can’t stand any more.” Without further
+farewell, he stalked away.
+
+The class was astounded; such an assumption of dignity had scarcely
+ever been seen, and who would have thought it of Placido Penitente? The
+surprised professor bit his lips and shook his head threateningly as he
+watched him depart. Then in a trembling voice he began his preachment
+on the same old theme, delivered however with more energy and more
+eloquence. It dealt with the growing arrogance, the innate ingratitude,
+the presumption, the lack of respect for superiors, the pride that the
+spirit of darkness infused in the young, the lack of manners, the
+absence of courtesy, and so on. From this he passed to coarse jests and
+sarcasm over the presumption which some good-for-nothing “prompters”
+had of teaching their teachers by establishing an academy for
+instruction in Castilian.
+
+“Aha, aha!” he moralized, “those who the day before yesterday scarcely
+knew how to say, ‘Yes, Padre,’ ‘No, Padre,’ now want to know more than
+those who have grown gray teaching them. He who wishes to learn, will
+learn, academies or no academies! Undoubtedly that fellow who has just
+gone out is one of those in the project. Castilian is in good hands
+with such guardians! When are you going to get the time to attend the
+academy if you have scarcely enough to fulfill your duties in the
+regular classes? We wish that you may all know Spanish and that you
+pronounce it well, so that you won’t split our ear-drums with your
+twist of expression and your ‘p’s’; [32] but first business and then
+pleasure: finish your studies first, and afterwards learn Castilian,
+and all become clerks, if you so wish.”
+
+So he went on with his harangue until the bell rang and the class was
+over. The two hundred and thirty-four students, after reciting their
+prayers, went out as ignorant as when they went in, but breathing more
+freely, as if a great weight had been lifted from them. Each youth had
+lost another hour of his life and with it a portion of his dignity and
+self-respect, and in exchange there was an increase of discontent, of
+aversion to study, of resentment in their hearts. After all this ask
+for knowledge, dignity, gratitude!
+
+De nobis, post haec, tristis sententia fertur!
+
+Just as the two hundred and thirty-four spent their class hours, so the
+thousands of students who preceded them have spent theirs, and, if
+matters do not mend, so will those yet to come spend theirs, and be
+brutalized, while wounded dignity and youthful enthusiasm will be
+converted into hatred and sloth, like the waves that become polluted
+along one part of the shore and roll on one after another, each in
+succession depositing a larger sediment of filth. But yet He who from
+eternity watches the consequences of a deed develop like a thread
+through the loom of the centuries, He who weighs the value of a second
+and has ordained for His creatures as an elemental law progress and
+development, He, if He is just, will demand a strict accounting from
+those who must render it, of the millions of intelligences darkened and
+blinded, of human dignity trampled upon in millions of His creatures,
+and of the incalculable time lost and effort wasted! And if the
+teachings of the Gospel are based on truth, so also will these have to
+answer—the millions and millions who do not know how to preserve the
+light of their intelligences and their dignity of mind, as the master
+demanded an accounting from the cowardly servant for the talent that he
+let be taken from him.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+IN THE HOUSE OF THE STUDENTS
+
+
+The house where Makaraig lived was worth visiting. Large and spacious,
+with two entresols provided with elegant gratings, it seemed to be a
+school during the first hours of the morning and pandemonium from ten
+o’clock on. During the boarders’ recreation hours, from the lower
+hallway of the spacious entrance up to the main floor, there was a
+bubbling of laughter, shouts, and movement. Boys in scanty clothing
+played sipa or practised gymnastic exercises on improvised trapezes,
+while on the staircase a fight was in progress between eight or nine
+armed with canes, sticks, and ropes, but neither attackers nor attacked
+did any great damage, their blows generally falling sidewise upon the
+shoulders of the Chinese pedler who was there selling his outlandish
+mixtures and indigestible pastries. Crowds of boys surrounded him,
+pulled at his already disordered queue, snatched pies from him, haggled
+over the prices, and committed a thousand deviltries. The Chinese
+yelled, swore, forswore, in all the languages he could jabber, not
+omitting his own; he whimpered, laughed, pleaded, put on a smiling face
+when an ugly one would not serve, or the reverse.
+
+He cursed them as devils, savages, no kilistanos [33] but that mattered
+nothing. A whack would bring his face around smiling, and if the blow
+fell only upon his shoulders he would calmly continue his business
+transactions, contenting himself with crying out to them that he was
+not in the game, but if it struck the flat basket on which were placed
+his wares, then he would swear never to come again, as he poured out
+upon them all the imprecations and anathemas imaginable. Then the boys
+would redouble their efforts to make him rage the more, and when at
+last his vocabulary was exhausted and they were satiated with his
+fearful mixtures, they paid him religiously, and sent him away happy,
+winking, chuckling to himself, and receiving as caresses the light
+blows from their canes that the students gave him as tokens of
+farewell.
+
+Concerts on the piano and violin, the guitar, and the accordion,
+alternated with the continual clashing of blades from the fencing
+lessons. Around a long, wide table the students of the Ateneo prepared
+their compositions or solved their problems by the side of others
+writing to their sweethearts on pink perforated note-paper covered with
+drawings. Here one was composing a melodrama at the side of another
+practising on the flute, from which he drew wheezy notes. Over there,
+the older boys, students in professional courses, who affected silk
+socks and embroidered slippers, amused themselves in teasing the
+smaller boys by pulling their ears, already red from repeated fillips,
+while two or three held down a little fellow who yelled and cried,
+defending himself with his feet against being reduced to the condition
+in which he was born, kicking and howling. In one room, around a small
+table, four were playing revesino with laughter and jokes, to the great
+annoyance of another who pretended to be studying his lesson but who
+was in reality waiting his turn to play.
+
+Still another came in with exaggerated wonder, scandalized as he
+approached the table. “How wicked you are! So early in the morning and
+already gambling! Let’s see, let’s see! You fool, take it with the
+three of spades!” Closing his book, he too joined in the game.
+
+Cries and blows were heard. Two boys were fighting in the adjoining
+room—a lame student who was very sensitive about his infirmity and an
+unhappy newcomer from the provinces who was just commencing his
+studies. He was working over a treatise on philosophy and reading
+innocently in a loud voice, with a wrong accent, the Cartesian
+principle: “Cogito, ergo sum!”
+
+The little lame boy (el cojito) took this as an insult and the others
+intervened to restore peace, but in reality only to sow discord and
+come to blows themselves.
+
+In the dining-room a young man with a can of sardines, a bottle of
+wine, and the provisions that he had just brought from his town, was
+making heroic efforts to the end that his friends might participate in
+his lunch, while they were offering in their turn heroic resistance to
+his invitation. Others were bathing on the azotea, playing firemen with
+the water from the well, and joining in combats with pails of water, to
+the great delight of the spectators.
+
+But the noise and shouts gradually died away with the coming of leading
+students, summoned by Makaraig to report to them the progress of the
+academy of Castilian. Isagani was cordially greeted, as was also the
+Peninsular, Sandoval, who had come to Manila as a government employee
+and was finishing his studies, and who had completely identified
+himself with the cause of the Filipino students. The barriers that
+politics had established between the races had disappeared in the
+schoolroom as though dissolved by the zeal of science and youth.
+
+From lack of lyceums and scientific, literary, or political centers,
+Sandoval took advantage of all the meetings to cultivate his great
+oratorical gifts, delivering speeches and arguing on any subject, to
+draw forth applause from his friends and listeners. At that moment the
+subject of conversation was the instruction in Castilian, but as
+Makaraig had not yet arrived conjecture was still the order of the day.
+
+“What can have happened?”
+
+“What has the General decided?”
+
+“Has he refused the permit?”
+
+“Has Padre Irene or Padre Sibyla won?”
+
+Such were the questions they asked one another, questions that could be
+answered only by Makaraig.
+
+Among the young men gathered together there were optimists like Isagani
+and Sandoval, who saw the thing already accomplished and talked of
+congratulations and praise from the government for the patriotism of
+the students—outbursts of optimism that led Juanito Pelaez to claim for
+himself a large part of the glory of founding the society.
+
+All this was answered by the pessimist Pecson, a chubby youth with a
+wide, clownish grin, who spoke of outside influences, whether the
+Bishop A., the Padre B., or the Provincial C., had been consulted or
+not, whether or not they had advised that the whole association should
+be put in jail—a suggestion that made Juanito Pelaez so uneasy that he
+stammered out, “Carambas, don’t you drag me into—”
+
+Sandoval, as a Peninsular and a liberal, became furious at this. “But
+pshaw!” he exclaimed, “that is holding a bad opinion of his Excellency!
+I know that he’s quite a friar-lover, but in such a matter as this he
+won’t let the friars interfere. Will you tell me, Pecson, on what you
+base your belief that the General has no judgment of his own?”
+
+“I didn’t say that, Sandoval,” replied Pecson, grinning until he
+exposed his wisdom-tooth. “For me the General has his own judgment,
+that is, the judgment of all those within his reach. That’s plain!”
+
+“You’re dodging—cite me a fact, cite me a fact!” cried Sandoval. “Let’s
+get away from hollow arguments, from empty phrases, and get on the
+solid ground of facts,”—this with an elegant gesture. “Facts,
+gentlemen, facts! The rest is prejudice—I won’t call it filibusterism.”
+
+Pecson smiled like one of the blessed as he retorted, “There comes the
+filibusterism. But can’t we enter into a discussion without resorting
+to accusations?”
+
+Sandoval protested in a little extemporaneous speech, again demanding
+facts.
+
+“Well, not long ago there was a dispute between some private persons
+and certain friars, and the acting Governor rendered a decision that it
+should be settled by the Provincial of the Order concerned,” replied
+Pecson, again breaking out into a laugh, as though he were dealing with
+an insignificant matter, he cited names and dates, and promised
+documents that would prove how justice was dispensed.
+
+“But, on what ground, tell me this, on what ground can they refuse
+permission for what plainly appears to be extremely useful and
+necessary?” asked Sandoval.
+
+Pecson shrugged his shoulders. “It’s that it endangers the integrity of
+the fatherland,” he replied in the tone of a notary reading an
+allegation.
+
+“That’s pretty good! What has the integrity of the fatherland to do
+with the rules of syntax?”
+
+“The Holy Mother Church has learned doctors—what do I know? Perhaps it
+is feared that we may come to understand the laws so that we can obey
+them. What will become of the Philippines on the day when we understand
+one another?”
+
+Sandoval did not relish the dialectic and jesting turn of the
+conversation; along that path could rise no speech worth the while.
+“Don’t make a joke of things!” he exclaimed. “This is a serious
+matter.”
+
+“The Lord deliver me from joking when there are friars concerned!”
+
+“But, on what do you base—”
+
+“On the fact that, the hours for the classes having to come at night,”
+continued Pecson in the same tone, as if he were quoting known and
+recognized formulas, “there may be invoked as an obstacle the
+immorality of the thing, as was done in the case of the school at
+Malolos.”
+
+“Another! But don’t the classes of the Academy of Drawing, and the
+novenaries and the processions, cover themselves with the mantle of
+night?”
+
+“The scheme affects the dignity of the University,” went on the chubby
+youth, taking no notice of the question.
+
+“Affects nothing! The University has to accommodate itself to the needs
+of the students. And granting that, what is a university then? Is it an
+institution to discourage study? Have a few men banded themselves
+together in the name of learning and instruction in order to prevent
+others from becoming enlightened?”
+
+“The fact is that movements initiated from below are regarded as
+discontent—”
+
+“What about projects that come from above?” interpolated one of the
+students. “There’s the School of Arts and Trades!”
+
+“Slowly, slowly, gentlemen,” protested Sandoval. “I’m not a
+friar-lover, my liberal views being well known, but render unto Caesar
+that which is Caesar’s. Of that School of Arts and Trades, of which I
+have been the most enthusiastic supporter and the realization of which
+I shall greet as the first streak of dawn for these fortunate islands,
+of that School of Arts and Trades the friars have taken charge—”
+
+“Or the cat of the canary, which amounts to the same thing,” added
+Pecson, in his turn interrupting the speech.
+
+“Get out!” cried Sandoval, enraged at the interruption, which had
+caused him to lose the thread of his long, well-rounded sentence. “As
+long as we hear nothing bad, let’s not be pessimists, let’s not be
+unjust, doubting the liberty and independence of the government.”
+
+Here he entered upon a defense in beautiful phraseology of the
+government and its good intentions, a subject that Pecson dared not
+break in upon.
+
+“The Spanish government,” he said among other things, “has given you
+everything, it has denied you nothing! We had absolutism in Spain and
+you had absolutism here; the friars covered our soil with conventos,
+and conventos occupy a third part of Manila; in Spain the garrote
+prevails and here the garrote is the extreme punishment; we are
+Catholics and we have made you Catholics; we were scholastics and
+scholasticism sheds its light in your college halls; in short,
+gentlemen, we weep when you weep, we suffer when you suffer, we have
+the same altars, the same courts, the same punishments, and it is only
+just that we should give you our rights and our joys.”
+
+As no one interrupted him, he became more and more enthusiastic, until
+he came to speak of the future of the Philippines.
+
+“As I have said, gentlemen, the dawn is not far distant. Spain is now
+breaking the eastern sky for her beloved Philippines, and the times are
+changing, as I positively know, faster than we imagine. This
+government, which, according to you, is vacillating and weak, should be
+strengthened by our confidence, that we may make it see that it is the
+custodian of our hopes. Let us remind it by our conduct (should it ever
+forget itself, which I do not believe can happen) that we have faith in
+its good intentions and that it should be guided by no other standard
+than justice and the welfare of all the governed. No, gentlemen,” he
+went on in a tone more and more declamatory, “we must not admit at all
+in this matter the possibility of a consultation with other more or
+less hostile entities, as such a supposition would imply our
+resignation to the fact. Your conduct up to the present has been frank,
+loyal, without vacillation, above suspicion; you have addressed it
+simply and directly; the reasons you have presented could not be more
+sound; your aim is to lighten the labor of the teachers in the first
+years and to facilitate study among the hundreds of students who fill
+the college halls and for whom one solitary professor cannot suffice.
+If up to the present the petition has not been granted, it has been for
+the reason, as I feel sure, that there has been a great deal of
+material accumulated, but I predict that the campaign is won, that the
+summons of Makaraig is to announce to us the victory, and tomorrow we
+shall see our efforts crowned with the applause and appreciation of the
+country, and who knows, gentlemen, but that the government may confer
+upon you some handsome decoration of merit, benefactors as you are of
+the fatherland!”
+
+Enthusiastic applause resounded. All immediately believed in the
+triumph, and many in the decoration.
+
+“Let it be remembered, gentlemen,” observed Juanito, “that I was one of
+the first to propose it.”
+
+The pessimist Pecson was not so enthusiastic. “Just so we don’t get
+that decoration on our ankles,” he remarked, but fortunately for Pelaez
+this comment was not heard in the midst of the applause.
+
+When they had quieted down a little, Pecson replied, “Good, good, very
+good, but one supposition: if in spite of all that, the General
+consults and consults and consults, and afterwards refuses the permit?”
+
+This question fell like a dash of cold water. All turned to Sandoval,
+who was taken aback. “Then—” he stammered.
+
+“Then?”
+
+“Then,” he exclaimed in a burst of enthusiasm, still excited by the
+applause, “seeing that in writing and in printing it boasts of desiring
+your enlightenment, and yet hinders and denies it when called upon to
+make it a reality—then, gentlemen, your efforts will not have been in
+vain, you will have accomplished what no one else has been able to do.
+Make them drop the mask and fling down the gauntlet to you!”
+
+“Bravo, bravo!” cried several enthusiastically.
+
+“Good for Sandoval! Hurrah for the gauntlet!” added others.
+
+“Let them fling down the gauntlet to us!” repeated Pecson disdainfully.
+“But afterwards?”
+
+Sandoval seemed to be cut short in his triumph, but with the vivacity
+peculiar to his race and his oratorical temperament he had an immediate
+reply.
+
+“Afterwards?” he asked. “Afterwards, if none of the Filipinos dare to
+accept the challenge, then I, Sandoval, in the name of Spain, will take
+up the gauntlet, because such a policy would give the lie to the good
+intentions that she has always cherished toward her provinces, and
+because he who is thus faithless to the trust reposed in him and abuses
+his unlimited authority deserves neither the protection of the
+fatherland nor the support of any Spanish citizen!”
+
+The enthusiasm of his hearers broke all bounds. Isagani embraced him,
+the others following his example. They talked of the fatherland, of
+union, of fraternity, of fidelity. The Filipinos declared that if there
+were only Sandovals in Spain all would be Sandovals in the Philippines.
+His eyes glistened, and it might well be believed that if at that
+moment any kind of gauntlet had been flung at him he would have leaped
+upon any kind of horse to ride to death for the Philippines.
+
+The “cold water” alone replied: “Good, that’s very good, Sandoval. I
+could also say the same if I were a Peninsular, but not being one, if I
+should say one half of what you have, you yourself would take me for a
+filibuster.”
+
+Sandoval began a speech in protest, but was interrupted.
+
+“Rejoice, friends, rejoice! Victory!” cried a youth who entered at that
+moment and began to embrace everybody.
+
+“Rejoice, friends! Long live the Castilian tongue!”
+
+An outburst of applause greeted this announcement. They fell to
+embracing one another and their eyes filled with tears. Pecson alone
+preserved his skeptical smile.
+
+The bearer of such good news was Makaraig, the young man at the head of
+the movement. This student occupied in that house, by himself, two
+rooms, luxuriously furnished, and had his servant and a cochero to look
+after his carriage and horses. He was of robust carriage, of refined
+manners, fastidiously dressed, and very rich. Although studying law
+only that he might have an academic degree, he enjoyed a reputation for
+diligence, and as a logician in the scholastic way had no cause to envy
+the most frenzied quibblers of the University faculty. Nevertheless he
+was not very far behind in regard to modern ideas and progress, for his
+fortune enabled him to have all the books and magazines that a watchful
+censor was unable to keep out. With these qualifications and his
+reputation for courage, his fortunate associations in his earlier
+years, and his refined and delicate courtesy, it was not strange that
+he should exercise such great influence over his associates and that he
+should have been chosen to carry out such a difficult undertaking as
+that of the instruction in Castilian.
+
+After the first outburst of enthusiasm, which in youth always takes
+hold in such exaggerated forms, since youth finds everything beautiful,
+they wanted to be informed how the affair had been managed.
+
+“I saw Padre Irene this morning,” said Makaraig with a certain air of
+mystery.
+
+“Hurrah for Padre Irene!” cried an enthusiastic student.
+
+“Padre Irene,” continued Makaraig, “has told me about everything that
+took place at Los Baños. It seems that they disputed for at least a
+week, he supporting and defending our case against all of them, against
+Padre Sibyla, Padre Fernandez, Padre Salvi, the General, the jeweler
+Simoun—”
+
+“The jeweler Simoun!” interrupted one of his listeners. “What has that
+Jew to do with the affairs of our country? We enrich him by buying—”
+
+“Keep quiet!” admonished another impatiently, anxious to learn how
+Padre Irene had been able to overcome such formidable opponents.
+
+“There were even high officials who were opposed to our project, the
+Head Secretary, the Civil Governor, Quiroga the Chinaman—”
+
+“Quiroga the Chinaman! The pimp of the—”
+
+“Shut up!”
+
+“At last,” resumed Makaraig, “they were going to pigeonhole the
+petition and let it sleep for months and months, when Padre Irene
+remembered the Superior Commission of Primary Instruction and proposed,
+since the matter concerned the teaching of the Castilian tongue, that
+the petition be referred to that body for a report upon it.”
+
+“But that Commission hasn’t been in operation for a long time,”
+observed Pecson.
+
+“That’s exactly what they replied to Padre Irene, and he answered that
+this was a good opportunity to revive it, and availing himself of the
+presence of Don Custodio, one of its members, he proposed on the spot
+that a committee should be appointed. Don Custodio’s activity being
+known and recognized, he was named as arbiter and the petition is now
+in his hands. He promised that he would settle it this month.”
+
+“Hurrah for Don Custodio!”
+
+“But suppose Don Custodio should report unfavorably upon it?” inquired
+the pessimist Pecson.
+
+Upon this they had not reckoned, being intoxicated with the thought
+that the matter would not be pigeonholed, so they all turned to
+Makaraig to learn how it could be arranged.
+
+“The same objection I presented to Padre Irene, but with his sly smile
+he said to me: ‘We’ve won a great deal, we have succeeded in getting
+the matter on the road to a decision, the opposition sees itself forced
+to join battle.’ If we can bring some influence to bear upon Don
+Custodio so that he, in accordance with his liberal tendencies, may
+report favorably, all is won, for the General showed himself to be
+absolutely neutral.”
+
+Makaraig paused, and an impatient listener asked, “How can we influence
+him?”
+
+“Padre Irene pointed out to me two ways—”
+
+“Quiroga,” some one suggested.
+
+“Pshaw, great use Quiroga—”
+
+“A fine present.”
+
+“No, that won’t do, for he prides himself upon being incorruptible.”
+
+“Ah, yes, I know!” exclaimed Pecson with a laugh. “Pepay the dancing
+girl.”
+
+“Ah, yes, Pepay the dancing girl,” echoed several.
+
+This Pepay was a showy girl, supposed to be a great friend of Don
+Custodio. To her resorted the contractors, the employees, the
+intriguers, when they wanted to get something from the celebrated
+councilor. Juanito Pelaez, who was also a great friend of the dancing
+girl, offered to look after the matter, but Isagani shook his head,
+saying that it was sufficient that they had made use of Padre Irene and
+that it would be going too far to avail themselves of Pepay in such an
+affair.
+
+“Show us the other way.”
+
+“The other way is to apply to his attorney and adviser, Señor Pasta,
+the oracle before whom Don Custodio bows.”
+
+“I prefer that,” said Isagani. “Señor Pasta is a Filipino, and was a
+schoolmate of my uncle’s. But how can we interest him?”
+
+“There’s the quid,” replied Makaraig, looking earnestly at Isagani.
+“Señor Pasta has a dancing girl—I mean, a seamstress.”
+
+Isagani again shook his head.
+
+“Don’t be such a puritan,” Juanito Pelaez said to him. “The end
+justifies the means! I know the seamstress, Matea, for she has a shop
+where a lot of girls work.”
+
+“No, gentlemen,” declared Isagani, “let’s first employ decent methods.
+I’ll go to Señor Pasta and, if I don’t accomplish anything, then you
+can do what you wish with the dancing girls and seamstresses.”
+
+They had to accept this proposition, agreeing that Isagani should talk
+to Señor Pasta that very day, and in the afternoon report to his
+associates at the University the result of the interview.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+SEÑOR PASTA
+
+
+Isagani presented himself in the house of the lawyer, one of the most
+talented minds in Manila, whom the friars consulted in their great
+difficulties. The youth had to wait some time on account of the
+numerous clients, but at last his turn came and he entered the office,
+or bufete, as it is generally called in the Philippines. The lawyer
+received him with a slight cough, looking down furtively at his feet,
+but he did not rise or offer a seat, as he went on writing. This gave
+Isagani an opportunity for observation and careful study of the lawyer,
+who had aged greatly. His hair was gray and his baldness extended over
+nearly the whole crown of his head. His countenance was sour and
+austere.
+
+There was complete silence in the study, except for the whispers of the
+clerks and understudies who were at work in an adjoining room. Their
+pens scratched as though quarreling with the paper.
+
+At length the lawyer finished what he was writing, laid down his pen,
+raised his head, and, recognizing the youth, let his face light up with
+a smile as he extended his hand affectionately.
+
+“Welcome, young man! But sit down, and excuse me, for I didn’t know
+that it was you. How is your uncle?”
+
+Isagani took courage, believing that his case would get on well. He
+related briefly what had been done, the while studying the effect of
+his words. Señor Pasta listened impassively at first and, although he
+was informed of the efforts of the students, pretended ignorance, as if
+to show that he had nothing to do with such childish matters, but when
+he began to suspect what was wanted of him and heard mention of the
+Vice-Rector, friars, the Captain-General, a project, and so on, his
+face slowly darkened and he finally exclaimed, “This is the land of
+projects! But go on, go on!”
+
+Isagani was not yet discouraged. He spoke of the manner in which a
+decision was to be reached and concluded with an expression of the
+confidence which the young men entertained that he, Señor Pasta, would
+intercede in their behalf in case Don Custodio should consult him, as
+was to be expected. He did not dare to say would advise, deterred by
+the wry face the lawyer put on.
+
+But Señor Pasta had already formed his resolution, and it was not to
+mix at all in the affair, either as consulter or consulted. He was
+familiar with what had occurred at Los Baños, he knew that there
+existed two factions, and that Padre Irene was not the only champion on
+the side of the students, nor had he been the one who proposed
+submitting the petition to the Commission of Primary Instruction, but
+quite the contrary. Padre Irene, Padre Fernandez, the Countess, a
+merchant who expected to sell the materials for the new academy, and
+the high official who had been citing royal decree after royal decree,
+were about to triumph, when Padre Sibyla, wishing to gain time, had
+thought of the Commission. All these facts the great lawyer had present
+in his mind, so that when Isagani had finished speaking, he determined
+to confuse him with evasions, tangle the matter up, and lead the
+conversation to other subjects.
+
+“Yes,” he said, pursing his lips and scratching his head, “there is no
+one who surpasses me in love for the country and in aspirations toward
+progress, but—I can’t compromise myself, I don’t know whether you
+clearly understand my position, a position that is very delicate, I
+have so many interests, I have to labor within the limits of strict
+prudence, it’s a risk—”
+
+The lawyer sought to bewilder the youth with an exuberance of words, so
+he went on speaking of laws and decrees, and talked so much that
+instead of confusing the youth, he came very near to entangling himself
+in a labyrinth of citations.
+
+“In no way do we wish to compromise you,” replied Isagani with great
+calmness. “God deliver us from injuring in the least the persons whose
+lives are so useful to the rest of the Filipinos! But, as little versed
+as I may be in the laws, royal decrees, writs, and resolutions that
+obtain in this country, I can’t believe that there can be any harm in
+furthering the high purposes of the government, in trying to secure a
+proper interpretation of these purposes. We are seeking the same end
+and differ only about the means.”
+
+The lawyer smiled, for the youth had allowed himself to wander away
+from the subject, and there where the former was going to entangle him
+he had already entangled himself.
+
+“That’s exactly the quid, as is vulgarly said. It’s clear that it is
+laudable to aid the government, when one aids it submissively,
+following out its desires and the true spirit of the laws in agreement
+with the just beliefs of the governing powers, and when not in
+contradiction to the fundamental and general way of thinking of the
+persons to whom is intrusted the common welfare of the individuals that
+form a social organism. Therefore, it is criminal, it is punishable,
+because it is offensive to the high principle of authority, to attempt
+any action contrary to its initiative, even supposing it to be better
+than the governmental proposition, because such action would injure its
+prestige, which is the elementary basis upon which all colonial
+edifices rest.”
+
+Confident that this broadside had at least stunned Isagani, the old
+lawyer fell back in his armchair, outwardly very serious, but laughing
+to himself.
+
+Isagani, however, ventured to reply. “I should think that governments,
+the more they are threatened, would be all the more careful to seek
+bases that are impregnable. The basis of prestige for colonial
+governments is the weakest of all, since it does not depend upon
+themselves but upon the consent of the governed, while the latter are
+willing to recognize it. The basis of justice or reason would seem to
+be the most durable.”
+
+The lawyer raised his head. How was this—did that youth dare to reply
+and argue with him, him, Señor Pasta? Was he not yet bewildered with
+his big words?
+
+“Young man, you must put those considerations aside, for they are
+dangerous,” he declared with a wave of his hand. “What I advise is that
+you let the government attend to its own business.”
+
+“Governments are established for the welfare of the peoples, and in
+order to accomplish this purpose properly they have to follow the
+suggestions of the citizens, who are the ones best qualified to
+understand their own needs.”
+
+“Those who constitute the government are also citizens, and among the
+most enlightened.”
+
+“But, being men, they are fallible, and ought not to disregard the
+opinions of others.”
+
+“They must be trusted, they have to attend to everything.”
+
+“There is a Spanish proverb which says, ‘No tears, no milk,’ in other
+words, ‘To him who does not ask, nothing is given.’ ”
+
+“Quite the reverse,” replied the lawyer with a sarcastic smile; “with
+the government exactly the reverse occurs—”
+
+But he suddenly checked himself, as if he had said too much and wished
+to correct his imprudence. “The government has given us things that we
+have not asked for, and that we could not ask for, because to ask—to
+ask, presupposes that it is in some way incompetent and consequently is
+not performing its functions. To suggest to it a course of action, to
+try to guide it, when not really antagonizing it, is to presuppose that
+it is capable of erring, and as I have already said to you such
+suppositions are menaces to the existence of colonial governments. The
+common crowd overlooks this and the young men who set to work
+thoughtlessly do not know, do not comprehend, do not try to comprehend
+the counter-effect of asking, the menace to order there is in that
+idea—”
+
+“Pardon me,” interrupted Isagani, offended by the arguments the jurist
+was using with him, “but when by legal methods people ask a government
+for something, it is because they think it good and disposed to grant a
+blessing, and such action, instead of irritating it, should flatter it
+—to the mother one appeals, never to the stepmother. The government, in
+my humble opinion, is not an omniscient being that can see and
+anticipate everything, and even if it could, it ought not to feel
+offended, for here you have the church itself doing nothing but asking
+and begging of God, who sees and knows everything, and you yourself ask
+and demand many things in the courts of this same government, yet
+neither God nor the courts have yet taken offense. Every one realizes
+that the government, being the human institution that it is, needs the
+support of all the people, it needs to be made to see and feel the
+reality of things. You yourself are not convinced of the truth of your
+objection, you yourself know that it is a tyrannical and despotic
+government which, in order to make a display of force and independence,
+denies everything through fear or distrust, and that the tyrannized and
+enslaved peoples are the only ones whose duty it is never to ask for
+anything. A people that hates its government ought to ask for nothing
+but that it abdicate its power.”
+
+The old lawyer grimaced and shook his head from side to side, in sign
+of discontent, while he rubbed his hand over his bald pate and said in
+a tone of condescending pity: “Ahem! those are bad doctrines, bad
+theories, ahem! How plain it is that you are young and inexperienced in
+life. Look what is happening with the inexperienced young men who in
+Madrid are asking for so many reforms. They are accused of
+filibusterism, many of them don’t dare return here, and yet, what are
+they asking for? Things holy, ancient, and recognized as quite
+harmless. But there are matters that can’t be explained, they’re so
+delicate. Let’s see—I confess to you that there are other reasons
+besides those expressed that might lead a sensible government to deny
+systematically the wishes of the people—no—but it may happen that we
+find ourselves under rulers so fatuous and ridiculous—but there are
+always other reasons, even though what is asked be quite just—different
+governments encounter different conditions—”
+
+The old man hesitated, stared fixedly at Isagani, and then with a
+sudden resolution made a sign with his hand as though he would dispel
+some idea.
+
+“I can guess what you mean,” said Isagani, smiling sadly. “You mean
+that a colonial government, for the very reason that it is imperfectly
+constituted and that it is based on premises—”
+
+“No, no, not that, no!” quickly interrupted the old lawyer, as he
+sought for something among his papers. “No, I meant—but where are my
+spectacles?”
+
+“There they are,” replied Isagani.
+
+The old man put them on and pretended to look over some papers, but
+seeing that the youth was waiting, he mumbled, “I wanted to tell you
+something, I wanted to say—but it has slipped from my mind. You
+interrupted me in your eagerness—but it was an insignificant matter. If
+you only knew what a whirl my head is in, I have so much to do!”
+
+Isagani understood that he was being dismissed. “So,” he said, rising,
+“we—”
+
+“Ah, you will do well to leave the matter in the hands of the
+government, which will settle it as it sees fit. You say that the
+Vice-Rector is opposed to the teaching of Castilian. Perhaps he may be,
+not as to the fact but as to the form. It is said that the Rector who
+is on his way will bring a project for reform in education. Wait a
+while, give time a chance, apply yourself to your studies as the
+examinations are near, and—carambas!—you who already speak Castilian
+and express yourself easily, what are you bothering yourself about?
+What interest have you in seeing it specially taught? Surely Padre
+Florentino thinks as I do! Give him my regards.”
+
+“My uncle,” replied Isagani, “has always admonished me to think of
+others as much as of myself. I didn’t come for myself, I came in the
+name of those who are in worse condition.”
+
+“What the devil! Let them do as you have done, let them singe their
+eyebrows studying and come to be bald like myself, stuffing whole
+paragraphs into their memories! I believe that if you talk Spanish it
+is because you have studied it—you’re not of Manila or of Spanish
+parents! Then let them learn it as you have, and do as I have done:
+I’ve been a servant to all the friars, I’ve prepared their chocolate,
+and while with my right hand I stirred it, with the left I held a
+grammar, I learned, and, thank God! have never needed other teachers or
+academies or permits from the government. Believe me, he who wishes to
+learn, learns and becomes wise!”
+
+“But how many among those who wish to learn come to be what you are?
+One in ten thousand, and more!”
+
+“Pish! Why any more?” retorted the old man, shrugging his shoulders.
+“There are too many lawyers now, many of them become mere clerks.
+Doctors? They insult and abuse one another, and even kill each other in
+competition for a patient. Laborers, sir, laborers, are what we need,
+for agriculture!”
+
+Isagani realized that he was losing time, but still could not forbear
+replying: “Undoubtedly, there are many doctors and lawyers, but I won’t
+say there are too many, since we have towns that lack them entirely,
+and if they do abound in quantity, perhaps they are deficient in
+quality. Since the young men can’t be prevented from studying, and no
+other professions are open to us, why let them waste their time and
+effort? And if the instruction, deficient as it is, does not keep many
+from becoming lawyers and doctors, if we must finally have them, why
+not have good ones? After all, even if the sole wish is to make the
+country a country of farmers and laborers, and condemn in it all
+intellectual activity, I don’t see any evil in enlightening those same
+farmers and laborers, in giving them at least an education that will
+aid them in perfecting themselves and in perfecting their work, in
+placing them in a condition to understand many things of which they are
+at present ignorant.”
+
+“Bah, bah, bah!” exclaimed the lawyer, drawing circles in the air with
+his hand to dispel the ideas suggested. “To be a good farmer no great
+amount of rhetoric is needed. Dreams, illusions, fancies! Eh, will you
+take a piece of advice?”
+
+He arose and placed his hand affectionately on the youth’s shoulder, as
+he continued: “I’m going to give you one, and a very good one, because
+I see that you are intelligent and the advice will not be wasted.
+You’re going to study medicine? Well, confine yourself to learning how
+to put on plasters and apply leeches, and don’t ever try to improve or
+impair the condition of your kind. When you become a licentiate, marry
+a rich and devout girl, try to make cures and charge well, shun
+everything that has any relation to the general state of the country,
+attend mass, confession, and communion when the rest do, and you will
+see afterwards how you will thank me, and I shall see it, if I am still
+alive. Always remember that charity begins at home, for man ought not
+to seek on earth more than the greatest amount of happiness for
+himself, as Bentham says. If you involve yourself in quixotisms you
+will have no career, nor will you get married, nor will you ever amount
+to anything. All will abandon you, your own countrymen will be the
+first to laugh at your simplicity. Believe me, you will remember me and
+see that I am right, when you have gray hairs like myself, gray hairs
+such as these!”
+
+Here the old lawyer stroked his scanty white hair, as he smiled sadly
+and shook his head.
+
+“When I have gray hairs like those, sir,” replied Isagani with equal
+sadness, “and turn my gaze back over my past and see that I have worked
+only for myself, without having done what I plainly could and should
+have done for the country that has given me everything, for the
+citizens that have helped me to live—then, sir, every gray hair will be
+a thorn, and instead of rejoicing, they will shame me!”
+
+So saying, he took his leave with a profound bow. The lawyer remained
+motionless in his place, with an amazed look on his face. He listened
+to the footfalls that gradually died away, then resumed his seat.
+
+“Poor boy!” he murmured, “similar thoughts also crossed my mind once!
+What more could any one desire than to be able to say: ‘I have done
+this for the good of the fatherland, I have consecrated my life to the
+welfare of others!’ A crown of laurel, steeped in aloes, dry leaves
+that cover thorns and worms! That is not life, that does not get us our
+daily bread, nor does it bring us honors— the laurel would hardly serve
+for a salad, nor produce ease, nor aid us in winning lawsuits, but
+quite the reverse! Every country has its code of ethics, as it has its
+climate and its diseases, different from the climate and the diseases
+of other countries.”
+
+After a pause, he added: “Poor boy! If all should think and act as he
+does, I don’t say but that—Poor boy! Poor Florentino!”
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE TRIBULATIONS OF A CHINESE
+
+
+In the evening of that same Saturday, Quiroga, the Chinese, who aspired
+to the creation of a consulate for his nation, gave a dinner in the
+rooms over his bazaar, located in the Escolta. His feast was well
+attended: friars, government employees, soldiers, merchants, all of
+them his customers, partners or patrons, were to be seen there, for his
+store supplied the curates and the conventos with all their
+necessities, he accepted the chits of all the employees, and he had
+servants who were discreet, prompt, and complaisant. The friars
+themselves did not disdain to pass whole hours in his store, sometimes
+in view of the public, sometimes in the chambers with agreeable
+company.
+
+That night, then, the sala presented a curious aspect, being filled
+with friars and clerks seated on Vienna chairs, stools of black wood,
+and marble benches of Cantonese origin, before little square tables,
+playing cards or conversing among themselves, under the brilliant glare
+of the gilt chandeliers or the subdued light of the Chinese lanterns,
+which were brilliantly decorated with long silken tassels. On the walls
+there was a lamentable medley of landscapes in dim and gaudy colors,
+painted in Canton or Hongkong, mingled with tawdry chromos of odalisks,
+half-nude women, effeminate lithographs of Christ, the deaths of the
+just and of the sinners—made by Jewish houses in Germany to be sold in
+the Catholic countries. Nor were there lacking the Chinese prints on
+red paper representing a man seated, of venerable aspect, with a calm,
+smiling face, behind whom stood a servant, ugly, horrible, diabolical,
+threatening, armed with a lance having a wide, keen blade. Among the
+Indians some call this figure Mohammed, others Santiago, [34] we do not
+know why, nor do the Chinese themselves give a very clear explanation
+of this popular pair. The pop of champagne corks, the rattle of
+glasses, laughter, cigar smoke, and that odor peculiar to a Chinese
+habitation—a mixture of punk, opium, and dried fruits—completed the
+collection.
+
+Dressed as a Chinese mandarin in a blue-tasseled cap, Quiroga moved
+from room to room, stiff and straight, but casting watchful glances
+here and there as though to assure himself that nothing was being
+stolen. Yet in spite of this natural distrust, he exchanged handshakes
+with each guest, greeted some with a smile sagacious and humble, others
+with a patronizing air, and still others with a certain shrewd look
+that seemed to say, “I know! You didn’t come on my account, you came
+for the dinner!”
+
+And Quiroga was right! That fat gentleman who is now praising him and
+speaking of the advisability of a Chinese consulate in Manila,
+intimating that to manage it there could be no one but Quiroga, is the
+Señor Gonzalez who hides behind the pseudonym Pitilí when he attacks
+Chinese immigration through the columns of the newspapers. That other,
+an elderly man who closely examines the lamps, pictures, and other
+furnishings with grimaces and ejaculations of disdain, is Don Timoteo
+Pelaez, Juanito’s father, a merchant who inveighs against the Chinese
+competition that is ruining his business. The one over there, that
+thin, brown individual with a sharp look and a pale smile, is the
+celebrated originator of the dispute over Mexican pesos, which so
+troubled one of Quiroga’s protéges: that government clerk is regarded
+in Manila as very clever. That one farther on, he of the frowning look
+and unkempt mustache, is a government official who passes for a most
+meritorious fellow because he has the courage to speak ill of the
+business in lottery tickets carried on between Quiroga and an exalted
+dame in Manila society. The fact is that two thirds of the tickets go
+to China and the few that are left in Manila are sold at a premium of a
+half-real. The honorable gentleman entertains the conviction that some
+day he will draw the first prize, and is in a rage at finding himself
+confronted with such tricks.
+
+The dinner, meanwhile, was drawing to an end. From the dining-room
+floated into the sala snatches of toasts, interruptions, bursts and
+ripples of laughter. The name of Quiroga was often heard mingled with
+the words “consul,” “equality,” “justice.” The amphitryon himself did
+not eat European dishes, so he contented himself with drinking a glass
+of wine with his guests from time to time, promising to dine with those
+who were not seated at the first table.
+
+Simoun, who was present, having already dined, was in the sala talking
+with some merchants, who were complaining of business conditions:
+everything was going wrong, trade was paralyzed, the European exchanges
+were exorbitantly high. They sought information from the jeweler or
+insinuated to him a few ideas, with the hope that these would be
+communicated to the Captain-General. To all the remedies suggested
+Simoun responded with a sarcastic and unfeeling exclamation about
+nonsense, until one of them in exasperation asked him for his opinion.
+
+“My opinion?” he retorted. “Study how other nations prosper, and then
+do as they do.”
+
+“And why do they prosper, Señor Simoun?”
+
+Simoun replied with a shrug of his shoulders.
+
+“The port works, which weigh so heavily upon commerce, and the port not
+yet completed!” sighed Don Timoteo Pelaez. “A Penelope’s web, as my son
+says, that is spun and unspun. The taxes—”
+
+“You complaining!” exclaimed another. “Just as the General has decreed
+the destruction of houses of light materials! [35] And you with a
+shipment of galvanized iron!”
+
+“Yes,” rejoined Don Timoteo, “but look what that decree cost me! Then,
+the destruction will not be carried out for a month, not until Lent
+begins, and other shipments may arrive. I would have wished them
+destroyed right away, but—Besides, what are the owners of those houses
+going to buy from me if they are all poor, all equally beggars?”
+
+“You can always buy up their shacks for a trifle.”
+
+“And afterwards have the decree revoked and sell them back at double
+the price—that’s business!”
+
+Simoun smiled his frigid smile. Seeing Quiroga approach, he left the
+querulous merchants to greet the future consul, who on catching sight
+of him lost his satisfied expression and assigned a countenance like
+those of the merchants, while he bent almost double.
+
+Quiroga respected the jeweler greatly, not only because he knew him to
+be very wealthy, but also on account of his rumored influence with the
+Captain-General. It was reported that Simoun favored Quiroga’s
+ambitions, that he was an advocate for the consulate, and a certain
+newspaper hostile to the Chinese had alluded to him in many
+paraphrases, veiled allusions, and suspension points, in the celebrated
+controversy with another sheet that was favorable to the queued folk.
+Some prudent persons added with winks and half-uttered words that his
+Black Eminence was advising the General to avail himself of the Chinese
+in order to humble the tenacious pride of the natives.
+
+“To hold the people in subjection,” he was reported to have said,
+“there’s nothing like humiliating them and humbling them in their own
+eyes.”
+
+To this end an opportunity had soon presented itself. The guilds of
+mestizos and natives were continually watching one another, venting
+their bellicose spirits and their activities in jealousy and distrust.
+At mass one day the gobernadorcillo of the natives was seated on a
+bench to the right, and, being extremely thin, happened to cross one of
+his legs over the other, thus adopting a nonchalant attitude, in order
+to expose his thighs more and display his pretty shoes. The
+gobernadorcillo of the guild of mestizos, who was seated on the
+opposite bench, as he had bunions, and could not cross his legs on
+account of his obesity, spread his legs wide apart to expose a plain
+waistcoat adorned with a beautiful gold chain set with diamonds. The
+two cliques comprehended these maneuvers and joined battle. On the
+following Sunday all the mestizos, even the thinnest, had large
+paunches and spread their legs wide apart as though on horseback, while
+the natives placed one leg over the other, even the fattest, there
+being one cabeza de barangay who turned a somersault. Seeing these
+movements, the Chinese all adopted their own peculiar attitude, that of
+sitting as they do in their shops, with one leg drawn back and upward,
+the other swinging loose. There resulted protests and petitions, the
+police rushed to arms ready to start a civil war, the curates rejoiced,
+the Spaniards were amused and made money out of everybody, until the
+General settled the quarrel by ordering that every one should sit as
+the Chinese did, since they were the heaviest contributors, even though
+they were not the best Catholics. The difficulty for the mestizos and
+natives then was that their trousers were too tight to permit of their
+imitating the Chinese. But to make the intention of humiliating them
+the more evident, the measure was carried out with great pomp and
+ceremony, the church being surrounded by a troop of cavalry, while all
+those within were sweating. The matter was carried to the Cortes, but
+it was repeated that the Chinese, as the ones who paid, should have
+their way in the religious ceremonies, even though they apostatized and
+laughed at Christianity immediately after. The natives and the mestizos
+had to be content, learning thus not to waste time over such fatuity.
+[36]
+
+Quiroga, with his smooth tongue and humble smile, was lavishly and
+flatteringly attentive to Simoun. His voice was caressing and his bows
+numerous, but the jeweler cut his blandishments short by asking
+brusquely:
+
+“Did the bracelets suit her?”
+
+At this question all Quiroga’s liveliness vanished like a dream. His
+caressing voice became plaintive; he bowed lower, gave the Chinese
+salutation of raising his clasped hands to the height of his face, and
+groaned: “Ah, Señor Simoun! I’m lost, I’m ruined!” [37]
+
+“How, Quiroga, lost and ruined when you have so many bottles of
+champagne and so many guests?”
+
+Quiroga closed his eyes and made a grimace. Yes, the affair of that
+afternoon, that affair of the bracelets, had ruined him. Simoun smiled,
+for when a Chinese merchant complains it is because all is going well,
+and when he makes a show that things are booming it is quite certain
+that he is planning an assignment or flight to his own country.
+
+“You didn’t know that I’m lost, I’m ruined? Ah, Señor Simoun, I’m
+busted!” To make his condition plainer, he illustrated the word by
+making a movement as though he were falling in collapse.
+
+Simoun wanted to laugh, but restrained himself and said that he knew
+nothing, nothing at all, as Quiroga led him to a room and closed the
+door. He then explained the cause of his misfortune.
+
+Three diamond bracelets that he had secured from Simoun on pretense of
+showing them to his wife were not for her, a poor native shut up in her
+room like a Chinese woman, but for a beautiful and charming lady, the
+friend of a powerful man, whose influence was needed by him in a
+certain deal in which he could clear some six thousand pesos. As he did
+not understand feminine tastes and wished to be gallant, the Chinese
+had asked for the three finest bracelets the jeweler had, each priced
+at three to four thousand pesos. With affected simplicity and his most
+caressing smile, Quiroga had begged the lady to select the one she
+liked best, and the lady, more simple and caressing still, had declared
+that she liked all three, and had kept them.
+
+Simoun burst out into laughter.
+
+“Ah, sir, I’m lost, I’m ruined!” cried the Chinese, slapping himself
+lightly with his delicate hands; but the jeweler continued his
+laughter.
+
+“Ugh, bad people, surely not a real lady,” went on the Chinaman,
+shaking his head in disgust. “What! She has no decency, while me, a
+Chinaman, me always polite! Ah, surely she not a real lady—a cigarrera
+has more decency!”
+
+“They’ve caught you, they’ve caught you!” exclaimed Simoun, poking him
+in the chest.
+
+“And everybody’s asking for loans and never pays—what about that?
+Clerks, officials, lieutenants, soldiers—” he checked them off on his
+long-nailed fingers—“ah, Señor Simoun, I’m lost, I’m busted!”
+
+“Get out with your complaints,” said Simoun. “I’ve saved you from many
+officials that wanted money from you. I’ve lent it to them so that they
+wouldn’t bother you, even when I knew that they couldn’t pay.”
+
+“But, Señor Simoun, you lend to officials; I lend to women, sailors,
+everybody.”
+
+“I bet you get your money back.”
+
+“Me, money back? Ah, surely you don’t understand! When it’s lost in
+gambling they never pay. Besides, you have a consul, you can force
+them, but I haven’t.”
+
+Simoun became thoughtful. “Listen, Quiroga,” he said, somewhat
+abstractedly, “I’ll undertake to collect what the officers and sailors
+owe you. Give me their notes.”
+
+Quiroga again fell to whining: they had never given him any notes.
+
+“When they come to you asking for money, send them to me. I want to
+help you.”
+
+The grateful Quiroga thanked him, but soon fell to lamenting again
+about the bracelets. “A cigarrera wouldn’t be so shameless!” he
+repeated.
+
+“The devil!” exclaimed Simoun, looking askance at the Chinese, as
+though studying him. “Exactly when I need the money and thought that
+you could pay me! But it can all be arranged, as I don’t want you to
+fail for such a small amount. Come, a favor, and I’ll reduce to seven
+the nine thousand pesos you owe me. You can get anything you wish
+through the Customs—boxes of lamps, iron, copper, glassware, Mexican
+pesos—you furnish arms to the conventos, don’t you?”
+
+The Chinese nodded affirmation, but remarked that he had to do a good
+deal of bribing. “I furnish the padres everything!”
+
+“Well, then,” added Simoun in a low voice, “I need you to get in for me
+some boxes of rifles that arrived this evening. I want you to keep them
+in your warehouse; there isn’t room for all of them in my house.”
+
+Quiroga began to show symptoms of fright.
+
+“Don’t get scared, you don’t run any risk. These rifles are to be
+concealed, a few at a time, in various dwellings, then a search will be
+instituted, and many people will be sent to prison. You and I can make
+a haul getting them set free. Understand me?”
+
+Quiroga wavered, for he was afraid of firearms. In his desk he had an
+empty revolver that he never touched without turning his head away and
+closing his eyes.
+
+“If you can’t do it, I’ll have to apply to some one else, but then I’ll
+need the nine thousand pesos to cross their palms and shut their eyes.”
+
+“All right, all right!” Quiroga finally agreed. “But many people will
+be arrested? There’ll be a search, eh?”
+
+When Quiroga and Simoun returned to the sala they found there, in
+animated conversation, those who had finished their dinner, for the
+champagne had loosened their tongues and stirred their brains. They
+were talking rather freely.
+
+In a group where there were a number of government clerks, some ladies,
+and Don Custodio, the topic was a commission sent to India to make
+certain investigations about footwear for the soldiers.
+
+“Who compose it?” asked an elderly lady.
+
+“A colonel, two other officers, and his Excellency’s nephew.”
+
+“Four?” rejoined a clerk. “What a commission! Suppose they disagree—are
+they competent?”
+
+“That’s what I asked,” replied a clerk. “It’s said that one civilian
+ought to go, one who has no military prejudices—a shoemaker, for
+instance.”
+
+“That’s right,” added an importer of shoes, “but it wouldn’t do to send
+an Indian or a Chinaman, and the only Peninsular shoemaker demanded
+such large fees—”
+
+“But why do they have to make any investigations about footwear?”
+inquired the elderly lady. “It isn’t for the Peninsular artillerymen.
+The Indian soldiers can go barefoot, as they do in their towns.” [38]
+
+“Exactly so, and the treasury would save more,” corroborated another
+lady, a widow who was not satisfied with her pension.
+
+“But you must remember,” remarked another in the group, a friend of the
+officers on the commission, “that while it’s true they go barefoot in
+the towns, it’s not the same as moving about under orders in the
+service. They can’t choose the hour, nor the road, nor rest when they
+wish. Remember, madam, that, with the noonday sun overhead and the
+earth below baking like an oven, they have to march over sandy
+stretches, where there are stones, the sun above and fire below,
+bullets in front—”
+
+“It’s only a question of getting used to it!”
+
+“Like the donkey that got used to not eating! In our present campaign
+the greater part of our losses have been due to wounds on the soles of
+the feet. Remember the donkey, madam, remember the donkey!”
+
+“But, my dear sir,” retorted the lady, “look how much money is wasted
+on shoe-leather. There’s enough to pension many widows and orphans in
+order to maintain our prestige. Don’t smile, for I’m not talking about
+myself, and I have my pension, even though a very small one,
+insignificant considering the services my husband rendered, but I’m
+talking of others who are dragging out miserable lives! It’s not right
+that after so much persuasion to come and so many hardships in crossing
+the sea they should end here by dying of hunger. What you say about the
+soldiers may be true, but the fact is that I’ve been in the country
+more than three years, and I haven’t seen any soldier limping.”
+
+“In that I agree with the lady,” said her neighbor. “Why issue them
+shoes when they were born without them?”
+
+“And why shirts?”
+
+“And why trousers?”
+
+“Just calculate what we should economize on soldiers clothed only in
+their skins!” concluded he who was defending the army.
+
+In another group the conversation was more heated. Ben-Zayb was talking
+and declaiming, while Padre Camorra, as usual, was constantly
+interrupting him. The friar-journalist, in spite of his respect for the
+cowled gentry, was always at loggerheads with Padre Camorra, whom he
+regarded as a silly half-friar, thus giving himself the appearance of
+being independent and refuting the accusations of those who called him
+Fray Ibañez. Padre Camorra liked his adversary, as the latter was the
+only person who would take seriously what he styled his arguments. They
+were discussing magnetism, spiritualism, magic, and the like. Their
+words flew through the air like the knives and balls of jugglers,
+tossed back and forth from one to the other.
+
+That year great attention had been attracted in the Quiapo fair by a
+head, wrongly called a sphinx, exhibited by Mr. Leeds, an American.
+Glaring advertisements covered the walls of the houses, mysterious and
+funereal, to excite the curiosity of the public. Neither Ben-Zayb nor
+any of the padres had yet seen it; Juanito Pelaez was the only one who
+had, and he was describing his wonderment to the party.
+
+Ben-Zayb, as a journalist, looked for a natural explanation. Padre
+Camorra talked of the devil, Padre Irene smiled, Padre Salvi remained
+grave.
+
+“But, Padre, the devil doesn’t need to come—we are sufficient to damn
+ourselves—”
+
+“It can’t be explained any other way.”
+
+“If science—”
+
+“Get out with science, puñales!”
+
+“But, listen to me and I’ll convince you. It’s all a question of
+optics. I haven’t yet seen the head nor do I know how it looks, but
+this gentleman”—indicating Juanito Pelaez—“tells us that it does not
+look like the talking heads that are usually exhibited. So be it! But
+the principle is the same—it’s all a question of optics. Wait! A mirror
+is placed thus, another mirror behind it, the image is reflected—I say,
+it is purely a problem in physics.”
+
+Taking down from the walls several mirrors, he arranged them, turned
+them round and round, but, not getting the desired result, concluded:
+“As I say, it’s nothing more or less than a question of optics.”
+
+“But what do you want mirrors for, if Juanito tells us that the head is
+inside a box placed on the table? I see in it spiritualism, because the
+spiritualists always make use of tables, and I think that Padre Salvi,
+as the ecclesiastical governor, ought to prohibit the exhibition.”
+
+Padre Salvi remained silent, saying neither yes nor no.
+
+“In order to learn if there are devils or mirrors inside it,” suggested
+Simoun, “the best thing would be for you to go and see the famous
+sphinx.”
+
+The proposal was a good one, so it was accepted, although Padre Salvi
+and Don Custodio showed some repugnance. They at a fair, to rub
+shoulders with the public, to see sphinxes and talking heads! What
+would the natives say? These might take them for mere men, endowed with
+the same passions and weaknesses as others. But Ben-Zayb, with his
+journalistic ingenuity, promised to request Mr. Leeds not to admit the
+public while they were inside. They would be honoring him sufficiently
+by the visit not to admit of his refusal, and besides he would not
+charge any admission fee. To give a show of probability to this, he
+concluded: “Because, remember, if I should expose the trick of the
+mirrors to the public, it would ruin the poor American’s business.”
+Ben-Zayb was a conscientious individual.
+
+About a dozen set out, among them our acquaintances, Padres Salvi,
+Camorra, and Irene, Don Custodio, Ben-Zayb, and Juanito Pelaez. Their
+carriages set them down at the entrance to the Quiapo Plaza.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE QUIAPO FAIR
+
+
+It was a beautiful night and the plaza presented a most animated
+aspect. Taking advantage of the freshness of the breeze and the
+splendor of the January moon, the people filled the fair to see, be
+seen, and amuse themselves. The music of the cosmoramas and the lights
+of the lanterns gave life and merriment to every one. Long rows of
+booths, brilliant with tinsel and gauds, exposed to view clusters of
+balls, masks strung by the eyes, tin toys, trains, carts, mechanical
+horses, carriages, steam-engines with diminutive boilers, Lilliputian
+tableware of porcelain, pine Nativities, dolls both foreign and
+domestic, the former red and smiling, the latter sad and pensive like
+little ladies beside gigantic children. The beating of drums, the roar
+of tin horns, the wheezy music of the accordions and the hand-organs,
+all mingled in a carnival concert, amid the coming and going of the
+crowd, pushing, stumbling over one another, with their faces turned
+toward the booths, so that the collisions were frequent and often
+amusing. The carriages were forced to move slowly, with the tabí of the
+cocheros repeated every moment. Met and mingled government clerks,
+soldiers, friars, students, Chinese, girls with their mammas or aunts,
+all greeting, signaling, calling to one another merrily.
+
+Padre Camorra was in the seventh heaven at the sight of so many pretty
+girls. He stopped, looked back, nudged Ben-Zayb, chuckled and swore,
+saying, “And that one, and that one, my ink-slinger? And that one over
+there, what say you?” In his contentment he even fell to using the
+familiar tu toward his friend and adversary. Padre Salvi stared at him
+from time to time, but he took little note of Padre Salvi. On the
+contrary, he pretended to stumble so that he might brush against the
+girls, he winked and made eyes at them.
+
+“Puñales!” he kept saying to himself. “When shall I be the curate of
+Quiapo?”
+
+Suddenly Ben-Zayb let go an oath, jumped aside, and slapped his hand on
+his arm; Padre Camorra in his excess of enthusiasm had pinched him.
+They were approaching a dazzling señorita who was attracting the
+attention of the whole plaza, and Padre Camorra, unable to restrain his
+delight, had taken Ben-Zayb’s arm as a substitute for the girl’s.
+
+It was Paulita Gomez, the prettiest of the pretty, in company with
+Isagani, followed by Doña Victorina. The young woman was resplendent in
+her beauty: all stopped and craned their necks, while they ceased their
+conversation and followed her with their eyes—even Doña Victorina was
+respectfully saluted.
+
+Paulita was arrayed in a rich camisa and pañuelo of embroidered piña,
+different from those she had worn that morning to the church. The gauzy
+texture of the piña set off her shapely head, and the Indians who saw
+her compared her to the moon surrounded by fleecy clouds. A silk
+rose-colored skirt, caught up in rich and graceful folds by her little
+hand, gave majesty to her erect figure, the movement of which,
+harmonizing with her curving neck, displayed all the triumphs of vanity
+and satisfied coquetry. Isagani appeared to be rather disgusted, for so
+many curious eyes fixed upon the beauty of his sweetheart annoyed him.
+The stares seemed to him robbery and the girl’s smiles faithlessness.
+
+Juanito saw her and his hump increased when he spoke to her. Paulita
+replied negligently, while Doña Victorina called to him, for Juanito
+was her favorite, she preferring him to Isagani.
+
+“What a girl, what a girl!” muttered the entranced Padre Camorra.
+
+“Come, Padre, pinch yourself and let me alone,” said Ben-Zayb
+fretfully.
+
+“What a girl, what a girl!” repeated the friar. “And she has for a
+sweetheart a pupil of mine, the boy I had the quarrel with.”
+
+“Just my luck that she’s not of my town,” he added, after turning his
+head several times to follow her with his looks. He was even tempted to
+leave his companions to follow the girl, and Ben-Zayb had difficulty in
+dissuading him. Paulita’s beautiful figure moved on, her graceful
+little head nodding with inborn coquetry.
+
+Our promenaders kept on their way, not without sighs on the part of the
+friar-artilleryman, until they reached a booth surrounded by
+sightseers, who quickly made way for them. It was a shop of little
+wooden figures, of local manufacture, representing in all shapes and
+sizes the costumes, races, and occupations of the country: Indians,
+Spaniards, Chinese, mestizos, friars, clergymen, government clerks,
+gobernadorcillos, students, soldiers, and so on.
+
+Whether the artists had more affection for the priests, the folds of
+whose habits were better suited to their esthetic purposes, or whether
+the friars, holding such an important place in Philippine life, engaged
+the attention of the sculptor more, the fact was that, for one cause or
+another, images of them abounded, well-turned and finished,
+representing them in the sublimest moments of their lives—the opposite
+of what is done in Europe, where they are pictured as sleeping on casks
+of wine, playing cards, emptying tankards, rousing themselves to
+gaiety, or patting the cheeks of a buxom girl. No, the friars of the
+Philippines were different: elegant, handsome, well-dressed, their
+tonsures neatly shaven, their features symmetrical and serene, their
+gaze meditative, their expression saintly, somewhat rosy-cheeked, cane
+in hand and patent-leather shoes on their feet, inviting adoration and
+a place in a glass case. Instead of the symbols of gluttony and
+incontinence of their brethren in Europe, those of Manila carried the
+book, the crucifix, and the palm of martyrdom; instead of kissing the
+simple country lasses, those of Manila gravely extended the hand to be
+kissed by children and grown men doubled over almost to kneeling;
+instead of the full refectory and dining-hall, their stage in Europe,
+in Manila they had the oratory, the study-table; instead of the
+mendicant friar who goes from door to door with his donkey and sack,
+begging alms, the friars of the Philippines scattered gold from full
+hands among the miserable Indians.
+
+“Look, here’s Padre Camorra!” exclaimed Ben-Zayb, upon whom the effect
+of the champagne still lingered. He pointed to a picture of a lean
+friar of thoughtful mien who was seated at a table with his head
+resting on the palm of his hand, apparently writing a sermon by the
+light of a lamp. The contrast suggested drew laughter from the crowd.
+
+Padre Camorra, who had already forgotten about Paulita, saw what was
+meant and laughing his clownish laugh, asked in turn, “Whom does this
+other figure resemble, Ben-Zayb?”
+
+It was an old woman with one eye, with disheveled hair, seated on the
+ground like an Indian idol, ironing clothes. The sad-iron was carefully
+imitated, being of copper with coals of red tinsel and smoke-wreaths of
+dirty twisted cotton.
+
+“Eh, Ben-Zayb, it wasn’t a fool who designed that” asked Padre Camorra
+with a laugh.
+
+“Well, I don’t see the point,” replied the journalist.
+
+“But, puñales, don’t you see the title, The Philippine Press? That
+utensil with which the old woman is ironing is here called the press!”
+
+All laughed at this, Ben-Zayb himself joining in good-naturedly.
+
+Two soldiers of the Civil Guard, appropriately labeled, were placed
+behind a man who was tightly bound and had his face covered by his hat.
+It was entitled The Country of Abaka, [39] and from appearances they
+were going to shoot him.
+
+Many of our visitors were displeased with the exhibition. They talked
+of rules of art, they sought proportion—one said that this figure did
+not have seven heads, that the face lacked a nose, having only three,
+all of which made Padre Camorra somewhat thoughtful, for he did not
+comprehend how a figure, to be correct, need have four noses and seven
+heads. Others said, if they were muscular, that they could not be
+Indians; still others remarked that it was not sculpture, but mere
+carpentry. Each added his spoonful of criticism, until Padre Camorra,
+not to be outdone, ventured to ask for at least thirty legs for each
+doll, because, if the others wanted noses, couldn’t he require feet? So
+they fell to discussing whether the Indian had or had not any aptitude
+for sculpture, and whether it would be advisable to encourage that art,
+until there arose a general dispute, which was cut short by Don
+Custodio’s declaration that the Indians had the aptitude, but that they
+should devote themselves exclusively to the manufacture of saints.
+
+“One would say,” observed Ben-Zayb, who was full of bright ideas that
+night, “that this Chinaman is Quiroga, but on close examination it
+looks like Padre Irene. And what do you say about that British Indian?
+He looks like Simoun!”
+
+Fresh peals of laughter resounded, while Padre Irene rubbed his nose.
+
+“That’s right!”
+
+“It’s the very image of him!”
+
+“But where is Simoun? Simoun should buy it.”
+
+But the jeweler had disappeared, unnoticed by any one.
+
+“Puñales!” exclaimed Padre Camorra, “how stingy the American is! He’s
+afraid we would make him pay the admission for all of us into Mr.
+Leeds’ show.”
+
+“No!” rejoined Ben-Zayb, “what he’s afraid of is that he’ll compromise
+himself. He may have foreseen the joke in store for his friend Mr.
+Leeds and has got out of the way.”
+
+Thus, without purchasing the least trifle, they continued on their way
+to see the famous sphinx. Ben-Zayb offered to manage the affair, for
+the American would not rebuff a journalist who could take revenge in an
+unfavorable article. “You’ll see that it’s all a question of mirrors,”
+he said, “because, you see—” Again he plunged into a long
+demonstration, and as he had no mirrors at hand to discredit his theory
+he tangled himself up in all kinds of blunders and wound up by not
+knowing himself what he was saying. “In short, you’ll see how it’s all
+a question of optics.”
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+LEGERDEMAIN
+
+
+Mr. Leeds, a genuine Yankee, dressed completely in black, received his
+visitors with great deference. He spoke Spanish well, from having been
+for many years in South America, and offered no objection to their
+request, saying that they might examine everything, both before and
+after the exhibition, but begged that they remain quiet while it was in
+progress. Ben-Zayb smiled in pleasant anticipation of the vexation he
+had prepared for the American.
+
+The room, hung entirely in black, was lighted by ancient lamps burning
+alcohol. A rail wrapped in black velvet divided it into two almost
+equal parts, one of which was filled with seats for the spectators and
+the other occupied by a platform covered with a checkered carpet. In
+the center of this platform was placed a table, over which was spread a
+piece of black cloth adorned with skulls and cabalistic signs. The mise
+en scène was therefore lugubrious and had its effect upon the merry
+visitors. The jokes died away, they spoke in whispers, and however much
+some tried to appear indifferent, their lips framed no smiles. All felt
+as if they had entered a house where there was a corpse, an illusion
+accentuated by an odor of wax and incense. Don Custodio and Padre Salvi
+consulted in whispers over the expediency of prohibiting such shows.
+
+Ben-Zayb, in order to cheer the dispirited group and embarrass Mr.
+Leeds, said to him in a familiar tone: “Eh, Mister, since there are
+none but ourselves here and we aren’t Indians who can be fooled, won’t
+you let us see the trick? We know of course that it’s purely a question
+of optics, but as Padre Camorra won’t be convinced—”
+
+Here he started to jump over the rail, instead of going through the
+proper opening, while Padre Camorra broke out into protests, fearing
+that Ben-Zayb might be right.
+
+“And why not, sir?” rejoined the American. “But don’t break anything,
+will you?”
+
+The journalist was already on the platform. “You will allow me, then?”
+he asked, and without waiting for the permission, fearing that it might
+not be granted, raised the cloth to look for the mirrors that he
+expected should be between the legs of the table. Ben-Zayb uttered an
+exclamation and stepped back, again placed both hands under the table
+and waved them about; he encountered only empty space. The table had
+three thin iron legs, sunk into the floor.
+
+The journalist looked all about as though seeking something.
+
+“Where are the mirrors?” asked Padre Camorra.
+
+Ben-Zayb looked and looked, felt the table with his fingers, raised the
+cloth again, and rubbed his hand over his forehead from time to time,
+as if trying to remember something.
+
+“Have you lost anything?” inquired Mr. Leeds.
+
+“The mirrors, Mister, where are the mirrors?”
+
+“I don’t know where yours are—mine are at the hotel. Do you want to
+look at yourself? You’re somewhat pale and excited.”
+
+Many laughed, in spite of their weird impressions, on seeing the
+jesting coolness of the American, while Ben-Zayb retired, quite
+abashed, to his seat, muttering, “It can’t be. You’ll see that he
+doesn’t do it without mirrors. The table will have to be changed
+later.”
+
+Mr. Leeds placed the cloth on the table again and turning toward his
+illustrious audience, asked them, “Are you satisfied? May we begin?”
+
+“Hurry up! How cold-blooded he is!” said the widow.
+
+“Then, ladies and gentlemen, take your seats and get your questions
+ready.”
+
+Mr. Leeds disappeared through a doorway and in a few moments returned
+with a black box of worm-eaten wood, covered with inscriptions in the
+form of birds, beasts, and human heads.
+
+“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began solemnly, “once having had occasion to
+visit the great pyramid of Khufu, a Pharaoh of the fourth dynasty, I
+chanced upon a sarcophagus of red granite in a forgotten chamber. My
+joy was great, for I thought that I had found a royal mummy, but what
+was my disappointment on opening the coffin, at the cost of infinite
+labor, to find nothing more than this box, which you may examine.”
+
+He handed the box to those in the front row. Padre Camorra drew back in
+loathing, Padre Salvi looked at it closely as if he enjoyed sepulchral
+things, Padre Irene smiled a knowing smile, Don Custodio affected
+gravity and disdain, while Ben-Zayb hunted for his mirrors—there they
+must be, for it was a question of mirrors.
+
+“It smells like a corpse,” observed one lady, fanning herself
+furiously. “Ugh!”
+
+“It smells of forty centuries,” remarked some one with emphasis.
+
+Ben-Zayb forgot about his mirrors to discover who had made this remark.
+It was a military official who had read the history of Napoleon.
+
+Ben-Zayb felt jealous and to utter another epigram that might annoy
+Padre Camorra a little said, “It smells of the Church.”
+
+“This box, ladies and gentlemen,” continued the American, “contained a
+handful of ashes and a piece of papyrus on which were written some
+words. Examine them yourselves, but I beg of you not to breathe
+heavily, because if any of the dust is lost my sphinx will appear in a
+mutilated condition.”
+
+The humbug, described with such seriousness and conviction, was
+gradually having its effect, so much so that when the box was passed
+around, no one dared to breathe. Padre Camorra, who had so often
+depicted from the pulpit of Tiani the torments and sufferings of hell,
+while he laughed in his sleeves at the terrified looks of the sinners,
+held his nose, and Padre Salvi—the same Padre Salvi who had on All
+Souls’ Day prepared a phantasmagoria of the souls in purgatory with
+flames and transparencies illuminated with alcohol lamps and covered
+with tinsel, on the high altar of the church in a suburb, in order to
+get alms and orders for masses—the lean and taciturn Padre Salvi held
+his breath and gazed suspiciously at that handful of ashes.
+
+“Memento, homo, quia pulvis es!” muttered Padre Irene with a smile.
+
+“Pish!” sneered Ben-Zayb—the same thought had occurred to him, and the
+Canon had taken the words out of his mouth.
+
+“Not knowing what to do,” resumed Mr. Leeds, closing the box carefully,
+“I examined the papyrus and discovered two words whose meaning was
+unknown to me. I deciphered them, and tried to pronounce them aloud.
+Scarcely had I uttered the first word when I felt the box slipping from
+my hands, as if pressed down by an enormous weight, and it glided along
+the floor, whence I vainly endeavored to remove it. But my surprise was
+converted into terror when it opened and I found within a human head
+that stared at me fixedly. Paralyzed with fright and uncertain what to
+do in the presence of such a phenomenon, I remained for a time
+stupefied, trembling like a person poisoned with mercury, but after a
+while recovered myself and, thinking that it was a vain illusion, tried
+to divert my attention by reading the second word. Hardly had I
+pronounced it when the box closed, the head disappeared, and in its
+place I again found the handful of ashes. Without suspecting it I had
+discovered the two most potent words in nature, the words of creation
+and destruction, of life and of death!”
+
+He paused for a few moments to note the effect of his story, then with
+grave and measured steps approached the table and placed the mysterious
+box upon it.
+
+“The cloth, Mister!” exclaimed the incorrigible Ben-Zayb.
+
+“Why not?” rejoined Mr. Leeds, very complaisantly.
+
+Lifting the box with his right hand, he caught up the cloth with his
+left, completely exposing the table sustained by its three legs. Again
+he placed the box upon the center and with great gravity turned to his
+audience.
+
+“Here’s what I want to see,” said Ben-Zayb to his neighbor. “You notice
+how he makes some excuse.”
+
+Great attention was depicted on all countenances and silence reigned.
+The noise and roar of the street could be distinctly heard, but all
+were so affected that a snatch of dialogue which reached them produced
+no effect.
+
+“Why can’t we go in?” asked a woman’s voice.
+
+“Abá, there’s a lot of friars and clerks in there,” answered a man.
+“The sphinx is for them only.”
+
+“The friars are inquisitive too,” said the woman’s voice, drawing away.
+“They don’t want us to know how they’re being fooled. Why, is the head
+a friar’s querida?”
+
+In the midst of a profound silence the American announced in a tone of
+emotion: “Ladies and gentlemen, with a word I am now going to reanimate
+the handful of ashes, and you will talk with a being that knows the
+past, the present, and much of the future!”
+
+Here the prestidigitator uttered a soft cry, first mournful, then
+lively, a medley of sharp sounds like imprecations and hoarse notes
+like threats, which made Ben-Zayb’s hair stand on end.
+
+“Deremof!” cried the American.
+
+The curtains on the wall rustled, the lamps burned low, the table
+creaked. A feeble groan responded from the interior of the box. Pale
+and uneasy, all stared at one another, while one terrified señora
+caught hold of Padre Salvi.
+
+The box then opened of its own accord and presented to the eyes of the
+audience a head of cadaverous aspect, surrounded by long and abundant
+black hair. It slowly opened its eyes and looked around the whole
+audience. Those eyes had a vivid radiance, accentuated by their
+cavernous sockets, and, as if deep were calling unto deep, fixed
+themselves upon the profound, sunken eyes of the trembling Padre Salvi,
+who was staring unnaturally, as though he saw a ghost.
+
+“Sphinx,” commanded Mr. Leeds, “tell the audience who you are.”
+
+A deep silence prevailed, while a chill wind blew through the room and
+made the blue flames of the sepulchral lamps flicker. The most
+skeptical shivered.
+
+“I am Imuthis,” declared the head in a funereal, but strangely
+menacing, voice. “I was born in the time of Amasis and died under the
+Persian domination, when Cambyses was returning from his disastrous
+expedition into the interior of Libya. I had come to complete my
+education after extensive travels through Greece, Assyria, and Persia,
+and had returned to my native laud to dwell in it until Thoth should
+call me before his terrible tribunal. But to my undoing, on passing
+through Babylonia, I discovered an awful secret—the secret of the false
+Smerdis who usurped the throne, the bold Magian Gaumata who governed as
+an impostor. Fearing that I would betray him to Cambyses, he determined
+upon my ruin through the instrumentality of the Egyptian priests, who
+at that time ruled my native country. They were the owners of
+two-thirds of the land, the monopolizers of learning, they held the
+people down in ignorance and tyranny, they brutalized them, thus making
+them fit to pass without resistance from one domination to another. The
+invaders availed themselves of them, and knowing their usefulness,
+protected and enriched them. The rulers not only depended on their
+will, but some were reduced to mere instruments of theirs. The Egyptian
+priests hastened to execute Gaumata’s orders, with greater zeal from
+their fear of me, because they were afraid that I would reveal their
+impostures to the people. To accomplish their purpose, they made use of
+a young priest of Abydos, who passed for a saint.”
+
+A painful silence followed these words. That head was talking of
+priestly intrigues and impostures, and although referring to another
+age and other creeds, all the friars present were annoyed, possibly
+because they could see in the general trend of the speech some analogy
+to the existing situation. Padre Salvi was in the grip of convulsive
+shivering; he worked his lips and with bulging eyes followed the gaze
+of the head as though fascinated. Beads of sweat began to break out on
+his emaciated face, but no one noticed this, so deeply absorbed and
+affected were they.
+
+“What was the plot concocted by the priests of your country against
+you?” asked Mr. Leeds.
+
+The head uttered a sorrowful groan, which seemed to come from the
+bottom of the heart, and the spectators saw its eyes, those fiery eyes,
+clouded and filled with tears. Many shuddered and felt their hair rise.
+No, that was not an illusion, it was not a trick: the head was the
+victim and what it told was its own story.
+
+“Ay!” it moaned, shaking with affliction, “I loved a maiden, the
+daughter of a priest, pure as light, like the freshly opened lotus! The
+young priest of Abydos also desired her and planned a rebellion, using
+my name and some papyri that he had secured from my beloved. The
+rebellion broke out at the time when Cambyses was returning in rage
+over the disasters of his unfortunate campaign. I was accused of being
+a rebel, was made a prisoner, and having effected my escape was killed
+in the chase on Lake Moeris. From out of eternity I saw the imposture
+triumph. I saw the priest of Abydos night and day persecuting the
+maiden, who had taken refuge in a temple of Isis on the island of
+Philae. I saw him persecute and harass her, even in the subterranean
+chambers, I saw him drive her mad with terror and suffering, like a
+huge bat pursuing a white dove. Ah, priest, priest of Abydos, I have
+returned to life to expose your infamy, and after so many years of
+silence, I name thee murderer, hypocrite, liar!”
+
+A dry, hollow laugh accompanied these words, while a choked voice
+responded, “No! Mercy!”
+
+It was Padre Salvi, who had been overcome with terror and with arms
+extended was slipping in collapse to the floor.
+
+“What’s the matter with your Reverence? Are you ill?” asked Padre
+Irene.
+
+“The heat of the room—”
+
+“This odor of corpses we’re breathing here—”
+
+“Murderer, slanderer, hypocrite!” repeated the head. “I accuse
+you—murderer, murderer, murderer!”
+
+Again the dry laugh, sepulchral and menacing, resounded, as though that
+head were so absorbed in contemplation of its wrongs that it did not
+see the tumult that prevailed in the room.
+
+“Mercy! She still lives!” groaned Padre Salvi, and then lost
+consciousness. He was as pallid as a corpse. Some of the ladies thought
+it their duty to faint also, and proceeded to do so.
+
+“He is out of his head! Padre Salvi!”
+
+“I told him not to eat that bird’s-nest soup,” said Padre Irene. “It
+has made him sick.”
+
+“But he didn’t eat anything,” rejoined Don Custodio shivering. “As the
+head has been staring at him fixedly, it has mesmerized him.”
+
+So disorder prevailed, the room seemed to be a hospital or a
+battlefield. Padre Salvi looked like a corpse, and the ladies, seeing
+that no one was paying them any attention, made the best of it by
+recovering.
+
+Meanwhile, the head had been reduced to ashes, and Mr. Leeds, having
+replaced the cloth on the table, bowed his audience out.
+
+“This show must be prohibited,” said Don Custodio on leaving. “It’s
+wicked and highly immoral.”
+
+“And above all, because it doesn’t use mirrors,” added Ben-Zayb, who
+before going out of the room tried to assure himself finally, so he
+leaped over the rail, went up to the table, and raised the cloth:
+nothing, absolutely nothing! [40] On the following day he wrote an
+article in which he spoke of occult sciences, spiritualism, and the
+like.
+
+An order came immediately from the ecclesiastical governor prohibiting
+the show, but Mr. Leeds had already disappeared, carrying his secret
+with him to Hongkong.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+THE FUSE
+
+
+Placido Penitente left the class with his heart overflowing with
+bitterness and sullen gloom in his looks. He was worthy of his name
+when not driven from his usual course, but once irritated he was a
+veritable torrent, a wild beast that could only be stopped by the death
+of himself or his foe. So many affronts, so many pinpricks, day after
+day, had made his heart quiver, lodging in it to sleep the sleep of
+lethargic vipers, and they now were awaking to shake and hiss with
+fury. The hisses resounded in his ears with the jesting epithets of the
+professor, the phrases in the slang of the markets, and he seemed to
+hear blows and laughter. A thousand schemes for revenge rushed into his
+brain, crowding one another, only to fade immediately like phantoms in
+a dream. His vanity cried out to him with desperate tenacity that he
+must do something.
+
+“Placido Penitente,” said the voice, “show these youths that you have
+dignity, that you are the son of a valiant and noble province, where
+wrongs are washed out with blood. You’re a Batangan, Placido Penitente!
+Avenge yourself, Placido Penitente!”
+
+The youth groaned and gnashed his teeth, stumbling against every one in
+the street and on the Bridge of Spain, as if he were seeking a quarrel.
+In the latter place he saw a carriage in which was the Vice-Rector,
+Padre Sibyla, accompanied by Don Custodio, and he had a great mind to
+seize the friar and throw him into the river.
+
+He proceeded along the Escolta and was tempted to assault two
+Augustinians who were seated in the doorway of Quiroga’s bazaar,
+laughing and joking with other friars who must have been inside in
+joyous conversation, for their merry voices and sonorous laughter could
+be heard. Somewhat farther on, two cadets blocked up the sidewalk,
+talking with the clerk of a warehouse, who was in his shirtsleeves.
+Penitents moved toward them to force a passage and they, perceiving his
+dark intention, good-humoredly made way for him. Placido was by this
+time under the influence of the amok, as the Malayists say.
+
+As he approached his home—the house of a silversmith where he lived as
+a boarder—he tried to collect his thoughts and make a plan—to return to
+his town and avenge himself by showing the friars that they could not
+with impunity insult a youth or make a joke of him. He decided to write
+a letter immediately to his mother, Cabesang Andang, to inform her of
+what had happened and to tell her that the schoolroom had closed
+forever for him. Although there was the Ateneo of the Jesuits, where he
+might study that year, yet it was not very likely that the Dominicans
+would grant him the transfer, and, even though he should secure it, in
+the following year he would have to return to the University.
+
+“They say that we don’t know how to avenge ourselves!” he muttered.
+“Let the lightning strike and we’ll see!”
+
+But Placido was not reckoning upon what awaited him in the house of the
+silversmith. Cabesang Andang had just arrived from Batangas, having
+come to do some shopping, to visit her son, and to bring him money,
+jerked venison, and silk handkerchiefs.
+
+The first greetings over, the poor woman, who had at once noticed her
+son’s gloomy look, could no longer restrain her curiosity and began to
+ask questions. His first explanations Cabesang Andang regarded as some
+subterfuge, so she smiled and soothed her son, reminding him of their
+sacrifices and privations. She spoke of Capitana Simona’s son, who,
+having entered the seminary, now carried himself in the town like a
+bishop, and Capitana Simona already considered herself a Mother of God,
+clearly so, for her son was going to be another Christ.
+
+“If the son becomes a priest,” said she, “the mother won’t have to pay
+us what she owes us. Who will collect from her then?”
+
+But on seeing that Placido was speaking seriously and reading in his
+eyes the storm that raged within him, she realized that what he was
+telling her was unfortunately the strict truth. She remained silent for
+a while and then broke out into lamentations.
+
+“Ay!” she exclaimed. “I promised your father that I would care for you,
+educate you, and make a lawyer of you! I’ve deprived myself of
+everything so that you might go to school! Instead of joining the
+panguingui where the stake is a half peso, I Ve gone only where it’s a
+half real, enduring the bad smells and the dirty cards. Look at my
+patched camisa; for instead of buying new ones I’ve spent the money in
+masses and presents to St. Sebastian, even though I don’t have great
+confidence in his power, because the curate recites the masses fast and
+hurriedly, he’s an entirely new saint and doesn’t yet know how to
+perform miracles, and isn’t made of batikulin but of lanete. Ay, what
+will your father say to me when I die and see him again!”
+
+So the poor woman lamented and wept, while Placido became gloomier and
+let stifled sighs escape from his breast.
+
+“What would I get out of being a lawyer?” was his response.
+
+“What will become of you?” asked his mother, clasping her hands.
+“They’ll call you a filibuster and garrote you. I’ve told you that you
+must have patience, that you must be humble. I don’t tell you that you
+must kiss the hands of the curates, for I know that you have a delicate
+sense of smell, like your father, who couldn’t endure European cheese.
+[41] But we have to suffer, to be silent, to say yes to everything.
+What are we going to do? The friars own everything, and if they are
+unwilling, no one will become a lawyer or a doctor. Have patience, my
+son, have patience!”
+
+“But I’ve had a great deal, mother, I’ve suffered for months and
+months.”
+
+Cabesang Andang then resumed her lamentations. She did not ask that he
+declare himself a partizan of the friars, she was not one herself—it
+was enough to know that for one good friar there were ten bad, who took
+the money from the poor and deported the rich. But one must be silent,
+suffer, and endure—there was no other course. She cited this man and
+that one, who by being patient and humble, even though in the bottom of
+his heart he hated his masters, had risen from servant of the friars to
+high office; and such another who was rich and could commit abuses,
+secure of having patrons who would protect him from the law, yet who
+had been nothing more than a poor sacristan, humble and obedient, and
+who had married a pretty girl whose son had the curate for a godfather.
+So Cabesang Andang continued her litany of humble and patient
+Filipinos, as she called them, and was about to cite others who by not
+being so had found themselves persecuted and exiled, when Placido on
+some trifling pretext left the house to wander about the streets.
+
+He passed through Sibakong, [42] Tondo, San Nicolas, and Santo Cristo,
+absorbed in his ill-humor, without taking note of the sun or the hour,
+and only when he began to feel hungry and discovered that he had no
+money, having given it all for celebrations and contributions, did he
+return to the house. He had expected that he would not meet his mother
+there, as she was in the habit, when in Manila, of going out at that
+hour to a neighboring house where panguingui was played, but Cabesang
+Andang was waiting to propose her plan. She would avail herself of the
+procurator of the Augustinians to restore her son to the good graces of
+the Dominicans.
+
+Placido stopped her with a gesture. “I’ll throw myself into the sea
+first,” he declared. “I’ll become a tulisan before I’ll go back to the
+University.”
+
+Again his mother began her preachment about patience and humility, so
+he went away again without having eaten anything, directing his steps
+toward the quay where the steamers tied up. The sight of a steamer
+weighing anchor for Hongkong inspired him with an idea—to go to
+Hongkong, to run away, get rich there, and make war on the friars.
+
+The thought of Hongkong awoke in his mind the recollection of a story
+about frontals, cirials, and candelabra of pure silver, which the piety
+of the faithful had led them to present to a certain church. The
+friars, so the silversmith told, had sent to Hongkong to have duplicate
+frontals, cirials, and candelabra made of German silver, which they
+substituted for the genuine ones, these being melted down and coined
+into Mexican pesos. Such was the story he had heard, and though it was
+no more than a rumor or a story, his resentment gave it the color of
+truth and reminded him of other tricks of theirs in that same style.
+The desire to live free, and certain half-formed plans, led him to
+decide upon Hongkong. If the corporations sent all their money there,
+commerce must be flourishing and he could enrich himself.
+
+“I want to be free, to live free!”
+
+Night surprised him wandering along San Fernando, but not meeting any
+sailor he knew, he decided to return home. As the night was beautiful,
+with a brilliant moon transforming the squalid city into a fantastic
+fairy kingdom, he went to the fair. There he wandered back and forth,
+passing booths without taking any notice of the articles in them, ever
+with the thought of Hongkong, of living free, of enriching himself.
+
+He was about to leave the fair when he thought he recognized the
+jeweler Simoun bidding good-by to a foreigner, both of them speaking in
+English. To Placido every language spoken in the Philippines by
+Europeans, when not Spanish, had to be English, and besides, he caught
+the name Hongkong. If only the jeweler would recommend him to that
+foreigner, who must be setting out for Hongkong!
+
+Placido paused. He was acquainted with the jeweler, as the latter had
+been in his town peddling his wares, and he had accompanied him on one
+of his trips, when Simoun had made himself very amiable indeed, telling
+him of the life in the universities of the free countries—what a
+difference!
+
+So he followed the jeweler. “Señor Simoun, Señor Simoun!” he called.
+
+The jeweler was at that moment entering his carriage. Recognizing
+Placido, he checked himself.
+
+“I want to ask a favor of you, to say a few words to you.”
+
+Simoun made a sign of impatience which Placido in his perturbation did
+not observe. In a few words the youth related what had happened and
+made known his desire to go to Hongkong.
+
+“Why?” asked Simoun, staring fixedly at Placido through his blue
+goggles.
+
+Placido did not answer, so Simoun threw back his head, smiled his cold,
+silent smile and said, “All right! Come with me. To Calle Iris!” he
+directed the cochero.
+
+Simoun remained silent throughout the whole drive, apparently absorbed
+in meditation of a very important nature. Placido kept quiet, waiting
+for him to speak first, and entertained himself in watching the
+promenaders who were enjoying the clear moonlight: pairs of infatuated
+lovers, followed by watchful mammas or aunts; groups of students in
+white clothes that the moonlight made whiter still; half-drunken
+soldiers in a carriage, six together, on their way to visit some nipa
+temple dedicated to Cytherea; children playing their games and Chinese
+selling sugar-cane. All these filled the streets, taking on in the
+brilliant moonlight fantastic forms and ideal outlines. In one house an
+orchestra was playing waltzes, and couples might be seen dancing under
+the bright lamps and chandeliers—what a sordid spectacle they presented
+in comparison with the sight the streets afforded! Thinking of
+Hongkong, he asked himself if the moonlit nights in that island were so
+poetical and sweetly melancholy as those of the Philippines, and a deep
+sadness settled down over his heart.
+
+Simoun ordered the carriage to stop and both alighted, just at the
+moment when Isagani and Paulita Gomez passed them murmuring sweet
+inanities. Behind them came Doña Victorina with Juanito Pelaez, who was
+talking in a loud voice, busily gesticulating, and appearing to have a
+larger hump than ever. In his preoccupation Pelaez did not notice his
+former schoolmate.
+
+“There’s a fellow who’s happy!” muttered Placido with a sigh, as he
+gazed toward the group, which became converted into vaporous
+silhouettes, with Juanito’s arms plainly visible, rising and falling
+like the arms of a windmill.
+
+“That’s all he’s good for,” observed Simoun. “It’s fine to be young!”
+
+To whom did Placido and Simoun each allude?
+
+The jeweler made a sign to the young man, and they left the street to
+pick their way through a labyrinth of paths and passageways among
+various houses, at times leaping upon stones to avoid the mudholes or
+stepping aside from the sidewalks that were badly constructed and still
+more badly tended. Placido was surprised to see the rich jeweler move
+through such places as if he were familiar with them. They at length
+reached an open lot where a wretched hut stood off by itself surrounded
+by banana-plants and areca-palms. Some bamboo frames and sections of
+the same material led Placido to suspect that they were approaching the
+house of a pyrotechnist.
+
+Simoun rapped on the window and a man’s face appeared.
+
+“Ah, sir!” he exclaimed, and immediately came outside.
+
+“Is the powder here?” asked Simoun.
+
+“In sacks. I’m waiting for the shells.”
+
+“And the bombs?”
+
+“Are all ready.”
+
+“All right, then. This very night you must go and inform the lieutenant
+and the corporal. Then keep on your way, and in Lamayan you will find a
+man in a banka. You will say Cabesa and he will answer Tales. It’s
+necessary that he be here tomorrow. There’s no time to be lost.”
+
+Saying this, he gave him some gold coins.
+
+“How’s this, sir?” the man inquired in very good Spanish. “Is there any
+news?”
+
+“Yes, it’ll be done within the coming week.”
+
+“The coming week!” exclaimed the unknown, stepping backward. “The
+suburbs are not yet ready, they hope that the General will withdraw the
+decree. I thought it was postponed until the beginning of Lent.”
+
+Simoun shook his head. “We won’t need the suburbs,” he said. “With
+Cabesang Tales’ people, the ex-carbineers, and a regiment, we’ll have
+enough. Later, Maria Clara may be dead. Start at once!”
+
+The man disappeared. Placido, who had stood by and heard all of this
+brief interview, felt his hair rise and stared with startled eyes at
+Simoun, who smiled.
+
+“You’re surprised,” he said with his icy smile, “that this Indian, so
+poorly dressed, speaks Spanish well? He was a schoolmaster who
+persisted in teaching Spanish to the children and did not stop until he
+had lost his position and had been deported as a disturber of the
+public peace, and for having been a friend of the unfortunate Ibarra. I
+got him back from his deportation, where he had been working as a
+pruner of coconut-palms, and have made him a pyrotechnist.”
+
+They returned to the street and set out for Trozo. Before a wooden
+house of pleasant and well-kept appearance was a Spaniard on crutches,
+enjoying the moonlight. When Simoun accosted him, his attempt to rise
+was accompanied by a stifled groan.
+
+“You’re ready?” Simoun inquired of him.
+
+“I always am!”
+
+“The coming week?”
+
+“So soon?”
+
+“At the first cannon-shot!”
+
+He moved away, followed by Placido, who was beginning to ask himself if
+he were not dreaming.
+
+“Does it surprise you,” Simoun asked him, “to see a Spaniard so young
+and so afflicted with disease? Two years ago he was as robust as you
+are, but his enemies succeeded in sending him to Balabak to work in a
+penal settlement, and there he caught the rheumatism and fever that are
+dragging him into the grave. The poor devil had married a very
+beautiful woman.”
+
+As an empty carriage was passing, Simoun hailed it and with Placido
+directed it to his house in the Escolta, just at the moment when the
+clocks were striking half-past ten.
+
+Two hours later Placido left the jeweler’s house and walked gravely and
+thoughtfully along the Escolta, then almost deserted, in spite of the
+fact that the cafés were still quite animated. Now and then a carriage
+passed rapidly, clattering noisily over the worn pavement.
+
+From a room in his house that overlooked the Pasig, Simoun turned his
+gaze toward the Walled City, which could be seen through the open
+windows, with its roofs of galvanized iron gleaming in the moonlight
+and its somber towers showing dull and gloomy in the midst of the
+serene night. He laid aside his blue goggles, and his white hair, like
+a frame of silver, surrounded his energetic bronzed features, dimly
+lighted by a lamp whose flame was dying out from lack of oil.
+Apparently wrapped in thought, he took no notice of the fading light
+and impending darkness.
+
+“Within a few days,” he murmured, “when on all sides that accursed city
+is burning, den of presumptuous nothingness and impious exploitation of
+the ignorant and the distressed, when the tumults break out in the
+suburbs and there rush into the terrorized streets my avenging hordes,
+engendered by rapacity and wrongs, then will I burst the walls of your
+prison, I will tear you from the clutches of fanaticism, and my white
+dove, you will be the Phoenix that will rise from the glowing embers! A
+revolution plotted by men in darkness tore me from your side—another
+revolution will sweep me into your arms and revive me! That moon,
+before reaching the apogee of its brilliance, will light the
+Philippines cleansed of loathsome filth!”
+
+Simoun, stopped suddenly, as though interrupted. A voice in his inner
+consciousness was asking if he, Simoun, were not also a part of the
+filth of that accursed city, perhaps its most poisonous ferment. Like
+the dead who are to rise at the sound of the last trumpet, a thousand
+bloody specters—desperate shades of murdered men, women violated,
+fathers torn from their families, vices stimulated and encouraged,
+virtues mocked, now rose in answer to the mysterious question. For the
+first time in his criminal career, since in Havana he had by means of
+corruption and bribery set out to fashion an instrument for the
+execution of his plans—a man without faith, patriotism, or
+conscience—for the first time in that life, something within rose up
+and protested against his actions. He closed his eyes and remained for
+some time motionless, then rubbed his hand over his forehead, tried to
+be deaf to his conscience, and felt fear creeping over him. No, he must
+not analyze himself, he lacked the courage to turn his gaze toward his
+past. The idea of his courage, his conviction, his self-confidence
+failing him at the very moment when his work was set before him! As the
+ghosts of the wretches in whose misfortunes he had taken a hand
+continued to hover before his eyes, as if issuing from the shining
+surface of the river to invade the room with appeals and hands extended
+toward him, as reproaches and laments seemed to fill the air with
+threats and cries for vengeance, he turned his gaze from the window and
+for the first time began to tremble.
+
+“No, I must be ill, I can’t be feeling well,” he muttered. “There are
+many who hate me, who ascribe their misfortunes to me, but—”
+
+He felt his forehead begin to burn, so he arose to approach the window
+and inhale the fresh night breeze. Below him the Pasig dragged along
+its silvered stream, on whose bright surface the foam glittered,
+winding slowly about, receding and advancing, following the course of
+the little eddies. The city loomed up on the opposite bank, and its
+black walls looked fateful, mysterious, losing their sordidness in the
+moonlight that idealizes and embellishes everything. But again Simoun
+shivered; he seemed to see before him the severe countenance of his
+father, dying in prison, but dying for having done good; then the face
+of another man, severer still, who had given his life for him because
+he believed that he was going to bring about the regeneration of his
+country.
+
+“No, I can’t turn back,” he exclaimed, wiping the perspiration from his
+forehead. “The work is at hand and its success will justify me! If I
+had conducted myself as you did, I should have succumbed. Nothing of
+idealism, nothing of fallacious theories! Fire and steel to the cancer,
+chastisement to vice, and afterwards destroy the instrument, if it be
+bad! No, I have planned well, but now I feel feverish, my reason
+wavers, it is natural—If I have done ill, it has been that I may do
+good, and the end justifies the means. What I will do is not to expose
+myself—”
+
+With his thoughts thus confused he lay down, and tried to fall asleep.
+
+On the following morning Placido listened submissively, with a smile on
+his lips, to his mother’s preachment. When she spoke of her plan of
+interesting the Augustinian procurator he did not protest or object,
+but on the contrary offered himself to carry it out, in order to save
+trouble for his mother, whom he begged to return at once to the
+province, that very day, if possible. Cabesang Andang asked him the
+reason for such haste.
+
+“Because—because if the procurator learns that you are here he won’t do
+anything until you send him a present and order some masses.”
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+THE ARBITER
+
+
+True it was that Padre Irene had said: the question of the academy of
+Castilian, so long before broached, was on the road to a solution. Don
+Custodio, the active Don Custodio, the most active of all the arbiters
+in the world, according to Ben-Zayb, was occupied with it, spending his
+days reading the petition and falling asleep without reaching any
+decision, waking on the following day to repeat the same performance,
+dropping off to sleep again, and so on continuously.
+
+How the good man labored, the most active of all the arbiters in the
+world! He wished to get out of the predicament by pleasing
+everybody—the friars, the high official, the Countess, Padre Irene, and
+his own liberal principles. He had consulted with Señor Pasta, and
+Señor Pasta had left him stupefied and confused, after advising him to
+do a million contradictory and impossible things. He had consulted with
+Pepay the dancing girl, and Pepay, who had no idea what he was talking
+about, executed a pirouette and asked him for twenty-five pesos to bury
+an aunt of hers who had suddenly died for the fifth time, or the fifth
+aunt who had suddenly died, according to fuller explanations, at the
+same time requesting that he get a cousin of hers who could read,
+write, and play the violin, a job as assistant on the public works—all
+things that were far from inspiring Don Custodio with any saving idea.
+
+Two days after the events in the Quiapo fair, Don Custodio was as usual
+busily studying the petition, without hitting upon the happy solution.
+While he yawns, coughs, smokes, and thinks about Pepay’s legs and her
+pirouettes, let us give some account of this exalted personage, in
+order to understand Padre Sibyla’s reason for proposing him as the
+arbiter of such a vexatious matter and why the other clique accepted
+him.
+
+Don Custodio de Salazar y Sanchez de Monteredondo, often referred to as
+Good Authority, belonged to that class of Manila society which cannot
+take a step without having the newspapers heap titles upon them,
+calling each indedefatigable, distinguished, zealous, active, profound,
+intelligent, well-informed, influential, and so on, as if they feared
+that he might be confused with some idle and ignorant possessor of the
+same name. Besides, no harm resulted from it, and the watchful censor
+was not disturbed. The Good Authority resulted from his friendship with
+Ben-Zayb, when the latter, in his two noisiest controversies, which he
+carried on for weeks and months in the columns of the newspapers about
+whether it was proper to wear a high hat, a derby, or a salakot, and
+whether the plural of carácter should be carácteres or caractéres, in
+order to strengthen his argument always came out with, “We have this on
+good authority,” “We learn this from good authority,” later letting it
+be known, for in Manila everything becomes known, that this Good
+Authority was no other than Don Custodio de Salazar y Sanchez de
+Monteredondo.
+
+He had come to Manila very young, with a good position that had enabled
+him to marry a pretty mestiza belonging to one of the wealthiest
+families of the city. As he had natural talent, boldness, and great
+self-possession, and knew how to make use of the society in which he
+found himself, he launched into business with his wife’s money, filling
+contracts for the government, by reason of which he was made alderman,
+afterwards alcalde, member of the Economic Society, [43] councilor of
+the administration, president of the directory of the Obras Pias, [44]
+member of the Society of Mercy, director of the Spanish-Filipino Bank,
+etc., etc. Nor are these etceteras to be taken like those ordinarily
+placed after a long enumeration of titles: Don Custodio, although never
+having seen a treatise on hygiene, came to be vice-chairman of the
+Board of Health, for the truth was that of the eight who composed this
+board only one had to be a physician and he could not be that one. So
+also he was a member of the Vaccination Board, which was composed of
+three physicians and seven laymen, among these being the Archbishop and
+three Provincials. He was a brother in all the confraternities of the
+common and of the most exalted dignity, and, as we have seen, director
+of the Superior Commission of Primary Instruction, which usually did
+not do anything—all these being quite sufficient reason for the
+newspapers to heap adjectives upon him no less when he traveled than
+when he sneezed.
+
+In spite of so many offices, Don Custodio was not among those who slept
+through the sessions, contenting themselves, like lazy and timid
+delegates, in voting with the majority. The opposite of the numerous
+kings of Europe who bear the title of King of Jerusalem, Don Custodio
+made his dignity felt and got from it all the benefit possible, often
+frowning, making his voice impressive, coughing out his words, often
+taking up the whole session telling a story, presenting a project, or
+disputing with a colleague who had placed himself in open opposition to
+him. Although not past forty, he already talked of acting with
+circumspection, of letting the figs ripen (adding under his breath
+“pumpkins”), of pondering deeply and of stepping with careful tread, of
+the necessity for understanding the country, because the nature of the
+Indians, because the prestige of the Spanish name, because they were
+first of all Spaniards, because religion—and so on. Remembered yet in
+Manila is a speech of his when for the first time it was proposed to
+light the city with kerosene in place of the old coconut oil: in such
+an innovation, far from seeing the extinction of the coconut-oil
+industry, he merely discerned the interests of a certain
+alderman—because Don Custodio saw a long way—and opposed it with all
+the resonance of his bucal cavity, considering the project too
+premature and predicting great social cataclysms. No less celebrated
+was his opposition to a sentimental serenade that some wished to tender
+a certain governor on the eve of his departure. Don Custodio, who felt
+a little resentment over some slight or other, succeeded in insinuating
+the idea that the rising star was the mortal enemy of the setting one,
+whereat the frightened promoters of the serenade gave it up.
+
+One day he was advised to return to Spain to be cured of a liver
+complaint, and the newspapers spoke of him as an Antaeus who had to set
+foot in the mother country to gain new strength. But the Manila Antaeus
+found himself a small and insignificant person at the capital. There he
+was nobody, and he missed his beloved adjectives. He did not mingle
+with the upper set, and his lack of education prevented him from
+amounting to much in the academies and scientific centers, while his
+backwardness and his parish-house politics drove him from the clubs
+disgusted, vexed, seeing nothing clearly but that there they were
+forever borrowing money and gambling heavily. He missed the submissive
+servants of Manila, who endured all his peevishness, and who now seemed
+to be far preferable; when a winter kept him between a fireplace and an
+attack of pneumonia, he sighed for the Manila winter during which a
+single quilt is sufficient, while in summer he missed the easy-chair
+and the boy to fan him. In short, in Madrid he was only one among many,
+and in spite of his diamonds he was once taken for a rustic who did not
+know how to comport himself and at another time for an Indiano. His
+scruples were scoffed at, and he was shamelessly flouted by some
+borrowers whom he offended. Disgusted with the conservatives, who took
+no great notice of his advice, as well as with the sponges who rifled
+his pockets, he declared himself to be of the liberal party and
+returned within a year to the Philippines, if not sound in his liver,
+yet completely changed in his beliefs.
+
+The eleven months spent at the capital among café politicians, nearly
+all retired half-pay office-holders, the various speeches caught here
+and there, this or that article of the opposition, all the political
+life that permeates the air, from the barber-shop where amid the
+scissors-clips the Figaro announces his program to the banquets where
+in harmonious periods and telling phrases the different shades of
+political opinion, the divergences and disagreements, are adjusted—all
+these things awoke in him the farther he got from Europe, like the
+life-giving sap within the sown seed prevented from bursting out by the
+thick husk, in such a way that when he reached Manila he believed that
+he was going to regenerate it and actually had the holiest plans and
+the purest ideals.
+
+During the first months after his return he was continually talking
+about the capital, about his good friends, about Minister So-and-So,
+ex-Minister Such-a-One, the delegate C., the author B., and there was
+not a political event, a court scandal, of which he was not informed to
+the last detail, nor was there a public man the secrets of whose
+private life were unknown to him, nor could anything occur that he had
+not foreseen, nor any reform be ordered but he had first been
+consulted. All this was seasoned with attacks on the conservatives in
+righteous indignation, with apologies of the liberal party, with a
+little anecdote here, a phrase there from some great man, dropped in as
+one who did not wish offices and employments, which same he had refused
+in order not to be beholden to the conservatives. Such was his
+enthusiasm in these first days that various cronies in the
+grocery-store which he visited from time to time affiliated themselves
+with the liberal party and began to style themselves liberals: Don
+Eulogio Badana, a retired sergeant of carbineers; the honest Armendia,
+by profession a pilot, and a rampant Carlist; Don Eusebio Picote,
+customs inspector; and Don Bonifacio Tacon, shoe- and harness-maker.
+[45]
+
+But nevertheless, from lack of encouragement and of opposition, his
+enthusiasm gradually waned. He did not read the newspapers that came
+from Spain, because they arrived in packages, the sight of which made
+him yawn. The ideas that he had caught having been all expended, he
+needed reinforcement, and his orators were not there, and although in
+the casinos of Manila there was enough gambling, and money was borrowed
+as in Madrid, no speech that would nourish his political ideas was
+permitted in them. But Don Custodio was not lazy, he did more than
+wish—he worked. Foreseeing that he was going to leave his bones in the
+Philippines, he began to consider that country his proper sphere and to
+devote his efforts to its welfare. Thinking to liberalize it, he
+commenced to draw up a series of reforms or projects, which were
+ingenious, to say the least. It was he who, having heard in Madrid
+mention of the wooden street pavements of Paris, not yet adopted in
+Spain, proposed the introduction of them in Manila by covering the
+streets with boards nailed down as they are on the sides of houses; it
+was he who, deploring the accidents to two-wheeled vehicles, planned to
+avoid them by putting on at least three wheels; it was also he who,
+while acting as vice-president of the Board of Health, ordered
+everything fumigated, even the telegrams that came from infected
+places; it was also he who, in compassion for the convicts that worked
+in the sun and with a desire of saving to the government the cost of
+their equipment, suggested that they be clothed in a simple
+breech-clout and set to work not by day but at night. He marveled, he
+stormed, that his projects should encounter objectors, but consoled
+himself with the reflection that the man who is worth enemies has them,
+and revenged himself by attacking and tearing to pieces any project,
+good or bad, presented by others.
+
+As he prided himself on being a liberal, upon being asked what he
+thought of the Indians he would answer, like one conferring a great
+favor, that they were fitted for manual labor and the imitative arts
+(meaning thereby music, painting, and sculpture), adding his old
+postscript that to know them one must have resided many, many years in
+the country. Yet when he heard of any one of them excelling in
+something that was not manual labor or an imitative art—in chemistry,
+medicine, or philosophy, for example—he would exclaim: “Ah, he promises
+fairly, fairly well, he’s not a fool!” and feel sure that a great deal
+of Spanish blood must flow in the veins of such an Indian. If unable to
+discover any in spite of his good intentions, he then sought a Japanese
+origin, for it was at that time the fashion began of attributing to the
+Japanese or the Arabs whatever good the Filipinos might have in them.
+For him the native songs were Arabic music, as was also the alphabet of
+the ancient Filipinos—he was certain of this, although he did not know
+Arabic nor had he ever seen that alphabet.
+
+“Arabic, the purest Arabic,” he said to Ben-Zayb in a tone that
+admitted no reply. “At best, Chinese!”
+
+Then he would add, with a significant wink: “Nothing can be, nothing
+ought to be, original with the Indians, you understand! I like them
+greatly, but they mustn’t be allowed to pride themselves upon anything,
+for then they would take heart and turn into a lot of wretches.”
+
+At other times he would say: “I love the Indians fondly, I’ve
+constituted myself their father and defender, but it’s necessary to
+keep everything in its proper place. Some were born to command and
+others to serve—plainly, that is a truism which can’t be uttered very
+loudly, but it can be put into practise without many words. For look,
+the trick depends upon trifles. When you wish to reduce a people to
+subjection, assure it that it is in subjection. The first day it will
+laugh, the second protest, the third doubt, and the fourth be
+convinced. To keep the Filipino docile, he must have repeated to him
+day after day what he is, to convince him that he is incompetent. What
+good would it do, besides, to have him believe in something else that
+would make him wretched? Believe me, it’s an act of charity to hold
+every creature in his place—that is order, harmony. That constitutes
+the science of government.”
+
+In referring to his policies, Don Custodio was not satisfied with the
+word art, and upon pronouncing the word government, he would extend his
+hand downwards to the height of a man bent over on his knees.
+
+In regard to his religious ideas, he prided himself on being a
+Catholic, very much a Catholic—ah, Catholic Spain, the land of María
+Santísima! A liberal could be and ought to be a Catholic, when the
+reactionaries were setting themselves up as gods or saints, just as a
+mulatto passes for a white man in Kaffirland. But with all that, he ate
+meat during Lent, except on Good Friday, never went to confession,
+believed neither in miracles nor the infallibility of the Pope, and
+when he attended mass, went to the one at ten o’clock, or to the
+shortest, the military mass. Although in Madrid he had spoken ill of
+the religious orders, so as not to be out of harmony with his
+surroundings, considering them anachronisms, and had hurled curses
+against the Inquisition, while relating this or that lurid or droll
+story wherein the habits danced, or rather friars without habits, yet
+in speaking of the Philippines, which should be ruled by special laws,
+he would cough, look wise, and again extend his hand downwards to that
+mysterious altitude.
+
+“The friars are necessary, they’re a necessary evil,” he would declare.
+
+But how he would rage when any Indian dared to doubt the miracles or
+did not acknowledge the Pope! All the tortures of the Inquisition were
+insufficient to punish such temerity.
+
+When it was objected that to rule or to live at the expense of
+ignorance has another and somewhat ugly name and is punished by law
+when the culprit is a single person, he would justify his position by
+referring to other colonies. “We,” he would announce in his official
+tone, “can speak out plainly! We’re not like the British and the Dutch
+who, in order to hold people in subjection, make use of the lash. We
+avail ourselves of other means, milder and surer. The salutary
+influence of the friars is superior to the British lash.”
+
+This last remark made his fortune. For a long time Ben-Zayb continued
+to use adaptations of it, and with him all Manila. The thinking part of
+Manila applauded it, and it even got to Madrid, where it was quoted in
+the Parliament as from a liberal of long residence there. The friars,
+flattered by the comparison and seeing their prestige enhanced, sent
+him sacks of chocolate, presents which the incorruptible Don Custodio
+returned, so that Ben-Zayb immediately compared him to Epaminondas.
+Nevertheless, this modern Epaminondas made use of the rattan in his
+choleric moments, and advised its use!
+
+At that time the conventos, fearful that he would render a decision
+favorable to the petition of the students, increased their gifts, so
+that on the afternoon when we see him he was more perplexed than ever,
+his reputation for energy was being compromised. It had been more than
+a fortnight since he had had the petition in his hands, and only that
+morning the high official, after praising his zeal, had asked for a
+decision. Don Custodio had replied with mysterious gravity, giving him
+to understand that it was not yet completed. The high official had
+smiled a smile that still worried and haunted him.
+
+As we were saying, he yawned and yawned. In one of these movements, at
+the moment when he opened his eyes and closed his mouth, his attention
+was caught by a file of red envelopes, arranged in regular order on a
+magnificent kamagon desk. On the back of each could be read in large
+letters: PROJECTS.
+
+For a moment he forgot his troubles and Pepay’s pirouettes, to reflect
+upon all that those files contained, which had issued from his prolific
+brain in his hours of inspiration. How many original ideas, how many
+sublime thoughts, how many means of ameliorating the woes of the
+Philippines! Immortality and the gratitude of the country were surely
+his!
+
+Like an old lover who discovers a moldy package of amorous epistles,
+Don Custodio arose and approached the desk. The first envelope, thick,
+swollen, and plethoric, bore the title: PROJECTS IN PROJECT.
+
+“No,” he murmured, “they’re excellent things, but it would take a year
+to read them over.”
+
+The second, also quite voluminous, was entitled: PROJECTS UNDER
+CONSIDERATION. “No, not those either.”
+
+Then came the PROJECTS NEARING COMPLETION, PROJECTS PRESENTED, PROJECTS
+REJECTED, PROJECTS APPROVED, PROJECTS POSTPONED. These last envelopes
+held little, but the least of all was that of the PROJECTS EXECUTED.
+
+Don Custodio wrinkled up his nose—what did it contain? He had
+completely forgotten what was in it. A sheet of yellowish paper showed
+from under the flap, as though the envelope were sticking out its
+tongue. This he drew out and unfolded: it was the famous project for
+the School of Arts and Trades!
+
+“What the devil!” he exclaimed. “If the Augustinian padres took charge
+of it—”
+
+Suddenly he slapped his forehead and arched his eyebrows, while a look
+of triumph overspread his face. “I have reached a decision!” he cried
+with an oath that was not exactly eureka. “My decision is made!”
+
+Repeating his peculiar eureka five or six times, which struck the air
+like so many gleeful lashes, he sat down at his desk, radiant with joy,
+and began to write furiously.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+MANILA TYPES
+
+
+That night there was a grand function at the Teatro de Variedades. Mr.
+Jouay’s French operetta company was giving its initial performance, Les
+Cloches de Corneville. To the eyes of the public was to be exhibited
+his select troupe, whose fame the newspapers had for days been
+proclaiming. It was reported that among the actresses was a very
+beautiful voice, with a figure even more beautiful, and if credit could
+be given to rumor, her amiability surpassed even her voice and figure.
+
+At half-past seven in the evening there were no more tickets to be had,
+not even though they had been for Padre Salvi himself in his direct
+need, and the persons waiting to enter the general admission already
+formed a long queue. In the ticket-office there were scuffles and
+fights, talk of filibusterism and races, but this did not produce any
+tickets, so that by a quarter before eight fabulous prices were being
+offered for them. The appearance of the building, profusely
+illuminated, with flowers and plants in all the doors and windows,
+enchanted the new arrivals to such an extent that they burst out into
+exclamations and applause. A large crowd surged about the entrance,
+gazing enviously at those going in, those who came early from fear of
+missing their seats. Laughter, whispering, expectation greeted the
+later arrivals, who disconsolately joined the curious crowd, and now
+that they could not get in contented themselves with watching those who
+did.
+
+Yet there was one person who seemed out of place amid such great
+eagerness and curiosity. He was a tall, meager man, who dragged one leg
+stiffly when he walked, dressed in a wretched brown coat and dirty
+checkered trousers that fitted his lean, bony limbs tightly. A straw
+sombrero, artistic in spite of being broken, covered an enormous head
+and allowed his dirty gray, almost red, hair to straggle out long and
+kinky at the end like a poet’s curls. But the most notable thing about
+this man was not his clothing or his European features, guiltless of
+beard or mustache, but his fiery red face, from which he got the
+nickname by which he was known, Camaroncocido. [46] He was a curious
+character belonging to a prominent Spanish family, but he lived like a
+vagabond and a beggar, scoffing at the prestige which he flouted
+indifferently with his rags. He was reputed to be a kind of reporter,
+and in fact his gray goggle-eyes, so cold and thoughtful, always showed
+up where anything publishable was happening. His manner of living was a
+mystery to all, as no one seemed to know where he ate and slept.
+Perhaps he had an empty hogshead somewhere.
+
+But at that moment Camaroncocido lacked his usual hard and indifferent
+expression, something like mirthful pity being reflected in his looks.
+A funny little man accosted him merrily.
+
+“Friend!” exclaimed the latter, in a raucous voice, as hoarse as a
+frog’s, while he displayed several Mexican pesos, which Camaroncocido
+merely glanced at and then shrugged his shoulders. What did they matter
+to him?
+
+The little old man was a fitting contrast to him. Small, very small, he
+wore on his head a high hat, which presented the appearance of a huge
+hairy worm, and lost himself in an enormous frock coat, too wide and
+too long for him, to reappear in trousers too short, not reaching below
+his calves. His body seemed to be the grandfather and his legs the
+grandchildren, while as for his shoes he appeared to be floating on the
+land, for they were of an enormous sailor type, apparently protesting
+against the hairy worm worn on his head with all the energy of a
+convento beside a World’s Exposition. If Camaroncocido was red, he was
+brown; while the former, although of Spanish extraction, had not a
+single hair on his face, yet he, an Indian, had a goatee and mustache,
+both long, white, and sparse. His expression was lively. He was known
+as Tio Quico, [47] and like his friend lived on publicity, advertising
+the shows and posting the theatrical announcements, being perhaps the
+only Filipino who could appear with impunity in a silk hat and frock
+coat, just as his friend was the first Spaniard who laughed at the
+prestige of his race.
+
+“The Frenchman has paid me well,” he said smiling and showing his
+picturesque gums, which looked like a street after a conflagration. “I
+did a good job in posting the bills.”
+
+Camaroncocido shrugged his shoulders again. “Quico,” he rejoined in a
+cavernous voice, “if they’ve given you six pesos for your work, how
+much will they give the friars?”
+
+Tio Quico threw back his head in his usual lively manner. “To the
+friars?”
+
+“Because you surely know,” continued Camaroncocido, “that all this
+crowd was secured for them by the conventos.”
+
+The fact was that the friars, headed by Padre Salvi, and some lay
+brethren captained by Don Custodio, had opposed such shows. Padre
+Camorra, who could not attend, watered at the eyes and mouth, but
+argued with Ben-Zayb, who defended them feebly, thinking of the free
+tickets they would send his newspaper. Don Custodio spoke of morality,
+religion, good manners, and the like.
+
+“But,” stammered the writer, “if our own farces with their plays on
+words and phrases of double meaning—”
+
+“But at least they’re in Castilian!” the virtuous councilor interrupted
+with a roar, inflamed to righteous wrath. “Obscenities in French, man,
+Ben-Zayb, for God’s sake, in French! Never!”
+
+He uttered this never with the energy of three Guzmans threatened with
+being killed like fleas if they did not surrender twenty Tarifas. Padre
+Irene naturally agreed with Don Custodio and execrated French operetta.
+Whew, he had been in Paris, but had never set foot in a theater, the
+Lord deliver him!
+
+Yet the French operetta also counted numerous partizans. The officers
+of the army and navy, among them the General’s aides, the clerks, and
+many society people were anxious to enjoy the delicacies of the French
+language from the mouths of genuine Parisiennes, and with them were
+affiliated those who had traveled by the M.M. [48] and had jabbered a
+little French during the voyage, those who had visited Paris, and all
+those who wished to appear learned.
+
+Hence, Manila society was divided into two factions, operettists and
+anti-operettists. The latter were supported by the elderly ladies,
+wives jealous and careful of their husbands’ love, and by those who
+were engaged, while those who were free and those who were beautiful
+declared themselves enthusiastic operettists. Notes and then more notes
+were exchanged, there were goings and comings, mutual recriminations,
+meetings, lobbyings, arguments, even talk of an insurrection of the
+natives, of their indolence, of inferior and superior races, of
+prestige and other humbugs, so that after much gossip and more
+recrimination, the permit was granted, Padre Salvi at the same time
+publishing a pastoral that was read by no one but the proof-reader.
+There were questionings whether the General had quarreled with the
+Countess, whether she spent her time in the halls of pleasure, whether
+His Excellency was greatly annoyed, whether there had been presents
+exchanged, whether the French consul—, and so on and on. Many names
+were bandied about: Quiroga the Chinaman’s, Simoun’s, and even those of
+many actresses.
+
+Thanks to these scandalous preliminaries, the people’s impatience had
+been aroused, and since the evening before, when the troupe arrived,
+there was talk of nothing but attending the first performance. From the
+hour when the red posters announced Les Cloches de Corneville the
+victors prepared to celebrate their triumph. In some offices, instead
+of the time being spent in reading newspapers and gossiping, it was
+devoted to devouring the synopsis and spelling out French novels, while
+many feigned business outside to consult their pocket-dictionaries on
+the sly. So no business was transacted, callers were told to come back
+the next day, but the public could not take offense, for they
+encountered some very polite and affable clerks, who received and
+dismissed them with grand salutations in the French style. The clerks
+were practising, brushing the dust off their French, and calling to one
+another oui, monsieur, s’il vous plait, and pardon! at every turn, so
+that it was a pleasure to see and hear them.
+
+But the place where the excitement reached its climax was the newspaper
+office. Ben-Zayb, having been appointed critic and translator of the
+synopsis, trembled like a poor woman accused of witchcraft, as he saw
+his enemies picking out his blunders and throwing up to his face his
+deficient knowledge of French. When the Italian opera was on, he had
+very nearly received a challenge for having mistranslated a tenor’s
+name, while an envious rival had immediately published an article
+referring to him as an ignoramus—him, the foremost thinking head in the
+Philippines! All the trouble he had had to defend himself! He had had
+to write at least seventeen articles and consult fifteen dictionaries,
+so with these salutary recollections, the wretched Ben-Zayb moved about
+with leaden hands, to say nothing of his feet, for that would be
+plagiarizing Padre Camorra, who had once intimated that the journalist
+wrote with them.
+
+“You see, Quico?” said Camaroncocido. “One half of the people have come
+because the friars told them not to, making it a kind of public
+protest, and the other half because they say to themselves, ‘Do the
+friars object to it? Then it must be instructive!’ Believe me, Quico,
+your advertisements are a good thing but the pastoral was better, even
+taking into consideration the fact that it was read by no one.”
+
+“Friend, do you believe,” asked Tio Quico uneasily, “that on account of
+the competition with Padre Salvi my business will in the future be
+prohibited?”
+
+“Maybe so, Quico, maybe so,” replied the other, gazing at the sky.
+“Money’s getting scarce.”
+
+Tio Quico muttered some incoherent words: if the friars were going to
+turn theatrical advertisers, he would become a friar. After bidding his
+friend good-by, he moved away coughing and rattling his silver coins.
+
+With his eternal indifference Camaroncocido continued to wander about
+here and there with his crippled leg and sleepy looks. The arrival of
+unfamiliar faces caught his attention, coming as they did from
+different parts and signaling to one another with a wink or a cough. It
+was the first time that he had ever seen these individuals on such an
+occasion, he who knew all the faces and features in the city. Men with
+dark faces, humped shoulders, uneasy and uncertain movements, poorly
+disguised, as though they had for the first time put on sack coats,
+slipped about among the shadows, shunning attention, instead of getting
+in the front rows where they could see well.
+
+“Detectives or thieves?” Camaroncocido asked himself and immediately
+shrugged his shoulders. “But what is it to me?”
+
+The lamp of a carriage that drove up lighted in passing a group of four
+or five of these individuals talking with a man who appeared to be an
+army officer.
+
+“Detectives! It must be a new corps,” he muttered with his shrug of
+indifference. Soon, however, he noticed that the officer, after
+speaking to two or three more groups, approached a carriage and seemed
+to be talking vigorously with some person inside. Camaroncocido took a
+few steps forward and without surprise thought that he recognized the
+jeweler Simoun, while his sharp ears caught this short dialogue.
+
+“The signal will be a gunshot!”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“Don’t worry—it’s the General who is ordering it, but be careful about
+saying so. If you follow my instructions, you’ll get a promotion.”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“So, be ready!”
+
+The voice ceased and a second later the carriage drove away. In spite
+of his indifference Camaroncocido could not but mutter, “Something’s
+afoot—hands on pockets!”
+
+But feeling his own to be empty, he again shrugged his shoulders. What
+did it matter to him, even though the heavens should fall?
+
+So he continued his pacing about. On passing near two persons engaged
+in conversation, he caught what one of them, who had rosaries and
+scapularies around his neck, was saying in Tagalog: “The friars are
+more powerful than the General, don’t be a fool! He’ll go away and
+they’ll stay here. So, if we do well, we’ll get rich. The signal is a
+gunshot.”
+
+“Hold hard, hold hard,” murmured Camaroncocido, tightening his fingers.
+“On that side the General, on this Padre Salvi. Poor country! But what
+is it to me?”
+
+Again shrugging his shoulders and expectorating at the same time, two
+actions that with him were indications of supreme indifference, he
+continued his observations.
+
+Meanwhile, the carriages were arriving in dizzy streams, stopping
+directly before the door to set down the members of the select society.
+Although the weather was scarcely even cool, the ladies sported
+magnificent shawls, silk neckerchiefs, and even light cloaks. Among the
+escorts, some who were in frock coats with white ties wore overcoats,
+while others carried them on their arms to display the rich silk
+linings.
+
+In a group of spectators, Tadeo, he who was always taken ill the moment
+the professor appeared, was accompanied by a fellow townsman of his,
+the novice whom we saw suffer evil consequences from reading wrongly
+the Cartesian principle. This novice was very inquisitive and addicted
+to tiresome questions, and Tadeo was taking advantage of his
+ingenuousness and inexperience to relate to him the most stupendous
+lies. Every Spaniard that spoke to him, whether clerkling or underling,
+was presented as a leading merchant, a marquis, or a count, while on
+the other hand any one who passed him by was a greenhorn, a petty
+official, a nobody! When pedestrians failed him in keeping up the
+novice’s astonishment, he resorted to the resplendent carriages that
+came up. Tadeo would bow politely, wave his hand in a friendly manner,
+and call out a familiar greeting.
+
+“Who’s he?”
+
+“Bah!” was the negligent reply. “The Civil Governor, the Vice-Governor,
+Judge ——, Señora ——, all friends of mine!”
+
+The novice marveled and listened in fascination, taking care to keep on
+the left. Tadeo the friend of judges and governors!
+
+Tadeo named all the persons who arrived, when he did not know them
+inventing titles, biographies, and interesting sketches.
+
+“You see that tall gentleman with dark whiskers, somewhat squint-eyed,
+dressed in black—he’s Judge A ——, an intimate friend of the wife of
+Colonel B ——. One day if it hadn’t been for me they would have come to
+blows. Hello, here comes that Colonel! What if they should fight?”
+
+The novice held his breath, but the colonel and the judge shook hands
+cordially, the soldier, an old bachelor, inquiring about the health of
+the judge’s family.
+
+“Ah, thank heaven!” breathed Tadeo. “I’m the one who made them
+friends.”
+
+“What if they should invite us to go in?” asked the novice timidly.
+
+“Get out, boy! I never accept favors!” retorted Tadeo majestically. “I
+confer them, but disinterestedly.”
+
+The novice bit his lip and felt smaller than ever, while he placed a
+respectful distance between himself and his fellow townsman.
+
+Tadeo resumed: “That is the musician H——; that one, the lawyer J——, who
+delivered as his own a speech printed in all the books and was
+congratulated and admired for it; Doctor K——, that man just getting out
+of a hansom, is a specialist in diseases of children, so he’s called
+Herod; that’s the banker L——, who can talk only of his money and his
+hoards; the poet M——, who is always dealing with the stars and the
+beyond. There goes the beautiful wife of N——, whom Padre Q——is
+accustomed to meet when he calls upon the absent husband; the Jewish
+merchant P——, who came to the islands with a thousand pesos and is now
+a millionaire. That fellow with the long beard is the physician R——,
+who has become rich by making invalids more than by curing them.”
+
+“Making invalids?”
+
+“Yes, boy, in the examination of the conscripts. Attention! That finely
+dressed gentleman is not a physician but a homeopathist sui generis—he
+professes completely the similis similibus. The young cavalry captain
+with him is his chosen disciple. That man in a light suit with his hat
+tilted back is the government clerk whose maxim is never to be polite
+and who rages like a demon when he sees a hat on any one else’s
+head—they say that he does it to ruin the German hatters. The man just
+arriving with his family is the wealthy merchant C——, who has an income
+of over a hundred thousand pesos. But what would you say if I should
+tell you that he still owes me four pesos, five reales, and twelve
+cuartos? But who would collect from a rich man like him?”
+
+“That gentleman in debt to you?”
+
+“Sure! One day I got him out of a bad fix. It was on a Friday at
+half-past six in the morning, I still remember, because I hadn’t
+breakfasted. That lady who is followed by a duenna is the celebrated
+Pepay, the dancing girl, but she doesn’t dance any more now that a very
+Catholic gentleman and a great friend of mine has—forbidden it. There’s
+the death’s-head Z——, who’s surely following her to get her to dance
+again. He’s a good fellow, and a great friend of mine, but has one
+defect—he’s a Chinese mestizo and yet calls himself a Peninsular
+Spaniard. Sssh! Look at Ben-Zayb, him with the face of a friar, who’s
+carrying a pencil and a roll of paper in his hand. He’s the great
+writer, Ben-Zayb, a good friend of mine—he has talent!”
+
+“You don’t say! And that little man with white whiskers?”
+
+“He’s the official who has appointed his daughters, those three little
+girls, assistants in his department, so as to get their names on the
+pay-roll. He’s a clever man, very clever! When he makes a mistake he
+blames it on somebody else, he buys things and pays for them out of the
+treasury. He’s clever, very, very clever!”
+
+Tadeo was about to say more, but suddenly checked himself.
+
+“And that gentleman who has a fierce air and gazes at everybody over
+his shoulders?” inquired the novice, pointing to a man who nodded
+haughtily.
+
+But Tadeo did not answer. He was craning his neck to see Paulita Gomez,
+who was approaching with a friend, Doña Victorina, and Juanito Pelaez.
+The latter had presented her with a box and was more humped than ever.
+
+Carriage after carriage drove up; the actors and actresses arrived and
+entered by a separate door, followed by their friends and admirers.
+
+After Paulita had gone in, Tadeo resumed: “Those are the nieces of the
+rich Captain D——, those coming up in a landau; you see how pretty and
+healthy they are? Well, in a few years they’ll be dead or crazy.
+Captain D—— is opposed to their marrying, and the insanity of the uncle
+is appearing in the nieces. That’s the Señorita E——, the rich heiress
+whom the world and the conventos are disputing over. Hello, I know that
+fellow! It’s Padre Irene, in disguise, with a false mustache. I
+recognize him by his nose. And he was so greatly opposed to this!”
+
+The scandalized novice watched a neatly cut coat disappear behind a
+group of ladies.
+
+“The Three Fates!” went on Tadeo, watching the arrival of three
+withered, bony, hollow-eyed, wide-mouthed, and shabbily dressed women.
+“They’re called—”
+
+“Atropos?” ventured the novice, who wished to show that he also knew
+somebody, at least in mythology.
+
+“No, boy, they’re called the Weary Waiters—old, censorious, and dull.
+They pretend to hate everybody—men, women, and children. But look how
+the Lord always places beside the evil a remedy, only that sometimes it
+comes late. There behind the Fates, the frights of the city, come those
+three girls, the pride of their friends, among whom I count myself.
+That thin young man with goggle-eyes, somewhat stooped, who is wildly
+gesticulating because he can’t get tickets, is the chemist S——, author
+of many essays and scientific treatises, some of which are notable and
+have captured prizes. The Spaniards say of him, ‘There’s some hope for
+him, some hope for him.’ The fellow who is soothing him with his
+Voltairian smile is the poet T——, a young man of talent, a great friend
+of mine, and, for the very reason that he has talent, he has thrown
+away his pen. That fellow who is trying to get in with the actors by
+the other door is the young physician U——, who has effected some
+remarkable cures—it’s also said of him that he promises well. He’s not
+such a scoundrel as Pelaez but he’s cleverer and slyer still. I believe
+that he’d shake dice with death and win.”
+
+“And that brown gentleman with a mustache like hog-bristles?”
+
+“Ah, that’s the merchant F——, who forges everything, even his baptismal
+certificate. He wants to be a Spanish mestizo at any cost, and is
+making heroic efforts to forget his native language.”
+
+“But his daughters are very white.”
+
+“Yes, that’s the reason rice has gone up in price, and yet they eat
+nothing but bread.”
+
+The novice did not understand the connection between the price of rice
+and the whiteness of those girls, but he held his peace.
+
+“There goes the fellow that’s engaged to one of them, that thin brown
+youth who is following them with a lingering movement and speaking with
+a protecting air to the three friends who are laughing at him. He’s a
+martyr to his beliefs, to his consistency.”
+
+The novice was filled with admiration and respect for the young man.
+
+“He has the look of a fool, and he is one,” continued Tadeo. “He was
+born in San Pedro Makati and has inflicted many privations upon
+himself. He scarcely ever bathes or eats pork, because, according to
+him, the Spaniards don’t do those things, and for the same reason he
+doesn’t eat rice and dried fish, although he may be watering at the
+mouth and dying of hunger. Anything that comes from Europe, rotten or
+preserved, he considers divine—a month ago Basilio cured him of a
+severe attack of gastritis, for he had eaten a jar of mustard to prove
+that he’s a European.”
+
+At that moment the orchestra struck up a waltz.
+
+“You see that gentleman—that hypochondriac who goes along turning his
+head from side to side, seeking salutes? That’s the celebrated governor
+of Pangasinan, a good man who loses his appetite whenever any Indian
+fails to salute him. He would have died if he hadn’t issued the
+proclamation about salutes to which he owes his celebrity. Poor fellow,
+it’s only been three days since he came from the province and look how
+thin he has become! Oh, here’s the great man, the illustrious—open your
+eyes!”
+
+“Who? That man with knitted brows?”
+
+“Yes, that’s Don Custodio, the liberal, Don Custodio. His brows are
+knit because he’s meditating over some important project. If the ideas
+he has in his head were carried out, this would be a different world!
+Ah, here comes Makaraig, your housemate.”
+
+It was in fact Makaraig, with Pecson, Sandoval, and Isagani. Upon
+seeing them, Tadeo advanced and spoke to them.
+
+“Aren’t you coming in?” Makaraig asked him.
+
+“We haven’t been able to get tickets.”
+
+“Fortunately, we have a box,” replied Makaraig. “Basilio couldn’t come.
+Both of you, come in with us.”
+
+Tadeo did not wait for the invitation to be repeated, but the novice,
+fearing that he would intrude, with the timidity natural to the
+provincial Indian, excused himself, nor could he be persuaded to enter.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+THE PERFORMANCE
+
+
+The interior of the theater presented a lively aspect. It was filled
+from top to bottom, with people standing in the corridors and in the
+aisles, fighting to withdraw a head from some hole where they had
+inserted it, or to shove an eye between a collar and an ear. The open
+boxes, occupied for the most part by ladies, looked like baskets of
+flowers, whose petals—the fans—shook in a light breeze, wherein hummed
+a thousand bees. However, just as there are flowers of strong or
+delicate fragrance, flowers that kill and flowers that console, so from
+our baskets were exhaled like emanations: there were to be heard
+dialogues, conversations, remarks that bit and stung. Three or four
+boxes, however, were still vacant, in spite of the lateness of the
+hour. The performance had been advertised for half-past eight and it
+was already a quarter to nine, but the curtain did not go up, as his
+Excellency had not yet arrived. The gallery-gods, impatient and
+uncomfortable in their seats, started a racket, clapping their hands
+and pounding the floor with their canes.
+
+“Boom—boom—boom! Ring up the curtain! Boom—boom—boom!”
+
+The artillerymen were not the least noisy. Emulators of Mars, as
+Ben-Zayb called them, they were not satisfied with this music; thinking
+themselves perhaps at a bullfight, they made remarks at the ladies who
+passed before them in words that are euphemistically called flowers in
+Madrid, although at times they seem more like foul weeds. Without
+heeding the furious looks of the husbands, they bandied from one to
+another the sentiments and longings inspired by so many beauties.
+
+In the reserved seats, where the ladies seemed to be afraid to venture,
+as few were to be seen there, a murmur of voices prevailed amid
+suppressed laughter and clouds of tobacco smoke. They discussed the
+merits of the players and talked scandal, wondering if his Excellency
+had quarreled with the friars, if his presence at such a show was a
+defiance or mere curiosity. Others gave no heed to these matters, but
+were engaged in attracting the attention of the ladies, throwing
+themselves into attitudes more or less interesting and statuesque,
+flashing diamond rings, especially when they thought themselves the
+foci of insistent opera-glasses, while yet another would address a
+respectful salute to this or that señora or señorita, at the same time
+lowering his head gravely to whisper to a neighbor, “How ridiculous she
+is! And such a bore!”
+
+The lady would respond with one of her most gracious smiles and an
+enchanting nod of her head, while murmuring to a friend sitting near,
+amid lazy flourishes of her fan, “How impudent he is! He’s madly in
+love, my dear.”
+
+Meanwhile, the noise increased. There remained only two vacant boxes,
+besides that of his Excellency, which was distinguished by its curtains
+of red velvet. The orchestra played another waltz, the audience
+protested, when fortunately there arose a charitable hero to distract
+their attention and relieve the manager, in the person of a man who had
+occupied a reserved seat and refused to give it up to its owner, the
+philosopher Don Primitivo. Finding his own arguments useless, Don
+Primitivo had appealed to an usher. “I don’t care to,” the hero
+responded to the latter’s protests, placidly puffing at his cigarette.
+The usher appealed to the manager. “I don’t care to,” was the response,
+as he settled back in the seat. The manager went away, while the
+artillerymen in the gallery began to sing out encouragement to the
+usurper.
+
+Our hero, now that he had attracted general attention, thought that to
+yield would be to lower himself, so he held on to the seat, while he
+repeated his answer to a pair of guards the manager had called in.
+These, in consideration of the rebel’s rank, went in search of their
+corporal, while the whole house broke out into applause at the firmness
+of the hero, who remained seated like a Roman senator.
+
+Hisses were heard, and the inflexible gentleman turned angrily to see
+if they were meant for him, but the galloping of horses resounded and
+the stir increased. One might have said that a revolution had broken
+out, or at least a riot, but no, the orchestra had suspended the waltz
+and was playing the royal march: it was his Excellency, the
+Captain-General and Governor of the islands, who was entering. All eyes
+sought and followed him, then lost sight of him, until he finally
+appeared in his box. After looking all about him and making some
+persons happy with a lordly salute, he sat down, as though he were
+indeed the man for whom the chair was waiting. The artillerymen then
+became silent and the orchestra tore into the prelude.
+
+Our students occupied a box directly facing that of Pepay, the dancing
+girl. Her box was a present from Makaraig, who had already got on good
+terms with her in order to propitiate Don Custodio. Pepay had that very
+afternoon written a note to the illustrious arbiter, asking for an
+answer and appointing an interview in the theater. For this reason, Don
+Custodio, in spite of the active opposition he had manifested toward
+the French operetta, had gone to the theater, which action won him some
+caustic remarks on the part of Don Manuel, his ancient adversary in the
+sessions of the Ayuntamiento.
+
+“I’ve come to judge the operetta,” he had replied in the tone of a Cato
+whose conscience was clear.
+
+So Makaraig was exchanging looks of intelligence with Pepay, who was
+giving him to understand that she had something to tell him. As the
+dancing girl’s face wore a happy expression, the students augured that
+a favorable outcome was assured. Sandoval, who had just returned from
+making calls in other boxes, also assured them that the decision had
+been favorable, that that very afternoon the Superior Commission had
+considered and approved it. Every one was jubilant, even Pecson having
+laid aside his pessimism when he saw the smiling Pepay display a note.
+Sandoval and Makaraig congratulated one another, Isagani alone
+remaining cold and unsmiling. What had happened to this young man?
+
+Upon entering the theater, Isagani had caught sight of Paulita in a
+box, with Juanito Pelaez talking to her. He had turned pale, thinking
+that he must be mistaken. But no, it was she herself, she who greeted
+him with a gracious smile, while her beautiful eyes seemed to be asking
+pardon and promising explanations. The fact was that they had agreed
+upon Isagani’s going first to the theater to see if the show contained
+anything improper for a young woman, but now he found her there, and in
+no other company than that of his rival. What passed in his mind is
+indescribable: wrath, jealousy, humiliation, resentment raged within
+him, and there were moments even when he wished that the theater would
+fall in; he had a violent desire to laugh aloud, to insult his
+sweetheart, to challenge his rival, to make a scene, but finally
+contented himself with sitting quiet and not looking at her at all. He
+was conscious of the beautiful plans Makaraig and Sandoval were making,
+but they sounded like distant echoes, while the notes of the waltz
+seemed sad and lugubrious, the whole audience stupid and foolish, and
+several times he had to make an effort to keep back the tears. Of the
+trouble stirred up by the hero who refused to give up the seat, of the
+arrival of the Captain-General, he was scarcely conscious. He stared
+toward the drop-curtain, on which was depicted a kind of gallery with
+sumptuous red hangings, affording a view of a garden in which a
+fountain played, yet how sad the gallery looked to him and how
+melancholy the painted landscape! A thousand vague recollections surged
+into his memory like distant echoes of music heard in the night, like
+songs of infancy, the murmur of lonely forests and gloomy rivulets,
+moonlit nights on the shore of the sea spread wide before his eyes. So
+the enamored youth considered himself very wretched and stared fixedly
+at the ceiling so that the tears should not fall from his eyes.
+
+A burst of applause drew him from these meditations. The curtain had
+just risen, and the merry chorus of peasants of Corneville was
+presented, all dressed in cotton caps, with heavy wooden sabots on
+their feet. Some six or seven girls, well-rouged on the lips and
+cheeks, with large black circles around their eyes to increase their
+brilliance, displayed white arms, fingers covered with diamonds, round
+and shapely limbs. While they were chanting the Norman phrase “Allez,
+marchez! Allez, marchez!” they smiled at their different admirers in
+the reserved seats with such openness that Don Custodio, after looking
+toward Pepay’s box to assure himself that she was not doing the same
+thing with some other admirer, set down in his note-book this
+indecency, and to make sure of it lowered his head a little to see if
+the actresses were not showing their knees.
+
+“Oh, these Frenchwomen!” he muttered, while his imagination lost itself
+in considerations somewhat more elevated, as he made comparisons and
+projects.
+
+“Quoi v’la tous les cancans d’la s’maine!” sang Gertrude, a proud
+damsel, who was looking roguishly askance at the Captain-General.
+
+“We’re going to have the cancan!” exclaimed Tadeo, the winner of the
+first prize in the French class, who had managed to make out this word.
+“Makaraig, they’re going to dance the cancan!”
+
+He rubbed his hands gleefully. From the moment the curtain rose, Tadeo
+had been heedless of the music. He was looking only for the prurient,
+the indecent, the immoral in actions and dress, and with his scanty
+French was sharpening his ears to catch the obscenities that the
+austere guardians of the fatherland had foretold.
+
+Sandoval, pretending to know French, had converted himself into a kind
+of interpreter for his friends. He knew as much about it as Tadeo, but
+the published synopsis helped him and his fancy supplied the rest.
+“Yes,” he said, “they’re going to dance the cancan—she’s going to lead
+it.”
+
+Makaraig and Pecson redoubled their attention, smiling in anticipation,
+while Isagani looked away, mortified to think that Paulita should be
+present at such a show and reflecting that it was his duty to challenge
+Juanito Pelaez the next day.
+
+But the young men waited in vain. Serpolette came on, a charming girl,
+in her cotton cap, provoking and challenging. “Hein, qui parle de
+Serpolette?” she demanded of the gossips, with her arms akimbo in a
+combative attitude. Some one applauded, and after him all those in the
+reserved seats. Without changing her girlish attitude, Serpolette gazed
+at the person who had started the applause and paid him with a smile,
+displaying rows of little teeth that looked like a string of pearls in
+a case of red velvet.
+
+Tadeo followed her gaze and saw a man in a false mustache with an
+extraordinarily large nose. “By the monk’s cowl!” he exclaimed. “It’s
+Irene!”
+
+“Yes,” corroborated Sandoval, “I saw him behind the scenes talking with
+the actresses.”
+
+The truth was that Padre Irene, who was a melomaniac of the first
+degree and knew French well, had been sent to the theater by Padre
+Salvi as a sort of religious detective, or so at least he told the
+persons who recognized him. As a faithful critic, who should not be
+satisfied with viewing the piece from a distance, he wished to examine
+the actresses at first hand, so he had mingled in the groups of
+admirers and gallants, had penetrated into the greenroom, where was
+whispered and talked a French required by the situation, a market
+French, a language that is readily comprehensible for the vender when
+the buyer seems disposed to pay well.
+
+Serpolette was surrounded by two gallant officers, a sailor, and a
+lawyer, when she caught sight of him moving about, sticking the tip of
+his long nose into all the nooks and corners, as though with it he were
+ferreting out all the mysteries of the stage. She ceased her chatter,
+knitted her eyebrows, then raised them, opened her lips and with the
+vivacity of a Parisienne left her admirers to hurl herself like a
+torpedo upon our critic.
+
+“Tiens, tiens, Toutou! Mon lapin!” she cried, catching Padre Irene’s
+arm and shaking it merrily, while the air rang with her silvery laugh.
+
+“Tut, tut!” objected Padre Irene, endeavoring to conceal himself.
+
+“Mais, comment! Toi ici, grosse bête! Et moi qui t’croyais—”
+
+“’Tais pas d’tapage, Lily! Il faut m’respecter! ’Suis ici l’Pape!”
+
+With great difficulty Padre Irene made her listen to reason, for Lily
+was enchanteé to meet in Manila an old friend who reminded her of the
+coulisses of the Grand Opera House. So it was that Padre Irene,
+fulfilling at the same time his duties as a friend and a critic, had
+initiated the applause to encourage her, for Serpolette deserved it.
+
+Meanwhile, the young men were waiting for the cancan. Pecson became all
+eyes, but there was everything except cancan. There was presented the
+scene in which, but for the timely arrival of the representatives of
+the law, the women would have come to blows and torn one another’s hair
+out, incited thereto by the mischievous peasants, who, like our
+students, hoped to see something more than the cancan.
+
+
+        Scit, scit, scit, scit, scit, scit,
+        Disputez-vous, battez-vous,
+        Scit, scit, scit, scit, scit, scit,
+        Nous allons compter les coups.
+
+
+The music ceased, the men went away, the women returned, a few at a
+time, and started a conversation among themselves, of which our friends
+understood nothing. They were slandering some absent person.
+
+“They look like the Chinamen of the pansiteria!” whispered Pecson.
+
+“But, the cancan?” asked Makaraig.
+
+“They’re talking about the most suitable place to dance it,” gravely
+responded Sandoval.
+
+“They look like the Chinamen of the pansiteria,” repeated Pecson in
+disgust.
+
+A lady accompanied by her husband entered at that moment and took her
+place in one of the two vacant boxes. She had the air of a queen and
+gazed disdainfully at the whole house, as if to say, “I’ve come later
+than all of you, you crowd of upstarts and provincials, I’ve come later
+than you!” There are persons who go to the theater like the contestants
+in a mule-race: the last one in, wins, and we know very sensible men
+who would ascend the scaffold rather than enter a theater before the
+first act. But the lady’s triumph was of short duration—she caught
+sight of the other box that was still empty, and began to scold her
+better half, thus starting such a disturbance that many were annoyed.
+
+“Ssh! Ssh!”
+
+“The blockheads! As if they understood French!” remarked the lady,
+gazing with supreme disdain in all directions, finally fixing her
+attention on Juanito’s box, whence she thought she had heard an
+impudent hiss.
+
+Juanito was in fact guilty, for he had been pretending to understand
+everything, holding himself up proudly and applauding at times as
+though nothing that was said escaped him, and this too without guiding
+himself by the actors’ pantomime, because he scarcely looked toward the
+stage. The rogue had intentionally remarked to Paulita that, as there
+was so much more beautiful a woman close at hand, he did not care to
+strain his eyes looking beyond her. Paulita had blushed, covered her
+face with her fan, and glanced stealthily toward where Isagani, silent
+and morose, was abstractedly watching the show.
+
+Paulita felt nettled and jealous. Would Isagani fall in love with any
+of those alluring actresses? The thought put her in a bad humor, so she
+scarcely heard the praises that Doña Victorina was heaping upon her own
+favorite.
+
+Juanito was playing his part well: he shook his head at times in sign
+of disapproval, and then there could be heard coughs and murmurs in
+some parts, at other times he smiled in approbation, and a second later
+applause resounded. Doña Victorina was charmed, even conceiving some
+vague ideas of marrying the young man the day Don Tiburcio should
+die—Juanito knew French and De Espadaña didn’t! Then she began to
+flatter him, nor did he perceive the change in the drift of her talk,
+so occupied was he in watching a Catalan merchant who was sitting next
+to the Swiss consul. Having observed that they were conversing in
+French, Juanito was getting his inspiration from their countenances,
+and thus grandly giving the cue to those about him.
+
+Scene followed scene, character succeeded character, comic and
+ridiculous like the bailiff and Grenicheux, imposing and winsome like
+the marquis and Germaine. The audience laughed heartily at the slap
+delivered by Gaspard and intended for the coward Grenicheux, which was
+received by the grave bailiff, whose wig went flying through the air,
+producing disorder and confusion as the curtain dropped.
+
+“Where’s the cancan?” inquired Tadeo.
+
+But the curtain rose again immediately, revealing a scene in a servant
+market, with three posts on which were affixed signs bearing the
+announcements: servantes, cochers, and domestiques. Juanito, to improve
+the opportunity, turned to Doña Victorina and said in a loud voice, so
+that Paulita might hear and be convinced of his learning:
+
+“Servantes means servants, domestiques domestics.”
+
+“And in what way do the servantes differ from the domestiques?” asked
+Paulita.
+
+Juanito was not found wanting. “Domestiques are those that are
+domesticated—haven’t you noticed that some of them have the air of
+savages? Those are the servantes.”
+
+“That’s right,” added Doña Victorina, “some have very bad manners—and
+yet I thought that in Europe everybody was cultivated. But as it
+happens in France,—well, I see!”
+
+“Ssh! Ssh!”
+
+But what was Juanito’s predicament when the time came for the opening
+of the market and the beginning of the sale, and the servants who were
+to be hired placed themselves beside the signs that indicated their
+class! The men, some ten or twelve rough characters in livery, carrying
+branches in their hands, took their place under the sign domestiques!
+
+“Those are the domestics,” explained Juanito.
+
+“Really, they have the appearance of being only recently domesticated,”
+observed Doña Victorina. “Now let’s have a look at the savages.”
+
+Then the dozen girls headed by the lively and merry Serpolette, decked
+out in their best clothes, each wearing a big bouquet of flowers at the
+waist, laughing, smiling, fresh and attractive, placed themselves, to
+Juanito’s great desperation, beside the post of the servantes.
+
+“How’s this?” asked Paulita guilelessly. “Are those the savages that
+you spoke of?”
+
+“No,” replied the imperturbable Juanito, “there’s a mistake—they’ve got
+their places mixed—those coming behind—”
+
+“Those with the whips?”
+
+Juanito nodded assent, but he was rather perplexed and uneasy.
+
+“So those girls are the cochers?”
+
+Here Juanito was attacked by such a violent fit of coughing that some
+of the spectators became annoyed.
+
+“Put him out! Put the consumptive out!” called a voice.
+
+Consumptive! To be called a consumptive before Paulita! Juanito wanted
+to find the blackguard and make him swallow that “consumptive.”
+Observing that the women were trying to hold him back, his bravado
+increased, and he became more conspicuously ferocious. But fortunately
+it was Don Custodio who had made the diagnosis, and he, fearful of
+attracting attention to himself, pretended to hear nothing, apparently
+busy with his criticism of the play.
+
+“If it weren’t that I am with you,” remarked Juanito, rolling his eyes
+like some dolls that are moved by clockwork, and to make the
+resemblance more real he stuck out his tongue occasionally.
+
+Thus that night he acquired in Doña Victorina’s eyes the reputation of
+being brave and punctilious, so she decided in her heart that she would
+marry him just as soon as Don Tiburcio was out of the way. Paulita
+became sadder and sadder in thinking about how the girls called cochers
+could occupy Isagani’s attention, for the name had certain disagreeable
+associations that came from the slang of her convent school-days.
+
+At length the first act was concluded, the marquis taking away as
+servants Serpolette and Germaine, the representative of timid beauty in
+the troupe, and for coachman the stupid Grenicheux. A burst of applause
+brought them out again holding hands, those who five seconds before had
+been tormenting one another and were about to come to blows, bowing and
+smiling here and there to the gallant Manila public and exchanging
+knowing looks with various spectators.
+
+While there prevailed the passing tumult occasioned by those who
+crowded one another to get into the greenroom and felicitate the
+actresses and by those who were going to make calls on the ladies in
+the boxes, some expressed their opinions of the play and the players.
+
+“Undoubtedly, Serpolette is the best,” said one with a knowing air.
+
+“I prefer Germaine, she’s an ideal blonde.”
+
+“But she hasn’t any voice.”
+
+“What do I care about the voice?”
+
+“Well, for shape, the tall one.”
+
+“Pshaw,” said Ben-Zayb, “not a one is worth a straw, not a one is an
+artist!”
+
+Ben-Zayb was the critic for El Grito de la Integridad, and his
+disdainful air gave him great importance in the eyes of those who were
+satisfied with so little.
+
+“Serpolette hasn’t any voice, nor Germaine grace, nor is that music,
+nor is it art, nor is it anything!” he concluded with marked contempt.
+To set oneself up as a great critic there is nothing like appearing to
+be discontented with everything. Besides, the management had sent only
+two seats for the newspaper staff.
+
+In the boxes curiosity was aroused as to who could be the possessor of
+the empty one, for that person, would surpass every one in chic, since
+he would be the last to arrive. The rumor started somewhere that it
+belonged to Simoun, and was confirmed: no one had seen the jeweler in
+the reserved seats, the greenroom, or anywhere else.
+
+“Yet I saw him this afternoon with Mr. Jouay,” some one said. “He
+presented a necklace to one of the actresses.”
+
+“To which one?” asked some of the inquisitive ladies.
+
+“To the finest of all, the one who made eyes at his Excellency.”
+
+This information was received with looks of intelligence, winks,
+exclamations of doubt, of confirmation, and half-uttered commentaries.
+
+“He’s trying to play the Monte Cristo,” remarked a lady who prided
+herself on being literary.
+
+“Or purveyor to the Palace!” added her escort, jealous of Simoun.
+
+In the students’ box, Pecson, Sandoval, and Isagani had remained, while
+Tadeo had gone to engage Don Custodio in conversation about his
+projects, and Makaraig to hold an interview with Pepay.
+
+“In no way, as I have observed to you before, friend Isagani,” declared
+Sandoval with violent gestures and a sonorous voice, so that the ladies
+near the box, the daughters of the rich man who was in debt to Tadeo,
+might hear him, “in no way does the French language possess the rich
+sonorousness or the varied and elegant cadence of the Castilian tongue.
+I cannot conceive, I cannot imagine, I cannot form any idea of French
+orators, and I doubt that they have ever had any or can have any now in
+the strict construction of the term orator, because we must not confuse
+the name orator with the words babbler and charlatan, for these can
+exist in any country, in all the regions of the inhabited world, among
+the cold and curt Englishmen as among the lively and impressionable
+Frenchmen.”
+
+Thus he delivered a magnificent review of the nations, with his
+poetical characterizations and most resounding epithets. Isagani nodded
+assent, with his thoughts fixed on Paulita, whom he had surprised
+gazing at him with an expressive look which contained a wealth of
+meaning. He tried to divine what those eyes were expressing—those eyes
+that were so eloquent and not at all deceptive.
+
+“Now you who are a poet, a slave to rhyme and meter, a son of the
+Muses,” continued Sandoval, with an elegant wave of his hand, as though
+he were saluting, on the horizon, the Nine Sisters, “do you comprehend,
+can you conceive, how a language so harsh and unmusical as French can
+give birth to poets of such gigantic stature as our Garcilasos, our
+Herreras, our Esproncedas, our Calderons?”
+
+“Nevertheless,” objected Pecson, “Victor Hugo—”
+
+“Victor Hugo, my friend Pecson, if Victor Hugo is a poet, it is because
+he owes it to Spain, because it is an established fact, it is a matter
+beyond all doubt, a thing admitted even by the Frenchmen themselves, so
+envious of Spain, that if Victor Hugo has genius, if he really is a
+poet, it is because his childhood was spent in Madrid; there he drank
+in his first impressions, there his brain was molded, there his
+imagination was colored, his heart modeled, and the most beautiful
+concepts of his mind born. And after all, who is Victor Hugo? Is he to
+be compared at all with our modern—”
+
+This peroration was cut short by the return of Makaraig with a
+despondent air and a bitter smile on his lips, carrying in his hand a
+note, which he offered silently to Sandoval, who read:
+
+
+   “MY DOVE: Your letter has reached me late, for I have already
+    handed in my decision, and it has been approved. However, as if I
+    had guessed your wish, I have decided the matter according to the
+    desires of your protégés. I’ll be at the theater and wait for you
+    after the performance.
+
+        “Your duckling,
+
+            “CUSTODINING.”
+
+
+“How tender the man is!” exclaimed Tadeo with emotion.
+
+“Well?” said Sandoval. “I don’t see anything wrong about this—quite the
+reverse!”
+
+“Yes,” rejoined Makaraig with his bitter smile, “decided favorably!
+I’ve just seen Padre Irene.”
+
+“What does Padre Irene say?” inquired Pecson.
+
+“The same as Don Custodio, and the rascal still had the audacity to
+congratulate me. The Commission, which has taken as its own the
+decision of the arbiter, approves the idea and felicitates the students
+on their patriotism and their thirst for knowledge—”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Only that, considering our duties—in short, it says that in order that
+the idea may not be lost, it concludes that the direction and execution
+of the plan should be placed in charge of one of the religious
+corporations, in case the Dominicans do not wish to incorporate the
+academy with the University.”
+
+Exclamations of disappointment greeted the announcement. Isagani rose,
+but said nothing.
+
+“And in order that we may participate in the management of the
+academy,” Makaraig went on, “we are intrusted with the collection of
+contributions and dues, with the obligation of turning them over to the
+treasurer whom the corporation may designate, which treasurer will
+issue us receipts.”
+
+“Then we’re tax-collectors!” remarked Tadeo.
+
+“Sandoval,” said Pecson, “there’s the gauntlet—take it up!”
+
+“Huh! That’s not a gauntlet—from its odor it seems more like a sock.”
+
+“The funniest, part of it,” Makaraig added, “is that Padre Irene has
+advised us to celebrate the event with a banquet or a torchlight
+procession—a public demonstration of the students en masse to render
+thanks to all the persons who have intervened in the affair.”
+
+“Yes, after the blow, let’s sing and give thanks. Super flumina
+Babylonis sedimus!”
+
+“Yes, a banquet like that of the convicts,” said Tadeo.
+
+“A banquet at which we all wear mourning and deliver funeral orations,”
+added Sandoval.
+
+“A serenade with the Marseillaise and funeral marches,” proposed
+Isagani.
+
+“No, gentlemen,” observed Pecson with his clownish grin, “to celebrate
+the event there’s nothing like a banquet in a pansitería, served by the
+Chinamen without camisas. I insist, without camisas!”
+
+The sarcasm and grotesqueness of this idea won it ready acceptance,
+Sandoval being the first to applaud it, for he had long wished to see
+the interior of one of those establishments which at night appeared to
+be so merry and cheerful.
+
+Just as the orchestra struck up for the second act, the young men arose
+and left the theater, to the scandal of the whole house.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+A CORPSE
+
+
+Simoun had not, in fact, gone to the theater. Already, at seven o’clock
+in the evening, he had left his house looking worried and gloomy. His
+servants saw him return twice, accompanied by different individuals,
+and at eight o’clock Makaraig encountered him pacing along Calle
+Hospital near the nunnery of St. Clara, just when the bells of its
+church were ringing a funeral knell. At nine Camaroncocido saw him
+again, in the neighborhood of the theater, speak with a person who
+seemed to be a student, pay the latter’s admission to the show, and
+again disappear among the shadows of the trees.
+
+“What is it to me?” again muttered Camaroncocido. “What do I get out of
+watching over the populace?”
+
+Basilio, as Makaraig said, had not gone to the show. The poor student,
+after returning from San Diego, whither he had gone to ransom Juli, his
+future bride, from her servitude, had turned again to his studies,
+spending his time in the hospital, in studying, or in nursing Capitan
+Tiago, whose affliction he was trying to cure.
+
+The invalid had become an intolerable character. During his bad spells,
+when he felt depressed from lack of opium, the doses of which Basilio
+was trying to reduce, he would scold, mistreat, and abuse the boy, who
+bore it resignedly, conscious that he was doing good to one to whom he
+owed so much, and yielded only in the last extremity. His vicious
+appetite satisfied, Capitan Tiago would fall into a good humor, become
+tender, and call him his son, tearfully recalling the youth’s services,
+how well he administered the estates, and would even talk of making him
+his heir. Basilio would smile bitterly and reflect that in this world
+complaisance with vice is rewarded better than fulfilment of duty. Not
+a few times did he feel tempted to give free rein to the craving and
+conduct his benefactor to the grave by a path of flowers and smiling
+illusions rather than lengthen his life along a road of sacrifice.
+
+“What a fool I am!” he often said to himself. “People are stupid and
+then pay for it.”
+
+But he would shake his head as he thought of Juli, of the wide future
+before him. He counted upon living without a stain on his conscience,
+so he continued the treatment prescribed, and bore everything
+patiently.
+
+Yet with all his care the sick man, except for short periods of
+improvement, grew worse. Basilio had planned gradually to reduce the
+amount of the dose, or at least not to let him injure himself by
+increasing it, but on returning from the hospital or some visit he
+would find his patient in the heavy slumber produced by the opium,
+driveling, pale as a corpse. The young man could not explain whence the
+drug came: the only two persons who visited the house were Simoun and
+Padre Irene, the former rarely, while the latter never ceased exhorting
+him to be severe and inexorable with the treatment, to take no notice
+of the invalid’s ravings, for the main object was to save him.
+
+“Do your duty, young man,” was Padre Irene’s constant admonition. “Do
+your duty.” Then he would deliver a sermon on this topic with such
+great conviction and enthusiasm that Basilio would begin to feel kindly
+toward the preacher. Besides, Padre Irene promised to get him a fine
+assignment, a good province, and even hinted at the possibility of
+having him appointed a professor. Without being carried away by
+illusions, Basilio pretended to believe in them and went on obeying the
+dictates of his own conscience.
+
+That night, while Les Cloches de Corneville was being presented,
+Basilio was studying at an old table by the light of an oil-lamp, whose
+thick glass globe partly illuminated his melancholy features. An old
+skull, some human bones, and a few books carefully arranged covered the
+table, whereon there was also a pan of water with a sponge. The smell
+of opium that proceeded from the adjoining bedroom made the air heavy
+and inclined him to sleep, but he overcame the desire by bathing his
+temples and eyes from time to time, determined not to go to sleep until
+he had finished the book, which he had borrowed and must return as soon
+as possible. It was a volume of the Medicina Legal y Toxicología of Dr.
+Friata, the only book that the professor would use, and Basilio lacked
+money to buy a copy, since, under the pretext of its being forbidden by
+the censor in Manila and the necessity for bribing many government
+employees to get it in, the booksellers charged a high price for it.
+
+So absorbed was the youth in his studies that he had not given any
+attention at all to some pamphlets that had been sent to him from some
+unknown source, pamphlets that treated of the Philippines, among which
+figured those that were attracting the greatest notice at the time
+because of their harsh and insulting manner of referring to the natives
+of the country. Basilio had no time to open them, and he was perhaps
+restrained also by the thought that there is nothing pleasant about
+receiving an insult or a provocation without having any means of
+replying or defending oneself. The censorship, in fact, permitted
+insults to the Filipinos but prohibited replies on their part.
+
+In the midst of the silence that reigned in the house, broken only by a
+feeble snore that issued now and then from the adjoining bedroom,
+Basilio heard light footfalls on the stairs, footfalls that soon
+crossed the hallway and approached the room where he was. Raising his
+head, he saw the door open and to his great surprise appeared the
+sinister figure of the jeweler Simoun, who since the scene in San Diego
+had not come to visit either himself or Capitan Tiago.
+
+“How is the sick man?” he inquired, throwing a rapid glance about the
+room and fixing his attention on the pamphlets, the leaves of which
+were still uncut.
+
+“The beating of his heart is scarcely perceptible, his pulse is very
+weak, his appetite entirely gone,” replied Basilio in a low voice with
+a sad smile. “He sweats profusely in the early morning.”
+
+Noticing that Simoun kept his face turned toward the pamphlets and
+fearing that he might reopen the subject of their conversation in the
+wood, he went on: “His system is saturated with poison. He may die any
+day, as though struck by lightning. The least irritation, any
+excitement may kill him.”
+
+“Like the Philippines!” observed Simoun lugubriously.
+
+Basilio was unable to refrain from a gesture of impatience, but he was
+determined not to recur to the old subject, so he proceeded as if he
+had heard nothing: “What weakens him the most is the nightmares, his
+terrors—”
+
+“Like the government!” again interrupted Simoun.
+
+“Several nights ago he awoke in the dark and thought that he had gone
+blind. He raised a disturbance, lamenting and scolding me, saying that
+I had put his eyes out. When I entered his room with a light he mistook
+me for Padre Irene and called me his saviour.”
+
+“Like the government, exactly!”
+
+“Last night,” continued Basilio, paying no attention, “he got up
+begging for his favorite game-cock, the one that died three years ago,
+and I had to give him a chicken. Then he heaped blessings upon me and
+promised me many thousands—”
+
+At that instant a clock struck half-past ten. Simoun shuddered and
+stopped the youth with a gesture.
+
+“Basilio,” he said in a low, tense voice, “listen to me carefully, for
+the moments are precious. I see that you haven’t opened the pamphlets
+that I sent you. You’re not interested in your country.”
+
+The youth started to protest.
+
+“It’s useless,” went on Simoun dryly. “Within an hour the revolution is
+going to break out at a signal from me, and tomorrow there’ll be no
+studies, there’ll be no University, there’ll be nothing but fighting
+and butchery. I have everything ready and my success is assured. When
+we triumph, all those who could have helped us and did not do so will
+be treated as enemies. Basilio, I’ve come to offer you death or a
+future!”
+
+“Death or a future!” the boy echoed, as though he did not understand.
+
+“With us or with the government,” rejoined Simoun. “With your country
+or with your oppressors. Decide, for time presses! I’ve come to save
+you because of the memories that unite us!”
+
+“With my country or with the oppressors!” repeated Basilio in a low
+tone. The youth was stupefied. He gazed at the jeweler with eyes in
+which terror was reflected, he felt his limbs turn cold, while a
+thousand confused ideas whirled about in his mind. He saw the streets
+running blood, he heard the firing, he found himself among the dead and
+wounded, and by the peculiar force of his inclinations fancied himself
+in an operator’s blouse, cutting off legs and extracting bullets.
+
+“The will of the government is in my hands,” said Simoun. “I’ve
+diverted and wasted its feeble strength and resources on foolish
+expeditions, dazzling it with the plunder it might seize. Its heads are
+now in the theater, calm and unsuspecting, thinking of a night of
+pleasure, but not one shall again repose upon a pillow. I have men and
+regiments at my disposition: some I have led to believe that the
+uprising is ordered by the General; others that the friars are bringing
+it about; some I have bought with promises, with employments, with
+money; many, very many, are acting from revenge, because they are
+oppressed and see it as a matter of killing or being killed. Cabesang
+Tales is below, he has come with me here! Again I ask you—will you come
+with us or do you prefer to expose yourself to the resentment of my
+followers? In critical moments, to declare oneself neutral is to be
+exposed to the wrath of both the contending parties.”
+
+Basilio rubbed his hand over his face several times, as if he were
+trying to wake from a nightmare. He felt that his brow was cold.
+
+“Decide!” repeated Simoun.
+
+“And what—what would I have to do?” asked the youth in a weak and
+broken voice.
+
+“A very simple thing,” replied Simoun, his face lighting up with a ray
+of hope. “As I have to direct the movement, I cannot get away from the
+scene of action. I want you, while the attention of the whole city is
+directed elsewhere, at the head of a company to force the doors of the
+nunnery of St. Clara and take from there a person whom only you,
+besides myself and Capitan Tiago, can recognize. You’ll run no risk at
+all.”
+
+“Maria Clara!” exclaimed Basilio.
+
+“Yes, Maria Clara,” repeated Simoun, and for the first time his voice
+became human and compassionate. “I want to save her; to save her I have
+wished to live, I have returned. I am starting the revolution, because
+only a revolution can open the doors of the nunneries.”
+
+“Ay!” sighed Basilio, clasping his hands. “You’ve come late, too late!”
+
+“Why?” inquired Simoun with a frown.
+
+“Maria Clara is dead!”
+
+Simoun arose with a bound and stood over the youth. “She’s dead?” he
+demanded in a terrible voice.
+
+“This afternoon, at six. By now she must be—”
+
+“It’s a lie!” roared Simoun, pale and beside himself. “It’s false!
+Maria Clara lives, Maria Clara must live! It’s a cowardly excuse! She’s
+not dead, and this night I’ll free her or tomorrow you die!”
+
+Basilio shrugged his shoulders. “Several days ago she was taken ill and
+I went to the nunnery for news of her. Look, here is Padre Salvi’s
+letter, brought by Padre Irene. Capitan Tiago wept all the evening,
+kissing his daughter’s picture and begging her forgiveness, until at
+last he smoked an enormous quantity of opium. This evening her knell
+was tolled.”
+
+“Ah!” exclaimed Simoun, pressing his hands to his head and standing
+motionless. He remembered to have actually heard the knell while he was
+pacing about in the vicinity of the nunnery.
+
+“Dead!” he murmured in a voice so low that it seemed to be a ghost
+whispering. “Dead! Dead without my having seen her, dead without
+knowing that I lived for her—dead!”
+
+Feeling a terrible storm, a tempest of whirlwind and thunder without a
+drop of water, sobs without tears, cries without words, rage in his
+breast and threaten to burst out like burning lava long repressed, he
+rushed precipitately from the room. Basilio heard him descend the
+stairs with unsteady tread, stepping heavily, he heard a stifled cry, a
+cry that seemed to presage death, so solemn, deep, and sad that he
+arose from his chair pale and trembling, but he could hear the
+footsteps die away and the noisy closing of the door to the street.
+
+“Poor fellow!” he murmured, while his eyes filled with tears. Heedless
+now of his studies, he let his gaze wander into space as he pondered
+over the fate of those two beings: he—young, rich, educated, master of
+his fortunes, with a brilliant future before him; she—fair as a dream,
+pure, full of faith and innocence, nurtured amid love and laughter,
+destined to a happy existence, to be adored in the family and respected
+in the world; and yet of those two beings, filled with love, with
+illusions and hopes, by a fatal destiny he wandered over the world,
+dragged ceaselessly through a whirl of blood and tears, sowing evil
+instead of doing good, undoing virtue and encouraging vice, while she
+was dying in the mysterious shadows of the cloister where she had
+sought peace and perhaps found suffering, where she entered pure and
+stainless and expired like a crushed flower!
+
+Sleep in peace, ill-starred daughter of my hapless fatherland! Bury in
+the grave the enchantments of youth, faded in their prime! When a
+people cannot offer its daughters a tranquil home under the protection
+of sacred liberty, when a man can only leave to his widow blushes,
+tears to his mother, and slavery to his children, you do well to
+condemn yourself to perpetual chastity, stifling within you the germ of
+a future generation accursed! Well for you that you have not to shudder
+in your grave, hearing the cries of those who groan in darkness, of
+those who feel that they have wings and yet are fettered, of those who
+are stifled from lack of liberty! Go, go with your poet’s dreams into
+the regions of the infinite, spirit of woman dim-shadowed in the
+moonlight’s beam, whispered in the bending arches of the bamboo-brakes!
+Happy she who dies lamented, she who leaves in the heart that loves her
+a pure picture, a sacred remembrance, unspotted by the base passions
+engendered by the years! Go, we shall remember you! In the clear air of
+our native land, under its azure sky, above the billows of the lake set
+amid sapphire hills and emerald shores, in the crystal streams shaded
+by the bamboos, bordered by flowers, enlivened by the beetles and
+butterflies with their uncertain and wavering flight as though playing
+with the air, in the silence of our forests, in the singing of our
+rivers, in the diamond showers of our waterfalls, in the resplendent
+light of our moon, in the sighs of the night breeze, in all that may
+call up the vision of the beloved, we must eternally see you as we
+dreamed of you, fair, beautiful, radiant with hope, pure as the light,
+yet still sad and melancholy in the contemplation of our woes!
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+DREAMS
+
+                                                  Amor, qué astro eres?
+
+
+On the following day, Thursday, at the hour of sunset, Isagani was
+walking along the beautiful promenade of Maria Cristina in the
+direction of the Malecon to keep an appointment which Paulita had that
+morning given him. The young man had no doubt that they were to talk
+about what had happened on the previous night, and as he was determined
+to ask for an explanation, and knew how proud and haughty she was, he
+foresaw an estrangement. In view of this eventuality he had brought
+with him the only two letters he had ever received from Paulita, two
+scraps of paper, whereon were merely a few hurriedly written lines with
+various blots, but in an even handwriting, things that did not prevent
+the enamored youth from preserving them with more solicitude than if
+they had been the autographs of Sappho and the Muse Polyhymnia.
+
+This decision to sacrifice his love on the altar of dignity, the
+consciousness of suffering in the discharge of duty, did not prevent a
+profound melancholy from taking possession of Isagani and brought back
+into his mind the beautiful days, and nights more beautiful still, when
+they had whispered sweet nothings through the flowered gratings of the
+entresol, nothings that to the youth took on such a character of
+seriousness and importance that they seemed to him the only matters
+worthy of meriting the attention of the most exalted human
+understanding. He recalled the walks on moonlit nights, the fair, the
+dark December mornings after the mass of Nativity, the holy water that
+he used to offer her, when she would thank him with a look charged with
+a whole epic of love, both of them trembling as their fingers touched.
+Heavy sighs, like small rockets, issued from his breast and brought
+back to him all the verses, all the sayings of poets and writers about
+the inconstancy of woman. Inwardly he cursed the creation of theaters,
+the French operetta, and vowed to get revenge on Pelaez at the first
+opportunity. Everything about him appeared under the saddest and
+somberest colors: the bay, deserted and solitary, seemed more solitary
+still on account of the few steamers that were anchored in it; the sun
+was dying behind Mariveles without poetry or enchantment, without the
+capricious and richly tinted clouds of happier evenings; the Anda
+monument, in bad taste, mean and squat, without style, without
+grandeur, looked like a lump of ice-cream or at best a chunk of cake;
+the people who were promenading along the Malecon, in spite of their
+complacent and contented air, appeared distant, haughty, and vain;
+mischievous and bad-mannered, the boys that played on the beach,
+skipping flat stones over the surface of the water or searching in the
+sand for mollusks and crustaceans which they caught for the mere fun of
+catching and killed without benefit to themselves; in short, even the
+eternal port works to which he had dedicated more than three odes,
+looked to him absurd, ridiculous child’s play.
+
+The port, ah, the port of Manila, a bastard that since its conception
+had brought tears of humiliation and shame to all! If only after so
+many tears there were not being brought forth a useless abortion!
+
+Abstractedly he saluted two Jesuits, former teachers of his, and
+scarcely noticed a tandem in which an American rode and excited the
+envy of the gallants who were in calesas only. Near the Anda monument
+he heard Ben-Zayb talking with another person about Simoun, learning
+that the latter had on the previous night been taken suddenly ill, that
+he refused to see any one, even the very aides of the General. “Yes!”
+exclaimed Isagani with a bitter smile, “for him attentions because he
+is rich. The soldiers return from their expeditions sick and wounded,
+but no one visits them.”
+
+Musing over these expeditions, over the fate of the poor soldiers, over
+the resistance offered by the islanders to the foreign yoke, he thought
+that, death for death, if that of the soldiers was glorious because
+they were obeying orders, that of the islanders was sublime because
+they were defending their homes. [49]
+
+“A strange destiny, that of some peoples!” he mused. “Because a
+traveler arrives at their shores, they lose their liberty and become
+subjects and slaves, not only of the traveler, not only of his heirs,
+but even of all his countrymen, and not for a generation, but for all
+time! A strange conception of justice! Such a state of affairs gives
+ample right to exterminate every foreigner as the most ferocious
+monster that the sea can cast up!”
+
+He reflected that those islanders, against whom his country was waging
+war, after all were guilty of no crime other than that of weakness. The
+travelers also arrived at the shores of other peoples, but finding them
+strong made no display of their strange pretension. With all their
+weakness the spectacle they presented seemed beautiful to him, and the
+names of the enemies, whom the newspapers did not fail to call cowards
+and traitors, appeared glorious to him, as they succumbed with glory
+amid the ruins of their crude fortifications, with greater glory even
+than the ancient Trojan heroes, for those islanders had carried away no
+Philippine Helen! In his poetic enthusiasm he thought of the young men
+of those islands who could cover themselves with glory in the eyes of
+their women, and in his amorous desperation he envied them because they
+could find a brilliant suicide.
+
+“Ah, I should like to die,” he exclaimed, “be reduced to nothingness,
+leave to my native land a glorious name, perish in its cause, defending
+it from foreign invasion, and then let the sun afterwards illumine my
+corpse, like a motionless sentinel on the rocks of the sea!”
+
+The conflict with the Germans [50] came into his mind and he almost
+felt sorry that it had been adjusted: he would gladly have died for the
+Spanish-Filipino banner before submitting to the foreigner.
+
+“Because, after all,” he mused, “with Spain we are united by firm
+bonds—the past, history, religion, language—”
+
+Language, yes, language! A sarcastic smile curled his lips. That very
+night they would hold a banquet in the pansitería to celebrate the
+demise of the academy of Castilian.
+
+“Ay!” he sighed, “provided the liberals in Spain are like those we have
+here, in a little while the mother country will be able to count the
+number of the faithful!”
+
+Slowly the night descended, and with it melancholy settled more heavily
+upon the heart of the young man, who had almost lost hope of seeing
+Paulita. The promenaders one by one left the Malecon for the Luneta,
+the music from which was borne to him in snatches of melodies on the
+fresh evening breeze; the sailors on a warship anchored in the river
+performed their evening drill, skipping about among the slender ropes
+like spiders; the boats one by one lighted their lamps, thus giving
+signs of life; while the beach,
+
+
+        Do el viento riza las calladas olas
+        Que con blando murmullo en la ribera
+        Se deslizan veloces por sí solas. [51]
+
+
+as Alaejos says, exhaled in the distance thin, vapors that the moon,
+now at its full, gradually converted into mysterious transparent gauze.
+
+A distant sound became audible, a noise that rapidly approached.
+Isagani turned his head and his heart began to beat violently. A
+carriage was coming, drawn by white horses, the white horses that he
+would know among a hundred thousand. In the carriage rode Paulita and
+her friend of the night before, with Doña Victorina.
+
+Before the young man could take a step, Paulita had leaped to the
+ground with sylph-like agility and smiled at him with a smile full of
+conciliation. He smiled in return, and it seemed to him that all the
+clouds, all the black thoughts that before had beset him, vanished like
+smoke, the sky lighted up, the breeze sang, flowers covered the grass
+by the roadside. But unfortunately Doña Victorina was there and she
+pounced upon the young man to ask him for news of Don Tiburcio, since
+Isagani had undertaken to discover his hiding-place by inquiry among
+the students he knew.
+
+“No one has been able to tell me up to now,” he answered, and he was
+telling the truth, for Don Tiburcio was really hidden in the house of
+the youth’s own uncle, Padre Florentino.
+
+“Let him know,” declared Doña Victorina furiously, “that I’ll call in
+the Civil Guard. Alive or dead, I want to know where he is—because one
+has to wait ten years before marrying again.”
+
+Isagani gazed at her in fright—Doña Victorina was thinking of
+remarrying! Who could the unfortunate be?
+
+“What do you think of Juanito Pelaez?” she asked him suddenly.
+
+Juanito! Isagani knew not what to reply. He was tempted to tell all the
+evil he knew of Pelaez, but a feeling of delicacy triumphed in his
+heart and he spoke well of his rival, for the very reason that he was
+such. Doña Victorina, entirely satisfied and becoming enthusiastic,
+then broke out into exaggerations of Pelaez’s merits and was already
+going to make Isagani a confidant of her new passion when Paulita’s
+friend came running to say that the former’s fan had fallen among the
+stones of the beach, near the Malecon. Stratagem or accident, the fact
+is that this mischance gave an excuse for the friend to remain with the
+old woman, while Isagani might talk with Paulita. Moreover, it was a
+matter of rejoicing to Doña Victorina, since to get Juanito for herself
+she was favoring Isagani’s love.
+
+Paulita had her plan ready. On thanking him she assumed the role of the
+offended party, showed resentment, and gave him to understand that she
+was surprised to meet him there when everybody was on the Luneta, even
+the French actresses.
+
+“You made the appointment for me, how could I be elsewhere?”
+
+“Yet last night you did not even notice that I was in the theater. I
+was watching you all the time and you never took your eyes off those
+cochers.”
+
+So they exchanged parts: Isagani, who had come to demand explanations,
+found himself compelled to give them and considered himself very happy
+when Paulita said that she forgave him. In regard to her presence at
+the theater, he even had to thank her for that: forced by her aunt, she
+had decided to go in the hope of seeing him during the performance.
+Little she cared for Juanito Pelaez!
+
+“My aunt’s the one who is in love with him,” she said with a merry
+laugh.
+
+Then they both laughed, for the marriage of Pelaez with Doña Victorina
+made them really happy, and they saw it already an accomplished fact,
+until Isagani remembered that Don Tiburcio was still living and
+confided the secret to his sweetheart, after exacting her promise that
+she would tell no one. Paulita promised, with the mental reservation of
+relating it to her friend.
+
+This led the conversation to Isagani’s town, surrounded by forests,
+situated on the shore of the sea which roared at the base of the high
+cliffs. Isagani’s gaze lighted up when he spoke of that obscure spot, a
+flush of pride overspread his cheeks, his voice trembled, his poetic
+imagination glowed, his words poured forth burning, charged with
+enthusiasm, as if he were talking of love to his love, and he could not
+but exclaim:
+
+“Oh, in the solitude of my mountains I feel free, free as the air, as
+the light that shoots unbridled through space! A thousand cities, a
+thousand palaces, would I give for that spot in the Philippines, where,
+far from men, I could feel myself to have genuine liberty. There, face
+to face with nature, in the presence of the mysterious and the
+infinite, the forest and the sea, I think, speak, and work like a man
+who knows not tyrants.”
+
+In the presence of such enthusiasm for his native place, an enthusiasm
+that she did not comprehend, for she was accustomed to hear her country
+spoken ill of, and sometimes joined in the chorus herself, Paulita
+manifested some jealousy, as usual making herself the offended party.
+
+But Isagani very quickly pacified her. “Yes,” he said, “I loved it
+above all things before I knew you! It was my delight to wander through
+the thickets, to sleep in the shade of the trees, to seat myself upon a
+cliff to take in with my gaze the Pacific which rolled its blue waves
+before me, bringing to me echoes of songs learned on the shores of free
+America. Before knowing you, that sea was for me my world, my delight,
+my love, my dream! When it slept in calm with the sun shining overhead,
+it was my delight to gaze into the abyss hundreds of feet below me,
+seeking monsters in the forests of madrepores and coral that were
+revealed through the limpid blue, enormous serpents that the country
+folk say leave the forests to dwell in the sea, and there take on
+frightful forms. Evening, they say, is the time when the sirens appear,
+and I saw them between the waves—so great was my eagerness that once I
+thought I could discern them amid the foam, busy in their divine
+sports, I distinctly heard their songs, songs of liberty, and I made
+out the sounds of their silvery harps. Formerly I spent hours and hours
+watching the transformations in the clouds, or gazing at a solitary
+tree in the plain or a high rock, without knowing why, without being
+able to explain the vague feelings they awoke in me. My uncle used to
+preach long sermons to me, and fearing that I would become a
+hypochondriac, talked of placing me under a doctor’s care. But I met
+you, I loved you, and during the last vacation it seemed that something
+was lacking there, the forest was gloomy, sad the river that glides
+through the shadows, dreary the sea, deserted the sky. Ah, if you
+should go there once, if your feet should press those paths, if you
+should stir the waters of the rivulet with your fingers, if you should
+gaze upon the sea, sit upon the cliff, or make the air ring with your
+melodious songs, my forest would be transformed into an Eden, the
+ripples of the brook would sing, light would burst from the dark
+leaves, into diamonds would be converted the dewdrops and into pearls
+the foam of the sea.”
+
+But Paulita had heard that to reach Isagani’s home it was necessary to
+cross mountains where little leeches abounded, and at the mere thought
+of them the little coward shivered convulsively. Humored and petted,
+she declared that she would travel only in a carriage or a railway
+train.
+
+Having now forgotten all his pessimism and seeing only thornless roses
+about him, Isagani answered, “Within a short time all the islands are
+going to be crossed with networks of iron rails.
+
+
+      “‘Por donde rápidas
+        Y voladoras
+        Locomotoras
+        Corriendo irán,’ [52]
+
+
+as some one said. Then the most beautiful spots of the islands will be
+accessible to all.”
+
+“Then, but when? When I’m an old woman?”
+
+“Ah, you don’t know what we can do in a few years,” replied the youth.
+“You don’t realize the energy and enthusiasm that are awakening in the
+country after the sleep of centuries. Spain heeds us; our young men in
+Madrid are working day and night, dedicating to the fatherland all
+their intelligence, all their time, all their strength. Generous voices
+there are mingled with ours, statesmen who realize that there is no
+better bond than community of thought and interest. Justice will be
+meted out to us, and everything points to a brilliant future for all.
+It’s true that we’ve just met with a slight rebuff, we students, but
+victory is rolling along the whole line, it is in the consciousness of
+all! The traitorous repulse that we have suffered indicates the last
+gasp, the final convulsions of the dying. Tomorrow we shall be citizens
+of the Philippines, whose destiny will be a glorious one, because it
+will be in loving hands. Ah, yes, the future is ours! I see it
+rose-tinted, I see the movement that stirs the life of these regions so
+long dead, lethargic. I see towns arise along the railroads, and
+factories everywhere, edifices like that of Mandaloyan! I hear the
+steam hiss, the trains roar, the engines rattle! I see the smoke
+rise—their heavy breathing; I smell the oil—the sweat of monsters busy
+at incessant toil. This port, so slow and laborious of creation, this
+river where commerce is in its death agony, we shall see covered with
+masts, giving us an idea of the forests of Europe in winter. This pure
+air, and these stones, now so clean, will be crowded with coal, with
+boxes and barrels, the products of human industry, but let it not
+matter, for we shall move about rapidly in comfortable coaches to seek
+in the interior other air, other scenes on other shores, cooler
+temperatures on the slopes of the mountains. The warships of our navy
+will guard our coasts, the Spaniard and the Filipino will rival each
+other in zeal to repel all foreign invasion, to defend our homes, and
+let you bask in peace and smiles, loved and respected. Free from the
+system of exploitation, without hatred or distrust, the people will
+labor because then labor will cease to be a despicable thing, it will
+no longer be servile, imposed upon a slave. Then the Spaniard will not
+embitter his character with ridiculous pretensions of despotism, but
+with a frank look and a stout heart we shall extend our hands to one
+another, and commerce, industry, agriculture, the sciences, will
+develop under the mantle of liberty, with wise and just laws, as in
+prosperous England.” [53]
+
+Paulita smiled dubiously and shook her head. “Dreams, dreams!” she
+sighed. “I’ve heard it said that you have many enemies. Aunt says that
+this country must always be enslaved.”
+
+“Because your aunt is a fool, because she can’t live without slaves!
+When she hasn’t them she dreams of them in the future, and if they are
+not obtainable she forces them into her imagination. True it is that we
+have enemies, that there will be a struggle, but we shall conquer. The
+old system may convert the ruins of its castle into formless
+barricades, but we will take them singing hymns of liberty, in the
+light of the eyes of you women, to the applause of your lovely hands.
+But do not be uneasy—the struggle will be a pacific one. Enough that
+you spur us to zeal, that you awake in us noble and elevated thoughts
+and encourage us to constancy, to heroism, with your affection for our
+reward.”
+
+Paulita preserved her enigmatic smile and seemed thoughtful, as she
+gazed toward the river, patting her cheek lightly with her fan. “But if
+you accomplish nothing?” she asked abstractedly.
+
+The question hurt Isagani. He fixed his eyes on his sweetheart, caught
+her lightly by the hand, and began: “Listen, if we accomplish nothing—”
+
+He paused in doubt, then resumed: “You know how I love you, how I adore
+you, you know that I feel myself a different creature when your gaze
+enfolds me, when I surprise in it the flash of love, but yet if we
+accomplish nothing, I would dream of another look of yours and would
+die happy, because the light of pride could burn in your eyes when you
+pointed to my corpse and said to the world: ‘My love died fighting for
+the rights of my fatherland!’ ”
+
+“Come home, child, you’re going to catch cold,” screeched Doña
+Victorina at that instant, and the voice brought them back to reality.
+It was time to return, and they kindly invited him to enter the
+carriage, an invitation which the young man did not give them cause to
+repeat. As it was Paulita’s carriage, naturally Doña Victorina and the
+friend occupied the back seat, while the two lovers sat on the smaller
+one in front.
+
+To ride in the same carriage, to have her at his side, to breathe her
+perfume, to rub against the silk of her dress, to see her pensive with
+folded arms, lighted by the moon of the Philippines that lends to the
+meanest things idealism and enchantment, were all dreams beyond
+Isagani’s hopes! What wretches they who were returning alone on foot
+and had to give way to the swift carriage! In the whole course of the
+drive, along the beach and down the length of La Sabana, across the
+Bridge of Spain, Isagani saw nothing but a sweet profile, gracefully
+set off by beautiful hair, ending in an arching neck that lost itself
+amid the gauzy piña. A diamond winked at him from the lobe of the
+little ear, like a star among silvery clouds. He heard faint echoes
+inquiring for Don Tiburcio de Espadaña, the name of Juanito Pelaez, but
+they sounded to him like distant bells, the confused noises heard in a
+dream. It was necessary to tell him that they had reached Plaza Santa
+Cruz.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+SMILES AND TEARS
+
+
+The sala of the Pansiteria Macanista de Buen Gusto [54] that night
+presented an extraordinary aspect. Fourteen young men of the principal
+islands of the archipelago, from the pure Indian (if there be pure
+ones) to the Peninsular Spaniard, were met to hold the banquet advised
+by Padre Irene in view of the happy solution of the affair about
+instruction in Castilian. They had engaged all the tables for
+themselves, ordered the lights to be increased, and had posted on the
+wall beside the landscapes and Chinese kakemonos this strange versicle:
+
+“GLORY TO CUSTODIO FOR HIS CLEVERNESS AND PANSIT ON EABTH TO THE YOUTHS
+OF GOOD WILL.”
+
+In a country where everything grotesque is covered with a mantle of
+seriousness, where many rise by the force of wind and hot air, in a
+country where the deeply serious and sincere may do damage on issuing
+from the heart and may cause trouble, probably this was the best way to
+celebrate the ingenious inspiration of the illustrious Don Custodio.
+The mocked replied to the mockery with a laugh, to the governmental
+joke with a plate of pansit, and yet—!
+
+They laughed and jested, but it could be seen that the merriment was
+forced. The laughter had a certain nervous ring, eyes flashed, and in
+more than one of these a tear glistened. Nevertheless, these young men
+were cruel, they were unreasonable! It was not the first time that
+their most beautiful ideas had been so treated, that their hopes had
+been defrauded with big words and small actions: before this Don
+Custodio there had been many, very many others.
+
+In the center of the room under the red lanterns were placed four round
+tables, systematically arranged to form a square. Little wooden stools,
+equally round, served as seats. In the middle of each table, according
+to the practise of the establishment, were arranged four small colored
+plates with four pies on each one and four cups of tea, with the
+accompanying dishes, all of red porcelain. Before each seat was a
+bottle and two glittering wine-glasses.
+
+Sandoval was curious and gazed about scrutinizing everything, tasting
+the food, examining the pictures, reading the bill of fare. The others
+conversed on the topics of the day: about the French actresses, about
+the mysterious illness of Simoun, who, according to some, had been
+found wounded in the street, while others averred that he had attempted
+to commit suicide. As was natural, all lost themselves in conjectures.
+Tadeo gave his particular version, which according to him came from a
+reliable source: Simoun had been assaulted by some unknown person in
+the old Plaza Vivac, [55] the motive being revenge, in proof of which
+was the fact that Simoun himself refused to make the least explanation.
+From this they proceeded to talk of mysterious revenges, and naturally
+of monkish pranks, each one relating the exploits of the curate of his
+town.
+
+A notice in large black letters crowned the frieze of the room with
+this warning:
+
+
+        De esta fonda el cabecilla
+        Al publico advierte
+        Que nada dejen absolutamente
+        Sobre alguna mesa ó silla. [56]
+
+
+“What a notice!” exclaimed Sandoval. “As if he might have confidence in
+the police, eh? And what verses! Don Tiburcio converted into a
+quatrain—two feet, one longer than the other, between two crutches! If
+Isagani sees them, he’ll present them to his future aunt.”
+
+“Here’s Isagani!” called a voice from the stairway. The happy youth
+appeared radiant with joy, followed by two Chinese, without camisas,
+who carried on enormous waiters tureens that gave out an appetizing
+odor. Merry exclamations greeted them.
+
+Juanito Pelaez was missing, but the hour fixed had already passed, so
+they sat down happily to the tables. Juanito was always unconventional.
+
+“If in his place we had invited Basilio,” said Tadeo, “we should have
+been better entertained. We might have got him drunk and drawn some
+secrets from him.”
+
+“What, does the prudent Basilio possess secrets?”
+
+“I should say so!” replied Tadeo. “Of the most important kind. There
+are some enigmas to which he alone has the key: the boy who
+disappeared, the nun—”
+
+“Gentlemen, the pansit lang-lang is the soup par excellence!” cried
+Makaraig. “As you will observe, Sandoval, it is composed of vermicelli,
+crabs or shrimps, egg paste, scraps of chicken, and I don’t know what
+else. As first-fruits, let us offer the bones to Don Custodio, to see
+if he will project something with them.”
+
+A burst of merry laughter greeted this sally.
+
+“If he should learn—”
+
+“He’d come a-running!” concluded Sandoval. “This is excellent soup—what
+is it called?”
+
+“Pansit lang-lang, that is, Chinese pansit, to distinguish it from that
+which is peculiar to this country.”
+
+“Bah! That’s a hard name to remember. In honor of Don Custodio, I
+christen it the soup project!”
+
+“Gentlemen,” said Makaraig, who had prepared the menu, “there are three
+courses yet. Chinese stew made of pork—”
+
+“Which should be dedicated to Padre Irene.”
+
+“Get out! Padre Irene doesn’t eat pork, unless he turns his nose away,”
+whispered a young man from Iloilo to his neighbor.
+
+“Let him turn his nose away!”
+
+“Down with Padre Irene’s nose,” cried several at once.
+
+“Respect, gentlemen, more respect!” demanded Pecson with comic gravity.
+
+“The third course is a lobster pie—”
+
+“Which should be dedicated to the friars,” suggested he of the Visayas.
+
+“For the lobsters’ sake,” added Sandoval.
+
+“Right, and call it friar pie!”
+
+The whole crowd took this up, repeating in concert, “Friar pie!”
+
+“I protest in the name of one of them,” said Isagani.
+
+“And I, in the name of the lobsters,” added Tadeo.
+
+“Respect, gentlemen, more respect!” again demanded Pecson with a full
+mouth.
+
+“The fourth is stewed pansit, which is dedicated—to the government and
+the country!”
+
+All turned toward Makaraig, who went on: “Until recently, gentlemen,
+the pansit was believed to be Chinese or Japanese, but the fact is
+that, being unknown in China or Japan, it would seem to be Filipino,
+yet those who prepare it and get the benefit from it are the
+Chinese—the same, the very, very same that happens to the government
+and to the Philippines: they seem to be Chinese, but whether they are
+or not, the Holy Mother has her doctors—all eat and enjoy it, yet
+characterize it as disagreeable and loathsome, the same as with the
+country, the same as with the government. All live at its cost, all
+share in its feast, and afterwards there is no worse country than the
+Philippines, there is no government more imperfect. Let us then
+dedicate the pansit to the country and to the government.”
+
+“Agreed!” many exclaimed.
+
+“I protest!” cried Isagani.
+
+“Respect for the weaker, respect for the victims,” called Pecson in a
+hollow voice, waving a chicken-bone in the air.
+
+“Let’s dedicate the pansit to Quiroga the Chinaman, one of the four
+powers of the Filipino world,” proposed Isagani.
+
+“No, to his Black Eminence.”
+
+“Silence!” cautioned one mysteriously. “There are people in the plaza
+watching us, and walls have ears.”
+
+True it was that curious groups were standing by the windows, while the
+talk and laughter in the adjoining houses had ceased altogether, as if
+the people there were giving their attention to what was occurring at
+the banquet. There was something extraordinary about the silence.
+
+“Tadeo, deliver your speech,” Makaraig whispered to him.
+
+It had been agreed that Sandoval, who possessed the most oratorical
+ability, should deliver the last toast as a summing up.
+
+Tadeo, lazy as ever, had prepared nothing, so he found himself in a
+quandary. While disposing of a long string of vermicelli, he meditated
+how to get out of the difficulty, until he recalled a speech learned in
+school and decided to plagiarize it, with adulterations.
+
+“Beloved brethren in project!” he began, gesticulating with two Chinese
+chop-sticks.
+
+“Brute! Keep that chop-stick out of my hair!” cried his neighbor.
+
+“Called by you to fill the void that has been left in—”
+
+“Plagiarism!” Sandoval interrupted him. “That speech was delivered by
+the president of our lyceum.”
+
+“Called by your election,” continued the imperturbable Tadeo, “to fill
+the void that has been left in my mind”—pointing to his stomach—“by a
+man famous for his Christian principles and for his inspirations and
+projects, worthy of some little remembrance, what can one like myself
+say of him, I who am very hungry, not having breakfasted?”
+
+“Have a neck, my friend!” called a neighbor, offering that portion of a
+chicken.
+
+“There is one course, gentlemen, the treasure of a people who are today
+a tale and a mockery in the world, wherein have thrust their hands the
+greatest gluttons of the western regions of the earth—” Here he pointed
+with his chopsticks to Sandoval, who was struggling with a refractory
+chicken-wing.
+
+“And eastern!” retorted the latter, describing a circle in the air with
+his spoon, in order to include all the banqueters.
+
+“No interruptions!”
+
+“I demand the floor!”
+
+“I demand pickles!” added Isagani.
+
+“Bring on the stew!”
+
+All echoed this request, so Tadeo sat down, contented with having got
+out of his quandary.
+
+The dish consecrated to Padre Irene did not appear to be extra good, as
+Sandoval cruelly demonstrated thus: “Shining with grease outside and
+with pork inside! Bring on the third course, the friar pie!”
+
+The pie was not yet ready, although the sizzling of the grease in the
+frying-pan could be heard. They took advantage of the delay to drink,
+begging Pecson to talk.
+
+Pecson crossed himself gravely and arose, restraining his clownish
+laugh with an effort, at the same time mimicking a certain Augustinian
+preacher, then famous, and beginning in a murmur, as though he were
+reading a text.
+
+“Si tripa plena laudal Deum, tripa famelica laudabit fratres—if the
+full stomach praises God, the hungry stomach will praise the friars.
+Words spoken by the Lord Custodio through the mouth of Ben-Zayb, in the
+journal El Grito de la Integridad, the second article, absurdity the
+one hundred and fifty-seventh.
+
+“Beloved brethren in Christ: Evil blows its foul breath over the
+verdant shores of Frailandia, commonly called the Philippine
+Archipelago. No day passes but the attack is renewed, but there is
+heard some sarcasm against the reverend, venerable, infallible
+corporations, defenseless and unsupported. Allow me, brethren, on this
+occasion to constitute myself a knight-errant to sally forth in defense
+of the unprotected, of the holy corporations that have reared us, thus
+again confirming the saving idea of the adage—a full stomach praises
+God, which is to say, a hungry stomach will praise the friars.”
+
+“Bravo, bravo!”
+
+“Listen,” said Isagani seriously, “I want you to understand that,
+speaking of friars, I respect one.”
+
+Sandoval was getting merry, so he began to sing a shady couplet about
+the friars.
+
+“Hear me, brethren!” continued Pecson. “Turn your gaze toward the happy
+days of your infancy, endeavor to analyze the present and ask
+yourselves about the future. What do you find? Friars, friars, and
+friars! A friar baptized you, confirmed you, visited you in school with
+loving zeal; a friar heard your first secret; he was the first to bring
+you into communion with God, to set your feet upon the pathway of life;
+friars were your first and friars will be your last teachers; a friar
+it is who opens the hearts of your sweethearts, disposing them to heed
+your sighs; a friar marries you, makes you travel over different
+islands to afford you changes of climate and diversion; he will attend
+your death-bed, and even though you mount the scaffold, there will the
+friar be to accompany you with his prayers and tears, and you may rest
+assured that he will not desert you until he sees you thoroughly dead.
+Nor does his charity end there—dead, he will then endeavor to bury you
+with all pomp, he will fight that your corpse pass through the church
+to receive his supplications, and he will only rest satisfied when he
+can deliver you into the hands of the Creator, purified here on earth,
+thanks to temporal punishments, tortures, and humiliations. Learned in
+the doctrines of Christ, who closes heaven against the rich, they, our
+redeemers and genuine ministers of the Saviour, seek every means to
+lift away our sins and bear them far, far off, there where the accursed
+Chinese and Protestants dwell, to leave us this air, limpid, pure,
+healthful, in such a way that even should we so wish afterwards, we
+could not find a real to bring about our condemnation.
+
+“If, then, their existence is necessary to our happiness, if
+wheresoever we turn we must encounter their delicate hands, hungering
+for kisses, that every day smooth the marks of abuse from our
+countenances, why not adore them and fatten them—why demand their
+impolitic expulsion? Consider for a moment the immense void that their
+absence would leave in our social system. Tireless workers, they
+improve and propagate the races! Divided as we are, thanks to our
+jealousies and our susceptibilities, the friars unite us in a common
+lot, in a firm bond, so firm that many are unable to move their elbows.
+Take away the friar, gentlemen, and you will see how the Philippine
+edifice will totter; lacking robust shoulders and hairy limbs to
+sustain it, Philippine life will again become monotonous, without the
+merry note of the playful and gracious friar, without the booklets and
+sermons that split our sides with laughter, without the amusing
+contrast between grand pretensions and small brains, without the
+actual, daily representations of the tales of Boccaccio and La
+Fontaine! Without the girdles and scapularies, what would you have our
+women do in the future—save that money and perhaps become miserly and
+covetous? Without the masses, novenaries, and processions, where will
+you find games of panguingui to entertain them in their hours of
+leisure? They would then have to devote themselves to their household
+duties and instead of reading diverting stories of miracles, we should
+then have to get them works that are not extant.
+
+“Take away the friar and heroism will disappear, the political virtues
+will fall under the control of the vulgar. Take him away and the Indian
+will cease to exist, for the friar is the Father, the Indian is the
+Word! The former is the sculptor, the latter the statue, because all
+that we are, think, or do, we owe to the friar—to his patience, his
+toil, his perseverance of three centuries to modify the form Nature
+gave us. The Philippines without the friar and without the Indian—what
+then would become of the unfortunate government in the hands of the
+Chinamen?”
+
+“It will eat lobster pie,” suggested Isagani, whom Pecson’s speech
+bored.
+
+“And that’s what we ought to be doing. Enough of speeches!”
+
+As the Chinese who should have served the courses did not put in his
+appearance, one of the students arose and went to the rear, toward the
+balcony that overlooked the river. But he returned at once, making
+mysterious signs.
+
+“We’re watched! I’ve seen Padre Sibyla’s pet!”
+
+“Yes?” ejaculated Isagani, rising.
+
+“It’s no use now. When he saw me he disappeared.”
+
+Approaching the window he looked toward the plaza, then made signs to
+his companions to come nearer. They saw a young man leave the door of
+the pansitería, gaze all about him, then with some unknown person enter
+a carriage that waited at the curb. It was Simoun’s carriage.
+
+“Ah!” exclaimed Makaraig. “The slave of the Vice-Rector attended by the
+Master of the General!”
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+PASQUINADES
+
+
+Very early the next morning Basilio arose to go to the hospital. He had
+his plans made: to visit his patients, to go afterwards to the
+University to see about his licentiateship, and then have an interview
+with Makaraig about the expense this would entail, for he had used up
+the greater part of his savings in ransoming Juli and in securing a
+house where she and her grandfather might live, and he had not dared to
+apply to Capitan Tiago, fearing that such a move would be construed as
+an advance on the legacy so often promised him.
+
+Preoccupied with these thoughts, he paid no attention to the groups of
+students who were at such an early hour returning from the Walled City,
+as though the classrooms had been closed, nor did he even note the
+abstracted air of some of them, their whispered conversations, or the
+mysterious signals exchanged among them. So it was that when he reached
+San Juan de Dios and his friends asked him about the conspiracy, he
+gave a start, remembering what Simoun had planned, but which had
+miscarried, owing to the unexplained accident to the jeweler.
+Terrified, he asked in a trembling voice, at the same time endeavoring
+to feign ignorance, “Ah, yes, what conspiracy?”
+
+“It’s been discovered,” replied one, “and it seems that many are
+implicated in it.”
+
+With an effort Basilio controlled himself. “Many implicated?” he
+echoed, trying to learn something from the looks of the others. “Who?”
+
+“Students, a lot of students.”
+
+Basilio did not think it prudent to ask more, fearing that he would
+give himself away, so on the pretext of visiting his patients he left
+the group. One of the clinical professors met him and placing his hand
+mysteriously on the youth’s shoulder—the professor was a friend of
+his—asked him in a low voice, “Were you at that supper last night?”
+
+In his excited frame of mind Basilio thought the professor had said
+night before last, which was the time of his interview with Simoun. He
+tried to explain. “I assure you,” he stammered, “that as Capitan Tiago
+was worse—and besides I had to finish that book—”
+
+“You did well not to attend it,” said the professor. “But you’re a
+member of the students’ association?”
+
+“I pay my dues.”
+
+“Well then, a piece of advice: go home at once and destroy any papers
+you have that may compromise you.”
+
+Basilio shrugged his shoulders—he had no papers, nothing more than his
+clinical notes.
+
+“Has Señor Simoun—”
+
+“Simoun has nothing to do with the affair, thank God!” interrupted the
+physician. “He was opportunely wounded by some unknown hand and is now
+confined to his bed. No, other hands are concerned in this, but hands
+no less terrible.”
+
+Basilio drew a breath of relief. Simoun was the only one who could
+compromise him, although he thought of Cabesang Tales.
+
+“Are there tulisanes—”
+
+“No, man, nothing more than students.”
+
+Basilio recovered his serenity. “What has happened then?” he made bold
+to ask.
+
+“Seditious pasquinades have been found; didn’t you know about them?”
+
+“Where?”
+
+“In the University.”
+
+“Nothing more than that?”
+
+“Whew! What more do you want?” asked the professor, almost in a rage.
+“The pasquinades are attributed to the students of the association—but,
+keep quiet!”
+
+The professor of pathology came along, a man who had more the look of a
+sacristan than of a physician. Appointed by the powerful mandate of the
+Vice-Rector, without other merit than unconditional servility to the
+corporation, he passed for a spy and an informer in the eyes of the
+rest of the faculty.
+
+The first professor returned his greeting coldly, and winked to
+Basilio, as he said to him, “Now I know that Capitan Tiago smells like
+a corpse—the crows and vultures have been gathering around him.” So
+saying, he went inside.
+
+Somewhat calmed, Basilio now ventured to inquire for more details, but
+all that he could learn was that pasquinades had been found on the
+doors of the University, and that the Vice-Rector had ordered them to
+be taken down and sent to the Civil Government. It was said that they
+were filled with threats of assassination, invasion, and other
+braggadocio.
+
+The students made their comments on the affair. Their information came
+from the janitor, who had it from a servant in Santo Tomas, who had it
+from an usher. They prognosticated future suspensions and
+imprisonments, even indicating who were to be the victims—naturally the
+members of the association.
+
+Basilio then recalled Simoun’s words: “The day in which they can get
+rid of you, you will not complete your course.”
+
+“Could he have known anything?” he asked himself. “We’ll see who is the
+most powerful.”
+
+Recovering his serenity, he went on toward the University, to learn
+what attitude it behooved him to take and at the same time to see about
+his licentiateship. He passed along Calle Legazpi, then down through
+Beaterio, and upon arriving at the corner of this street and Calle
+Solana saw that something important must indeed have happened. Instead
+of the former lively, chattering groups on the sidewalks were to be
+seen civil-guards making the students move on, and these latter issuing
+from the University silent, some gloomy, some agitated, to stand off at
+a distance or make their way home.
+
+The first acquaintance he met was Sandoval, but Basilio called to him
+in vain. He seemed to have been smitten deaf. “Effect of fear on the
+gastro-intestinal juices,” thought Basilio.
+
+Later he met Tadeo, who wore a Christmas face—at last that eternal
+holiday seemed to be realized.
+
+“What has happened, Tadeo?”
+
+“We’ll have no school, at least for a week, old man! Sublime!
+Magnificent!” He rubbed his hands in glee.
+
+“But what has happened?”
+
+“They’re going to arrest all of us in the association.”
+
+“And are you glad of that?”
+
+“There’ll be no school, there’ll be no school!” He moved away almost
+bursting with joy.
+
+Basilio saw Juanito Pelaez approaching, pale and suspicious. This time
+his hump had reached its maximum, so great was his haste to get away.
+He had been one of the most active promoters of the association while
+things were running smoothly.
+
+“Eh, Pelaez, what’s happened?”
+
+“Nothing, I know nothing. I didn’t have anything to do with it,” he
+responded nervously. “I was always telling you that these things were
+quixotisms. It’s the truth, you know I’ve said so to you?”
+
+Basilio did not remember whether he had said so or not, but to humor
+him replied, “Yes, man, but what’s happened?”
+
+“It’s the truth, isn’t it? Look, you’re a witness: I’ve always been
+opposed—you’re a witness, don’t forget it!”
+
+“Yes, man, but what’s going on?”
+
+“Listen, you’re a witness! I’ve never had anything to do with the
+members of the association, except to give them advice. You’re not
+going to deny it now. Be careful, won’t you?”
+
+“No, no, I won’t deny it, but for goodness’ sake, what has happened?”
+
+But Juanito was already far away. He had caught a glimpse of a guard
+approaching and feared arrest.
+
+Basilio then went on toward the University to see if perhaps the
+secretary’s office might be open and if he could glean any further
+news. The office was closed, but there was an extraordinary commotion
+in the building. Hurrying up and down the stairways were friars, army
+officers, private persons, old lawyers and doctors, there doubtless to
+offer their services to the endangered cause.
+
+At a distance he saw his friend Isagani, pale and agitated, but radiant
+with youthful ardor, haranguing some fellow students with his voice
+raised as though he cared little that he be heard by everybody.
+
+“It seems preposterous, gentlemen, it seems unreal, that an incident so
+insignificant should scatter us and send us into flight like sparrows
+at whom a scarecrow has been shaken! But is this the first time that
+students have gone to prison for the sake of liberty? Where are those
+who have died, those who have been shot? Would you apostatize now?”
+
+“But who can the fool be that wrote such pasquinades?” demanded an
+indignant listener.
+
+“What does that matter to us?” rejoined Isagani. “We don’t have to find
+out, let them find out! Before we know how they are drawn up, we have
+no need to make any show of agreement at a time like this. There where
+the danger is, there must we hasten, because honor is there! If what
+the pasquinades say is compatible with our dignity and our feelings, be
+he who he may that wrote them, he has done well, and we ought to be
+grateful to him and hasten to add our signatures to his! If they are
+unworthy of us, our conduct and our consciences will in themselves
+protest and defend us from every accusation!”
+
+Upon hearing such talk, Basilio, although he liked Isagani very much,
+turned and left. He had to go to Makaraig’s house to see about the
+loan.
+
+Near the house of the wealthy student he observed whisperings and
+mysterious signals among the neighbors, but not comprehending what they
+meant, continued serenely on his way and entered the doorway. Two
+guards advanced and asked him what he wanted. Basilio realized that he
+had made a bad move, but he could not now retreat.
+
+“I’ve come to see my friend Makaraig,” he replied calmly.
+
+The guards looked at each other. “Wait here,” one of them said to him.
+“Wait till the corporal comes down.”
+
+Basilio bit his lips and Simoun’s words again recurred to him. Had they
+come to arrest Makaraig?—was his thought, but he dared not give it
+utterance. He did not have to wait long, for in a few moments Makaraig
+came down, talking pleasantly with the corporal. The two were preceded
+by a warrant officer.
+
+“What, you too, Basilio?” he asked.
+
+“I came to see you—”
+
+“Noble conduct!” exclaimed Makaraig laughing. “In time of calm, you
+avoid us.”
+
+The corporal asked Basilio his name, then scanned a list. “Medical
+student, Calle Anloague?” he asked.
+
+Basilio bit his lip.
+
+“You’ve saved us a trip,” added the corporal, placing his hand on the
+youth’s shoulder. “You’re under arrest!”
+
+“What, I also?”
+
+Makaraig burst out into laughter.
+
+“Don’t worry, friend. Let’s get into the carriage, while I tell you
+about the supper last night.”
+
+With a graceful gesture, as though he were in his own house, he invited
+the warrant officer and the corporal to enter the carriage that waited
+at the door.
+
+“To the Civil Government!” he ordered the cochero.
+
+Now that Basilio had again regained his composure, he told Makaraig the
+object of his visit. The rich student did not wait for him to finish,
+but seized his hand. “Count on me, count on me, and to the festivities
+celebrating our graduation we’ll invite these gentlemen,” he said,
+indicating the corporal and the warrant officer.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+THE FRIAR AND THE FILIPINO
+
+                                                    Vox populi, vox Dei
+
+
+We left Isagani haranguing his friends. In the midst of his enthusiasm
+an usher approached him to say that Padre Fernandez, one of the higher
+professors, wished to talk with him.
+
+Isagani’s face fell. Padre Fernandez was a person greatly respected by
+him, being the one always excepted by him whenever the friars were
+attacked.
+
+“What does Padre Fernandez want?” he inquired.
+
+The usher shrugged his shoulders and Isagani reluctantly followed him.
+
+Padre Fernandez, the friar whom we met in Los Baños, was waiting in his
+cell, grave and sad, with his brows knitted as if he were in deep
+thought. He arose as Isagani entered, shook hands with him, and closed
+the door. Then he began to pace from one end of the room to the other.
+Isagani stood waiting for him to speak.
+
+“Señor Isagani,” he began at length with some emotion, “from the window
+I’ve heard you speaking, for though I am a consumptive I have good
+ears, and I want to talk with you. I have always liked the young men
+who express themselves clearly and have their own way of thinking and
+acting, no matter that their ideas may differ from mine. You young men,
+from what I have heard, had a supper last night. Don’t excuse
+yourself—”
+
+“I don’t intend to excuse myself!” interrupted Isagani.
+
+“So much the better—it shows that you accept the consequences of your
+actions. Besides, you would do ill in retracting, and I don’t blame
+you, I take no notice of what may have been said there last night, I
+don’t accuse you, because after all you’re free to say of the
+Dominicans what seems best to you, you are not a pupil of ours—only
+this year have we had the pleasure of having you, and we shall probably
+not have you longer. Don’t think that I’m going to invoke
+considerations of gratitude; no, I’m not going to waste my time in
+stupid vulgarisms. I’ve had you summoned here because I believe that
+you are one of the few students who act from conviction, and, as I like
+men of conviction, I’m going to explain myself to Señor Isagani.”
+
+Padre Fernandez paused, then continued his walk with bowed head, his
+gaze riveted on the floor.
+
+“You may sit down, if you wish,” he remarked. “It’s a habit of mine to
+walk about while talking, because my ideas come better then.”
+
+Isagani remained standing, with his head erect, waiting for the
+professor to get to the point of the matter.
+
+“For more than eight years I have been a professor here,” resumed Padre
+Fernandez, still continuing to pace back and forth, “and in that time
+I’ve known and dealt with more than twenty-five hundred students. I’ve
+taught them, I’ve tried to educate them, I’ve tried to inculcate in
+them principles of justice and of dignity, and yet in these days when
+there is so much murmuring against us I’ve not seen one who has the
+temerity to maintain his accusations when he finds himself in the
+presence of a friar, not even aloud in the presence of any numbers.
+Young men there are who behind our backs calumniate us and before us
+kiss our hands, with a base smile begging kind looks from us! Bah! What
+do you wish that we should do with such creatures?”
+
+“The fault is not all theirs, Padre,” replied Isagani. “The fault lies
+partly with those who have taught them to be hypocrites, with those who
+have tyrannized over freedom of thought and freedom of speech. Here
+every independent thought, every word that is not an echo of the will
+of those in power, is characterized as filibusterism, and you know well
+enough what that means. A fool would he be who to please himself would
+say aloud what he thinks, who would lay himself liable to suffer
+persecution!”
+
+“What persecution have you had to suffer?” asked Padre Fernandez,
+raising his head. “Haven’t I let you express yourself freely in my
+class? Nevertheless, you are an exception that, if what you say is
+true, I must correct, so as to make the rule as general as possible and
+thus avoid setting a bad example.”
+
+Isagani smiled. “I thank you, but I will not discuss with you whether I
+am an exception. I will accept your qualification so that you may
+accept mine: you also are an exception, and as here we are not going to
+talk about exceptions, nor plead for ourselves, at least, I mean, I’m
+not, I beg of my professor to change the course of the conversation.”
+
+In spite of his liberal principles, Padre Fernandez raised his head and
+stared in surprise at Isagani. That young man was more independent than
+he had thought—although he called him professor, in reality he was
+dealing with him as an equal, since he allowed himself to offer
+suggestions. Like a wise diplomat, Padre Fernandez not only recognized
+the fact but even took his stand upon it.
+
+“Good enough!” he said. “But don’t look upon me as your professor. I’m
+a friar and you are a Filipino student, nothing more nor less! Now I
+ask you—what do the Filipino students want of us?”
+
+The question came as a surprise; Isagani was not prepared for it. It
+was a thrust made suddenly while they were preparing their defense, as
+they say in fencing. Thus startled, Isagani responded with a violent
+stand, like a beginner defending himself.
+
+“That you do your duty!” he exclaimed.
+
+Fray Fernandez straightened up—that reply sounded to him like a
+cannon-shot. “That we do our duty!” he repeated, holding himself erect.
+“Don’t we, then, do our duty? What duties do you ascribe to us?”
+
+“Those which you voluntarily placed upon yourselves on joining the
+order, and those which afterwards, once in it, you have been willing to
+assume. But, as a Filipino student, I don’t think myself called upon to
+examine your conduct with reference to your statutes, to Catholicism,
+to the government, to the Filipino people, and to humanity in
+general—those are questions that you have to settle with your founders,
+with the Pope, with the government, with the whole people, and with
+God. As a Filipino student, I will confine myself to your duties toward
+us. The friars in general, being the local supervisors of education in
+the provinces, and the Dominicans in particular, by monopolizing in
+their hands all the studies of the Filipino youth, have assumed the
+obligation to its eight millions of inhabitants, to Spain, and to
+humanity, of which we form a part, of steadily bettering the young
+plant, morally and physically, of training it toward its happiness, of
+creating a people honest, prosperous, intelligent, virtuous, noble, and
+loyal. Now I ask you in my turn—have the friars fulfilled that
+obligation of theirs?”
+
+“We’re fulfilling—”
+
+“Ah, Padre Fernandez,” interrupted Isagani, “you with your hand on your
+heart can say that you are fulfilling it, but with your hand on the
+heart of your order, on the heart of all the orders, you cannot say
+that without deceiving yourself. Ah, Padre Fernandez, when I find
+myself in the presence of a person whom I esteem and respect, I prefer
+to be the accused rather than the accuser, I prefer to defend myself
+rather than take the offensive. But now that we have entered upon the
+discussion, let us carry it to the end! How do they fulfill their
+obligation, those who look after education in the towns? By hindering
+it! And those who here monopolize education, those who try to mold the
+mind of youth, to the exclusion of all others whomsoever, how do they
+carry out their mission? By curtailing knowledge as much as possible,
+by extinguishing all ardor and enthusiasm, by trampling on all dignity,
+the soul’s only refuge, by inculcating in us worn-out ideas, rancid
+beliefs, false principles incompatible with a life of progress! Ah,
+yes, when it is a question of feeding convicts, of providing for the
+maintenance of criminals, the government calls for bids in order to
+find the purveyor who offers the best means of subsistence, he who at
+least will not let them perish from hunger, but when it is a question
+of morally feeding a whole people, of nourishing the intellect of
+youth, the healthiest part, that which is later to be the country and
+the all, the government not only does not ask for any bid, but
+restricts the power to that very body which makes a boast of not
+desiring education, of wishing no advancement. What should we say if
+the purveyor for the prisons, after securing the contract by intrigue,
+should then leave the prisoners to languish in want, giving them only
+what is stale and rancid, excusing himself afterwards by saying that it
+is not convenient for the prisoners to enjoy good health, because good
+health brings merry thoughts, because merriment improves the man, and
+the man ought not to be improved, because it is to the purveyor’s
+interest that there be many criminals? What should we say if afterwards
+the government and the purveyor should agree between themselves that of
+the ten or twelve cuartos which one received for each criminal, the
+other should receive five?”
+
+Padre Fernandek bit his lip. “Those are grave charges,” he said, “and
+you are overstepping the limits of our agreement.”
+
+“No, Padre, not if I continue to deal with the student question. The
+friars—and I do not say, you friars, since I do not confuse you with
+the common herd—the friars of all the orders have constituted
+themselves our mental purveyors, yet they say and shamelessly proclaim
+that it is not expedient for us to become enlightened, because some day
+we shall declare ourselves free! That is just the same as not wishing
+the prisoner to be well-fed so that he may improve and get out of
+prison. Liberty is to man what education is to the intelligence, and
+the friars’ unwillingness that we have it is the origin of our
+discontent.”
+
+“Instruction is given only to those who deserve it,” rejoined Padre
+Fernandez dryly. “To give it to men without character and without
+morality is to prostitute it.”
+
+“Why are there men without character and without morality?”
+
+The Dominican shrugged his shoulders. “Defects that they imbibe with
+their mothers’ milk, that they breathe in the bosom of the family—how
+do I know?”
+
+“Ah, no, Padre Fernandez!” exclaimed the young man impetuously. “You
+have not dared to go into the subject deeply, you have not wished to
+gaze into the depths from fear of finding yourself there in the
+darkness of your brethren. What we are, you have made us. A people
+tyrannized over is forced to be hypocritical; a people denied the truth
+must resort to lies; and he who makes himself a tyrant breeds slaves.
+There is no morality, you say, so let it be—even though statistics can
+refute you in that here are not committed crimes like those among other
+peoples, blinded by the fumes of their moralizers. But, without
+attempting now to analyze what it is that forms the character and how
+far the education received determines morality, I will agree with you
+that we are defective. Who is to blame for that? You who for three
+centuries and a half have had in your hands our education, or we who
+submit to everything? If after three centuries and a half the artist
+has been able to produce only a caricature, stupid indeed he must be!”
+
+“Or bad enough the material he works upon.”
+
+“Stupider still then, when, knowing it to be bad, he does not give it
+up, but goes on wasting time. Not only is he stupid, but he is a cheat
+and a robber, because he knows that his work is useless, yet continues
+to draw his salary. Not only is he stupid and a thief, he is a villain
+in that he prevents any other workman from trying his skill to see if
+he might not produce something worth while! The deadly jealousy of the
+incompetent!”
+
+The reply was sharp and Padre Fernandez felt himself caught. To his
+gaze Isagani appeared gigantic, invincible, convincing, and for the
+first time in his life he felt beaten by a Filipino student. He
+repented of having provoked the argument, but it was too late to turn
+back. In this quandary, finding himself confronted with such a
+formidable adversary, he sought a strong shield and laid hold of the
+government.
+
+“You impute all the faults to us, because you see only us, who are
+near,” he said in a less haughty tone. “It’s natural and doesn’t
+surprise me. A person hates the soldier or policeman who arrests him
+and not the judge who sends him to prison. You and we are both dancing
+to the same measure of music—if at the same note you lift your foot in
+unison with us, don’t blame us for it, it’s the music that is directing
+our movements. Do you think that we friars have no consciences and that
+we do not desire what is right? Do you believe that we do not think
+about you, that we do not heed our duty, that we only eat to live, and
+live to rule? Would that it were so! But we, like you, follow the
+cadence, finding ourselves between Scylla and Charybdis: either you
+reject us or the government rejects us. The government commands, and he
+who commands, commands,—and must be obeyed!”
+
+“From which it may be inferred,” remarked Isagani with a bitter smile,
+“that the government wishes our demoralization.”
+
+“Oh, no, I didn’t mean that! What I meant to say is that there are
+beliefs, there are theories, there are laws, which, dictated with the
+best intention, produce the most deplorable consequences. I’ll explain
+myself better by citing an example. To stamp out a small evil, there
+are dictated many laws that cause greater evils still: ‘corruptissima
+in republica plurimae leges,’ said Tacitus. To prevent one case of
+fraud, there are provided a million and a half preventive or
+humiliating regulations, which produce the immediate effect of
+awakening in the public the desire to elude and mock such regulations.
+To make a people criminal, there’s nothing more needed than to doubt
+its virtue. Enact a law, not only here, but even in Spain, and you will
+see how the means of evading it will be sought, and this is for the
+very reason that the legislators have overlooked the fact that the more
+an object is hidden, the more a sight of it is desired. Why are
+rascality and astuteness regarded as great qualities in the Spanish
+people, when there is no other so noble, so proud, so chivalrous as it?
+Because our legislators, with the best intentions, have doubted its
+nobility, wounded its pride, challenged its chivalry! Do you wish to
+open in Spain a road among the rocks? Then place there an imperative
+notice forbidding the passage, and the people, in order to protest
+against the order, will leave the highway to clamber over the rocks.
+The day on which some legislator in Spain forbids virtue and commands
+vice, then all will become virtuous!”
+
+The Dominican paused for a brief space, then resumed: “But you may say
+that we are getting away from the subject, so I’ll return to it. What I
+can say to you, to convince you, is that the vices from which you
+suffer ought to be ascribed by you neither to us nor to the government.
+They are due to the imperfect organization of our social system: qui
+multum probat, nihil probat, one loses himself through excessive
+caution, lacking what is necessary and having too much of what is
+superfluous.”
+
+“If you admit those defects in your social system,” replied Isagani,
+“why then do you undertake to regulate alien societies, instead of
+first devoting your attention to yourselves?”
+
+“We’re getting away from the subject, young man. The theory in
+accomplished facts must be accepted.”
+
+“So let it be! I accept it because it is an accomplished fact, but I
+will further ask: why, if your social organization is defective, do you
+not change it or at least give heed to the cry of those who are injured
+by it?”
+
+“We’re still far away. Let’s talk about what the students want from the
+friars.”
+
+“From the moment when the friars hide themselves behind the government,
+the students have to turn to it.”
+
+This statement was true and there appeared no means of ignoring it.
+
+“I’m not the government and I can’t answer for its acts. What do the
+students wish us to do for them within the limits by which we are
+confined?”
+
+“Not to oppose the emancipation of education but to favor it.”
+
+The Dominican shook his head. “Without stating my own opinion, that is
+asking us to commit suicide,” he said.
+
+“On the contrary, it is asking you for room to pass in order not to
+trample upon and crush you.”
+
+“Ahem!” coughed Padre Fernandez, stopping and remaining thoughtful.
+“Begin by asking something that does not cost so much, something that
+any one of us can grant without abatement of dignity or privilege, for
+if we can reach an understanding and dwell in peace, why this hatred,
+why this distrust?”
+
+“Then let’s get down to details.”
+
+“Yes, because if we disturb the foundation, we’ll bring down the whole
+edifice.”
+
+“Then let’s get down to details, let’s leave the region of abstract
+principles,” rejoined Isagani with a smile, “and also without stating
+my own opinion,”—the youth accented these words—“the students would
+desist from their attitude and soften certain asperities if the
+professors would try to treat them better than they have up to the
+present. That is in their hands.”
+
+“What?” demanded the Dominican. “Have the students any complaint to
+make about my conduct?”
+
+“Padre, we agreed from the start not to talk of yourself or of myself,
+we’re speaking generally. The students, besides getting no great
+benefit out of the years spent in the classes, often leave there
+remnants of their dignity, if not the whole of it.”
+
+Padre Fernandez again bit his lip. “No one forces them to study—the
+fields are uncultivated,” he observed dryly.
+
+“Yes, there is something that impels them to study,” replied Isagani in
+the same tone, looking the Dominican full in the face. “Besides the
+duty of every one to seek his own perfection, there is the desire
+innate in man to cultivate his intellect, a desire the more powerful
+here in that it is repressed. He who gives his gold and his life to the
+State has the right to require of it opporttmity better to get that
+gold and better to care for his life. Yes, Padre, there is something
+that impels them, and that something is the government itself. It is
+you yourselves who pitilessly ridicule the uncultured Indian and deny
+him his rights, on the ground that he is ignorant. You strip him and
+then scoff at his nakedness.”
+
+Padre Fernandez did not reply, but continued to pace about feverishly,
+as though very much agitated.
+
+“You say that the fields are not cultivated,” resumed Isagani in a
+changed tone, after a brief pause. “Let’s not enter upon an analysis of
+the reason for this, because we should get far away. But you, Padre
+Fernandez, you, a teacher, you, a learned man, do you wish a people of
+peons and laborers? In your opinion, is the laborer the perfect state
+at which man may arrive in his development? Or is it that you wish
+knowledge for yourself and labor for the rest?”
+
+“No, I want knowledge for him who deserves it, for him who knows how to
+use it,” was the reply. “When the students demonstrate that they love
+it, when young men of conviction appear, young men who know how to
+maintain their dignity and make it respected, then there will be
+knowledge, then there will be considerate professors! If there are now
+professors who resort to abuse, it is because there are pupils who
+submit to it.”
+
+“When there are professors, there will be students!”
+
+“Begin by reforming yourselves, you who have need of change, and we
+will follow.”
+
+“Yes,” said Isagani with a bitter laugh, “let us begin it, because the
+difficulty is on our side. Well you know what is expected of a pupil
+who stands before a professor—you yourself, with all your love of
+justice, with all your kind sentiments, have been restraining yourself
+by a great effort while I have been telling you bitter truths, you
+yourself, Padre Fernandez! What good has been secured by him among us
+who has tried to inculcate other ideas? What evils have not fallen upon
+you because you have tried to be just and perform your duty?”
+
+“Señor Isagani,” said the Dominican, extending his hand, “although it
+may seem that nothing practical has resulted from this conversation,
+yet something has been gained. I’ll talk to my brethren about what you
+have told me and I hope that something can be done. Only I fear that
+they won’t believe in your existence.”
+
+“I fear the same,” returned Isagani, shaking the Dominican’s hand. “I
+fear that my friends will not believe in your existence, as you have
+revealed yourself to me today.” [57]
+
+Considering the interview at an end, the young man took his leave.
+
+Padre Fernandez opened the door and followed him with his gaze until he
+disappeared around a corner in the corridor. For some time he listened
+to the retreating footsteps, then went back into his cell and waited
+for the youth to appear in the street.
+
+He saw him and actually heard him say to a friend who asked where he
+was going: “To the Civil Government! I’m going to see the pasquinades
+and join the others!”
+
+His startled friend stared at him as one would look at a person who is
+about to commit suicide, then moved away from him hurriedly.
+
+“Poor boy!” murmured Padre Fernandez, feeling his eyes moisten. “I
+grudge you to the Jesuits who educated you.”
+
+But Padre Fernandez was completely mistaken; the Jesuits repudiated
+Isagani [58] when that afternoon they learned that he had been
+arrested, saying that he would compromise them. “That young man has
+thrown himself away, he’s going to do us harm! Let it be understood
+that he didn’t get those ideas here.”
+
+Nor were the Jesuits wrong. No! Those ideas come only from God through
+the medium of Nature.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+TATAKUT
+
+
+With prophetic inspiration Ben-Zayb had been for some days past
+maintaining in his newspaper that education was disastrous, very
+disastrous for the Philippine Islands, and now in view of the events of
+that Friday of pasquinades, the writer crowed and chanted his triumph,
+leaving belittled and overwhelmed his adversary Horatius, who in the
+Pirotecnia had dared to ridicule him in the following manner:
+
+
+    From our contemporary, El Grito:
+
+    “Education is disastrous, very disastrous, for the Philippine
+    Islands.”
+
+    Admitted.
+
+    For some time El Grito has pretended to represent the Filipino
+    people—ergo, as Fray Ibañez would say, if he knew Latin.
+
+    But Fray Ibañez turns Mussulman when he writes, and we know how the
+    Mussulmans dealt with education. In witness whereof, as a royal
+    preacher said, the Alexandrian library!
+
+
+Now he was right, he, Ben-Zayb! He was the only one in the islands who
+thought, the only one who foresaw events!
+
+Truly, the news that seditious pasquinades had been found on the doors
+of the University not only took away the appetite from many and
+disturbed the digestion of others, but it even rendered the phlegmatic
+Chinese uneasy, so that they no longer dared to sit in their shops with
+one leg drawn up as usual, from fear of losing time in extending it in
+order to put themselves into flight. At eight o’clock in the morning,
+although the sun continued on its course and his Excellency, the
+Captain-General, did not appear at the head of his victorious cohorts,
+still the excitement had increased. The friars who were accustomed to
+frequent Quiroga’s bazaar did not put in their appearance, and this
+symptom presaged terrific cataclysms. If the sun had risen a square and
+the saints appeared only in pantaloons, Quiroga would not have been so
+greatly alarmed, for he would have taken the sun for a gaming-table and
+the sacred images for gamblers who had lost their camisas, but for the
+friars not to come, precisely when some novelties had just arrived for
+them!
+
+By means of a provincial friend of his, Quiroga forbade entrance into
+his gaming-houses to every Indian who was not an old acquaintance, as
+the future Chinese consul feared that they might get possession of the
+sums that the wretches lost there. After arranging his bazaar in such a
+way that he could close it quickly in case of need, he had a policeman
+accompany him for the short distance that separated his house from
+Simoun’s. Quiroga thought this occasion the most propitious for making
+use of the rifles and cartridges that he had in his warehouse, in the
+way the jeweler had pointed out; so that on the following days there
+would be searches made, and then—how many prisoners, how many terrified
+people would give up their savings! It was the game of the old
+carbineers, in slipping contraband cigars and tobacco-leaves under a
+house, in order to pretend a search and force the unfortunate owner to
+bribery or fines, only now the art had been perfected and, the tobacco
+monopoly abolished, resort was had to the prohibited arms.
+
+But Simoun refused to see any one and sent word to the Chinese that he
+should leave things as they were, whereupon he went to see Don Custodio
+to inquire whether he should fortify his bazaar, but neither would Don
+Custodio receive him, being at the time engaged in the study of a
+project for defense in case of a siege. He thought of Ben-Zayb as a
+source of information, but finding the writer armed to the teeth and
+using two loaded revolvers for paper-weights, took his leave in the
+shortest possible time, to shut himself up in his house and take to his
+bed under pretense of illness.
+
+At four in the afternoon the talk was no longer of simple pasquinades.
+There were whispered rumors of an understanding between the students
+and the outlaws of San Mateo, it was certain that in the pansitería
+they had conspired to surprise the city, there was talk of German ships
+outside the bay to support the movement, of a band of young men who
+under the pretext of protesting and demonstrating their Hispanism had
+gone to the Palace to place themselves at the General’s orders but had
+been arrested because it was discovered that they were armed.
+Providence had saved his Excellency, preventing him from receiving
+those precocious criminals, as he was at the time in conference with
+the Provincials, the Vice-Rector, and with Padre Irene, Padre Salvi’s
+representative. There was considerable truth in these rumors, if we
+have to believe Padre Irene, who in the afternoon went to visit Capitan
+Tiago. According to him, certain persons had advised his Excellency to
+improve the opportunity in order to inspire terror and administer a
+lasting lesson to the filibusters.
+
+“A number shot,” one had advised, “some two dozen reformers deported at
+once, in the silence of the night, would extinguish forever the flames
+of discontent.”
+
+“No,” rejoined another, who had a kind heart, “sufficient that the
+soldiers parade through the streets, a troop of cavalry, for example,
+with drawn sabers—sufficient to drag along some cannon, that’s enough!
+The people are timid and will all retire into their houses.”
+
+“No, no,” insinuated another. “This is the opportunity to get rid of
+the enemy. It’s not sufficient that they retire into their houses, they
+should be made to come out, like evil humors by means of plasters. If
+they are inclined to start riots, they should be stirred up by secret
+agitators. I am of the opinion that the troops should be resting on
+their arms and appearing careless and indifferent, so the people may be
+emboldened, and then in case of any disturbance—out on them, action!”
+
+“The end justifies the means,” remarked another. “Our end is our holy
+religion and the integrity of the fatherland. Proclaim a state of
+siege, and in case of the least disturbance, arrest all the rich and
+educated, and—clean up the country!”
+
+“If I hadn’t got there in time to counsel moderation,” added Padre
+Irene, speaking to Capitan Tiago, “it’s certain that blood would now be
+flowing through the streets. I thought of you, Capitan—The partizans of
+force couldn’t do much with the General, and they missed Simoun. Ah, if
+Simoun had not been taken ill—”
+
+With the arrest of Basilio and the search made later among his books
+and papers, Capitan Tiago had become much worse. Now Padre Irene had
+come to augment his terror with hair-raising tales. Ineffable fear
+seized upon the wretch, manifesting itself first by a light shiver,
+which was rapidly accentuated, until he was unable to speak. With his
+eyes bulging and his brow covered with sweat, he caught Padre Irene’s
+arm and tried to rise, but could not, and then, uttering two groans,
+fell heavily back upon the pillow. His eyes were wide open and he was
+slavering—but he was dead. The terrified Padre Irene fled, and, as the
+dying man had caught hold of him, in his flight he dragged the corpse
+from the bed, leaving it sprawling in the middle of the room.
+
+By night the terror had reached a climax. Several incidents had
+occurred to make the timorous believe in the presence of secret
+agitators.
+
+During a baptism some cuartos were thrown to the boys and naturally
+there was a scramble at the door of the church. It happened that at the
+time there was passing a bold soldier, who, somewhat preoccupied,
+mistook the uproar for a gathering of filibusters and hurled himself,
+sword in hand, upon the boys. He went into the church, and had he not
+become entangled in the curtains suspended from the choir he would not
+have left a single head on shoulders. It was but the matter of a moment
+for the timorous to witness this and take to flight, spreading the news
+that the revolution had begun. The few shops that had been kept open
+were now hastily closed, there being Chinese who even left bolts of
+cloth outside, and not a few women lost their slippers in their flight
+through the streets. Fortunately, there was only one person wounded and
+a few bruised, among them the soldier himself, who suffered a fall
+fighting with the curtain, which smelt to him of filibusterism. Such
+prowess gained him great renown, and a renown so pure that it is to be
+wished all fame could be acquired in like manner—mothers would then
+weep less and earth would be more populous!
+
+In a suburb the inhabitants caught two unknown individuals burying arms
+under a house, whereupon a tumult arose and the people pursued the
+strangers in order to kill them and turn their bodies over to the
+authorities, but some one pacified the excited crowd by telling them
+that it would be sufficient to hand over the corpora delictorum, which
+proved to be some old shotguns that would surely have killed the first
+person who tried to fire them.
+
+“All right,” exclaimed one braggart, “if they want us to rebel, let’s
+go ahead!” But he was cuffed and kicked into silence, the women
+pinching him as though he had been the owner of the shotguns.
+
+In Ermita the affair was more serious, even though there was less
+excitement, and that when there were shots fired. A certain cautious
+government employee, armed to the teeth, saw at nightfall an object
+near his house, and taking it for nothing less than a student, fired at
+it twice with a revolver. The object proved to be a policeman, and they
+buried him—pax Christi! Mutis!
+
+In Dulumbayan various shots also resounded, from which there resulted
+the death of a poor old deaf man, who had not heard the sentinel’s
+quién vive, and of a hog that had heard it and had not answered España!
+The old man was buried with difficulty, since there was no money to pay
+for the obsequies, but the hog was eaten.
+
+In Manila, [59] in a confectionery near the University much frequented
+by the students, the arrests were thus commented upon.
+
+“And have they arrested Tadeo?” [60] asked the proprietess.
+
+“Abá!” answered a student who lived in Parian, “he’s already shot!”
+
+“Shot! Nakú! He hasn’t paid what he owes me.”
+
+“Ay, don’t mention that or you’ll be taken for an accomplice. I’ve
+already burnt the book [61] you lent me. There might be a search and it
+would be found. Be careful!”
+
+“Did you say that Isagani is a prisoner?”
+
+“Crazy fool, too, that Isagani,” replied the indignant student. “They
+didn’t try to catch him, but he went and surrendered. Let him bust
+himself—he’ll surely be shot.”
+
+The señora shrugged her shoulders. “He doesn’t owe me anything. And
+what about Paulita?”
+
+“She won’t lack a husband. Sure, she’ll cry a little, and then marry a
+Spaniard.”
+
+The night was one of the gloomiest. In the houses the rosary was
+recited and pious women dedicated paternosters and requiems to each of
+the souls of their relatives and friends. By eight o’clock hardly a
+pedestrian could be seen—only from time to time was heard the galloping
+of a horse against whose sides a saber clanked noisily, then the
+whistles of the watchmen, and carriages that whirled along at full
+speed, as though pursued by mobs of filibusters.
+
+Yet terror did not reign everywhere. In the house of the silversmith,
+where Placido Penitente boarded, the events were commented upon and
+discussed with some freedom.
+
+“I don’t believe in the pasquinades,” declared a workman, lank and
+withered from operating the blowpipe. “To me it looks like Padre
+Salvi’s doings.”
+
+“Ahem, ahem!” coughed the silversmith, a very prudent man, who did not
+dare to stop the conversation from fear that he would be considered a
+coward. The good man had to content himself with coughing, winking to
+his helper, and gazing toward the street, as if to say, “They may be
+watching us!”
+
+“On account of the operetta,” added another workman.
+
+“Aha!” exclaimed one who had a foolish face, “I told you so!”
+
+“Ahem!” rejoined a clerk, in a tone of compassion, “the affair of the
+pasquinades is true, Chichoy, and I can give you the explanation.”
+
+Then he added mysteriously, “It’s a trick of the Chinaman Quiroga’s!”
+
+“Ahem, ahem!” again coughed the silversmith, shifting his quid of buyo
+from one cheek to the other.
+
+“Believe me, Chichoy, of Quiroga the Chinaman! I heard it in the
+office.”
+
+“Nakú, it’s certain then,” exclaimed the simpleton, believing it at
+once.
+
+“Quiroga,” explained the clerk, “has a hundred thousand pesos in
+Mexican silver out in the bay. How is he to get it in? Very easily. Fix
+up the pasquinades, availing himself of the question of the students,
+and, while every-body is excited, grease the officials’ palms, and in
+the cases come!”
+
+“Just it! Just it!” cried the credulous fool, striking the table with
+his fist. “Just it! That’s why Quiroga did it! That’s why—” But he had
+to relapse into silence as he really did not know what to say about
+Quiroga.
+
+“And we must pay the damages?” asked the indignant Chichoy.
+
+“Ahem, ahem, a-h-hem!” coughed the silversmith, hearing steps in the
+street.
+
+The footsteps approached and all in the shop fell silent.
+
+“St. Pascual Bailon is a great saint,” declared the silversmith
+hypocritically, in a loud voice, at the same time winking to the
+others. “St. Pascual Bailon—”
+
+At that moment there appeared the face of Placido Penitente, who was
+accompanied by the pyrotechnician that we saw receiving orders from
+Simoun. The newcomers were surrounded and importuned for news.
+
+“I haven’t been able to talk with the prisoners,” explained Placido.
+“There are some thirty of them.”
+
+“Be on your guard,” cautioned the pyrotechnician, exchanging a knowing
+look with Placido. “They say that to-night there’s going to be a
+massacre.”
+
+“Aha! Thunder!” exclaimed Chichoy, looking about for a weapon. Seeing
+none, he caught up his blowpipe.
+
+The silversmith sat down, trembling in every limb. The credulous
+simpleton already saw himself beheaded and wept in anticipation over
+the fate of his family.
+
+“No,” contradicted the clerk, “there’s not going to be any massacre.
+The adviser of”—he made a mysterious gesture—“is fortunately sick.”
+
+“Simoun!”
+
+“Ahem, ahem, a-h-hem!”
+
+Placido and the pyrotechnician exchanged another look.
+
+“If he hadn’t got sick—”
+
+“It would look like a revolution,” added the pyrotechnician
+negligently, as he lighted a cigarette in the lamp chimney. “And what
+should we do then?”
+
+“Then we’d start a real one, now that they’re going to massacre us
+anyhow—”
+
+The violent fit of coughing that seized the silversmith prevented the
+rest of this speech from being heard, but Chichoy must have been saying
+terrible things, to judge from his murderous gestures with the blowpipe
+and the face of a Japanese tragedian that he put on.
+
+“Rather say that he’s playing off sick because he’s afraid to go out.
+As may be seen—”
+
+The silversmith was attacked by another fit of coughing so severe that
+he finally asked all to retire.
+
+“Nevertheless, get ready,” warned the pyrotechnician. “If they want to
+force us to kill or be killed—”
+
+Another fit of coughing on the part of the poor silversmith prevented
+further conversation, so the workmen and apprentices retired to their
+homes, carrying with them hammers and saws, and other implements, more
+or less cutting, more or less bruising, disposed to sell their lives
+dearly. Placido and the pyrotechnician went out again.
+
+“Prudence, prudence!” cautioned the silversmith in a tearful voice.
+
+“You’ll take care of my widow and orphans!” begged the credulous
+simpleton in a still more tearful voice, for he already saw himself
+riddled with bullets and buried.
+
+That night the guards at the city gates were replaced with Peninsular
+artillerymen, and on the following morning as the sun rose, Ben-Zayb,
+who had ventured to take a morning stroll to examine the condition of
+the fortifications, found on the glacis near the Luneta the corpse of a
+native girl, half-naked and abandoned. Ben-Zayb was horrified, but
+after touching it with his cane and gazing toward the gates proceeded
+on his way, musing over a sentimental tale he might base upon the
+incident.
+
+However, no allusion to it appeared in the newspapers on the following
+days, engrossed as they were with the falls and slippings caused by
+banana-peels. In the dearth of news Ben-Zayb had to comment at length
+on a cyclone that had destroyed in America whole towns, causing the
+death of more than two thousand persons. Among other beautiful things
+he said:
+
+
+   “The sentiment of charity, MORE PREVALENT IN CATHOLIC COUNTRIES
+    THAN IN OTHERS, and the thought of Him who, influenced by that same
+    feeling, sacrificed himself for humanity, moves (sic) us to
+    compassion over the misfortunes of our kind and to render thanks
+    that in this country, so scourged by cyclones, there are not
+    enacted scenes so desolating as that which the inhabitants of the
+    United States mus have witnessed!”
+
+
+Horatius did not miss the opportunity, and, also without mentioning the
+dead, or the murdered native girl, or the assaults, answered him in his
+Pirotecnia:
+
+
+   “After such great charity and such great humanity, Fray Ibañez—I
+    mean, Ben-Zayb—brings himself to pray for the Philippines.
+
+    But he is understood.
+
+    Because he is not Catholic, and the sentiment of charity is most
+    prevalent,” etc. [62]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+EXIT CAPITAN TIAGO
+
+                                                  Talis vita, finis ita
+
+
+Capitan Tiago had a good end—that is, a quite exceptional funeral. True
+it is that the curate of the parish had ventured the observation to
+Padre Irene that Capitan Tiago had died without confession, but the
+good priest, smiling sardonically, had rubbed the tip of his nose and
+answered:
+
+“Why say that to me? If we had to deny the obsequies to all who die
+without confession, we should forget the De profundis! These
+restrictions, as you well know, are enforced when the impenitent is
+also insolvent. But Capitan Tiago—out on you! You’ve buried infidel
+Chinamen, and with a requiem mass!”
+
+Capitan Tiago had named Padre Irene as his executor and willed his
+property in part to St. Clara, part to the Pope, to the Archbishop, the
+religious corporations, leaving twenty pesos for the matriculation of
+poor students. This last clause had been dictated at the suggestion of
+Padre Irene, in his capacity as protector of studious youths. Capitan
+Tiago had annulled a legacy of twenty-five pesos that he had left to
+Basilio, in view of the ungrateful conduct of the boy during the last
+few days, but Padre Irene had restored it and announced that he would
+take it upon his own purse and conscience.
+
+In the dead man’s house, where were assembled on the following day many
+old friends and acquaintances, considerable comment was indulged in
+over a miracle. It was reported that, at the very moment when he was
+dying, the soul of Capitan Tiago had appeared to the nuns surrounded by
+a brilliant light. God had saved him, thanks to the pious legacies, and
+to the numerous masses he had paid for. The story was commented upon,
+it was recounted vividly, it took on particulars, and was doubted by no
+one. The appearance of Capitan Tiago was minutely described—of course
+the frock coat, the cheek bulged out by the quid of buyo, without
+omitting the game-cock and the opium-pipe. The senior sacristan, who
+was present, gravely affirmed these facts with his head and reflected
+that, after death, he would appear with his cup of white tajú, for
+without that refreshing breakfast he could not comprehend happiness
+either on earth or in heaven.
+
+On this subject, because of their inability to discuss the events of
+the preceding day and because there were gamblers present, many strange
+speculations were developed. They made conjectures as to whether
+Capitan Tiago would invite St. Peter to a soltada, whether they would
+place bets, whether the game-cocks were immortal, whether invulnerable,
+and in this case who would be the referee, who would win, and so on:
+discussions quite to the taste of those who found sciences, theories,
+and systems, based on a text which they esteem infallible, revealed or
+dogmatic. Moreover, there were cited passages from novenas, books of
+miracles, sayings of the curates, descriptions of heaven, and other
+embroidery. Don Primitivo, the philosopher, was in his glory quoting
+opinions of the theologians.
+
+“Because no one can lose,” he stated with great authority. “To lose
+would cause hard feelings and in heaven there can’t be any hard
+feelings.”
+
+“But some one has to win,” rejoined the gambler Aristorenas. “The fun
+lies in winning!”
+
+“Well, both win, that’s easy!”
+
+This idea of both winning could not be admitted by Aristorenas, for he
+had passed his life in the cockpit and had always seen one cock lose
+and the other win—at best, there was a tie. Vainly Don Primitivo argued
+in Latin. Aristorenas shook his head, and that too when Don Primitivo’s
+Latin was easy to understand, for he talked of an gallus talisainus,
+acuto tari armatus, an gallus beati Petri bulikus sasabung̃us sit, [63]
+and so on, until at length he decided to resort to the argument which
+many use to convince and silence their opponents.
+
+“You’re going to be damned, friend Martin, you’re falling into heresy!
+Cave ne cadas! I’m not going to play monte with you any more, and we’ll
+not set up a bank together. You deny the omnipotence of God, peccatum
+mortale! You deny the existence of the Holy Trinity— three are one and
+one is three! Take care! You indirectly deny that two natures, two
+understandings, and two wills can have only one memory! Be careful!
+Quicumque non crederit anathema sit!”
+
+Martin Aristorenas shrank away pale and trembling, while Quiroga, who
+had listened with great attention to the argument, with marked
+deference offered the philosopher a magnificent cigar, at the same time
+asking in his caressing voice: “Surely, one can make a contract for a
+cockpit with Kilisto, [64] ha? When I die, I’ll be the contractor, ha?”
+
+Among the others, they talked more of the deceased; at least they
+discussed what kind of clothing to put on him. Capitan Tinong proposed
+a Franciscan habit—and fortunately, he had one, old, threadbare, and
+patched, a precious object which, according to the friar who gave it to
+him as alms in exchange for thirty-six pesos, would preserve the corpse
+from the flames of hell and which reckoned in its support various pious
+anecdotes taken from the books distributed by the curates. Although he
+held this relic in great esteem, Capitan Tinong was disposed to part
+with it for the sake of his intimate friend, whom he had not been able
+to visit during his illness. But a tailor objected, with good reason,
+that since the nuns had seen Capitan Tiago ascending to heaven in a
+frock coat, in a frock coat he should be dressed here on earth, nor was
+there any necessity for preservatives and fire-proof garments. The
+deceased had attended balls and fiestas in a frock coat, and nothing
+else would be expected of him in the skies—and, wonderful to relate,
+the tailor accidentally happened to have one ready, which he would part
+with for thirty-two pesos, four cheaper than the Franciscan habit,
+because he didn’t want to make any profit on Capitan Tiago, who had
+been his customer in life and would now be his patron in heaven. But
+Padre Irene, trustee and executor, rejected both proposals and ordered
+that the Capitan be dressed in one of his old suits of clothes,
+remarking with holy unction that God paid no attention to clothing.
+
+The obsequies were, therefore, of the very first class. There were
+responsories in the house, and in the street three friars officiated,
+as though one were not sufficient for such a great soul. All the rites
+and ceremonies possible were performed, and it is reported that there
+were even extras, as in the benefits for actors. It was indeed a
+delight: loads of incense were burned, there were plenty of Latin
+chants, large quantities of holy water were expended, and Padre Irene,
+out of regard for his old friend, sang the Dies Irae in a falsetto
+voice from the choir, while the neighbors suffered real headaches from
+so much knell-ringing.
+
+Doña Patrocinio, the ancient rival of Capitan Tiago in religiosity,
+actually wanted to die on the next day, so that she might order even
+more sumptuous obsequies. The pious old lady could not bear the thought
+that he, whom she had long considered vanquished forever, should in
+dying come forward again with so much pomp. Yes, she desired to die,
+and it seemed that she could hear the exclamations of the people at the
+funeral: “This indeed is what you call a funeral! This indeed is to
+know how to die, Doña Patrocinio!”
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+JULI
+
+
+The death of Capitan Tiago and Basilio’s imprisonment were soon
+reported in the province, and to the honor of the simple inhabitants of
+San Diego, let it be recorded that the latter was the incident more
+regretted and almost the only one discussed. As was to be expected, the
+report took on different forms, sad and startling details were given,
+what could not be understood was explained, the gaps being filled by
+conjectures, which soon passed for accomplished facts, and the phantoms
+thus created terrified their own creators.
+
+In the town of Tiani it was reported that at least, at the very least,
+the young man was going to be deported and would very probably be
+murdered on the journey. The timorous and pessimistic were not
+satisfied with this but even talked about executions and
+courts-martial—January was a fatal month; in January the Cavite affair
+had occurred, and they [65] even though curates, had been garroted, so
+a poor Basilio without protectors or friends—
+
+“I told him so!” sighed the Justice of the Peace, as if he had at some
+time given advice to Basilio. “I told him so.”
+
+“It was to be expected,” commented Sister Penchang. “He would go into
+the church and when he saw that the holy water was somewhat dirty he
+wouldn’t cross himself with it. He talked about germs and disease, abá,
+it’s the chastisement of God! He deserved it, and he got it! As though
+the holy water could transmit diseases! Quite the contrary, abá!”
+
+She then related how she had cured herself of indigestion by moistening
+her stomach with holy water, at the same time reciting the Sanctus
+Deus, and she recommended the remedy to those present when they should
+suffer from dysentery, or an epidemic occurred, only that then they
+must pray in Spanish:
+
+
+        Santo Diós,
+        Santo fuerte,
+        Santo inmortal,
+        ¡Libranos, Señor, de la peste
+        Y de todo mal! [66]
+
+
+“It’s an infallible remedy, but you must apply the holy water to the
+part affected,” she concluded.
+
+But there were many persons who did not believe in these things, nor
+did they attribute Basilio’s imprisonment to the chastisement of God.
+Nor did they take any stock in insurrections and pasquinades, knowing
+the prudent and ultra-pacific character of the boy, but preferred to
+ascribe it to revenge on the part of the friars, because of his having
+rescued from servitude Juli, the daughter of a tulisan who was the
+mortal enemy of a certain powerful corporation. As they had quite a
+poor idea of the morality of that same corporation and could recall
+cases of petty revenge, their conjecture was believed to have more
+probability and justification.
+
+“What a good thing I did when I drove her from my house!” said Sister
+Penchang. “I don’t want to have any trouble with the friars, so I urged
+her to find the money.”
+
+The truth was, however, that she regretted Juli’s liberty, for Juli
+prayed and fasted for her, and if she had stayed a longer time, would
+also have done penance. Why, if the curates pray for us and Christ died
+for our sins, couldn’t Juli do the same for Sister Penchang?
+
+When the news reached the hut where the poor Juli and her grandfather
+lived, the girl had to have it repeated to her. She stared at Sister
+Bali, who was telling it, as though without comprehension, without
+ability to collect her thoughts. Her ears buzzed, she felt a sinking at
+the heart and had a vague presentiment that this event would have a
+disastrous influence on her own future. Yet she tried to seize upon a
+ray of hope, she smiled, thinking that Sister Bali was joking with her,
+a rather strong joke, to be sure, but she forgave her beforehand if she
+would acknowledge that it was such. But Sister Bali made a cross with
+one of her thumbs and a forefinger, and kissed it, to prove that she
+was telling the truth. Then the smile faded forever from the girl’s
+lips, she turned pale, frightfully pale, she felt her strength leave
+her and for the first time in her life she lost consciousness, falling
+into a swoon.
+
+When by dint of blows, pinches, dashes of water, crosses, and the
+application of sacred palms, the girl recovered and remembered the
+situation, silent tears sprang from her eyes, drop by drop, without
+sobs, without laments, without complaints! She thought about Basilio,
+who had had no other protector than Capitan Tiago, and who now, with
+the Capitan dead, was left completely unprotected and in prison. In the
+Philippines it is a well-known fact that patrons are needed for
+everything, from the time one is christened until one dies, in order to
+get justice, to secure a passport, or to develop an industry. As it was
+said that his imprisonment was due to revenge on account of herself and
+her father, the girl’s sorrow turned to desperation. Now it was her
+duty to liberate him, as he had done in rescuing her from servitude,
+and the inner voice which suggested the idea offered to her imagination
+a horrible means.
+
+“Padre Camorra, the curate,” whispered the voice. Juli gnawed at her
+lips and became lost in gloomy meditation.
+
+As a result of her father’s crime, her grandfather had been arrested in
+the hope that by such means the son could be made to appear. The only
+one who could get him his liberty was Padre Camorra, and Padre Camorra
+had shown himself to be poorly satisfied with her words of gratitude,
+having with his usual frankness asked for some sacrifices—since which
+time Juli had tried to avoid meeting him. But the curate made her kiss
+his hand, he twitched her nose and patted her cheeks, he joked with
+her, winking and laughing, and laughing he pinched her. Juli was also
+the cause of the beating the good curate had administered to some young
+men who were going about the village serenading the girls. Malicious
+ones, seeing her pass sad and dejected, would remark so that she might
+hear: “If she only wished it, Cabesang Tales would be pardoned.”
+
+Juli reached her home, gloomy and with wandering looks. She had changed
+greatly, having lost her merriment, and no one ever saw her smile
+again. She scarcely spoke and seemed to be afraid to look at her own
+face. One day she was seen in the town with a big spot of soot on her
+forehead, she who used to go so trim and neat. Once she asked Sister
+Bali if the people who committed suicide went to hell.
+
+“Surely!” replied that woman, and proceeded to describe the place as
+though she had been there.
+
+Upon Basilio’s imprisonment, the simple and grateful relatives had
+planned to make all kinds of sacrifices to save the young man, but as
+they could collect among themselves no more than thirty pesos, Sister
+Bali, as usual, thought of a better plan.
+
+“What we must do is to get some advice from the town clerk,” she said.
+To these poor people, the town clerk was what the Delphic oracle was to
+the ancient Greeks.
+
+“By giving him a real and a cigar,” she continued, “he’ll tell you all
+the laws so that your head bursts listening to him. If you have a peso,
+he’ll save you, even though you may be at the foot of the scaffold.
+When my friend Simon was put in jail and flogged for not being able to
+give evidence about a robbery perpetrated near his house, abá, for two
+reales and a half and a string of garlics, the town clerk got him out.
+And I saw Simon myself when he could scarcely walk and he had to stay
+in bed at least a month. Ay, his flesh rotted as a result and he died!”
+
+Sister Bali’s advice was accepted and she herself volunteered to
+interview the town clerk. Juli gave her four reales and added some
+strips of jerked venison her grand-father had got, for Tandang Selo had
+again devoted himself to hunting.
+
+But the town clerk could do nothing—the prisoner was in Manila, and his
+power did not extend that far. “If at least he were at the capital,
+then—” he ventured, to make a show of his authority, which he knew very
+well did not extend beyond the boundaries of Tiani, but he had to
+maintain his prestige and keep the jerked venison. “But I can give you
+a good piece of advice, and it is that you go with Juli to see the
+Justice of the Peace. But it’s very necessary that Juli go.”
+
+The Justice of the Peace was a very rough fellow, but if he should see
+Juli he might conduct himself less rudely—this is wherein lay the
+wisdom of the advice.
+
+With great gravity the honorable Justice listened to Sister Bali, who
+did the talking, but not without staring from time to time at the girl,
+who hung her head with shame. People would say that she was greatly
+interested in Basilio, people who did not remember her debt of
+gratitude, nor that his imprisonment, according to report, was on her
+account.
+
+After belching three or four times, for his Honor had that ugly habit,
+he said that the only person who could save Basilio was Padre Camorra,
+in case he should care to do so. Here he stared meaningly at the girl
+and advised her to deal with the curate in person.
+
+“You know what influence he has,—he got your grand-father out of jail.
+A report from him is enough to deport a new-born babe or save from
+death a man with the noose about his neck.”
+
+Juli said nothing, but Sister Bali took this advice as though she had
+read it in a novena, and was ready to accompany the girl to the
+convento. It so happened that she was just going there to get as alms a
+scapulary in exchange for four full reales.
+
+But Juli shook her head and was unwilling to go to the convento. Sister
+Bali thought she could guess the reason—Padre Camorra was reputed to be
+very fond of the women and was very frolicsome—so she tried to reassure
+her. “You’ve nothing to fear if I go with you. Haven’t you read in the
+booklet Tandang Basio, given you by the curate, that the girls should
+go to the convento, even without the knowledge of their elders, to
+relate what is going on at home? Abá, that book is printed with the
+permission of the Archbishop!”
+
+Juli became impatient and wished to cut short such talk, so she begged
+the pious woman to go if she wished, but his Honor observed with a
+belch that the supplications of a youthful face were more moving than
+those of an old one, the sky poured its dew over the fresh flowers in
+greater abundance than over the withered ones. The metaphor was
+fiendishly beautiful.
+
+Juli did not reply and the two left the house. In the street the girl
+firmly refused to go to the convento and they returned to their
+village. Sister Bali, who felt offended at this lack of confidence in
+herself, on the way home relieved her feelings by administering a long
+preachment to the girl.
+
+The truth was that the girl could not take that step without damning
+herself in her own eyes, besides being cursed of men and cursed of God!
+It had been intimated to her several times, whether with reason or not,
+that if she would make that sacrifice her father would be pardoned, and
+yet she had refused, in spite of the cries of her conscience reminding
+her of her filial duty. Now must she make it for Basilio, her
+sweetheart? That would be to fall to the sound of mockery and laughter
+from all creation. Basilio himself would despise her! No, never! She
+would first hang herself or leap from some precipice. At any rate, she
+was already damned for being a wicked daughter.
+
+The poor girl had besides to endure all the reproaches of her
+relatives, who, knowing nothing of what had passed between her and
+Padre Camovra, laughed at her fears. Would Padre Camorra fix his
+attention upon a country girl when there were so many others in the
+town? Hero the good women cited names of unmarried girls, rich and
+beautiful, who had been more or less unfortunate. Meanwhile, if they
+should shoot Basilio?
+
+Juli covered her ears and stared wildly about, as if seeking a voice
+that might plead for her, but she saw only her grandfather, who was
+dumb and had his gaze fixed on his hunting-spear.
+
+That night she scarcely slept at all. Dreams and nightmares, some
+funereal, some bloody, danced before her sight and woke her often,
+bathed in cold perspiration. She fancied that she heard shots, she
+imagined that she saw her father, that father who had done so much for
+her, fighting in the forests, hunted like a wild beast because she had
+refused to save him. The figure of her father was transformed and she
+recognized Basilio, dying, with looks of reproach at her. The wretched
+girl arose, prayed, wept, called upon her mother, upon death, and there
+was even a moment when, overcome with terror, if it had not been
+night-time, she would have run straight to the convento, let happen
+what would.
+
+With the coming of day the sad presentiments and the terrors of
+darkness were partly dissipated. The light inspired hopes in her. But
+the news of the afternoon was terrible, for there was talk of persons
+shot, so the next night was for the girl frightful. In her desperation
+she decided to give herself up as soon as day dawned and then kill
+herself afterwards—anything, rather than enditre such tortures! But the
+dawn brought new hope and she would not go to church or even leave the
+house. She was afraid she would yield.
+
+So passed several days in praying and cursing, in calling upon God and
+wishing for death. The day gave her a slight respite and she trusted in
+some miracle. The reports that came from Manila, although they reached
+there magnified, said that of the prisoners some had secured their
+liberty, thanks to patrons and influence. Some one had to be
+sacrificed—who would it be? Juli shuddered and returned home biting her
+finger-nails. Then came the night with its terrors, which took on
+double proportions and seemed to be converted into realities. Juli
+feared to fall asleep, for her slumbers were a continuous nightmare.
+Looks of reproach would flash across her eyelids just as soon as they
+were closed, complaints and laments pierced her ears. She saw her
+father wandering about hungry, without rest or repose; she saw Basilio
+dying in the road, pierced by two bullets, just as she had seen the
+corpse of that neighbor who had been killed while in the charge of the
+Civil Guard. She saw the bonds that cut into the flesh, she saw the
+blood pouring from the mouth, she heard Basilio calling to her, “Save
+me! Save me! You alone can save me!” Then a burst of laughter would
+resound and she would turn her eyes to see her father gazing at her
+with eyes full of reproach. Juli would wake up, sit up on her petate,
+and draw her hands across her forehead to arrange her hair—cold sweat,
+like the sweat of death, moistened it!
+
+“Mother, mother!” she sobbed.
+
+Meanwhile, they who were so carelessly disposing of people’s fates, he
+who commanded the legal murders, he who violated justice and made use
+of the law to maintain himself by force, slept in peace.
+
+At last a traveler arrived from Manila and reported that all the
+prisoners had been set free, all except Basilio, who had no protector.
+It was reported in Manila, added the traveler, that the young man would
+be deported to the Carolines, having been forced to sign a petition
+beforehand, in which he declared that he asked it voluntarily. [67] The
+traveler had seen the very steamer that was going to take him away.
+
+This report put an end to all the girl’s hesitation. Besides, her mind
+was already quite weak from so many nights of watching and horrible
+dreams. Pale and with unsteady eyes, she sought out Sister Bali and, in
+a voice that was cause for alarm, told her that she was ready, asking
+her to accompany her. Sister Bali thereupon rejoiced and tried to
+soothe her, but Juli paid no attention to her, apparently intent only
+upon hurrying to the convento. She had decked herself out in her finest
+clothes, and even pretended to be quite gay, talking a great deal,
+although in a rather incoherent way.
+
+So they set out. Juli went ahead, becoming impatient that her companion
+lagged behind. But as they neared the town, her nervous energy began
+gradually to abate, she fell silent and wavered in her resolution,
+lessened her pace and soon dropped behind, so that Sister Bali had to
+encourage her.
+
+“We’ll get there late,” she remonstrated.
+
+Juli now followed, pale, with downcast eyes, which she was afraid to
+raise. She felt that the whole world was staring at her and pointing
+its finger at her. A vile name whistled in her ears, but still she
+disregarded it and continued on her way. Nevertheless, when they came
+in sight of the convento, she stopped and began to tremble.
+
+“Let’s go home, let’s go home,” she begged, holding her companion back.
+
+Sister Bali had to take her by the arm and half drag her along,
+reassuring her and telling her about the books of the friars. She would
+not desert her, so there was nothing to fear. Padre Camorra had other
+things in mind—Juli was only a poor country girl.
+
+But upon arriving at the door of the convento, Juli firmly refused to
+go in, catching hold of the wall.
+
+“No, no,” she pleaded in terror. “No, no, no! Have pity!”
+
+“But what a fool—”
+
+Sister Bali pushed her gently along, Juli, pallid and with wild
+features, offering resistance. The expression of her face said that she
+saw death before her.
+
+“All right, let’s go back, if you don’t want to!” at length the good
+woman exclaimed in irritation, as she did not believe there was any
+real danger. Padre Camorra, in spite of all his reputation, would dare
+do nothing before her.
+
+“Let them carry poor Basilio into exile, let them shoot him on the way,
+saying that he tried to escape,” she added. “When he’s dead, then
+remorse will come. But as for myself, I owe him no favors, so he can’t
+reproach me!”
+
+That was the decisive stroke. In the face of that reproach, with wrath
+and desperation mingled, like one who rushes to suicide, Juli closed
+her eyes in order not to see the abyss into which she was hurling
+herself and resolutely entered the convento. A sigh that sounded like
+the rattle of death escaped from her lips. Sister Bali followed,
+telling her how to act.
+
+That night comments were mysteriously whispered about certain events
+which had occurred that afternoon. A girl had leaped from a window of
+the convento, falling upon some stones and killing herself. Almost at
+the same time another woman had rushed out of the convento to run
+through the streets shouting and screaming like a lunatic. The prudent
+townsfolk dared not utter any names and many mothers pinched their
+daughters for letting slip expressions that might compromise them.
+
+Later, very much later, at twilight, an old man came from a village and
+stood calling at the door of the convento, which was closed and guarded
+by sacristans. The old man beat the door with his fists and with his
+head, while he littered cries stifled and inarticulate, like those of a
+dumb person, until he was at length driven away by blows and shoves.
+Then he made his way to the gobernadorcillo’s house, but was told that
+the gobernadorcillo was not there, he was at the convento; he went to
+the Justice of the Peace, but neither was the Justice of the Peace at
+home—he had been summoned to the convento; he went to the
+teniente-mayor, but he too was at the convento; he directed his steps
+to the barracks, but the lieutenant of the Civil Guard was at the
+convento. The old man then returned to his village, weeping like a
+child. His wails were heard in the middle of the night, causing men to
+bite their lips and women to clasp their hands, while the dogs slunk
+fearfully back into the houses with their tails between their legs.
+
+“Ah, God, God!” said a poor woman, lean from fasting, “in Thy presence
+there is no rich, no poor, no white, no black—Thou wilt grant us
+justice!”
+
+“Yes,” rejoined her husband, “just so that God they preach is not a
+pure invention, a fraud! They themselves are the first not to believe
+in Him.”
+
+At eight o’clock in the evening it was rumored that more than seven
+friars, proceeding from neighboring towns, were assembled in the
+convento to hold a conference. On the following day, Tandang Selo
+disappeared forever from the village, carrying with him his
+hunting-spear.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+THE HIGH OFFICIAL
+
+                       L’Espagne et sa, vertu, l’Espagne et sa grandeur
+                       Tout s’en va!—Victor Hugo
+
+
+The newspapers of Manila were so engrossed in accounts of a notorious
+murder committed in Europe, in panegyrics and puffs for various
+preachers in the city, in the constantly increasing success of the
+French operetta, that they could scarcely devote space to the crimes
+perpetrated in the provinces by a band of tulisanes headed by a fierce
+and terrible leader who was called Matanglawin. [68] Only when the
+object of the attack was a convento or a Spaniard there then appeared
+long articles giving frightful details and asking for martial law,
+energetic measures, and so on. So it was that they could take no notice
+of what had occurred in the town of Tiani, nor was there the slightest
+hint or allusion to it. In private circles something was whispered, but
+so confused, so vague, and so little consistent, that not even the name
+of the victim was known, while those who showed the greatest interest
+forgot it quickly, trusting that the affair had been settled in some
+way with the wronged family. The only one who knew anything certain was
+Padre Camorra, who had to leave the town, to be transferred to another
+or to remain for some time in the convento in Manila.
+
+“Poor Padre Camorra!” exclaimed Ben-Zayb in a fit of generosity. “He
+was so jolly and had such a good heart!”
+
+It was true that the students had recovered their liberty, thanks to
+the exertions of their relatives, who did not hesitate at expense,
+gifts, or any sacrifice whatsoever. The first to see himself free, as
+was to be expected, was Makaraig, and the last Isagani, because Padre
+Florentine did not reach Manila until a week after the events. So many
+acts of clemency secured for the General the title of clement and
+merciful, which Ben-Zayb hastened to add to his long list of
+adjectives.
+
+The only one who did not obtain his liberty was Basilio, since he was
+also accused of having in his possession prohibited books. We don’t
+know whether this referred to his text-book on legal medicine or to the
+pamphlets that were found, dealing with the Philippines, or both
+together—the fact is that it was said that prohibited literature was
+being secretly sold, and upon the unfortunate boy fell all the weight
+of the rod of justice.
+
+It was reported that his Excellency had been thus advised: “It’s
+necessary that there be some one, so that the prestige of authority may
+be sustained and that it may not be said that we made a great fuss over
+nothing. Authority before everything. It’s necessary that some one be
+made an example of. Let there be just one, one who, according to Padre
+Irene, was the servant of Capitan Tiago—there’ll be no one to enter a
+complaint—”
+
+“Servant and student?” asked his Excellency. “That fellow, then! Let it
+be he!”
+
+“Your Excellency will pardon me,” observed the high official, who
+happened to be present, “but I’ve been told that this boy is a medical
+student and his teachers speak well of him. If he remains a prisoner
+he’ll lose a year, and as this year he finishes—”
+
+The high official’s interference in behalf of Basilio, instead of
+helping, harmed him. For some time there had been between this official
+and his Excellency strained relations and bad feelings, augmented by
+frequent clashes.
+
+“Yes? So much the greater reason that he should be kept prisoner; a
+year longer in his studies, instead of injuring him, will do good, not
+only to himself but to all who afterwards fall into his hands. One
+doesn’t become a bad physician by extensive practise. So much the more
+reason that he should remain! Soon the filibustering reformers will say
+that we are not looking out for the country!” concluded his Excellency
+with a sarcastic laugh.
+
+The high official realized that he had made a false move and took
+Basilio’s case to heart. “But it seems to me that this young man is the
+most innocent of all,” he rejoined rather timidly.
+
+“Books have been seized in his possession,” observed the secretary.
+
+“Yes, works on medicine and pamphlets written by Peninsulars, with the
+leaves uncut, and besides, what does that signify? Moreover, this young
+man was not present at the banquet in the pansitería, he hasn’t mixed
+up in anything. As I’ve said, he’s the most innocent—”
+
+“So much the better!” exclaimed his Excellency jocosely. “In that way
+the punishment will prove more salutary and exemplary, since it
+inspires greater terror. To govern is to act in this way, my dear sir,
+as it is often expedient to sacrifice the welfare of one to the welfare
+of many. But I’m doing more—from the welfare of one will result the
+welfare of all, the principle of endangered authority is preserved,
+prestige is respected and maintained. By this act of mine I’m
+correcting my own and other people’s faults.”
+
+The high official restrained himself with an effort and, disregarding
+the allusion, decided to take another tack. “But doesn’t your
+Excellency fear the—responsibility?”
+
+“What have I to fear?” rejoined the General impatiently. “Haven’t I
+discretionary powers? Can’t I do what I please for the better
+government of these islands? What have I to fear? Can some menial
+perhaps arraign me before the tribunals and exact from me
+responsibility? Even though he had the means, he would have to consult
+the Ministry first, and the Minister—”
+
+He waved his hand and burst out into laughter.
+
+“The Minister who appointed me, the devil knows where he is, and he
+will feel honored in being able to welcome me when I return. The
+present one, I don’t even think of him, and the devil take him too! The
+one that relieves him will find himself in so many difficulties with
+his new duties that he won’t be able to fool with trifles. I, my dear
+sir, have nothing over me but my conscience, I act according to my
+conscience, and my conscience is satisfied, so I don’t care a straw for
+the opinions of this one and that. My conscience, my dear sir, my
+conscience!”
+
+“Yes, General, but the country—”
+
+“Tut, tut, tut, tut! The country—what have I to do Avith the country?
+Have I perhaps contracted any obligations to it? Do I owe my office to
+it? Was it the country that elected me?”
+
+A brief pause ensued, during which the high official stood with bowed
+head. Then, as if reaching a decision, he raised it to stare fixedly at
+the General. Pale and trembling, he said with repressed energy: “That
+doesn’t matter, General, that doesn’t matter at all! Your Excellency
+has not been chosen by the Filipino people, but by Spain, all the more
+reason why you should treat the Filipinos well so that they may not be
+able to reproach Spain. The greater reason, General, the greater
+reason! Your Excellency, by coming here, has contracted the obligation
+to govern justly, to seek the welfare—”
+
+“Am I not doing it?” interrupted his Excellency in exasperation, taking
+a step forward. “Haven’t I told you that I am getting from the good of
+one the good of all? Are you now going to give me lessons? If you don’t
+understand my actions, how am I to blame? Do I compel you to share my
+responsibility?”
+
+“Certainly not,” replied the high official, drawing himself up proudly.
+“Your Excellency does not compel me, your Excellency cannot compel me,
+me, to share your responsibility. I understand mine in quite another
+way, and because I have it, I’m going to speak—I’ve held my peace a
+long time. Oh, your Excellency needn’t make those gestures, because the
+fact that I’ve come here in this or that capacity doesn’t mean that I
+have given up my rights, that I have been reduced to the part of a
+slave, without voice or dignity.
+
+“I don’t want Spain to lose this beautiful empire, these eight millions
+of patient and submissive subjects, who live on hopes and delusions,
+but neither do I wish to soil my hands in their barbarous exploitation.
+I don’t wish it ever to be said that, the slave-trade abolished, Spain
+has continued to cloak it with her banner and perfect it under a wealth
+of specious institutions. No, to be great Spain does not have to be a
+tyrant, Spain is sufficient unto herself, Spain was greater when she
+had only her own territory, wrested from the clutches of the Moor. I
+too am a Spaniard, but before being a Spaniard I am a man, and before
+Spain and above Spain is her honor, the lofty principles of morality,
+the eternal principles of immutable justice! Ah, you are surprised that
+I think thus, because you have no idea of the grandeur of the Spanish
+name, no, you haven’t any idea of it, you identify it with persons and
+interests. To you the Spaniard may be a pirate, he may be a murderer, a
+hypocrite, a cheat, anything, just so he keep what he has—but to me the
+Spaniard should lose everything, empire, power, wealth, everything,
+before his honor! Ah, my dear sir, we protest when we read that might
+is placed before right, yet we applaud when in practise we see might
+play the hypocrite in not only perverting right but even in using it as
+a tool in order to gain control. For the very reason that I love Spain,
+I’m speaking now, and I defy your frown!
+
+“I don’t wish that the coming ages accuse Spain of being the stepmother
+of the nations, the vampire of races, the tyrant of small islands,
+since it would be a horrible mockery of the noble principles of our
+ancient kings. How are we carrying out their sacred legacy? They
+promised to these islands protection and justice, and we are playing
+with the lives and liberties of the inhabitants; they promised
+civilization, and we are curtailing it, fearful that they may aspire to
+a nobler existence; they promised them light, and we cover their eyes
+that they may not witness our orgies; they promised to teach them
+virtue and we are encouraging their vice. Instead of peace, wealth, and
+justice, confusion reigns, commerce languishes, and skepticism is
+fostered among the masses.
+
+“Let us put ourselves in the place of the Filipinos and ask ourselves
+what we would do in their place. Ah, in your silence I read their right
+to rebel, and if matters do not mend they will rebel some day, and
+justice will be on their side, with them will go the sympathy of all
+honest men, of every patriot in the world! When a people is denied
+light, home, liberty, and justice—things that are essential to life,
+and therefore man’s patrimony—that people has the right to treat him
+who so despoils it as we would the robber who intercepts us on the
+highway. There are no distinctions, there are no exceptions, nothing
+but a fact, a right, an aggression, and every honest man who does not
+place himself on the side of the wronged makes himself an accomplice
+and stains his conscience.
+
+“True, I am not a soldier, and the years are cooling the little fire in
+my blood, but just as I would risk being torn to pieces to defend the
+integrity of Spain against any foreign invader or against an
+unjustified disloyalty in her provinces, so I also assure you that I
+would place myself beside the oppressed Filipinos, because I would
+prefer to fall in the cause of the outraged rights of humanity to
+triumphing with the selfish interests of a nation, even when that
+nation be called as it is called—Spain!”
+
+“Do you know when the mail-boat leaves?” inquired his Excellency
+coldly, when the high official had finished speaking.
+
+The latter stared at him fixedly, then dropped his head and silently
+left the palace.
+
+Outside he found his carriage awaiting him. “Some day when you declare
+yourselves independent,” he said somewhat abstractedly to the native
+lackey who opened the carriage-door for him, “remember that there were
+not lacking in Spain hearts that beat for you and struggled for your
+rights!”
+
+“Where, sir?” asked the lackey, who had understood nothing of this and
+was inquiring whither they should go.
+
+Two hours later the high official handed in his resignation and
+announced his intention of returning to Spain by the next mail-steamer.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+EFFECT OF THE PASQUINADES
+
+
+As a result of the events narrated, many mothers ordered their sons
+immediately to leave off their studies and devote themselves to
+idleness or to agriculture. When the examinations came, suspensions
+were plentiful, and he was a rare exception who finished the course, if
+he had belonged to the famous association, to which no one paid any
+more attention. Pecson, Tadeo, and Juanito Pelaez were all alike
+suspended—the first receiving his dismissal with his foolish grin and
+declaring his intention of becoming an officer in some court, while
+Tadeo, with his eternal holiday realized at last, paid for an
+illumination and made a bonfire of his books. Nor did the others get
+off much better, and at length they too had to abandon their studies,
+to the great satisfaction of their mothers, who always fancy their sons
+hanged if they should come to understand what the books teach. Juanito
+Pelaez alone took the blow ill, since it forced him to leave school for
+his father’s store, with whom he was thenceforward to be associated in
+the business: the rascal found the store much less entertaining, but
+after some time his friends again noticed his hump appear, a symptom
+that his good humor was returning. The rich Makaraig, in view of the
+catastrophe, took good care not to expose himself, and having secured a
+passport by means of money set out in haste for Europe. It was said
+that his Excellency, the Captain-General, in his desire to do good by
+good means, and careful of the interests of the Filipinos, hindered the
+departure of every one who could not first prove substantially that he
+had the money to spend and could live in idleness in European cities.
+Among our acquaintances those who got off best were Isagani and
+Sandoval: the former passed in the subject he studied under Padre
+Fernandez and was suspended in the others, while the latter was able to
+confuse the examining-board with his oratory.
+
+Basilio was the only one who did not pass in any subject, who was not
+suspended, and who did not go to Europe, for he remained in Bilibid
+prison, subjected every three days to examinations, almost always the
+same in principle, without other variation than a change of
+inquisitors, since it seemed that in the presence of such great guilt
+all gave up or fell away in horror. And while the documents moldered or
+were shifted about, while the stamped papers increased like the
+plasters of an ignorant physician on the body of a hypochondriac,
+Basilio became informed of all the details of what had happened in
+Tiani, of the death of Juli and the disappearance of Tandang Selo.
+Sinong, the abused cochero, who had driven him to San Diego, happened
+to be in Manila at that time and called to give him all the news.
+
+Meanwhile, Simoun had recovered his health, or so at least the
+newspapers said. Ben-Zayb rendered thanks to “the Omnipotent who
+watches over such a precious life,” and manifested the hope that the
+Highest would some day reveal the malefactor, whose crime remained
+unpunished, thanks to the charity of the victim, who was too closely
+following the words of the Great Martyr: Father, forgive them, for they
+know not what they do. These and other things Ben-Zayb said in print,
+while by mouth he was inquiring whether there was any truth in the
+rumor that the opulent jeweler was going to give a grand fiesta, a
+banquet such as had never before been seen, in part to celebrate his
+recovery and in part as a farewell to the country in which he had
+increased his fortune. It was whispered as certain that Simoun, who
+would have to leave with the Captain-General, whose command expired in
+May, was making every effort to secure from Madrid an extension, and
+that he was advising his Excellency to start a campaign in order to
+have an excuse for remaining, but it was further reported that for the
+first time his Excellency had disregarded the advice of his favorite,
+making it a point of honor not to retain for a single additional day
+the power that had been conferred upon him, a rumor which encouraged
+belief that the fiesta announced would take place; very soon. For the
+rest, Simoun remained unfathomable, since he had become very
+uncommunicative, showed himself seldom, and smiled mysteriously when
+the rumored fiesta was mentioned.
+
+“Come, Señor Sindbad,” Ben-Zayb had once rallied him, “dazzle us with
+something Yankee! You owe something to this country.”
+
+“Doubtless!” was Simoun’s response, with a dry smile.
+
+“You’ll throw the house wide open, eh?”
+
+“Maybe, but as I have no house—”
+
+“You ought to have secured Capitan Tiago’s, which Señor Pelaez got for
+nothing.”
+
+Simoun became silent, and from that time on he was often seen in the
+store of Don Timoteo Pelaez, with whom it was said he had entered into
+partnership. Some weeks afterward, in the month of April, it was
+rumored that Juanito Pelaez, Don Timoteo’s son, was going to marry
+Paulita Gomez, the girl coveted by Spaniards and foreigners.
+
+“Some men are lucky!” exclaimed other envious merchants. “To buy a
+house for nothing, sell his consignment of galvanized iron well, get
+into partnership with a Simoun, and marry his son to a rich
+heiress—just say if those aren’t strokes of luck that all honorable men
+don’t have!”
+
+“If you only knew whence came that luck of Señor Pelaez’s!” another
+responded, in a tone which indicated that the speaker did know. “It’s
+also assured that there’ll be a fiesta and on a grand scale,” was added
+with mystery.
+
+It was really true that Paulita was going to marry Juanito Pelaez. Her
+love for Isagani had gradually waned, like all first loves based on
+poetry and sentiment. The events of the pasquinades and the
+imprisonment of the youth had shorn him of all his charms. To whom
+would it have occurred to seek danger, to desire to share the fate of
+his comrades, to surrender himself, when every one was hiding and
+denying any complicity in the affair? It was quixotic, it was madness
+that no sensible person in Manila could pardon, and Juanito was quite
+right in ridiculing him, representing what a sorry figure he cut when
+he went to the Civil Government. Naturally, the brilliant Paulita could
+no longer love a young man who so erroneously understood social matters
+and whom all condemned. Then she began to reflect. Juanito was clever,
+capable, gay, shrewd, the son of a rich merchant of Manila, and a
+Spanish mestizo besides—if Don Timoteo was to be believed, a
+full-blooded Spaniard. On the other hand, Isagani was a provincial
+native who dreamed of forests infested with leeches, he was of doubtful
+family, with a priest for an uncle, who would perhaps be an enemy to
+luxury and balls, of which she was very fond. One beautiful morning
+therefore it occurred to her that she had been a downright fool to
+prefer him to his rival, and from that time on Pelaez’s hump steadily
+increased. Unconsciously, yet rigorously, Paulita was obeying the law
+discovered by Darwin, that the female surrenders herself to the fittest
+male, to him who knows how to adapt himself to the medium in which he
+lives, and to live in Manila there was no other like Pelaez, who from
+his infancy had had chicanery at his finger-tips. Lent passed with its
+Holy Week, its array of processions and pompous displays, without other
+novelty than a mysterious mutiny among the artillerymen, the cause of
+which was never disclosed. The houses of light materials were torn down
+in the presence of a troop of cavalry, ready to fall upon the owners in
+case they should offer resistance. There was a great deal of weeping
+and many lamentations, but the affair did not get beyond that. The
+curious, among them Simoun, went to see those who were left homeless,
+walking about indifferently and assuring each other that thenceforward
+they could sleep in peace.
+
+Towards the end of April, all the fears being now forgotten, Manila was
+engrossed with one topic: the fiesta that Don Timoteo Pelaez was going
+to celebrate at the wedding of his son, for which the General had
+graciously and condescendingly agreed to be the patron. Simoun was
+reported to have arranged the matter. The ceremony would be solemnized
+two days before the departure of the General, who would honor the house
+and make a present to the bridegroom. It was whispered that the jeweler
+would pour out cascades of diamonds and throw away handfuls of pearls
+in honor of his partner’s son, thus, since he could hold no fiesta of
+his own, as he was a bachelor and had no house, improving the
+opportunity to dazzle the Filipino people with a memorable farewell.
+All Manila prepared to be invited, and never did uneasiness take
+stronger hold of the mind than in view of the thought of not being
+among those bidden. Friendship with Simoun became a matter of dispute,
+and many husbands were forced by their wives to purchase bars of steel
+and sheets of galvanized iron in order to make friends with Don Timoteo
+Pelaez.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+LA ULTIMA RAZÓN [69]
+
+
+At last the great day arrived. During the morning Simoun had not left
+his house, busied as he was in packing his arms and his jewels. His
+fabulous wealth was already locked up in the big steel chest with its
+canvas cover, there remaining only a few cases containing bracelets and
+pins, doubtless gifts that he meant to make. He was going to leave with
+the Captain-General, who cared in no way to lengthen his stay, fearful
+of what people would say. Malicious ones insinuated that Simoun did not
+dare remain alone, since without the General’s support he did not care
+to expose himself to the vengeance of the many wretches he had
+exploited, all the more reason for which was the fact that the General
+who was coming was reported to be a model of rectitude and might make
+him disgorge his gains. The superstitious Indians, on the other hand,
+believed that Simoun was the devil who did not wish to separate himself
+from his prey. The pessimists winked maliciously and said, “The field
+laid waste, the locust leaves for other parts!” Only a few, a very few,
+smiled and said nothing.
+
+In the afternoon Simoun had given orders to his servant that if there
+appeared a young man calling himself Basilio he should be admitted at
+once. Then he shut himself up in his room and seemed to become lost in
+deep thought. Since his illness the jeweler’s countenance had become
+harder and gloomier, while the wrinkles between his eyebrows had
+deepened greatly. He did not hold himself so erect as formerly, and his
+head was bowed.
+
+So absorbed was he in his meditations that he did not hear a knock at
+the door, and it had to be repeated. He shuddered and called out, “Come
+in!”
+
+It was Basilio, but how altered! If the change that had taken place in
+Simoun during those two months was great, in the young student it was
+frightful. His cheeks were hollow, his hair unkempt, his clothing
+disordered. The tender melancholy had disappeared from his eyes, and in
+its place glittered a dark light, so that it might be said that he had
+died and his corpse had revived, horrified with what it had seen in
+eternity. If not crime, then the shadow of crime, had fixed itself upon
+his whole appearance. Simoun himself was startled and felt pity for the
+wretch.
+
+Without any greeting Basilio slowly advanced into the room, and in a
+voice that made the jeweler shudder said to him, “Señor Simoun, I’ve
+been a wicked son and a bad brother—I’ve overlooked the murder of one
+and the tortures of the other, and God has chastised me! Now there
+remains to me only one desire, and it is to return evil for evil, crime
+for crime, violence for violence!”
+
+Simoun listened in silence, while Basilio continued; “Four months ago
+you talked to me about your plans. I refused to take part in them, but
+I did wrong, you have been right. Three months and a half ago the
+revolution was on the point of breaking out, but I did not then care to
+participate in it, and the movement failed. In payment for my conduct
+I’ve been arrested and owe my liberty to your efforts only. You are
+right and now I’ve come to say to you: put a weapon in my hand and let
+the revolution come! I am ready to serve you, along with all the rest
+of the unfortunates.”
+
+The cloud that had darkened Simoun’s brow suddenly disappeared, a ray
+of triumph darted from his eyes, and like one who has found what he
+sought he exclaimed: “I’m right, yes, I’m right! Right and Justice are
+on my side, because my cause is that of the persecuted. Thanks, young
+man, thanks! You’ve come to clear away my doubts, to end my
+hesitation.”
+
+He had risen and his face was beaming. The zeal that had animated him
+when four months before he had explained his plans to Basilio in the
+wood of his ancestors reappeared in his countenance like a red sunset
+after a cloudy day.
+
+“Yes,” he resumed, “the movement failed and many have deserted me
+because they saw me disheartened and wavering at the supreme moment. I
+still cherished something in my heart, I was not the master of all my
+feelings, I still loved! Now everything is dead in me, no longer is
+there even a corpse sacred enough for me to respect its sleep. No
+longer will there be any vacillation, for you yourself, an idealistic
+youth, a gentle dove, understand the necessity and come to spur me to
+action. Somewhat late you have opened your eyes, for between you and me
+together we might have executed marvelous plans, I above in the higher
+circles spreading death amid perfume and gold, brutalizing the vicious
+and corrupting or paralyzing the few good, and you below among the
+people, among the young men, stirring them to life amid blood and
+tears. Our task, instead of being bloody and barbarous, would have been
+holy, perfect, artistic, and surely success would have crowned our
+efforts. But no intelligence would support me, I encountered fear or
+effeminacy among the enlightened classes, selfishness among the rich,
+simplicity among the youth, and only in the mountains, in the waste
+places, among the outcasts, have I found my men. But no matter now! If
+we can’t get a finished statue, rounded out in all its details, of the
+rough block we work upon let those to come take charge!”
+
+Seizing the arm of Basilio, who was listening without comprehending all
+he said, he led him to the laboratory where he kept his chemical
+mixtures. Upon the table was placed a large case made of dark shagreen,
+similar to those that hold the silver plate exchanged as gifts among
+the rich and powerful. Opening this, Simoun revealed to sight, upon a
+bottom of red satin, a lamp of very peculiar shape, Its body was in the
+form of a pomegranate as large as a man’s head, with fissures in it
+exposing to view the seeds inside, which were fashioned of enormous
+carnelians. The covering was of oxidized gold in exact imitation of the
+wrinkles on the fruit.
+
+Simoun took it out with great care and, removing the burner, exposed to
+view the interior of the tank, which was lined with steel two
+centimeters in thickness and which had a capacity of over a liter.
+Basilio questioned him with his eyes, for as yet he comprehended
+nothing. Without entering upon explanations, Simoun carefully took from
+a cabinet a flask and showed the young man the formula written upon it.
+
+“Nitro-glycerin!” murmured Basilio, stepping backward and instinctively
+thrusting his hands behind him. “Nitro-glycerin! Dynamite!” Beginning
+now to understand, he felt his hair stand on end.
+
+“Yes, nitro-glycerin!” repeated Simoun slowly, with his cold smile and
+a look of delight at the glass flask. “It’s also something more than
+nitro-glycerin—it’s concentrated tears, repressed hatred, wrongs,
+injustice, outrage. It’s the last resort of the weak, force against
+force, violence against violence. A moment ago I was hesitating, but
+you have come and decided me. This night the most dangerous tyrants
+will be blown to pieces, the irresponsible rulers that hide themselves
+behind God and the State, whose abuses remain unpunished because no one
+can bring them to justice. This night the Philippines will hear the
+explosion that will convert into rubbish the formless monument whose
+decay I have fostered.”
+
+Basilio was so terrified that his lips worked without producing any
+sound, his tongue was paralyzed, his throat parched. For the first time
+he was looking at the powerful liquid which he had heard talked of as a
+thing distilled in gloom by gloomy men, in open war against society.
+Now he had it before him, transparent and slightly yellowish, poured
+with great caution into the artistic pomegranate. Simoun looked to him
+like the jinnee of the Arabian Nights that sprang from the sea, he took
+on gigantic proportions, his head touched the sky, he made the house
+tremble and shook the whole city with a shrug of his shoulders. The
+pomegranate assumed the form of a colossal sphere, the fissures became
+hellish grins whence escaped names and glowing cinders. For the first
+time in his life Basilio was overcome with fright and completely lost
+his composure.
+
+Simoun, meanwhile, screwed on solidly a curious and complicated
+mechanism, put in place a glass chimney, then the bomb, and crowned the
+whole with an elegant shade. Then he moved away some distance to
+contemplate the effect, inclining his head now to one side, now to the
+other, thus better to appreciate its magnificent appearance.
+
+Noticing that Basilio was watching him with questioning and suspicious
+eyes, he said, “Tonight there will be a fiesta and this lamp will be
+placed in a little dining-kiosk that I’ve had constructed for the
+purpose. The lamp will give a brilliant light, bright enough to suffice
+for the illumination of the whole place by itself, but at the end of
+twenty minutes the light will fade, and then when some one tries to
+turn up the wick a cap of fulminate of mercury will explode, the
+pomegranate will blow up and with it the dining-room, in the roof and
+floor of which I have concealed sacks of powder, so that no one shall
+escape.”
+
+There wras a moment’s silence, while Simoun stared at his mechanism and
+Basilio scarcely breathed.
+
+“So my assistance is not needed,” observed the young man.
+
+“No, you have another mission to fulfill,” replied Simoun thoughtfully.
+“At nine the mechanism will have exploded and the report will have been
+heard in the country round, in the mountains, in the caves. The
+uprising that I had arranged with the artillerymen was a failure from
+lack of plan and timeliness, but this time it won’t be so. Upon hearing
+the explosion, the wretched and the oppressed, those who wander about
+pursued by force, will sally forth armed to join Cabesang Tales in
+Santa Mesa, whence they will fall upon the city, [70] while the
+soldiers, whom I have made to believe that the General is shamming an
+insurrection in order to remain, will issue from their barracks ready
+to fire upon whomsoever I may designate. Meanwhile, the cowed populace,
+thinking that the hour of massacre has come, will rush out prepared to
+kill or be killed, and as they have neither arms nor organization, you
+with some others will put yourself at their head and direct them to the
+warehouses of Quiroga, where I keep my rifles. Cabesang Tales and I
+will join one another in the city and take possession of it, while you
+in the suburbs will seize the bridges and throw up barricades, and then
+be ready to come to our aid to butcher not only those opposing the
+revolution but also every man who refuses to take up arms and join us.”
+
+“All?” stammered Basilio in a choking voice.
+
+“All!” repeated Simoun in a sinister tone. “All—Indians, mestizos,
+Chinese, Spaniards, all who are found to be without courage, without
+energy. The race must be renewed! Cowardly fathers will only breed
+slavish sons, and it wouldn’t be worth while to destroy and then try to
+rebuild with rotten materials. What, do you shudder? Do you tremble, do
+you fear to scatter death? What is death? What does a hecatomb of
+twenty thousand wretches signify? Twenty thousand miseries less, and
+millions of wretches saved from birth! The most timid ruler does not
+hesitate to dictate a law that produces misery and lingering death for
+thousands and thousands of prosperous and industrious subjects, happy
+perchance, merely to satisfy a caprice, a whim, his pride, and yet you
+shudder because in one night are to be ended forever the mental
+tortures of many helots, because a vitiated and paralytic people has to
+die to give place to another, young, active, full of energy!
+
+“What is death? Nothingness, or a dream? Can its specters be compared
+to the reality of the agonies of a whole miserable generation? The
+needful thing is to destroy the evil, to kill the dragon and bathe the
+new people in the blood, in order to make it strong and invulnerable.
+What else is the inexorable law of Nature, the law of strife in which
+the weak has to succumb so that the vitiated species be not perpetuated
+and creation thus travel backwards? Away then with effeminate scruples!
+Fulfill the eternal laws, foster them, and then the earth will be so
+much the more fecund the more it is fertilized with blood, and the
+thrones the more solid the more they rest upon crimes and corpses. Let
+there be no hesitation, no doubtings! What is the pain of death? A
+momentary sensation, perhaps confused, perhaps agreeable, like the
+transition from waking to sleep. What is it that is being destroyed?
+Evil, suffering—feeble weeds, in order to set in their place luxuriant
+plants. Do you call that destruction? I should call it creating,
+producing, nourishing, vivifying!”
+
+Such bloody sophisms, uttered with conviction and coolness, overwhelmed
+the youth, weakened as he was by more than three months in prison and
+blinded by his passion for revenge, so he was not in a mood to analyze
+the moral basis of the matter. Instead of replying that the worst and
+cowardliest of men is always something more than a plant, because he
+has a soul and an intelligence, which, however vitiated and brutalized
+they may be, can be redeemed; instead of replying that man has no right
+to dispose of one life for the benefit of another, that the right to
+life is inherent in every individual like the right to liberty and to
+light; instead of replying that if it is an abuse on the part of
+governments to punish in a culprit the faults and crimes to which they
+have driven him by their own negligence or stupidity, how much more so
+would it be in a man, however great and however unfortunate he might
+be, to punish in a wretched people the faults of its governments and
+its ancestors; instead of declaring that God alone can use such
+methods, that God can destroy because He can create, God who holds in
+His hands recompense, eternity, and the future, to justify His acts,
+and man never; instead of these reflections, Basilio merely interposed
+a cant reflection.
+
+“What will the world say at the sight of such butchery?”
+
+“The world will applaud, as usual, conceding the right of the
+strongest, the most violent!” replied Simoun with his cruel smile.
+“Europe applauded when the western nations sacrificed millions of
+Indians in America, and not by any means to found nations much more
+moral or more pacific: there is the North with its egotistic liberty,
+its lynch-law, its political frauds—the South with its turbulent
+republics, its barbarous revolutions, civil wars, pronunciamientos, as
+in its mother Spain! Europe applauded when the powerful Portugal
+despoiled the Moluccas, it applauds while England is destroying the
+primitive races in the Pacific to make room for its emigrants. Europe
+will applaud as the end of a drama, the close of a tragedy, is
+applauded, for the vulgar do not fix their attention on principles,
+they look only at results. Commit the crime well, and you will be
+admired and have more partizans than if you had carried out virtuous
+actions with modesty and timidity.”
+
+“Exactly,” rejoined the youth, “what does it matter to me, after all,
+whether they praise or censure, when this world takes no care of the
+oppressed, of the poor, and of weak womankind? What obligations have I
+to recognize toward society when it has recognized none toward me?”
+
+“That’s what I like to hear,” declared the tempter triumphantly. He
+took a revolver from a case and gave it to Basilio, saying, “At ten
+o’clock wait for me in front of the church of St. Sebastian to receive
+my final instructions. Ah, at nine you must be far, very far from Calle
+Anloague.”
+
+Basilio examined the weapon, loaded it, and placed it in the inside
+pocket of his coat, then took his leave with a curt, “I’ll see you
+later.”
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+THE WEDDING
+
+
+Once in the street, Basilio began to consider how he might spend the
+time until the fatal hour arrived, for it was then not later than seven
+o’clock. It was the vacation period and all the students were back in
+their towns, Isagani being the only one who had not cared to leave, but
+he had disappeared that morning and no one knew his whereabouts—so
+Basilio had been informed when after leaving the prison he had gone to
+visit his friend and ask him for lodging. The young man did not know
+where to go, for he had no money, nothing but the revolver. The memory
+of the lamp filled his imagination, the great catastrophe that would
+occur within two hours. Pondering over this, he seemed to see the men
+who passed before his eyes walking without heads, and he felt a thrill
+of ferocious joy in telling himself that, hungry and destitute, he that
+night was going to be dreaded, that from a poor student and servant,
+perhaps the sun would see him transformed into some one terrible and
+sinister, standing upon pyramids of corpses, dictating laws to all
+those who were passing before his gaze now in magnificent carriages. He
+laughed like one condemned to death and patted the butt of the
+revolver. The boxes of cartridges were also in his pockets.
+
+A question suddenly occurred to him—where would the drama begin? In his
+bewilderment he had not thought of asking Simoun, but the latter had
+warned him to keep away from Calle Anloague. Then came a suspicion:
+that afternoon, upon leaving the prison, he had proceeded to the former
+house of Capitan Tiago to get his few personal effects and had found it
+transformed, prepared for a fiesta—the wedding of Juanito Pelaez!
+Simoun had spoken of a fiesta.
+
+At this moment he noticed passing in front of him a long line of
+carriages filled with ladies and gentlemen, conversing in a lively
+manner, and he even thought he could make out big bouquets of flowers,
+but he gave the detail no thought. The carriages were going toward
+Calle Rosario and in meeting those that came down off the Bridge of
+Spain had to move along slowly and stop frequently. In one he saw
+Juanito Pelaez at the side of a woman dressed in white with a
+transparent veil, in whom he recognized Paulita Gomez.
+
+“Paulita!” he ejaculated in surprise, realizing that it was indeed she,
+in a bridal gown, along with Juanito Pelaez, as though they were just
+coming from the church. “Poor Isagani!” he murmured, “what can have
+become of him?”
+
+He thought for a while about his friend, a great and generous soul, and
+mentally asked himself if it would not be well to tell him about the
+plan, then answered himself that Isagani would never take part in such
+a butchery. They had not treated Isagani as they had him.
+
+Then he thought that had there been no imprisonment, he would have been
+betrothed, or a husband, at this time, a licentiate in medicine, living
+and working in some corner of his province. The ghost of Juli, crushed
+in her fall, crossed his mind, and dark flames of hatred lighted his
+eyes; again he caressed the butt of the revolver, regretting that the
+terrible hour had not yet come. Just then he saw Simoun come out of the
+door of his house, carrying in his hands the case containing the lamp,
+carefully wrapped up, and enter a carriage, which then followed those
+bearing the bridal party. In order not to lose track of Simoun, Basilio
+took a good look at the cochero and with astonishment recognized in him
+the wretch who had driven him to San Diego, Sinong, the fellow
+maltreated by the Civil Guard, the same who had come to the prison to
+tell him about the occurrences in Tiani.
+
+Conjecturing that Calle Anloague was to be the scene of action, thither
+the youth directed his steps, hurrying forward and getting ahead of the
+carriages, which were, in fact, all moving toward the former house of
+Capitan Tiago—there they were assembling in search of a ball, but
+actually to dance in the air! Basilio smiled when he noticed the pairs
+of civil-guards who formed the escort, and from their number he could
+guess the importance of the fiesta and the guests. The house overflowed
+with people and poured floods of light from its windows, the entrance
+was carpeted and strewn with flowers. Upstairs there, perhaps in his
+former solitary room, an orchestra was playing lively airs, which did
+not completely drown the confused tumult of talk and laughter.
+
+Don Timoteo Pelaez was reaching the pinnacle of fortune, and the
+reality surpassed his dreams. He was, at last, marrying his son to the
+rich Gomez heiress, and, thanks to the money Simoun had lent him, he
+had royally furnished that big house, purchased for half its value, and
+was giving in it a splendid fiesta, with the foremost divinities of the
+Manila Olympus for his guests, to gild him with the light of their
+prestige. Since that morning there had been recurring to him, with the
+persistence of a popular song, some vague phrases that he had read in
+the communion service. “Now has the fortunate hour come! Now draws nigh
+the happy moment! Soon there will be fulfilled in you the admirable
+words of Simoun—‘I live, and yet not I alone, but the Captain-General
+liveth in me.’” The Captain-General the patron of his son! True, he had
+not attended the ceremony, where Don Custodio had represented him, but
+he would come to dine, he would bring a wedding-gift, a lamp which not
+even Aladdin’s—between you and me, Simoun was presenting the lamp.
+Timoteo, what more could you desire?
+
+The transformation that Capitan Tiago’s house had undergone was
+considerable—it had been richly repapered, while the smoke and the
+smell of opium had been completely eradicated. The immense sala,
+widened still more by the colossal mirrors that infinitely multiplied
+the lights of the chandeliers, was carpeted throughout, for the salons
+of Europe had carpets, and even though the floor was of wide boards
+brilliantly polished, a carpet it must have too, since nothing should
+be lacking. The rich furniture of Capitan Tiago had disappeared and in
+its place was to be seen another kind, in the style of Louis XV. Heavy
+curtains of red velvet, trimmed with gold, with the initials of the
+bridal couple worked on them, and upheld by garlands of artificial
+orange-blossoms, hung as portières and swept the floor with their wide
+fringes, likewise of gold. In the corners appeared enormous Japanese
+vases, alternating with those of Sèvres of a clear dark-blue, placed
+upon square pedestals of carved wood.
+
+The only decorations not in good taste were the screaming chromos which
+Don Timoteo had substituted for the old drawings and pictures of saints
+of Capitan Tiago. Simoun had been unable to dissuade him, for the
+merchant did not want oil-paintings—some one might ascribe them to
+Filipino artists! He, a patron of Filipino artists, never! On that
+point depended his peace of mind and perhaps his life, and he knew how
+to get along in the Philippines! It is true that he had heard foreign
+painters mentioned—Raphael, Murillo, Velasquez—but he did not know
+their addresses, and then they might prove to be somewhat seditious.
+With the chromos he ran no risk, as the Filipinos did not make them,
+they came cheaper, the effect was the same, if not better, the colors
+brighter and the execution very fine. Don’t say that Don Timoteo did
+not know how to comport himself in the Philippines!
+
+The large hallway was decorated with flowers, having been converted
+into a dining-room, with a long table for thirty persons in the center,
+and around the sides, pushed against the walls, other smaller ones for
+two or three persons each. Bouquets of flowers, pyramids of fruits
+among ribbons and lights, covered their centers. The groom’s place was
+designated by a bunch of roses and the bride’s by another of
+orange-blossoms and tuberoses. In the presence of so much finery and
+flowers one could imagine that nymphs in gauzy garments and Cupids with
+iridescent wings were going to serve nectar and ambrosia to aerial
+guests, to the sound of lyres and Aeolian harps.
+
+But the table for the greater gods was not there, being placed yonder
+in the middle of the wide azotea within a magnificent kiosk constructed
+especially for the occasion. A lattice of gilded wood over which
+clambered fragrant vines screened the interior from the eyes of the
+vulgar without impeding the free circulation of air to preserve the
+coolness necessary at that season. A raised platform lifted the table
+above the level of the others at which the ordinary mortals were going
+to dine and an arch decorated by the best artists would protect the
+august heads from the jealous gaze of the stars.
+
+On this table were laid only seven plates. The dishes were of solid
+silver, the cloth and napkins of the finest linen, the wines the most
+costly and exquisite. Don Timoteo had sought the most rare and
+expensive in everything, nor would he have hesitated at crime had he
+been assured that the Captain-General liked to eat human flesh.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+THE FIESTA
+
+                                              “Danzar sobre un volcán.”
+
+
+By seven in the evening the guests had begun to arrive: first, the
+lesser divinities, petty government officials, clerks, and merchants,
+with the most ceremonious greetings and the gravest airs at the start,
+as if they were parvenus, for so much light, so many decorations, and
+so much glassware had some effect. Afterwards, they began to be more at
+ease, shaking their fists playfully, with pats on the shoulders, and
+even familiar slaps on the back. Some, it is true, adopted a rather
+disdainful air, to let it be seen that they were accustomed to better
+things—of course they were! There was one goddess who yawned, for she
+found everything vulgar and even remarked that she was ravenously
+hungry, while another quarreled with her god, threatening to box his
+ears.
+
+Don Timoteo bowed here and bowed there, scattered his best smiles,
+tightened his belt, stepped backward, turned halfway round, then
+completely around, and so on again and again, until one goddess could
+not refrain from remarking to her neighbor, under cover of her fan: “My
+dear, how important the old man is! Doesn’t he look like a
+jumping-jack?”
+
+Later came the bridal couple, escorted by Doña Victorina and the rest
+of the party. Congratulations, hand-shakings, patronizing pats for the
+groom: for the bride, insistent stares and anatomical observations on
+the part of the men, with analyses of her gown, her toilette,
+speculations as to her health and strength on the part of the women.
+
+“Cupid and Psyche appearing on Olympus,” thought Ben-Zayb, making a
+mental note of the comparison to spring it at some better opportunity.
+The groom had in fact the mischievous features of the god of love, and
+with a little good-will his hump, which the severity of his frock coat
+did not altogether conceal, could be taken for a quiver.
+
+Don Timoteo began to feel his belt squeezing him, the corns on his feet
+began to ache, his neck became tired, but still the General had not
+come. The greater gods, among them Padre Irene and Padre Salvi, had
+already arrived, it was true, but the chief thunderer was still
+lacking. The poor man became uneasy, nervous; his heart beat violently,
+but still he had to bow and smile; he sat down, he arose, failed to
+hear what was said to him, did not say what he meant. In the meantime,
+an amateur god made remarks to him about his chromos, criticizing them
+with the statement that they spoiled the walls.
+
+“Spoil the walls!” repeated Don Timoteo, with a smile and a desire to
+choke him. “But they were made in Europe and are the most costly I
+could get in Manila! Spoil the walls!” Don Timoteo swore to himself
+that on the very next day he would present for payment all the chits
+that the critic had signed in his store.
+
+Whistles resounded, the galloping of horses was heard—at last! “The
+General! The Captain-General!”
+
+Pale with emotion, Don Timoteo, dissembling the pain of his corns and
+accompanied by his son and some of the greater gods, descended to
+receive the Mighty Jove. The pain at his belt vanished before the
+doubts that now assailed him: should he frame a smile or affect
+gravity; should he extend his hand or wait for the General to offer
+his? Carambas! Why had nothing of this occurred to him before, so that
+he might have consulted his good friend Simoun?
+
+To conceal his agitation, he whispered to his son in a low, shaky
+voice, “Have you a speech prepared?”
+
+“Speeches are no longer in vogue, papa, especially on such an occasion
+as this.”
+
+Jupiter arrived in the company of Juno, who was converted into a tower
+of artificial lights—with diamonds in her hair, diamonds around her
+neck, on her arms, on her shoulders, she was literally covered with
+diamonds. She was arrayed in a magnificent silk gown having a long
+train decorated with embossed flowers.
+
+His Excellency literally took possession of the house, as Don Timoteo
+stammeringly begged him to do. [71] The orchestra played the royal
+march while the divine couple majestically ascended the carpeted
+stairway.
+
+Nor was his Excellency’s gravity altogether affected. Perhaps for the
+first time since his arrival in the islands he felt sad, a strain of
+melancholy tinged his thoughts. This was the last triumph of his three
+years of government, and within two days he would descend forever from
+such an exalted height. What was he leaving behind? His Excellency did
+not care to turn his head backwards, but preferred to look ahead, to
+gaze into the future. Although he was carrying away a fortune, large
+sums to his credit were awaiting him in European banks, and he had
+residences, yet he had injured many, he had made enemies at the Court,
+the high official was waiting for him there. Other Generals had
+enriched themselves as rapidly as he, and now they were ruined. Why not
+stay longer, as Simoun had advised him to do? No, good taste before
+everything else. The bows, moreover, were not now so profound as
+before, he noticed insistent stares and even looks of dislike, but
+still he replied affably and even attempted to smile.
+
+“It’s plain that the sun is setting,” observed Padre Irene in
+Ben-Zayb’s ear. “Many now stare him in the face.”
+
+The devil with the curate—that was just what he was going to remark!
+
+“My dear,” murmured into the ear of a neighbor the lady who had
+referred to Don Timoteo as a jumping-jack, “did you ever see such a
+skirt?”
+
+“Ugh, the curtains from the Palace!”
+
+“You don’t say! But it’s true! They’re carrying everything away. You’ll
+see how they make wraps out of the carpets.”
+
+“That only goes to show that she has talent and taste,” observed her
+husband, reproving her with a look. “Women should be economical.” This
+poor god was still suffering from the dressmaker’s bill.
+
+“My dear, give me curtains at twelve pesos a yard, and you’ll see if I
+put on these rags!” retorted the goddess in pique. “Heavens! You can
+talk when you have done something fine like that to give you the
+right!”
+
+Meanwhile, Basilio stood before the house, lost in the throng of
+curious spectators, counting those who alighted from their carriages.
+When he looked upon so many persons, happy and confident, when he saw
+the bride and groom followed by their train of fresh and innocent
+little girls, and reflected that they were going to meet there a
+horrible death, he was sorry and felt his hatred waning within him. He
+wanted to save so many innocents, he thought of notifying the police,
+but a carriage drove up to set down Padre Salvi and Padre Irene, both
+beaming with content, and like a passing cloud his good intentions
+vanished. “What does it matter to me?” he asked himself. “Let the
+righteous suffer with the sinners.”
+
+Then he added, to silence his scruples: “I’m not an informer, I mustn’t
+abuse the confidence he has placed in me. I owe him, him more than I do
+them: he dug my mother’s grave, they killed her! What have I to do with
+them? I did everything possible to be good and useful, I tried to
+forgive and forget, I suffered every imposition, and only asked that
+they leave me in peace. I got in no one’s way. What have they done to
+me? Let their mangled limbs fly through the air! We’ve suffered
+enough.”
+
+Then he saw Simoun alight with the terrible lamp in his hands, saw him
+cross the entrance with bowed head, as though deep in thought. Basilio
+felt his heart beat fainter, his feet and hands turn cold, while the
+black silhouette of the jeweler assumed fantastic shapes enveloped in
+flames. There at the foot of the stairway Simoun checked his steps, as
+if in doubt, and Basilio held his breath. But the hesitation was
+transient—Simoun raised his head, resolutely ascended the stairway, and
+disappeared.
+
+It then seemed to the student that the house was going to blow up at
+any moment, and that walls, lamps, guests, roof, windows, orchestra,
+would be hurtling through the air like a handful of coals in the midst
+of an infernal explosion. He gazed about him and fancied that he saw
+corpses in place of idle spectators, he saw them torn to shreds, it
+seemed to him that the air was filled with flames, but his calmer self
+triumphed over this transient hallucination, which was due somewhat to
+his hunger.
+
+“Until he comes out, there’s no danger,” he said to himself. “The
+Captain-General hasn’t arrived yet.”
+
+He tried to appear calm and control the convulsive trembling in his
+limbs, endeavoring to divert his thoughts to other things. Something
+within was ridiculing him, saying, “If you tremble now, before the
+supreme moment, how will you conduct yourself when you see blood
+flowing, houses burning, and bullets whistling?”
+
+His Excellency arrived, but the young man paid no attention to him. He
+was watching the face of Simoun, who was among those that descended to
+receive him, and he read in that implacable countenance the sentence of
+death for all those men, so that fresh terror seized upon him. He felt
+cold, he leaned against the wall, and, with his eyes fixed on the
+windows and his ears cocked, tried to guess what might be happening. In
+the sala he saw the crowd surround Simoun to look at the lamp, he heard
+congratulations and exclamations of admiration—the words “dining-room,”
+“novelty,” were repeated many times—he saw the General smile and
+conjectured that the novelty was to be exhibited that very night, by
+the jeweler’s arrangement, on the table whereat his Excellency was to
+dine. Simoun disappeared, followed by a crowd of admirers.
+
+At that supreme moment his good angel triumphed, he forgot his hatreds,
+he forgot Juli, he wanted to save the innocent. Come what might, he
+would cross the street and try to enter. But Basilio had forgotten that
+he was miserably dressed. The porter stopped him and accosted him
+roughly, and finally, upon his insisting, threatened to call the
+police.
+
+Just then Simoun came down, slightly pale, and the porter turned from
+Basilio to salute the jeweler as though he had been a saint passing.
+Basilio realized from the expression of Simoun’s face that he was
+leaving the fated house forever, that the lamp was lighted. Alea jacta
+est! Seized by the instinct of self-preservation, he thought then of
+saving himself. It might occur to any of the guests through curiosity
+to tamper with the wick and then would come the explosion to overwhelm
+them all. Still he heard Simoun say to the cochero, “The Escolta,
+hurry!”
+
+Terrified, dreading that he might at any moment hear the awful
+explosion, Basilio hurried as fast as his legs would carry him to get
+away from the accursed spot, but his legs seemed to lack the necessary
+agility, his feet slipped on the sidewalk as though they were moving
+but not advancing. The people he met blocked the way, and before he had
+gone twenty steps he thought that at least five minutes had elapsed.
+
+Some distance away he stumbled against a young man who was standing
+with his head thrown back, gazing fixedly at the house, and in him he
+recognized Isagani. “What are you doing here?” he demanded. “Come
+away!”
+
+Isagani stared at him vaguely, smiled sadly, and again turned his gaze
+toward the open balconies, across which was revealed the ethereal
+silhouette of the bride clinging to the groom’s arm as they moved
+slowly out of sight.
+
+“Come, Isagani, let’s get away from that house. Come!” Basilio urged in
+a hoarse voice, catching his friend by the arm.
+
+Isagani gently shook himself free and continued to stare with the same
+sad smile upon his lips.
+
+“For God’s sake, let’s get away from here!”
+
+“Why should I go away? Tomorrow it will not be she.”
+
+There was so much sorrow in those words that Basilio for a moment
+forgot his own terror. “Do you want to die?” he demanded.
+
+Isagani shrugged his shoulders and continued to gaze toward the house.
+
+Basilio again tried to drag him away. “Isagani, Isagani, listen to me!
+Let’s not waste any time! That house is mined, it’s going to blow up at
+any moment, by the least imprudent act, the least curiosity! Isagani,
+all will perish in its ruins.”
+
+“In its ruins?” echoed Isagani, as if trying to understand, but without
+removing his gaze from the window.
+
+“Yes, in its ruins, yes, Isagani! For God’s sake, come! I’ll explain
+afterwards. Come! One who has been more unfortunate than either you or
+I has doomed them all. Do you see that white, clear light, like an
+electric lamp, shining from the azotea? It’s the light of death! A lamp
+charged with dynamite, in a mined dining-room, will burst and not a rat
+will escape alive. Come!”
+
+“No,” answered Isagani, shaking his head sadly. “I want to stay here, I
+want to see her for the last time. Tomorrow, you see, she will be
+something different.”
+
+“Let fate have its way!” Basilio then exclaimed, hurrying away.
+
+Isagani watched his friend rush away with a precipitation that
+indicated real terror, but continued to stare toward the charmed
+window, like the cavalier of Toggenburg waiting for his sweetheart to
+appear, as Schiller tells. Now the sala was deserted, all having
+repaired to the dining-rooms, and it occurred to Isagani that Basilio’s
+fears may have been well-founded. He recalled the terrified countenance
+of him who was always so calm and composed, and it set him to thinking.
+
+Suddenly an idea appeared clear in his imagination—the house was going
+to blow up and Paulita was there, Paulita was going to die a frightful
+death. In the presence of this idea everything was forgotten: jealousy,
+suffering, mental torture, and the generous youth thought only of his
+love. Without reflecting, without hesitation, he ran toward the house,
+and thanks to his stylish clothes and determined mien, easily secured
+admittance.
+
+While these short scenes were occurring in the street, in the
+dining-kiosk of the greater gods there was passed from hand to hand a
+piece of parchment on which were written in red ink these fateful
+words:
+
+
+        Mene, Tekel, Phares [72]
+        Juan Crisostomo Ibarra
+
+
+“Juan Crisostomo Ibarra? Who is he?” asked his Excellency, handing the
+paper to his neighbor.
+
+“A joke in very bad taste!” exclaimed Don Custodio. “To sign the name
+of a filibuster dead more than ten years!”
+
+“A filibuster!”
+
+“It’s a seditious joke!”
+
+“There being ladies present—”
+
+Padre Irene looked around for the joker and saw Padre Salvi, who was
+seated at the right of the Countess, turn as white as his napkin, while
+he stared at the mysterious words with bulging eyes. The scene of the
+sphinx recurred to him.
+
+“What’s the matter, Padre Salvi?” he asked. “Do you recognize your
+friend’s signature?”
+
+Padre Salvi did not reply. He made an effort to speak and without being
+conscious of what he was doing wiped his forehead with his napkin.
+
+“What has happened to your Reverence?”
+
+“It is his very handwriting!” was the whispered reply in a scarcely
+perceptible voice. “It’s the very handwriting of Ibarra.” Leaning
+against the back of his chair, he let his arms fall as though all
+strength had deserted him.
+
+Uneasiness became converted into fright, they all stared at one another
+without uttering a single word. His Excellency started to rise, but
+apprehending that such a move would be ascribed to fear, controlled
+himself and looked about him. There were no soldiers present, even the
+waiters were unknown to him.
+
+“Let’s go on eating, gentlemen,” he exclaimed, “and pay no attention to
+the joke.” But his voice, instead of reassuring, increased the general
+uneasiness, for it trembled.
+
+“I don’t suppose that that Mene, Tekel, Phares, means that we’re to be
+assassinated tonight?” speculated Don Custodio.
+
+All remained motionless, but when he added, “Yet they might poison us,”
+they leaped up from their chairs.
+
+The light, meanwhile, had begun slowly to fade. “The lamp is going
+out,” observed the General uneasily. “Will you turn up the wick, Padre
+Irene?”
+
+But at that instant, with the swiftness of a flash of lightning, a
+figure rushed in, overturning a chair and knocking a servant down, and
+in the midst of the general surprise seized the lamp, rushed to the
+azotea, and threw it into the river. The whole thing happened in a
+second and the dining-kiosk was left in darkness.
+
+The lamp had already struck the water before the servants could cry
+out, “Thief, thief!” and rush toward the azotea. “A revolver!” cried
+one of them. “A revolver, quick! After the thief!”
+
+But the figure, more agile than they, had already mounted the
+balustrade and before a light could be brought, precipitated itself
+into the river, striking the water with a loud splash.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+BEN-ZAYB’S AFFLICTIONS
+
+
+Immediately upon hearing of the incident, after lights had been brought
+and the scarcely dignified attitudes of the startled gods revealed,
+Ben-Zayb, filled with holy indignation, and with the approval of the
+press-censor secured beforehand, hastened home—an entresol where he
+lived in a mess with others—to write an article that would be the
+sublimest ever penned under the skies of the Philippines. The
+Captain-General would leave disconsolate if he did not first enjoy his
+dithyrambs, and this Ben-Zayb, in his kindness of heart, could not
+allow. Hence he sacrificed the dinner and ball, nor did he sleep that
+night.
+
+Sonorous exclamations of horror, of indignation, to fancy that the
+world was smashing to pieces and the stars, the eternal stars, were
+clashing together! Then a mysterious introduction, filled with
+allusions, veiled hints, then an account of the affair, and the final
+peroration. He multiplied the flourishes and exhausted all his
+euphemisms in describing the drooping shoulders and the tardy baptism
+of salad his Excellency had received on his Olympian brow, he eulogized
+the agility with which the General had recovered a vertical position,
+placing his head where his legs had been, and vice versa, then intoned
+a hymn to Providence for having so solicitously guarded those sacred
+bones. The paragraph turned out to be so perfect that his Excellency
+appeared as a hero, and fell higher, as Victor Hugo said.
+
+He wrote, erased, added, and polished, so that, without wanting in
+veracity—this was his special merit as a journalist—the whole would be
+an epic, grand for the seven gods, cowardly and base for the unknown
+thief, “who had executed himself, terror-stricken, and in the very act
+convinced of the enormity of his crime.”
+
+He explained Padre Irene’s act of plunging under the table as “an
+impulse of innate valor, which the habit of a God of peace and
+gentleness, worn throughout a whole life, had been unable to
+extinguish,” for Padre Irene had tried to hurl himself upon the thief
+and had taken a straight course along the submensal route. In passing,
+he spoke of submarine passages, mentioned a project of Don Custodio’s,
+called attention to the liberal education and wide travels of the
+priest. Padre Salvi’s swoon was the excessive sorrow that took
+possession of the virtuous Franciscan to see the little fruit borne
+among the Indians by his pious sermons, while the immobility and fright
+of the other guests, among them the Countess, who “sustained” Padre
+Salvi (she grabbed him), were the serenity and sang-froid of heroes,
+inured to danger in the performance of their duties, beside whom the
+Roman senators surprised by the Gallic invaders were nervous
+schoolgirls frightened at painted cockroaches.
+
+Afterwards, to form a contrast, the picture of the thief: fear,
+madness, confusion, the fierce look, the distorted features, and—force
+of moral superiority in the race—his religious awe to see assembled
+there such august personages! Here came in opportunely a long
+imprecation, a harangue, a diatribe against the perversion of good
+customs, hence the necessity of a permanent military tribunal, “a
+declaration of martial law within the limits already so declared,
+special legislation, energetic and repressive, because it is in every
+way needful, it is of imperative importance to impress upon the
+malefactors and criminals that if the heart is generous and paternal
+for those who are submissive and obedient to the law, the hand is
+strong, firm, inexorable, hard, and severe for those who against all
+reason fail to respect it and who insult the sacred institutions of the
+fatherland. Yes, gentlemen, this is demanded not only for the welfare
+of these islands, not only for the welfare of all mankind, but also in
+the name of Spain, the honor of the Spanish name, the prestige of the
+Iberian people, because before all things else Spaniards we are, and
+the flag of Spain,” etc.
+
+He terminated the article with this farewell: “Go in peace, gallant
+warrior, you who with expert hand have guided the destinies of this
+country in such calamitous times! Go in peace to breathe the balmy
+breezes of Manzanares! [73] We shall remain here like faithful
+sentinels to venerate your memory, to admire your wise dispositions, to
+avenge the infamous attempt upon your splendid gift, which we will
+recover even if we have to dry up the seas! Such a precious relic will
+be for this country an eternal monument to your splendor, your presence
+of mind, your gallantry!”
+
+In this rather confused way he concluded the article and before dawn
+sent it to the printing-office, of course with the censor’s permit.
+Then he went to sleep like Napoleon, after he had arranged the plan for
+the battle of Jena.
+
+But at dawn he was awakened to have the sheets of copy returned with a
+note from the editor saying that his Excellency had positively and
+severely forbidden any mention of the affair, and had further ordered
+the denial of any versions and comments that might get abroad,
+discrediting them as exaggerated rumors.
+
+To Ben-Zayb this blow was the murder of a beautiful and sturdy child,
+born and nurtured with such great pain and fatigue. Where now hurl the
+Catilinarian pride, the splendid exhibition of warlike crime-avenging
+materials? And to think that within a month or two he was going to
+leave the Philippines, and the article could not be published in Spain,
+since how could he say those things about the criminals of Madrid,
+where other ideas prevailed, where extenuating circumstances were
+sought, where facts were weighed, where there were juries, and so on?
+Articles such as his were like certain poisonous rums that are
+manufactured in Europe, good enough to be sold among the negroes, good
+for negroes, [74] with the difference that if the negroes did not drink
+them they would not be destroyed, while Ben-Zayb’s articles, whether
+the Filipinos read them or not, had their effect.
+
+“If only some other crime might be committed today or tomorrow,” he
+mused.
+
+With the thought of that child dead before seeing the light, those
+frozen buds, and feeling his eyes fill with tears, he dressed himself
+to call upon the editor. But the editor shrugged his shoulders; his
+Excellency had forbidden it because if it should be divulged that seven
+of the greater gods had let themselves be surprised and robbed by a
+nobody, while they brandished knives and forks, that would endanger the
+integrity of the fatherland! So he had ordered that no search be made
+for the lamp or the thief, and had recommended to his successors that
+they should not run the risk of dining in any private house, without
+being surrounded by halberdiers and guards. As those who knew anything
+about the events that night in Don Timoteo’s house were for the most
+part military officials and government employees, it was not difficult
+to suppress the affair in public, for it concerned the integrity of the
+fatherland. Before this name Ben-Zayb bowed his head heroically,
+thinking about Abraham, Guzman El Bueno, [75] or at least, Brutus and
+other heroes of antiquity.
+
+Such a sacrifice could not remain unrewarded, the gods of journalism
+being pleased with Abraham Ben-Zayb. Almost upon the hour came the
+reporting angel bearing the sacrificial lamb in the shape of an assault
+committed at a country-house on the Pasig, where certain friars were
+spending the heated season. Here was his opportunity and Ben-Zayb
+praised his gods.
+
+“The robbers got over two thousand pesos, leaving badly wounded one
+friar and two servants. The curate defended himself as well as he could
+behind a chair, which was smashed in his hands.”
+
+“Wait, wait!” said Ben-Zayb, taking notes. “Forty or fifty outlaws
+traitorously—revolvers, bolos, shotguns, pistols—lion at
+bay—chair—splinters flying—barbarously wounded—ten thousand pesos!”
+
+So great was his enthusiasm that he was not content with mere reports,
+but proceeded in person to the scene of the crime, composing on the
+road a Homeric description of the fight. A harangue in the mouth of the
+leader? A scornful defiance on the part of the priest? All the
+metaphors and similes applied to his Excellency, Padre Irene, and Padre
+Salvi would exactly fit the wounded friar and the description of the
+thief would serve for each of the outlaws. The imprecation could be
+expanded, since he could talk of religion, of the faith, of charity, of
+the ringing of bells, of what the Indians owed to the friars, he could
+get sentimental and melt into Castelarian [76] epigrams and lyric
+periods. The señoritas of the city would read the article and murmur,
+“Ben-Zayb, bold as a lion and tender as a lamb!”
+
+But when he reached the scene, to his great astonishment he learned
+that the wounded friar was no other than Padre Camorra, sentenced by
+his Provincial to expiate in the pleasant country-house on the banks of
+the Pasig his pranks in Tiani. He had a slight scratch on his hand and
+a bruise on his head received from flattening himself out on the floor.
+The robbers numbered three or four, armed only with bolos, the sum
+stolen fifty pesos!
+
+“It won’t do!” exclaimed Ben-Zayb. “Shut up! You don’t know what you’re
+talking about.”
+
+“How don’t I know, puñales?”
+
+“Don’t be a fool—the robbers must have numbered more.”
+
+“You ink-slinger—”
+
+So they had quite an altercation. What chiefly concerned Ben-Zayb was
+not to throw away the article, to give importance to the affair, so
+that he could use the peroration.
+
+But a fearful rumor cut short their dispute. The robbers caught had
+made some important revelations. One of the outlaws under Matanglawin
+(Cabesang Tales) had made an appointment with them to join his band in
+Santa Mesa, thence to sack the conventos and houses of the wealthy.
+They would be guided by a Spaniard, tall and sunburnt, with white hair,
+who said that he was acting under the orders of the General, whose
+great friend he was, and they had been further assured that the
+artillery and various regiments would join them, wherefore they were to
+entertain no fear at all. The tulisanes would be pardoned and have a
+third part of the booty assigned to them. The signal was to have been a
+cannon-shot, but having waited for it in vain the tulisanes, thinking
+themselves deceived, separated, some going back to their homes, some
+returning to the mountains vowing vengeance on the Spaniard, who had
+thus failed twice to keep his word. Then they, the robbers caught, had
+decided to do something on their own account, attacking the
+country-house that they found closest at hand, resolving religiously to
+give two-thirds of the booty to the Spaniard with white hair, if
+perchance he should call upon them for it.
+
+The description being recognized as that of Simoun, the declaration was
+received as an absurdity and the robber subjected to all kinds of
+tortures, including the electric machine, for his impious blasphemy.
+But news of the disappearance of the jeweler having attracted the
+attention of the whole Escolta, and the sacks of powder and great
+quantities of cartridges having been discovered in his house, the story
+began to wear an appearance of truth. Mystery began to enwrap the
+affair, enveloping it in clouds; there were whispered conversations,
+coughs, suspicious looks, suggestive comments, and trite second-hand
+remarks. Those who were on the inside were unable to get over their
+astonishment, they put on long faces, turned pale, and but little was
+wanting for many persons to lose their minds in realizing certain
+things that had before passed unnoticed.
+
+“We’ve had a narrow escape! Who would have said—”
+
+In the afternoon Ben-Zayb, his pockets filled with revolvers and
+cartridges, went to see Don Custodio, whom he found hard at work over a
+project against American jewelers. In a hushed voice he whispered
+between the palms of his hands into the journalist’s ear mysterious
+words.
+
+“Really?” questioned Ben-Zayb, slapping his hand on his pocket and
+paling visibly.
+
+“Wherever he may be found—” The sentence was completed with an
+expressive pantomime. Don Custodio raised both arms to the height of
+his face, with the right more bent than the left, turned the palms of
+his hands toward the floor, closed one eye, and made two movements in
+advance. “Ssh! Ssh!” he hissed.
+
+“And the diamonds?” inquired Ben-Zayb.
+
+“If they find him—” He went through another pantomime with the fingers
+of his right hand, spreading them out and clenching them together like
+the closing of a fan, clutching out with them somewhat in the manner of
+the wings of a wind-mill sweeping imaginary objects toward itself with
+practised skill. Ben-Zayb responded with another pantomime, opening his
+eyes wide, arching his eyebrows and sucking in his breath eagerly as
+though nutritious air had just been discovered.
+
+“Sssh!”
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+THE MYSTERY
+
+                                                           Todo se sabe
+
+
+Notwithstanding so many precautions, rumors reached the public, even
+though quite changed and mutilated. On the following night they were
+the theme of comment in the house of Orenda, a rich jewel merchant in
+the industrious district of Santa Cruz, and the numerous friends of the
+family gave attention to nothing else. They were not indulging in
+cards, or playing the piano, while little Tinay, the youngest of the
+girls, became bored playing chongka by herself, without being able to
+understand the interest awakened by assaults, conspiracies, and sacks
+of powder, when there were in the seven holes so many beautiful cowries
+that seemed to be winking at her in unison and smiled with their tiny
+mouths half-opened, begging to be carried up to the home. Even Isagani,
+who, when he came, always used to play with her and allow himself to be
+beautifully cheated, did not come at her call, for Isagani was gloomily
+and silently listening to something Chichoy the silversmith was
+relating. Momoy, the betrothed of Sensia, the eldest of the daughters—a
+pretty and vivacious girl, rather given to joking—had left the window
+where he was accustomed to spend his evenings in amorous discourse, and
+this action seemed to be very annoying to the lory whose cage hung from
+the eaves there, the lory endeared to the house from its ability to
+greet everybody in the morning with marvelous phrases of love. Capitana
+Loleng, the energetic and intelligent Capitana Loleng, had her
+account-book open before her, but she neither read nor wrote in it, nor
+was her attention fixed on the trays of loose pearls, nor on the
+diamonds—she had completely forgotten herself and was all ears. Her
+husband himself, the great Capitan Toringoy,—a transformation of the
+name Domingo,—the happiest man in the district, without other
+occupation than to dress well, eat, loaf, and gossip, while his whole
+family worked and toiled, had not gone to join his coterie, but was
+listening between fear and emotion to the hair-raising news of the lank
+Chichoy.
+
+Nor was reason for all this lacking. Chichoy had gone to deliver some
+work for Don Timoteo Pelaez, a pair of earrings for the bride, at the
+very time when they were tearing down the kiosk that on the previous
+night had served as a dining-room for the foremost officials. Here
+Chichoy turned pale and his hair stood on end.
+
+“Nakú!” he exclaimed, “sacks and sacks of powder, sacks of powder under
+the floor, in the roof, under the table, under the chairs, everywhere!
+It’s lucky none of the workmen were smoking.”
+
+“Who put those sacks of powder there?” asked Capitana Loleng, who was
+brave and did not turn pale, as did the enamored Momoy. But Momoy had
+attended the wedding, so his posthumous emotion can be appreciated: he
+had been near the kiosk.
+
+“That’s what no one can explain,” replied Chichoy. “Who would have any
+interest in breaking up the fiesta? There couldn’t have been more than
+one, as the celebrated lawyer Señor Pasta who was there on a visit
+declared—either an enemy of Don Timoteo’s or a rival of Juanito’s.”
+
+The Orenda girls turned instinctively toward Isagani, who smiled
+silently.
+
+“Hide yourself,” Capitana Loleng advised him. “They may accuse you.
+Hide!”
+
+Again Isagani smiled but said nothing.
+
+“Don Timoteo,” continued Chichoy, “did not know to whom to attribute
+the deed. He himself superintended the work, he and his friend Simoun,
+and nobody else. The house was thrown into an uproar, the lieutenant of
+the guard came, and after enjoining secrecy upon everybody, they sent
+me away. But—”
+
+“But—but—” stammered the trembling Momoy.
+
+“Nakú!” ejaculated Sensia, gazing at her fiancé and trembling
+sympathetically to remember that he had been at the fiesta. “This young
+man—If the house had blown up—” She stared at her sweetheart
+passionately and admired his courage.
+
+“If it had blown up—”
+
+“No one in the whole of Calle Anloague would have been left alive,”
+concluded Capitan Toringoy, feigning valor and indifference in the
+presence of his family.
+
+“I left in consternation,” resumed Chichoy, “thinking about how, if a
+mere spark, a cigarette had fallen, if a lamp had been overturned, at
+the present moment we should have neither a General, nor an Archbishop,
+nor any one, not even a government clerk! All who were at the fiesta
+last night—annihilated!”
+
+“Vírgen Santísima! This young man—”
+
+“’Susmariosep!” exclaimed Capitana Loleng. “All our debtors were there,
+’Susmariosep! And we have a house near there! Who could it have been?”
+
+“Now you may know about it,” added Chichoy in a whisper, “but you must
+keep it a secret. This afternoon I met a friend, a clerk in an office,
+and in talking about the affair, he gave me the clue to the mystery—he
+had it from some government employees. Who do you suppose put the sacks
+of powder there?”
+
+Many shrugged their shoulders, while Capitan Toringoy merely looked
+askance at Isagani.
+
+“The friars?”
+
+“Quiroga the Chinaman?”
+
+“Some student?”
+
+“Makaraig?”
+
+Capitan Toringoy coughed and glanced at Isagani, while Chichoy shook
+his head and smiled.
+
+“The jeweler Simoun.”
+
+“Simoun!!”
+
+The profound silence of amazement followed these words. Simoun, the
+evil genius of the Captain-General, the rich trader to whose house they
+had gone to buy unset gems, Simoun, who had received the Orenda girls
+with great courtesy and had paid them fine compliments! For the very
+reason that the story seemed absurd it was believed. “Credo quia
+absurdum,” said St. Augustine.
+
+“But wasn’t Simoun at the fiesta last night?” asked Sensia.
+
+“Yes,” said Momoy. “But now I remember! He left the house just as we
+were sitting down to the dinner. He went to get his wedding-gift.”
+
+“But wasn’t he a friend of the General’s? Wasn’t he a partner of Don
+Timoteo’s?”
+
+“Yes, he made himself a partner in order to strike the blow and kill
+all the Spaniards.”
+
+“Aha!” cried Sensia. “Now I understand!”
+
+“What?”
+
+“You didn’t want to believe Aunt Tentay. Simoun is the devil and he has
+bought up the souls of all the Spaniards. Aunt Tentay said so!”
+
+Capitana Loleng crossed herself and looked uneasily toward the jewels,
+fearing to see them turn into live coals, while Capitan Toringoy took
+off the ring which had come from Simoun.
+
+“Simoun has disappeared without leaving any traces,” added Chichoy.
+“The Civil Guard is searching for him.”
+
+“Yes,” observed Sensia, crossing herself, “searching for the devil.”
+
+Now many things were explained: Simoun’s fabulous wealth and the
+peculiar smell in his house, the smell of sulphur. Binday, another of
+the daughters, a frank and lovely girl, remembered having seen blue
+flames in the jeweler’s house one afternoon when she and her mother had
+gone there to buy jewels. Isagani listened attentively, but said
+nothing.
+
+“So, last night—” ventured Momoy.
+
+“Last night?” echoed Sensia, between curiosity and fear.
+
+Momoy hesitated, but the face Sensia put on banished his fear. “Last
+night, while we were eating, there was a disturbance, the light in the
+General’s dining-room went out. They say that some unknown person stole
+the lamp that was presented by Simoun.”
+
+“A thief? One of the Black Hand?”
+
+Isagani arose to walk back and forth.
+
+“Didn’t they catch him?”
+
+“He jumped into the river before anybody recognized him. Some say he
+was a Spaniard, some a Chinaman, and others an Indian.”
+
+“It’s believed that with the lamp,” added Chichoy, “he was going to set
+fire to the house, then the powder—”
+
+Momoy again shuddered but noticing that Sensia was watching him tried
+to control himself. “What a pity!” he exclaimed with an effort. “How
+wickedly the thief acted. Everybody would have been killed.”
+
+Sensia stared at him in fright, the women crossed themselves, while
+Capitan Toringoy, who was afraid of politics, made a move to go away.
+
+Momoy turned to Isagani, who observed with an enigmatic smile: “It’s
+always wicked to take what doesn’t belong to you. If that thief had
+known what it was all about and had been able to reflect, surely he
+wouldn’t have done as he did.”
+
+Then, after a pause, he added, “For nothing in the world would I want
+to be in his place!”
+
+So they continued their comments and conjectures until an hour later,
+when Isagani bade the family farewell, to return forever to his uncle’s
+side.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+FATALITY
+
+
+Matanglawin was the terror of Luzon. His band had as lief appear in one
+province where it was least expected as make a descent upon another
+that was preparing to resist it. It burned a sugar-mill in Batangas and
+destroyed the crops, on the following day it murdered the Justice of
+the Peace of Tiani, and on the next took possession of the town of
+Cavite, carrying off the arms from the town hall. The central
+provinces, from Tayabas to Pangasinan, suffered from his depredations,
+and his bloody name extended from Albay in the south to Kagayan in the
+north. The towns, disarmed through mistrust on the part of a weak
+government, fell easy prey into his hands—at his approach the fields
+were abandoned by the farmers, the herds were scattered, while a trail
+of blood and fire marked his passage. Matanglawin laughed at the severe
+measures ordered by the government against the tulisanes, since from
+them only the people in the outlying villages suffered, being captured
+and maltreated if they resisted the band, and if they made peace with
+it being flogged and deported by the government, provided they
+completed the journey and did not meet with a fatal accident on the
+way. Thanks to these terrible alternatives many of the country folk
+decided to enlist under his command.
+
+As a result of this reign of terror, trade among the towns, already
+languishing, died out completely. The rich dared not travel, and the
+poor feared to be arrested by the Civil Guard, which, being under
+obligation to pursue the tulisanes, often seized the first person
+encountered and subjected him to unspeakable tortures. In its
+impotence, the government put on a show of energy toward the persons
+whom it suspected, in order that by force of cruelty the people should
+not realize its weakness—the fear that prompted such measures.
+
+A string of these hapless suspects, some six or seven, with their arms
+tied behind them, bound together like a bunch of human meat, was one
+afternoon marching through the excessive heat along a road that skirted
+a mountain, escorted by ten or twelve guards armed with rifles. Their
+bayonets gleamed in the sun, the barrels of their rifles became hot,
+and even the sage-leaves in their helmets scarcely served to temper the
+effect of the deadly May sun.
+
+Deprived of the use of their arms and pressed close against one another
+to save rope, the prisoners moved along almost uncovered and unshod, he
+being the best off who had a handkerchief twisted around his head.
+Panting, suffering, covered with dust which perspiration converted into
+mud, they felt their brains melting, they saw lights dancing before
+them, red spots floating in the air. Exhaustion and dejection were
+pictured in their faces, desperation, wrath, something indescribable,
+the look of one who dies cursing, of a man who is weary of life, who
+hates himself, who blasphemes against God. The strongest lowered their
+heads to rub their faces against the dusky backs of those in front of
+them and thus wipe away the sweat that was blinding them. Many were
+limping, but if any one of them happened to fall and thus delay the
+march he would hear a curse as a soldier ran up brandishing a branch
+torn from a tree and forced him to rise by striking about in all
+directions. The string then started to run, dragging, rolling in the
+dust, the fallen one, who howled and begged to be killed; but perchance
+he succeeded in getting on his feet and then went along crying like a
+child and cursing the hour he was born.
+
+The human cluster halted at times while the guards drank, and then the
+prisoners continued on their way with parched mouths, darkened brains,
+and hearts full of curses. Thirst was for these wretches the least of
+their troubles.
+
+“Move on, you sons of ——!” cried a soldier, again refreshed, hurling
+the insult common among the lower classes of Filipinos.
+
+The branch whistled and fell on any shoulder whatsoever, the nearest
+one, or at times upon a face to leave a welt at first white, then red,
+and later dirty with the dust of the road.
+
+“Move on, you cowards!” at times a voice yelled in Spanish, deepening
+its tone.
+
+“Cowards!” repeated the mountain echoes.
+
+Then the cowards quickened their pace under a sky of red-hot iron, over
+a burning road, lashed by the knotty branch which was worn into shreds
+on their livid skins. A Siberian winter would perhaps be tenderer than
+the May sun of the Philippines.
+
+Yet, among the soldiers there was one who looked with disapproving eyes
+upon so much wanton cruelty, as he marched along silently with his
+brows knit in disgust. At length, seeing that the guard, not satisfied
+with the branch, was kicking the prisoners that fell, he could no
+longer restrain himself but cried out impatiently, “Here, Mautang, let
+them alone!”
+
+Mautang turned toward him in surprise. “What’s it to you, Carolino?” he
+asked.
+
+“To me, nothing, but it hurts me,” replied Carolino. “They’re men like
+ourselves.”
+
+“It’s plain that you’re new to the business!” retorted Mautang with a
+compassionate smile. “How did you treat the prisoners in the war?”
+
+“With more consideration, surely!” answered Carolino.
+
+Mautang remained silent for a moment and then, apparently having
+discovered the reason, calmly rejoined, “Ah, it’s because they are
+enemies and fight us, while these—these are our own countrymen.”
+
+Then drawing nearer to Carolino he whispered, “How stupid you are!
+They’re treated so in order that they may attempt to resist or to
+escape, and then—bang!”
+
+Carolino made no reply.
+
+One of the prisoners then begged that they let him stop for a moment.
+
+“This is a dangerous place,” answered the corporal, gazing uneasily
+toward the mountain. “Move on!”
+
+“Move on!” echoed Mautang and his lash whistled.
+
+The prisoner twisted himself around to stare at him with reproachful
+eyes. “You are more cruel than the Spaniard himself,” he said.
+
+Mautang replied with more blows, when suddenly a bullet whistled,
+followed by a loud report. Mautang dropped his rifle, uttered an oath,
+and clutching at his breast with both hands fell spinning into a heap.
+The prisoner saw him writhing in the dust with blood spurting from his
+mouth.
+
+“Halt!” called the corporal, suddenly turning pale.
+
+The soldiers stopped and stared about them. A wisp of smoke rose from a
+thicket on the height above. Another bullet sang to its accompanying
+report and the corporal, wounded in the thigh, doubled over vomiting
+curses. The column was attacked by men hidden among the rocks above.
+
+Sullen with rage the corporal motioned toward the string of prisoners
+and laconically ordered, “Fire!”
+
+The wretches fell upon their knees, filled with consternation. As they
+could not lift their hands, they begged for mercy by kissing the dust
+or bowing their heads—one talked of his children, another of his mother
+who would be left unprotected, one promised money, another called upon
+God—but the muzzles were quickly lowered and a hideous volley silenced
+them all.
+
+Then began the sharpshooting against those who were behind the rocks
+above, over which a light cloud of smoke began to hover. To judge from
+the scarcity of their shots, the invisible enemies could not have more
+than three rifles. As they advanced firing, the guards sought cover
+behind tree-trunks or crouched down as they attempted to scale the
+height. Splintered rocks leaped up, broken twigs fell from trees,
+patches of earth were torn up, and the first guard who attempted the
+ascent rolled back with a bullet through his shoulder.
+
+The hidden enemy had the advantage of position, but the valiant guards,
+who did not know how to flee, were on the point of retiring, for they
+had paused, unwilling to advance; that fight against the invisible
+unnerved them. Smoke and rocks alone could be seen—not a voice was
+heard, not a shadow appeared; they seemed to be fighting with the
+mountain.
+
+“Shoot, Carolino! What are you aiming at?” called the corporal.
+
+At that instant a man appeared upon a rock, making signs with his
+rifle.
+
+“Shoot him!” ordered the corporal with a foul oath.
+
+Three guards obeyed the order, but the man continued standing there,
+calling out at the top of his voice something unintelligible.
+
+Carolino paused, thinking that he recognized something familiar about
+that figure, which stood out plainly in the sunlight. But the corporal
+threatened to tie him up if he did not fire, so Carolino took aim and
+the report of his rifle was heard. The man on the rock spun around and
+disappeared with a cry that left Carolino horror-stricken.
+
+Then followed a rustling in the bushes, indicating that those within
+were scattering in all directions, so the soldiers boldly advanced, now
+that there was no more resistance. Another man appeared upon the rock,
+waving a spear, and they fired at him. He sank down slowly, catching at
+the branch of a tree, but with another volley fell face downwards on
+the rock.
+
+The guards climbed on nimbly, with bayonets fixed ready for a
+hand-to-hand fight. Carolino alone moved forward reluctantly, with a
+wandering, gloomy look, the cry of the man struck by his bullet still
+ringing in his ears. The first to reach the spot found an old man
+dying, stretched out on the rock. He plunged his bayonet into the body,
+but the old man did not even wink, his eyes being fixed on Carolino
+with an indescribable gaze, while with his bony hand he pointed to
+something behind the rock.
+
+The soldiers turned to see Caroline frightfully pale, his mouth hanging
+open, with a look in which glimmered the last spark of reason, for
+Carolino, who was no other than Tano, Cabesang Tales’ son, and who had
+just returned from the Carolines, recognized in the dying man his
+grandfather, Tandang Selo. No longer able to speak, the old man’s dying
+eyes uttered a whole poem of grief—and then a corpse, he still
+continued to point to something behind the rock.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+
+In his solitary retreat on the shore of the sea, whose mobile surface
+was visible through the open, windows, extending outward until it
+mingled with the horizon, Padre Florentino was relieving the monotony
+by playing on his harmonium sad and melancholy tunes, to which the
+sonorous roar of the surf and the sighing of the treetops of the
+neighboring wood served as accompaniments. Notes long, full, mournful
+as a prayer, yet still vigorous, escaped from the old instrument. Padre
+Florentino, who was an accomplished musician, was improvising, and, as
+he was alone, gave free rein to the sadness in his heart.
+
+For the truth was that the old man was very sad. His good friend, Don
+Tiburcio de Espadaña, had just left him, fleeing from the persecution
+of his wife. That morning he had received a note from the lieutenant of
+the Civil Guard, which ran thus:
+
+
+    MY DEAR CHAPLAIN,—I have just received from the commandant a
+    telegram that says, “Spaniard hidden house Padre Florentino capture
+    forward alive dead.” As the telegram is quite explicit, warn your
+    friend not to be there when I come to arrest him at eight tonight.
+
+    Affectionately,
+
+    PEREZ
+
+    Burn this note.
+
+
+“T-that V-victorina!” Don Tiburcio had stammered. “S-she’s c-capable of
+having me s-shot!”
+
+Padre Florentino was unable to reassure him. Vainly he pointed out to
+him that the word cojera should have read cogerá, [77] and that the
+hidden Spaniard could not be Don  Tiburcio, but the jeweler Simoun, who
+two days before had arrived, wounded and a fugitive, begging for
+shelter. But Don Tiburcio would not be convinced—cojera was his own
+lameness, his personal description, and it was an intrigue of
+Victorina’s to get him back alive or dead, as Isagani had written from
+Manila. So the poor Ulysses had left the priest’s house to conceal
+himself in the hut of a woodcutter.
+
+No doubt was entertained by Padre Florentino that the Spaniard wanted
+was the jeweler Simoun, who had arrived mysteriously, himself carrying
+the jewel-chest, bleeding, morose, and exhausted. With the free and
+cordial Filipino hospitality, the priest had taken him in, without
+asking indiscreet questions, and as news of the events in Manila had
+not yet reached his ears he was unable to understand the situation
+clearly. The only conjecture that occurred to him was that the General,
+the jeweler’s friend and protector, being gone, probably his enemies,
+the victims of wrong and abuse, were now rising and calling for
+vengeance, and that the acting Governor was pursuing him to make him
+disgorge the wealth he had accumulated—hence his flight. But whence
+came his wounds? Had he tried to commit suicide? Were they the result
+of personal revenge? Or were they merely caused by an accident, as
+Simoun claimed? Had they been received in escaping from the force that
+was pursuing him?
+
+This last conjecture was the one that seemed to have the greatest
+appearance of probability, being further strengthened by the telegram
+received and Simoun’s decided unwillingness from the start to be
+treated by the doctor from the capital. The jeweler submitted only to
+the ministrations of Don Tiburcio, and even to them with marked
+distrust. In this situation Padre Florentino was asking himself what
+line of conduct he should pursue when the Civil Guard came to arrest
+Simoun. His condition would not permit his removal, much less a long
+journey—but the telegram said alive or dead.
+
+Padre Florentine ceased playing and approached the window to gaze out
+at the sea, whose desolate surface was without a ship, without a
+sail—it gave him no suggestion. A solitary islet outlined in the
+distance spoke only of solitude and made the space more lonely.
+Infinity is at times despairingly mute.
+
+The old man was trying to analyze the sad and ironical smile with which
+Simoun had received the news that he was to be arrested. What did that
+smile mean? And that other smile, still sadder and more ironical, with
+which he received the news that they would not come before eight at
+night? What did all this mystery signify? Why did Simoun refuse to
+hide? There came into his mind the celebrated saying of St. John
+Chrysostom when he was defending the eunuch Eutropius: “Never was a
+better time than this to say—Vanity of vanities and all is vanity!”
+
+Yes, that Simoun, so rich, so powerful, so feared a week ago, and now
+more unfortunate than Eutropius, was seeking refuge, not at the altars
+of a church, but in the miserable house of a poor native priest, hidden
+in the forest, on the solitary seashore! Vanity of vanities and all is
+vanity! That man would within a few hours be a prisoner, dragged from
+the bed where he lay, without respect for his condition, without
+consideration for his wounds—dead or alive his enemies demanded him!
+How could he save him? Where could he find the moving accents of the
+bishop of Constantinople? What weight would his weak words have, the
+words of a native priest, whose own humiliation this same Simoun had in
+his better days seemed to applaud and encourage?
+
+But Padre Florentine no longer recalled the indifferent reception that
+two months before the jeweler had accorded to him when he had tried to
+interest him in favor of Isagani, then a prisoner on account of his
+imprudent chivalry; he forgot the activity Simoun had displayed in
+urging Paulita’s marriage, which had plunged Isagani into the fearful
+misanthropy that was worrying his uncle. He forgot all these things and
+thought only of the sick man’s plight and his own obligations as a
+host, until his senses reeled. Where must he hide him to avoid his
+falling into the clutches of the authorities? But the person chiefly
+concerned was not worrying, he was smiling.
+
+While he was pondering over these things, the old man was approached by
+a servant who said that the sick man wished to speak with him, so he
+went into the next room, a clean and well-ventilated apartment with a
+floor of wide boards smoothed and polished, and simply furnished with
+big, heavy armchairs of ancient design, without varnish or paint. At
+one end there was a large kamagon bed with its four posts to support
+the canopy, and beside it a table covered with bottles, lint, and
+bandages. A praying-desk at the feet of a Christ and a scanty library
+led to the suspicion that it was the priest’s own bedroom, given up to
+his guest according to the Filipino custom of offering to the stranger
+the best table, the best room, and the best bed in the house. Upon
+seeing the windows opened wide to admit freely the healthful sea-breeze
+and the echoes of its eternal lament, no one in the Philippines would
+have said that a sick person was to be found there, since it is the
+custom to close all the windows and stop up all the cracks just as soon
+as any one catches a cold or gets an insignificant headache.
+
+Padre Florentine looked toward the bed and was astonished to see that
+the sick man’s face had lost its tranquil and ironical expression.
+Hidden grief seemed to knit his brows, anxiety was depicted in his
+looks, his lips were curled in a smile of pain.
+
+“Are you suffering, Señor Simoun?” asked the priest solicitously, going
+to his side.
+
+“Some! But in a little while I shall cease to suffer,” he replied with
+a shake of his head.
+
+Padre Florentine clasped his hands in fright, suspecting that he
+understood the terrible truth. “My God, what have you done? What have
+you taken?” He reached toward the bottles.
+
+“It’s useless now! There’s no remedy at all!” answered Simoun with a
+pained smile. “What did you expect me to do? Before the clock strikes
+eight—alive or dead—dead, yes, but alive, no!”
+
+“My God, what have you done?”
+
+“Be calm!” urged the sick man with a wave of his hand. “What’s done is
+done. I must not fall into anybody’s hands—my secret would be torn from
+me. Don’t get excited, don’t lose your head, it’s useless! Listen—the
+night is coming on and there’s no time to be lost. I must tell you my
+secret, and intrust to you my last request, I must lay my life open
+before you. At the supreme moment I want to lighten myself of a load, I
+want to clear up a doubt of mine. You who believe so firmly in God—I
+want you to tell me if there is a God!”
+
+“But an antidote, Señor Simoun! I have ether, chloroform—”
+
+The priest began to search for a flask, until Simoun cried impatiently,
+“Useless, it’s useless! Don’t waste time! I’ll go away with my secret!”
+
+The bewildered priest fell down at his desk and prayed at the feet of
+the Christ, hiding his face in his hands. Then he arose serious and
+grave, as if he had received from his God all the force, all the
+dignity, all the authority of the Judge of consciences. Moving a chair
+to the head of the bed he prepared to listen.
+
+At the first words Simoun murmured, when he told his real name, the old
+priest started back and gazed at him in terror, whereat the sick man
+smiled bitterly. Taken by surprise, the priest was not master of
+himself, but he soon recovered, and covering his face with a
+handkerchief again bent over to listen.
+
+Simoun related his sorrowful story: how, thirteen years before, he had
+returned from Europe filled with hopes and smiling illusions, having
+come back to marry a girl whom he loved, disposed to do good and
+forgive all who had wronged him, just so they would let him live in
+peace. But it was not so. A mysterious hand involved him in the
+confusion of an uprising planned by his enemies. Name, fortune, love,
+future, liberty, all were lost, and he escaped only through the heroism
+of a friend. Then he swore vengeance. With the wealth of his family,
+which had been buried in a wood, he had fled, had gone to foreign lands
+and engaged in trade. He took part in the war in Cuba, aiding first one
+side and then another, but always profiting. There he made the
+acquaintance of the General, then a major, whose good-will he won first
+by loans of money, and afterwards he made a friend of him by the
+knowledge of criminal secrets. With his money he had been able to
+secure the General’s appointment and, once in the Philippines, he had
+used him as a blind tool and incited him to all kinds of injustice,
+availing himself of his insatiable lust for gold.
+
+The confession was long and tedious, but during the whole of it the
+confessor made no further sign of surprise and rarely interrupted the
+sick man. It was night when Padre Florentino, wiping the perspiration
+from his face, arose and began to meditate. Mysterious darkness flooded
+the room, so that the moonbeams entering through the window filled it
+with vague lights and vaporous reflections.
+
+Into the midst of the silence the priest’s voice broke sad and
+deliberate, but consoling: “God will forgive you, Señor—Simoun,” he
+said. “He knows that we are fallible, He has seen that you have
+suffered, and in ordaining that the chastisement for your faults should
+come as death from the very ones you have instigated to crime, we can
+see His infinite mercy. He has frustrated your plans one by one, the
+best conceived, first by the death of Maria Clara, then by a lack of
+preparation, then in some mysterious way. Let us bow to His will and
+render Him thanks!”
+
+“According to you, then,” feebly responded the sick man, “His will is
+that these islands—”
+
+“Should continue in the condition in which they suffer?” finished the
+priest, seeing that the other hesitated. “I don’t know, sir, I can’t
+read the thought of the Inscrutable. I know that He has not abandoned
+those peoples who in their supreme moments have trusted in Him and made
+Him the Judge of their cause, I know that His arm has never failed
+when, justice long trampled upon and every recourse gone, the oppressed
+have taken up the sword to fight for home and wife and children, for
+their inalienable rights, which, as the German poet says, shine ever
+there above, unextinguished and inextinguishable, like the eternal
+stars themselves. No, God is justice, He cannot abandon His cause, the
+cause of liberty, without which no justice is possible.”
+
+“Why then has He denied me His aid?” asked the sick man in a voice
+charged with bitter complaint.
+
+“Because you chose means that He could not sanction,” was the severe
+reply. “The glory of saving a country is not for him who has
+contributed to its ruin. You have believed that what crime and iniquity
+have defiled and deformed, another crime and another iniquity can
+purify and redeem. Wrong! Hate never produces anything but monsters and
+crime criminals! Love alone realizes wonderful works, virtue alone can
+save! No, if our country has ever to be free, it will not be through
+vice and crime, it will not be so by corrupting its sons, deceiving
+some and bribing others, no! Redemption presupposes virtue, virtue
+sacrifice, and sacrifice love!”
+
+“Well, I accept your explanation,” rejoined the sick man, after a
+pause. “I have been mistaken, but, because I have been mistaken, will
+that God deny liberty to a people and yet save many who are much worse
+criminals than I am? What is my mistake compared to the crimes of our
+rulers? Why has that God to give more heed to my iniquity than to the
+cries of so many innocents? Why has He not stricken me down and then
+made the people triumph? Why does He let so many worthy and just ones
+suffer and look complacently upon their tortures?”
+
+“The just and the worthy must suffer in order that their ideas may be
+known and extended! You must shake or shatter the vase to spread its
+perfume, you must smite the rock to get the spark! There is something
+providential in the persecutions of tyrants, Señor Simoun!”
+
+“I knew it,” murmured the sick man, “and therefore I encouraged the
+tyranny.”
+
+“Yes, my friend, but more corrupt influences than anything else were
+spread. You fostered the social rottenness without sowing an idea. From
+this fermentation of vices loathing alone could spring, and if anything
+were born overnight it would be at best a mushroom, for mushrooms only
+can spring spontaneously from filth. True it is that the vices of the
+government are fatal to it, they cause its death, but they kill also
+the society in whose bosom they are developed. An immoral government
+presupposes a demoralized people, a conscienceless administration,
+greedy and servile citizens in the settled parts, outlaws and brigands
+in the mountains. Like master, like slave! Like government, like
+country!”
+
+A brief pause ensued, broken at length by the sick man’s voice. “Then,
+what can be done?”
+
+“Suffer and work!”
+
+“Suffer—work!” echoed the sick man bitterly. “Ah, it’s easy to say
+that, when you are not suffering, when the work is rewarded. If your
+God demands such great sacrifices from man, man who can scarcely count
+upon the present and doubts the future, if you had seen what I have,
+the miserable, the wretched, suffering unspeakable tortures for crimes
+they have not committed, murdered to cover up the faults and incapacity
+of others, poor fathers of families torn from their homes to work to no
+purpose upon highways that are destroyed each day and seem only to
+serve for sinking families into want. Ah, to suffer, to work, is the
+will of God! Convince them that their murder is their salvation, that
+their work is the prosperity of the home! To suffer, to work! What God
+is that?”
+
+“A very just God, Señor Simoun,” replied the priest. “A God who
+chastises our lack of faith, our vices, the little esteem in which we
+hold dignity and the civic virtues. We tolerate vice, we make ourselves
+its accomplices, at times we applaud it, and it is just, very just that
+we suffer the consequences, that our children suffer them. It is the
+God of liberty, Señor Simoun, who obliges us to love it, by making the
+yoke heavy for us—a God of mercy, of equity, who while He chastises us,
+betters us and only grants prosperity to him who has merited it through
+his efforts. The school of suffering tempers, the arena of combat
+strengthens the soul.
+
+“I do not mean to say that our liberty will be secured at the sword’s
+point, for the sword plays but little part in modern affairs, but that
+we must secure it by making ourselves worthy of it, by exalting the
+intelligence and the dignity of the individual, by loving justice,
+right, and greatness, even to the extent of dying for them,—and when a
+people reaches that height God will provide a weapon, the idols will be
+shattered, the tyranny will crumble like a house of cards and liberty
+will shine out like the first dawn.
+
+“Our ills we owe to ourselves alone, so let us blame no one. If Spain
+should see that we were less complaisant with tyranny and more disposed
+to struggle and suffer for our rights, Spain would be the first to
+grant us liberty, because when the fruit of the womb reaches maturity
+woe unto the mother who would stifle it! So, while the Filipino people
+has not sufficient energy to proclaim, with head erect and bosom bared,
+its rights to social life, and to guarantee it with its sacrifices,
+with its own blood; while we see our countrymen in private life ashamed
+within themselves, hear the voice of conscience roar in rebellion and
+protest, yet in public life keep silence or even echo the words of him
+who abuses them in order to mock the abused; while we see them wrap
+themselves up in their egotism and with a forced smile praise the most
+iniquitous actions, begging with their eyes a portion of the booty—why
+grant them liberty? With Spain or without Spain they would always be
+the same, and perhaps worse! Why independence, if the slaves of today
+will be the tyrants of tomorrow? And that they will be such is not to
+be doubted, for he who submits to tyranny loves it.
+
+“Señor Simoun, when our people is unprepared, when it enters the fight
+through fraud and force, without a clear understanding of what it is
+doing, the wisest attempts will fail, and better that they do fail,
+since why commit the wife to the husband if he does not sufficiently
+love her, if he is not ready to die for her?”
+
+Padre Florentino felt the sick man catch and press his hand, so he
+became silent, hoping that the other might speak, but he merely felt a
+stronger pressure of the hand, heard a sigh, and then profound silence
+reigned in the room. Only the sea, whose waves were rippled by the
+night breeze, as though awaking from the heat of the day, sent its
+hoarse roar, its eternal chant, as it rolled against the jagged rocks.
+The moon, now free from the sun’s rivalry, peacefully commanded the
+sky, and the trees of the forest bent down toward one another, telling
+their ancient legends in mysterious murmurs borne on the wings of the
+wind.
+
+The sick man said nothing, so Padre Florentino, deeply thoughtful,
+murmured: “Where are the youth who will consecrate their golden hours,
+their illusions, and their enthusiasm to the welfare of their native
+land? Where are the youth who will generously pour out their blood to
+wash away so much shame, so much crime, so much abomination? Pure and
+spotless must the victim be that the sacrifice may be acceptable! Where
+are you, youth, who will embody in yourselves the vigor of life that
+has left our veins, the purity of ideas that has been contaminated in
+our brains, the fire of enthusiasm that has been quenched in our
+hearts? We await you, O youth! Come, for we await you!”
+
+Feeling his eyes moisten he withdrew his hand from that of the sick
+man, arose, and went to the window to gaze out upon the wide surface of
+the sea. He was drawn from his meditation by gentle raps at the door.
+It was the servant asking if he should bring a light.
+
+When the priest returned to the sick man and looked at him in the light
+of the lamp, motionless, his eyes closed, the hand that had pressed his
+lying open and extended along the edge of the bed, he thought for a
+moment that he was sleeping, but noticing that he was not breathing
+touched him gently, and then realized that he was dead. His body had
+already commenced to turn cold. The priest fell upon his knees and
+prayed.
+
+When he arose and contemplated the corpse, in whose features were
+depicted the deepest grief, the tragedy of a whole wasted life which he
+was carrying over there beyond death, the old man shuddered and
+murmured, “God have mercy on those who turned him from the straight
+path!”
+
+While the servants summoned by him fell upon their knees and prayed for
+the dead man, curious and bewildered as they gazed toward the bed,
+reciting requiem after requiem, Padre Florentino took from a cabinet
+the celebrated steel chest that contained Simoun’s fabulous wealth. He
+hesitated for a moment, then resolutely descended the stairs and made
+his way to the cliff where Isagani was accustomed to sit and gaze into
+the depths of the sea.
+
+Padre Florentino looked down at his feet. There below he saw the dark
+billows of the Pacific beating into the hollows of the cliff, producing
+sonorous thunder, at the same time that, smitten by the moonbeams, the
+waves and foam glittered like sparks of fire, like handfuls of diamonds
+hurled into the air by some jinnee of the abyss. He gazed about him. He
+was alone. The solitary coast was lost in the distance amid the dim
+cloud that the moonbeams played through, until it mingled with the
+horizon. The forest murmured unintelligible sounds.
+
+Then the old man, with an effort of his herculean arms, hurled the
+chest into space, throwing it toward the sea. It whirled over and over
+several times and descended rapidly in a slight curve, reflecting the
+moonlight on its polished surface. The old man saw the drops of water
+fly and heard a loud splash as the abyss closed over and swallowed up
+the treasure. He waited for a few moments to see if the depths would
+restore anything, but the wave rolled on as mysteriously as before,
+without adding a fold to its rippling surface, as though into the
+immensity of the sea a pebble only had been dropped.
+
+“May Nature guard you in her deep abysses among the pearls and corals
+of her eternal seas,” then said the priest, solemnly extending his
+hands. “When for some holy and sublime purpose man may need you, God
+will in his wisdom draw you from the bosom of the waves. Meanwhile,
+there you will not work woe, you will not distort justice, you will not
+foment avarice!”
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+GLOSSARY
+
+
+abá: A Tagalog exclamation of wonder, surprise, etc., often used to
+introduce or emphasize a contradictory statement.
+
+alcalde: Governor of a province or district, with both executive and
+judicial authority.
+
+Ayuntamiento: A city corporation or council, and by extension the
+building in which it has its offices; specifically, in Manila, the
+capitol.
+
+balete: The Philippine banyan, a tree sacred in Malay folk-lore.
+
+banka: A dugout canoe with bamboo supports or outriggers.
+
+batalan: The platform of split bamboo attached to a nipa house.
+
+batikúlin: A variety of easily-turned wood, used in carving.
+
+bibinka: A sweetmeat made of sugar or molasses and rice-flour, commonly
+sold in the small shops.
+
+buyera: A woman who prepares and sells the buyo.
+
+buyo: The masticatory prepared by wrapping a piece of areca-nut with a
+little shell-lime in a betel-leaf—the pan of British India.
+
+cabesang: Title of a cabeza de barangay; given by courtesy to his wife
+also.
+
+cabeza de barangay: Headman and tax-collector for a group of about
+fifty families, for whose “tribute” he was personally responsible.
+
+calesa: A two-wheeled chaise with folding top.
+
+calle: Street (Spanish).
+
+camisa: 1. A loose, collarless shirt of transparent material worn by
+men outside the trousers. 2. A thin, transparent waist with flowing
+sleeves, worn by women.
+
+capitan: “Captain,” a title used in addressing or referring to a
+gobernadorcillo, or a former occupant of that office.
+
+carambas: A Spanish exclamation denoting surprise or displeasure.
+
+carbineer: Internal-revenue guard.
+
+carromata: A small two-wheeled vehicle with a fixed top.
+
+casco: A flat-bottomed freight barge.
+
+cayman: The Philippine crocodile.
+
+cedula: Certificate of registration and receipt for poll-tax.
+
+chongka: A child’s game played with pebbles or cowry-shells.
+
+cigarrera: A woman working in a cigar or cigarette factory.
+
+Civil Guard: Internal quasi-military police force of Spanish officers
+and native soldiers.
+
+cochero: Carriage driver, coachman.
+
+cuarto: A copper coin, one hundred and sixty of which were equal in
+value to a silver peso.
+
+filibuster: A native of the Philippines who was accused of advocating
+their separation from Spain.
+
+filibusterism: See filibuster.
+
+gobernadorcillo: “Petty governor,” the principal municipal
+official—also, in Manila, the head of a commercial guild.
+
+gumamela: The hibiscus, common as a garden shrub in the Philippines.
+
+Indian: The Spanish designation for the Christianized Malay of the
+Philippines was indio (Indian), a term used rather contemptuously, the
+name Filipino being generally applied in a restricted sense to the
+children of Spaniards born in the Islands.
+
+kalan: The small, portable, open, clay fireplace commonly used in
+cooking.
+
+kalikut: A short section of bamboo for preparing the buyo; a primitive
+betel-box.
+
+kamagon: A tree of the ebony family, from which fine cabinet-wood is
+obtained. Its fruit is the mabolo, or date-plum.
+
+lanete: A variety of timber used in carving.
+
+linintikan: A Tagalog exclamation of disgust or contempt—“thunder!”
+
+Malacañang: The palace of the Captain-General: from the vernacular name
+of the place where it stands, “fishermen’s resort.”
+
+Malecon: A drive along the bay shore of Manila, opposite the Walled
+City.
+
+Mestizo: A person of mixed Filipino and Spanish blood; sometimes
+applied also to a person of mixed Filipino and Chinese blood.
+
+nakú: A Tagalog exclamation of surprise, wonder, etc.
+
+narra: The Philippine mahogany.
+
+nipa: Swamp palm, with the imbricated leaves of which the roofs and
+sides of the common native houses are constructed.
+
+novena: A devotion consisting of prayers recited for nine consecutive
+days, asking for some special favor; also, a booklet of these prayers.
+
+panguingui: A complicated card-game, generally for small stakes, played
+with a monte deck.
+
+panguinguera: A woman addicted to panguingui, this being chiefly a
+feminine diversion in the Philippines.
+
+pansit: A soup made of Chinese vermicelli.
+
+pansitería: A shop where pansit is prepared and sold.
+
+pañuelo: A starched neckerchief folded stiffly over the shoulders,
+fastened in front and falling in a point behind: the most distinctive
+portion of the customary dress of Filipino women.
+
+peso: A silver coin, either the Spanish peso or the Mexican dollar,
+about the size of an American dollar and of approximately half its
+value.
+
+petate: Sleeping-mat woven from palm leaves.
+
+piña: Fine cloth made from pineapple-leaf fibers.
+
+Provincial: The head of a religious order in the Philippines.
+
+puñales: “Daggers!”
+
+querida: A paramour, mistress: from the Spanish “beloved.”
+
+real: One-eighth of a peso, twenty cuartos.
+
+sala: The principal room in the more pretentious Philippine houses.
+
+salakot: Wide hat of palm or bamboo, distinctively Filipino.
+
+sampaguita: The Arabian jasmine: a small, white, very fragrant flower,
+extensively cultivated, and worn in chaplets and rosaries by women and
+girls—the typical Philippine flower.
+
+sipa: A game played with a hollow ball of plaited bamboo or rattan, by
+boys standing in a circle, who by kicking it with their heels endeavor
+to keep it from striking the ground.
+
+soltada: A bout between fighting-cocks.
+
+’Susmariosep: A common exclamation: contraction of the Spanish, Jesús,
+María, y José, the Holy Family.
+
+tabi: The cry used by carriage drivers to warn pedestrians.
+
+tabú: A utensil fashioned from half of a coconut shell.
+
+tajú: A thick beverage prepared from bean-meal and syrup.
+
+tampipi: A telescopic basket of woven palm, bamboo, or rattan.
+
+Tandang: A title of respect for an old man: from the Tagalog term for
+“old.”
+
+tapis: A piece of dark cloth or lace, often richly worked or
+embroidered, worn at the waist somewhat in the fashion of an apron; a
+distinctive portion of the native women’s attire, especially among the
+Tagalogs.
+
+tatakut: The Tagalog term for “fear.”
+
+teniente-mayor: “Senior lieutenant,” the senior member of the town
+council and substitute for the gobernadorcillo.
+
+tertiary sister: A member of a lay society affiliated with a regular
+monastic order.
+
+tienda: A shop or stall for the sale of merchandise.
+
+tikbalang: An evil spirit, capable of assuming various forms, but said
+to appear usually as a tall black man with disproportionately long
+legs: the “bogey man” of Tagalog children.
+
+tulisan: Outlaw, bandit. Under the old régime in the Philippines the
+tulisanes were those who, on account of real or fancied grievances
+against the authorities, or from fear of punishment for crime, or from
+an instinctive desire to return to primitive simplicity, foreswore life
+in the towns “under the bell,” and made their homes in the mountains or
+other remote places. Gathered in small bands with such arms as they
+could secure, they sustained themselves by highway robbery and the
+levying of black-mail from the country folk.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+NOTES
+
+
+[1] The Spanish designation for the Christianized Malay of the
+Philippines was indio (Indian), a term used rather contemptuously, the
+name filipino being generally applied in a restricted sense to the
+children of Spaniards born in the Islands.—Tr.
+
+[2] Now generally known as the Mariquina.—Tr.
+
+[3] This bridge, constructed in Lukban under the supervision of a
+Franciscan friar, was jocularly referred to as the Puente de Capricho,
+being apparently an ignorant blunder in the right direction, since it
+was declared in an official report made by Spanish engineers in 1852 to
+conform to no known principle of scientific construction, and yet
+proved to be strong and durable.—Tr.
+
+[4] Don Custodio’s gesture indicates money.—Tr.
+
+[5] Duck eggs, that are allowed to advance well into the duckling
+stage, then boiled and eaten. The señora is sneering at a custom among
+some of her own people.—Tr.
+
+[6] The Jesuit College in Manila, established in 1859.—Tr.
+
+[7] Natives of Spain; to distinguish them from the Filipinos, i.e.,
+descendants of Spaniards born in the Philippines. See Glossary:
+“Indian.”—Tr.
+
+[8] It was a common saying among the old Filipinos that the Spaniards
+(white men) were fire (activity), while they themselves were water
+(passivity).—Tr.
+
+[9] The “liberal” demonstrations in Manila, and the mutiny in the
+Cavite Arsenal, resulting in the garroting of the three native priests
+to whom this work was dedicated: the first of a series of fatal
+mistakes, culminating in the execution of the author, that cost Spain
+the loyalty of the Filipinos.—Tr.
+
+[10] Archbishop of Manila from 1767 to 1787.—Tr.
+
+[11] “Between this island (Talim) and Halahala point extends a strait a
+mile wide and a league long, which the Indians call ‘Kinabutasan,’ a
+name that in their language means ‘place that was cleft open’; from
+which it is inferred that in other times the island was joined to the
+mainland and was separated from it by some severe earthquake, thus
+leaving this strait: of this there is an old tradition among the
+Indians.”—Fray Martinez de Zuñiga’s Estadismo (1803).
+
+[12] The reference is to the novel Noli Me Tangere (The Social Cancer),
+the author’s first work, of which, the present is in a way a
+continuation.—Tr.
+
+[13] This legend is still current among the Tagalogs. It circulates in
+various forms, the commonest being that the king was so confined for
+defying the lightning; and it takes no great stretch of the imagination
+to fancy in this idea a reference to the firearms used by the Spanish
+conquerors. Quite recently (January 1909), when the nearly extinct
+volcano of Banahao shook itself and scattered a few tons of mud over
+the surrounding landscape, the people thereabout recalled this old
+legend, saying that it was their King Bernardo making another effort to
+get that right foot loose.—Tr.
+
+[14] The reference is to Noli Me Tangere, in which Sinang appears.
+
+[15] The Dominican school of secondary instruction in Manila.—Tr.
+
+[16] “The studies of secondary instruction given in Santo Tomas, in the
+college of San Juan de Letran, and of San José, and in the private
+schools, had the defects inherent in the plan of instruction which the
+friars developed in the Philippines. It suited their plans that
+scientific and literary knowledge should not become general nor very
+extensive, for which reason they took but little interest in the study
+of those subjects or in the quality of the instruction. Their
+educational establishments were places of luxury for the children of
+wealthy and well-to-do families rather than establishments in which to
+perfect and develop the minds of the Filipino youth. It is true they
+were careful to give them a religious education, tending to make them
+respect the omnipotent power (sic) of the monastic corporations.
+
+“The intellectual powers were made dormant by devoting a greater part
+of the time to the study of Latin, to which they attached an
+extraordinary importance, for the purpose of discouraging pupils from
+studying the exact and experimental sciences and from gaining a
+knowledge of true literary studies.
+
+“The philosophic system explained was naturally the scholastic one,
+with an exceedingly refined and subtile logic, and with deficient ideas
+upon physics. By the study of Latin, and their philosophic systems,
+they converted their pupils into automatic machines rather than into
+practical men prepared to battle with life.”—Census of the Philippine
+Islands (Washington, 1905), Volume III, pp. 601, 602.
+
+[17] The nature of this booklet, in Tagalog, is made clear in several
+passages. It was issued by the Franciscans, but proved too outspoken
+for even Latin refinement, and was suppressed by the Order itself.—Tr.
+
+[18] The rectory or parish house.
+
+[19] Friends of the author, who suffered in Weyler’s expedition,
+mentioned below.—Tr.
+
+[20] The Dominican corporation, at whose instigation Captain-General
+Valeriano Weyler sent a battery of artillery to Kalamba to destroy the
+property of tenants who were contesting in the courts the friars’
+titles to land there. The author’s family were the largest
+sufferers.—Tr.
+
+[21] A relative of the author, whose body was dragged from the tomb and
+thrown to the dogs, on the pretext that he had died without receiving
+final absolution.—Tr.
+
+[22] Under the Spanish régime the government paid no attention to
+education, the schools (!) being under the control of the religious
+orders and the friar-curates of the towns.—Tr.
+
+[23] The cockpits are farmed out annually by the local governments, the
+terms “contract,” and “contractor,” having now been softened into
+“license” and “licensee.”—Tr.
+
+[24] The “Municipal School for Girls” was founded by the municipality
+of Manila in 1864.... The institution was in charge of the Sisters of
+Charity.—Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. III, p. 615.
+
+[25] Now known as Plaza España.—Tr.
+
+[26] Patroness of the Dominican Order. She was formally and sumptuously
+recrowned a queen of the skies in 1907.—Tr.
+
+[27] A burlesque on an association of students known as the Milicia
+Angelica, organized by the Dominicans to strengthen their hold on the
+people. The name used is significant, “carbineers” being the local
+revenue officers, notorious in their later days for graft and
+abuse.—Tr.
+
+[28] “Tinamáan ñg lintik!”—a Tagalog exclamation of anger,
+disappointment, or dismay, regarded as a very strong expression,
+equivalent to profanity. Literally, “May the lightning strike you!”—Tr.
+
+[29] “To lie about the stars is a safe kind of lying.”—Tr.
+
+[30] Throughout this chapter the professor uses the familiar tu in
+addressing the students, thus giving his remarks a contemptuous
+tone.—Tr.
+
+[31] The professor speaks these words in vulgar dialect.
+
+[32] To confuse the letters p and f in speaking Spanish was a common
+error among uneducated Filipinos.—Tr.
+
+[33] No cristianos, not Christians, i.e., savages.—Tr.
+
+[34] The patron saint of Spain, St. James.—Tr.
+
+[35] Houses of bamboo and nipa, such as form the homes of the masses of
+the natives.—Tr.
+
+[36] “In this paragraph Rizal alludes to an incident that had very
+serious results. There was annually celebrated in Binondo a certain
+religious festival, principally at the expense of the Chinese mestizos.
+The latter finally petitioned that their gobernadorcillo be given the
+presidency of it, and this was granted, thanks to the fact that the
+parish priest (the Dominican, Fray José Hevia Campomanes) held to the
+opinion that the presidency belonged to those who paid the most. The
+Tagalogs protested, alleging their better right to it, as the genuine
+sons of the country, not to mention the historical precedent, but the
+friar, who was looking after his own interests, did not yield. General
+Terrero (Governor, 1885–1888), at the advice of his liberal councilors,
+finally had the parish priest removed and for the time being decided
+the affair in favor of the Tagalogs. The matter reached the Colonial
+Office (Ministerio de Ultramar) and the Minister was not even content
+merely to settle it in the way the friars desired, but made amends to
+Padre Hevia by appointing him a bishop.”—W. E. Retana, who was a
+journalist in Manila at the time, in a note to this chapter.
+
+Childish and ridiculous as this may appear now, it was far from being
+so at the time, especially in view of the supreme contempt with which
+the pugnacious Tagalog looks down upon the meek and complaisant Chinese
+and the mortal antipathy that exists between the two races.—Tr.
+
+[37] It is regrettable that Quiroga’s picturesque butchery of Spanish
+and Tagalog—the dialect of the Manila Chinese—cannot be reproduced
+here. Only the thought can be given. There is the same difficulty with
+r’s, d’s, and l’s that the Chinese show in English.—Tr.
+
+[38] Up to the outbreak of the insurrection in 1896, the only genuinely
+Spanish troops in the islands were a few hundred artillerymen, the rest
+being natives, with Spanish officers.—Tr.
+
+[39] Abaka is the fiber obtained from the leaves of the Musa textilis
+and is known commercially as Manila hemp. As it is exclusively a
+product of the Philippines, it may be taken here to symbolize the
+country.—Tr.
+
+[40] Yet Ben-Zayb was not very much mistaken. The three legs of the
+table have grooves in them in which slide the mirrors hidden below the
+platform and covered by the squares of the carpet. By placing the box
+upon the table a spring is pressed and the mirrors rise gently. The
+cloth is then removed, with care to raise it instead of letting it
+slide off, and then there is the ordinary table of the talking heads.
+The table is connected with the bottom of the box. The exhibition
+ended, the prestidigitator again covers the table, presses another
+spring, and the mirrors descend.—Author’s note.
+
+[41] The Malay method of kissing is quite different from the
+Occidental. The mouth is placed close to the object and a deep breath
+taken, often without actually touching the object, being more of a
+sniff than a kiss.—Tr.
+
+[42] Now Calle Tetuan, Santa Cruz. The other names are still in
+use.—Tr.
+
+[43] The Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País for the encouragement of
+agricultural and industrial development, was established by Basco de
+Vargas in 1780.—Tr.
+
+[44] Funds managed by the government for making loans and supporting
+charitable enterprises.—Tr.
+
+[45] The names are fictitious burlesques.—Tr.
+
+[46] “Boiled Shrimp”—Tr.
+
+[47] “Uncle Frank.”—Tr.
+
+[48] Messageries Maritimes, a French line of steamers in the Oriental
+trade.—Tr.
+
+[49] Referring to the expeditions—Misión Española Católica—to the
+Caroline and Pelew Islands from 1886 to 1895, headed by the Capuchin
+Fathers, which brought misery and disaster upon the natives of those
+islands, unprofitable losses and sufferings to the Filipino soldiers
+engaged in them, discredit to Spain, and decorations of merit to a
+number of Spanish officers.—Tr.
+
+[50] Over the possession of the Caroline and Pelew Islands. The
+expeditions referred to in the previous note were largely inspired by
+German activity with regard to those islands, which had always been
+claimed by Spain, who sold her claim to them to Germany after the loss
+of the Philippines.—Tr.
+
+[51] “Where the wind wrinkles the silent waves, that rapidly break,
+    of their own movement, with a gentle murmur on the shore.”—Tr.
+
+[52] “Where rapid and winged engines will rush in flight.”—Tr.
+
+[53] There is something almost uncanny about the general accuracy of
+the prophecy in these lines, the economic part of which is now so well
+on the way to realization, although the writer of them would doubtless
+have been a very much surprised individual had he also foreseen how it
+would come about. But one of his own expressions was “fire and steel to
+the cancer,” and it surely got them.
+
+On the very day that this passage was translated and this note written,
+the first commercial liner was tied up at the new docks, which have
+destroyed the Malecon but raised Manila to the front rank of Oriental
+seaports, and the final revision is made at Baguio, Mountain Province,
+amid the “cooler temperatures on the slopes of the mountains.” As for
+the political portion, it is difficult even now to contemplate calmly
+the blundering fatuity of that bigoted medieval brand of “patriotism”
+which led the decrepit Philippine government to play the Ancient
+Mariner and shoot the Albatross that brought this message.—Tr.
+
+[54] These establishments are still a notable feature of native life in
+Manila. Whether the author adopted a title already common or
+popularized one of his own invention, the fact is that they are now
+invariably known by the name used here. The use of macanista was due to
+the presence in Manila of a large number of Chinese from Macao.—Tr.
+
+[55] Originally, Plaza San Gabriel, from the Dominican mission for the
+Chinese established there; later, as it became a commercial center,
+Plaza Vivac; and now known as Plaza Cervantes, being the financial
+center of Manila.—Tr.
+
+[56] “The manager of this restaurant warns the public to leave
+absolutely nothing on any table or chair.”—Tr.
+
+[57] “We do not believe in the verisimilitude of this dialogue,
+fabricated by the author in order to refute the arguments of the
+friars, whose pride was so great that it would not permit any Isagani
+to tell them these truths face to face. The invention of Padre
+Fernandez as a Dominican professor is a stroke of generosity on Rizal’s
+part, in conceding that there could have existed any friar capable of
+talking frankly with an Indian.”—W. E. Retana, in note to this chapter
+in the edition published by him at Barcelona in 1908. Retana ought to
+know of what he is writing, for he was in the employ of the friars for
+several years and later in Spain wrote extensively for the journal
+supported by them to defend their position in the Philippines. He has
+also been charged with having strongly urged Rizal’s execution in 1896.
+Since 1898, however, he has doubled about, or, perhaps more aptly,
+performed a journalistic somersault—having written a diffuse biography
+and other works dealing with Rizal. He is strong in unassorted facts,
+but his comments, when not inane and wearisome, approach a maudlin wail
+over “spilt milk,” so the above is given at its face value only.—Tr.
+
+[58] Quite suggestive of, and perhaps inspired by, the author’s own
+experience.—Tr.
+
+[59] The Walled City, the original Manila, is still known to the
+Spaniards and older natives exclusively as such, the other districts
+being referred to by their distinctive names.—Tr.
+
+[60] Nearly all the dialogue in this chapter is in the mongrel
+Spanish-Tagalog “market language,” which cannot be reproduced in
+English.—Tr.
+
+[61] Doubtless a reference to the author’s first work, Noli Me Tangere,
+which was tabooed by the authorities.—Tr.
+
+[62] Such inanities as these are still a feature of Manila
+journalism.—Tr.
+
+[63] “Whether there would be a talisain cock, armed with a sharp gaff,
+whether the blessed Peter’s fighting-cock would be a bulik—”
+
+Talisain and bulik are distinguishing terms in the vernacular for
+fighting-cocks, tari and sasabung̃in the Tagalog terms for “gaff” and
+“game-cock,” respectively.
+
+The Tagalog terminology of the cockpit and monkish Latin certainly make
+a fearful and wonderful mixture—nor did the author have to resort to
+his imagination to get samples of it.—Tr.
+
+[64] This is Quiroga’s pronunciation of Christo.—Tr.
+
+[65] The native priests Burgos, Gomez, and Zamora, charged with
+complicity in the uprising of 1872, and executed.—Tr.
+
+[66] This versicle, found in the booklets of prayer, is common on the
+scapularies, which, during the late insurrection, were easily converted
+into the anting-anting, or amulets, worn by the fanatics.—Tr.
+
+[67] This practise—secretly compelling suspects to sign a request to be
+transferred to some other island—was by no means a figment of the
+author’s imagination, but was extensively practised to anticipate any
+legal difficulties that might arise.—Tr.
+
+[68] “Hawk-Eye.”—Tr.
+
+[69] Ultima Razón de Reyes: the last argument of kings—force.
+(Expression attributed to Calderon de la Barca, the great Spanish
+dramatist.)—Tr.
+
+[70] Curiously enough, and by what must have been more than a mere
+coincidence, this route through Santa Mesa from San Juan del Monte was
+the one taken by an armed party in their attempt to enter the city at
+the outbreak of the Katipunan rebellion on the morning of August 30,
+1896. (Foreman’s The Philippine Islands, Chap. XXVI.)
+
+It was also on the bridge connecting these two places that the first
+shot in the insurrection against American sovereignty was fired on the
+night of February 4, 1899.—Tr.
+
+[71] Spanish etiquette requires a host to welcome his guest with the
+conventional phrase: “The house belongs to you.”—Tr.
+
+[72] The handwriting on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast, foretelling the
+destruction of Babylon. Daniel, v, 25–28.—Tr.
+
+[73] A town in Ciudad Real province, Spain.—Tr.
+
+[74] The italicized words are in English in the original.—Tr.
+
+[75] A Spanish hero, whose chief exploit was the capture of Gibraltar
+from the Moors in 1308.—Tr.
+
+[76] Emilio Castelar (1832–1899), generally regarded as the greatest of
+Spanish orators.—Tr.
+
+[77] In the original the message reads: “Español escondido casa Padre
+Florentino cojera remitirá vivo muerto.” Don Tiburcio understands
+cojera as referring to himself; there is a play upon the Spanish words
+cojera, lameness, and cogerá, a form of the verb coger, to seize or
+capture—j and g in these two words having the same sound, that of the
+English h.—Tr.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10676 ***
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+<meta name="DC.Title" content="The Reign of Greed">
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+<body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10676 ***</div>
+<div class="front">
+<div class="div1 cover"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divBody">
+<p class="first"></p>
+<div class="figure cover-imagewidth"><img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="Original Front Cover." width="497" height="720"></div><p>
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e89">[<a href="#xd32e89">iii</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div class="titlePage">
+<div class="docTitle">
+<h1 class="mainTitle">The Reign of Greed</h1>
+</div>
+<div class="byline">A Complete English Version of <span class="sc">El Filibusterismo</span> from the Spanish of<br>
+<span class="docAuthor">José Rizal</span>
+<br>
+By
+<br>
+Charles Derbyshire</div>
+<div class="docImprint">Manila<br>
+Philippine Education Company<br>
+<span class="docDate">1912</span></div>
+</div>
+<p><span class="pageNum" id="xd32e114">[<a href="#xd32e114">iv</a>]</span></p>
+<div class="div1 copyright"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divBody">
+<p class="first xd32e116">Copyright, 1912, by Philippine Education Company.<br>
+Entered at Stationers’ Hall.<br>
+<span lang="es">Registrado en las Islas Filipinas.</span><br>
+<i>All rights reserved</i>.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e128">[<a href="#xd32e128">v</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div class="div1 introduction"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="main">Translator’s Introduction</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">El Filibusterismo, the second of José Rizal’s novels of Philippine life, is a story
+of the last days of the Spanish régime in the Philippines. Under the name of <i>The Reign of Greed</i> it is for the first time translated into English. Written some four or five years
+after <i lang="la">Noli Me Tangere</i>, the book represents Rizal’s more mature judgment on political and social conditions
+in the islands, and in its graver and less hopeful tone reflects the disappointments
+and discouragements which he had encountered in his efforts to lead the way to reform.
+Rizal’s dedication to the first edition is of special interest, as the writing of
+it was one of the grounds of accusation against him when he was condemned to death
+in 1896. It reads:
+</p>
+<blockquote>
+<p class="first">“To the memory of the priests, Don Mariano Gomez (85 years old), Don José Burgos (30
+years old), and Don Jacinto Zamora (35 years old). Executed in Bagumbayan Field on
+the 28th of February, 1872.
+</p>
+<p>“The Church, by refusing to degrade you, has placed in doubt the crime that has been
+imputed to you; the Government, by surrounding your trials with mystery and shadows,
+causes the belief that there was some error, committed in fatal moments; and all the
+Philippines, by worshiping your memory and calling you martyrs, in no <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e142">[<a href="#xd32e142">vi</a>]</span>sense recognizes your culpability. In so far, therefore, as your complicity in the
+Cavite mutiny is not clearly proved, as you may or may not have been patriots, and
+as you may or may not have cherished sentiments for justice and for liberty, I have
+the right to dedicate my work to you as victims of the evil which I undertake to combat.
+And while we await expectantly upon Spain some day to restore your good name and cease
+to be answerable for your death, let these pages serve as a tardy wreath of dried
+leaves over your unknown tombs, and let it be understood that every one who without
+clear proofs attacks your memory stains his hands in your blood!
+</p>
+<p class="xd32e144">J. Rizal.”</p>
+</blockquote><p>
+</p>
+<p>A brief recapitulation of the story in <i lang="es">Noli Me Tangere</i> (The Social Cancer) is essential to an understanding of such plot as there is in
+the present work, which the author called a “continuation” of the first story.
+</p>
+<p>Juan Crisostomo Ibarra is a young Filipino, who, after studying for seven years in
+Europe, returns to his native land to find that his father, a wealthy landowner, has
+died in prison as the result of a quarrel with the parish curate, a Franciscan friar
+named Padre Damaso. Ibarra is engaged to a beautiful and accomplished girl, Maria
+Clara, the supposed daughter and only child of the rich Don Santiago de los Santos,
+commonly known as “Capitan Tiago,” a typical Filipino cacique, the predominant character
+fostered by the friar régime.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e154">[<a href="#xd32e154">vii</a>]</span></p>
+<p>Ibarra resolves to forego all quarrels and to work for the betterment of his people.
+To show his good intentions, he seeks to establish, at his own expense, a public school
+in his native town. He meets with ostensible support from all, especially Padre Damaso’s
+successor, a young and gloomy Franciscan named Padre Salvi, for whom Maria Clara confesses
+to an instinctive dread.
+</p>
+<p>At the laying of the corner-stone for the new schoolhouse a suspicious accident, apparently
+aimed at Ibarra’s life, occurs, but the festivities proceed until the dinner, where
+Ibarra is grossly and wantonly insulted over the memory of his father by Fray Damaso.
+The young man loses control of himself and is about to kill the friar, who is saved
+by the intervention of Maria Clara.
+</p>
+<p>Ibarra is excommunicated, and Capitan Tiago, through his fear of the friars, is forced
+to break the engagement and agree to the marriage of Maria Clara with a young and
+inoffensive Spaniard provided by Padre Damaso. Obedient to her reputed father’s command
+and influenced by her mysterious dread of Padre Salvi, Maria Clara consents to this
+arrangement, but becomes seriously ill, only to be saved by medicines sent secretly
+by Ibarra and clandestinely administered by a girl friend.
+</p>
+<p>Ibarra succeeds in having the excommunication removed, but before he can explain matters
+an uprising against the Civil Guard is secretly brought about through agents of Padre
+Salvi, and the leadership is ascribed to Ibarra to ruin him. He is warned by a mysterious
+friend, an outlaw called Elias, whose life he had accidentally saved; but desiring
+first to see Maria Clara, he refuses to make his escape, and when the outbreak <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e160">[<a href="#xd32e160">viii</a>]</span>occurs he is arrested as the instigator of it and thrown into prison in Manila.
+</p>
+<p>On the evening when Capitan Tiago gives a ball in his Manila house to celebrate his
+supposed daughter’s engagement, Ibarra makes his escape from prison and succeeds in
+seeing Maria Clara alone. He begins to reproach her because it is a letter written
+to her before he went to Europe which forms the basis of the charge against him, but
+she clears herself of treachery to him. The letter had been secured from her by false
+representations and in exchange for two others written by her mother just before her
+birth, which prove that Padre Damaso is her real father. These letters had been accidentally
+discovered in the convento by Padre Salvi, who made use of them to intimidate the
+girl and get possession of Ibarra’s letter, from which he forged others to incriminate
+the young man. She tells him that she will marry the young Spaniard, sacrificing herself
+thus to save her mother’s name and Capitan Tiago’s honor and to prevent a public scandal,
+but that she will always remain true to him.
+</p>
+<p>Ibarra’s escape had been effected by Elias, who conveys him in a banka up the Pasig
+to the Lake, where they are so closely beset by the Civil Guard that Elias leaps into
+the water and draws the pursuers away from the boat, in which Ibarra lies concealed.
+</p>
+<p>On Christmas Eve, at the tomb of the Ibarras in a gloomy wood, Elias appears, wounded
+and dying, to find there a boy named Basilio beside the corpse of his mother, a poor
+woman who had been driven to insanity by her husband’s neglect and abuses on the part
+of the Civil Guard, her younger son having <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e166">[<a href="#xd32e166">ix</a>]</span>disappeared some time before in the convento, where he was a sacristan. Basilio, who
+is ignorant of Elias’s identity, helps him to build a funeral pyre, on which his corpse
+and the madwoman’s are to be burned.
+</p>
+<p>Upon learning of the reported death of Ibarra in the chase on the Lake, Maria Clara
+becomes disconsolate and begs her supposed godfather, Fray Damaso, to put her in a
+nunnery. Unconscious of her knowledge of their true relationship, the friar breaks
+down and confesses that all the trouble he has stirred up with the Ibarras has been
+to prevent her from marrying a native, which would condemn her and her children to
+the oppressed and enslaved class. He finally yields to her entreaties and she enters
+the nunnery of St. Clara, to which Padre Salvi is soon assigned in a ministerial capacity.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e171">[<a href="#xd32e171">x</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div class="div1 epigraph"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<div class="lgouter">
+<div class="lg">
+<p class="line">O masters, lords, and rulers in all lands,
+</p>
+<p class="line">Is this the handiwork you give to God,
+</p>
+<p class="line">This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?
+</p>
+<p class="line">How will you ever straighten up this shape-;
+</p>
+<p class="line">Touch it again with immortality;
+</p>
+<p class="line">Give back the upward looking and the light;
+</p>
+<p class="line">Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
+</p>
+<p class="line">Make right the immemorial infamies,
+</p>
+<p class="line">Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="lg">
+<p class="line">O masters, lords, and rulers in all lands,
+</p>
+<p class="line">How will the future reckon with this man?
+</p>
+<p class="line">How answer his brute question in that hour
+</p>
+<p class="line">When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
+</p>
+<p class="line">How will it be with kingdoms and with kings—
+</p>
+<p class="line">With those who shaped him to the thing he is—
+</p>
+<p class="line">When this dumb terror shall reply to God,
+</p>
+<p class="line">After the silence of the centuries?
+</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first xd32e193">Edwin Markham
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e195">[<a href="#xd32e195">xi</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="toc" class="div1 last-child contents"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="main">Contents</h2>
+<table class="tocList">
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum small"><span class="sc">Chapter</span></td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle">
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum small"><span class="sc">Page</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">I.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch01" id="xd32e212">On the Upper Deck</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">1</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">II.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch02" id="xd32e222">On the Lower Deck</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">14</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">III.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch03" id="xd32e232">Legends</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">23</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">IV.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch04" id="xd32e242">Cabesang Tales</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">30</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">V.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch05" id="xd32e252">A Cochero’s Christmas Eve</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">41</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">VI.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch06" id="xd32e262">Basilio</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">48</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">VII.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch07" id="xd32e272">Simoun</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">56</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">VIII.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch08" id="xd32e282">Merry Christmas</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">69</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">IX.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch09" id="xd32e292">Pilates</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">73</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">X.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch10" id="xd32e302">Wealth and Want</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">76</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XI.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch11" id="xd32e313">Los Baños</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">88</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XII.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch12" id="xd32e323">Placido Penitente</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">104</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XIII.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch13" id="xd32e333">The Class in Physics</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">114</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XIV.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch14" id="xd32e343">In the House of the Students</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">127</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XV.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch15" id="xd32e353">Señor Pasta</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">139</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XVI.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch16" id="xd32e363">The Tribulations of a Chinese</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">148</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XVII.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch17" id="xd32e373">The Quiapo Pair</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">160</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XVIII.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch18" id="xd32e383">Legerdemain</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">166</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XIX.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch19" id="xd32e393">The Fuse</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">175</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XX.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch20" id="xd32e403">The Arbiter</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">187</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XXI.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch21" id="xd32e413">Manila Types</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">197</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XXII.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch22" id="xd32e424">The Performance</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">210</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XXIII.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch23" id="xd32e434">A Corpse</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">225</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XXIV.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch24" id="xd32e444">Dreams</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">233</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XXV.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch25" id="xd32e454">Smiles and Tears</a>
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e460">[<a href="#xd32e460">xii</a>]</span></td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">245</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XXVI.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch26" id="xd32e465">Pasquinades</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">254</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XXVII.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch27" id="xd32e475">The Friar and the Filipino</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">261</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XXVIII.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch28" id="xd32e485">Tatakut</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">273</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XXIX.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch29" id="xd32e495">Exit Capitan Tiago</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">283</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XXX.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch30" id="xd32e505">Juli</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">288</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XXXI.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch31" id="xd32e515">The High Official</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">299</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XXXII.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch32" id="xd32e525">Effect of the Pasquinades</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">306</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XXXIII.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch33" id="xd32e536">La Ultima Razón</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">311</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XXXIV.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch34" id="xd32e546">The Wedding</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">320</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XXXV.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch35" id="xd32e556">The Fiesta</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">325</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XXXVI.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch36" id="xd32e566">Ben-Zayb’s Afflictions</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">334</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XXXVII.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch37" id="xd32e576">The Mystery</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">341</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XXXVIII.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch38" id="xd32e586">Fatality</a>
+</td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">346</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tocDivNum">XXXIX.</td>
+<td class="tocDivTitle"> <a href="#ch39" id="xd32e596">Conclusion</a> </td>
+<td class="tocPageNum">352</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<p><span class="pageNum" id="xd32e601">[<a href="#xd32e601">1</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div class="body">
+<div id="ch01" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e212">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter I</h2>
+<h2 class="main">On the Upper Deck</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first"></p>
+<blockquote lang="la">Sic itur ad astra.</blockquote><p>
+</p>
+<p>One morning in December the steamer <i>Tabo</i> was laboriously ascending the tortuous course of the Pasig, carrying a large crowd
+of passengers toward the province of La Laguna. She was a heavily built steamer, almost
+round, like the <i>tabú</i> from which she derived her name, quite dirty in spite of her pretensions to whiteness,
+majestic and grave from her leisurely motion. Altogether, she was held in great affection
+in that region, perhaps from her Tagalog name, or from the fact that she bore the
+characteristic impress of things in the country, representing something like a triumph
+over progress, a steamer that was not a steamer at all, an organism, stolid, imperfect
+yet unimpeachable, which, when it wished to pose as being rankly progressive, proudly
+contented itself with putting on a fresh coat of paint. Indeed, the happy steamer
+was genuinely Filipino! If a person were only reasonably considerate, she might even
+have been taken for the Ship of State, constructed, as she had been, under the inspection
+of <i>Reverendos</i> and <i>Ilustrísimos</i>.…
+</p>
+<p>Bathed in the sunlight of a morning that made the waters of the river sparkle and
+the breezes rustle in the bending bamboo on its banks, there she goes with her white
+silhouette throwing out great clouds of smoke—the Ship of State, so the joke runs,
+also has the vice of smoking! The whistle shrieks at every moment, hoarse and commanding
+like a tyrant who would rule by shouting, so that no one on <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e623">[<a href="#xd32e623">2</a>]</span>board can hear his own thoughts. She menaces everything she meets: now she looks as
+though she would grind to bits the <i>salambaw</i>, insecure fishing apparatus which in their movements resemble skeletons of giants
+saluting an antediluvian tortoise; now she speeds straight toward the clumps of bamboo
+or against the amphibian structures, <i>karihan</i>, or wayside lunch-stands, which, amid <i>gumamelas</i> and other flowers, look like indecisive bathers who with their feet already in the
+water cannot bring themselves to make the final plunge; at times, following a sort
+of channel marked out in the river by tree-trunks, she moves along with a satisfied
+air, except when a sudden shock disturbs the passengers and throws them off their
+balance, all the result of a collision with a sand-bar which no one dreamed was there.
+</p>
+<p>Moreover, if the comparison with the Ship of State is not yet complete, note the arrangement
+of the passengers. On the lower deck appear brown faces and black heads, types of
+Indians,<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e633src" href="#xd32e633">1</a> Chinese, and mestizos, wedged in between bales of merchandise and boxes, while there
+on the upper deck, beneath an awning that protects them from the sun, are seated in
+comfortable chairs a few passengers dressed in the fashion of Europeans, friars, and
+government clerks, each with his <i>puro</i> cigar, and gazing at the landscape apparently without heeding the efforts of the
+captain and the sailors to overcome the obstacles in the river.
+</p>
+<p>The captain was a man of kindly aspect, well along in years, an old sailor who in
+his youth had plunged into far vaster seas, but who now in his age had to exercise
+much greater attention, care, and vigilance to avoid dangers of a trivial character.
+And they were the same for each day: the same sand-bars, the same hulk of unwieldy
+steamer wedged into the same curves, like a corpulent dame <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e644">[<a href="#xd32e644">3</a>]</span>in a jammed throng. So, at each moment, the good man had to stop, to back up, to go
+forward at half speed, sending—now to port, now to starboard—the five sailors equipped
+with long bamboo poles to give force to the turn the rudder had suggested. He was
+like a veteran who, after leading men through hazardous campaigns, had in his age
+become the tutor of a capricious, disobedient, and lazy boy.
+</p>
+<p>Doña Victorina, the only lady seated in the European group, could say whether the
+<i>Tabo</i> was not lazy, disobedient, and capricious—Doña Victorina, who, nervous as ever, was
+hurling invectives against the cascos, bankas, rafts of coconuts, the Indians paddling
+about, and even the washerwomen and bathers, who fretted her with their mirth and
+chatter. Yes, the <i>Tabo</i> would move along very well if there were no Indians in the river, no Indians in the
+country, yes, if there were not a single Indian in the world—regardless of the fact
+that the helmsmen were Indians, the sailors Indians, Indians the engineers, Indians
+ninety-nine per cent, of the passengers, and she herself also an Indian if the rouge
+were scratched off and her pretentious gown removed. That morning Doña Victorina was
+more irritated than usual because the members of the group took very little notice
+of her, reason for which was not lacking; for just consider—there could be found three
+friars, convinced that the world would move backwards the very day they should take
+a single step to the right; an indefatigable Don Custodio who was sleeping peacefully,
+satisfied with his projects; a prolific writer like Ben-Zayb (anagram of Ibañez),
+who believed that the people of Manila thought because he, Ben-Zayb, was a thinker;
+a canon like Padre Irene, who added luster to the clergy with his rubicund face, carefully
+shaven, from which towered a beautiful Jewish nose, and his silken cassock of neat
+cut and small buttons; and a wealthy jeweler like Simoun, who was reputed to be the
+adviser and inspirer of all the acts of his Excellency, the Captain-General—<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e652">[<a href="#xd32e652">4</a>]</span>just consider the presence there of these pillars <i lang="la">sine quibus non</i> of the country, seated there in agreeable discourse, showing little sympathy for
+a renegade Filipina who dyed her hair red! Now wasn’t this enough to exhaust the patience
+of a female Job—a sobriquet Doña Victorina always applied to herself when put out
+with any one!
+</p>
+<p>The ill-humor of the señora increased every time the captain shouted “Port,” “Starboard”
+to the sailors, who then hastily seized their poles and thrust them against the banks,
+thus with the strength of their legs and shoulders preventing the steamer from shoving
+its hull ashore at that particular point. Seen under these circumstances the Ship
+of State might be said to have been converted from a tortoise into a crab every time
+any danger threatened.
+</p>
+<p>“But, captain, why don’t your stupid steersmen go in that direction?” asked the lady
+with great indignation.
+</p>
+<p>“Because it’s very shallow in the other, señora,” answered the captain, deliberately,
+slowly winking one eye, a little habit which he had cultivated as if to say to his
+words on their way out, “Slowly, slowly!”
+</p>
+<p>“Half speed! Botheration, half speed!” protested Doña Victorina disdainfully. “Why
+not full?”
+</p>
+<p>“Because we should then be traveling over those ricefields, señora,” replied the imperturbable
+captain, pursing his lips to indicate the cultivated fields and indulging in two circumspect
+winks.
+</p>
+<p>This Doña Victorina was well known in the country for her caprices and extravagances.
+She was often seen in society, where she was tolerated whenever she appeared in the
+company of her niece, Paulita Gomez, a very beautiful and wealthy orphan, to whom
+she was a kind of guardian. At a rather advanced age she had married a poor wretch
+named Don Tiburcio de Espadaña, and at the time we now see her, carried upon herself
+fifteen years of wedded life, false frizzes, and a half-European costume—for her whole
+ambition had been to Europeanize herself, with the result that from the ill-omened
+day of her wedding she had gradually, <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e665">[<a href="#xd32e665">5</a>]</span>thanks to her criminal attempts, succeeded in so transforming herself that at the
+present time Quatrefages and Virchow together could not have told where to classify
+her among the known races.
+</p>
+<p>Her husband, who had borne all her impositions with the resignation of a fakir through
+so many years of married life, at last on one luckless day had had his bad half-hour
+and administered to her a superb whack with his crutch. The surprise of Madam Job
+at such an inconsistency of character made her insensible to the immediate effects,
+and only after she had recovered from her astonishment and her husband had fled did
+she take notice of the pain, then remaining in bed for several days, to the great
+delight of Paulita, who was very fond of joking and laughing at her aunt. As for her
+husband, horrified at the impiety of what appeared to him to be a terrific parricide,
+he took to flight, pursued by the matrimonial furies (two curs and a parrot), with
+all the speed his lameness permitted, climbed into the first carriage he encountered,
+jumped into the first banka he saw on the river, and, a Philippine Ulysses, began
+to wander from town to town, from province to province, from island to island, pursued
+and persecuted by his bespectacled Calypso, who bored every one that had the misfortune
+to travel in her company. She had received a report of his being in the province of
+La Laguna, concealed in one of the towns, so thither she was bound to seduce him back
+with her dyed frizzes.
+</p>
+<p>Her fellow travelers had taken measures of defense by keeping up among themselves
+a lively conversation on any topic whatsoever. At that moment the windings and turnings
+of the river led them to talk about straightening the channel and, as a matter of
+course, about the port works. Ben-Zayb, the journalist with the countenance of a friar,
+was disputing with a young friar who in turn had the countenance of an artilleryman.
+Both were shouting, gesticulating, waving their arms, spreading out their hands, <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e670">[<a href="#xd32e670">6</a>]</span>stamping their feet, talking of levels, fish-corrals, the San Mateo River,<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e672src" href="#xd32e672">2</a> of cascos, of Indians, and so on, to the great satisfaction of their listeners and
+the undisguised disgust of an elderly Franciscan, remarkably thin and withered, and
+a handsome Dominican about whose lips flitted constantly a scornful smile.
+</p>
+<p>The thin Franciscan, understanding the Dominican’s smile, decided to intervene and
+stop the argument. He was undoubtedly respected, for with a wave of his hand he cut
+short the speech of both at the moment when the friar-artilleryman was talking about
+experience and the journalist-friar about scientists.
+</p>
+<p>“Scientists, Ben-Zayb—do you know what they are?” asked the Franciscan in a hollow
+voice, scarcely stirring in his seat and making only a faint gesture with his skinny
+hand. “Here you have in the province a bridge, constructed by a brother of ours, which
+was not completed because the scientists, relying on their theories, condemned it
+as weak and scarcely safe—yet look, it is the bridge that has withstood all the floods
+and earthquakes!”<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e678src" href="#xd32e678">3</a>
+</p>
+<p>“That’s it, <i>puñales,</i> that very thing, that was exactly what I was going to say!” exclaimed the friar-artilleryman,
+thumping his fists down on the arms of his bamboo chair. “That’s it, that bridge and
+the scientists! That was just what I was going to mention, Padre Salvi—<i>puñales!</i>”
+</p>
+<p>Ben-Zayb remained silent, half smiling, either out of respect or because he really
+did not know what to reply, and yet his was the only thinking head in the Philippines!
+Padre Irene nodded his approval as he rubbed his long nose.
+</p>
+<p>Padre Salvi, the thin and withered cleric, appeared to be satisfied with such submissiveness
+and went on in the <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e692">[<a href="#xd32e692">7</a>]</span>midst of the silence: “But this does not mean that you may not be as near right as
+Padre Camorra” (the friar-artilleryman). “The trouble is in the lake—”
+</p>
+<p>“The fact is there isn’t a single decent lake in this country,” interrupted Doña Victorina,
+highly indignant, and getting ready for a return to the assault upon the citadel.
+</p>
+<p>The besieged gazed at one another in terror, but with the promptitude of a general,
+the jeweler Simoun rushed in to the rescue. “The remedy is very simple,” he said in
+a strange accent, a mixture of English and South American. “And I really don’t understand
+why it hasn’t occurred to somebody.”
+</p>
+<p>All turned to give him careful attention, even the Dominican. The jeweler was a tall,
+meager, nervous man, very dark, dressed in the English fashion and wearing a pith
+helmet. Remarkable about him was his long white hair contrasted with a sparse black
+beard, indicating a mestizo origin. To avoid the glare of the sun he wore constantly
+a pair of enormous blue goggles, which completely hid his eyes and a portion of his
+cheeks, thus giving him the aspect of a blind or weak-sighted person. He was standing
+with his legs apart as if to maintain his balance, with his hands thrust into the
+pockets of his coat.
+</p>
+<p>“The remedy is very simple,” he repeated, “and wouldn’t cost a cuarto.”
+</p>
+<p>The attention now redoubled, for it was whispered in Manila that this man controlled
+the Captain-General, and all saw the remedy in process of execution. Even Don Custodio
+himself turned to listen.
+</p>
+<p>“Dig a canal straight from the source to the mouth of the river, passing through Manila;
+that is, make a new river-channel and fill up the old Pasig. That would save land,
+shorten communication, and prevent the formation of sandbars.”
+</p>
+<p>The project left all his hearers astounded, accustomed as they were to palliative
+measures.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e703">[<a href="#xd32e703">8</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“It’s a Yankee plan!” observed Ben-Zayb, to ingratiate himself with Simoun, who had
+spent a long time in North America.
+</p>
+<p>All considered the plan wonderful and so indicated by the movements of their heads.
+Only Don Custodio, the liberal Don Custodio, owing to his independent position and
+his high offices, thought it his duty to attack a project that did not emanate from
+himself—that was a usurpation! He coughed, stroked the ends of his mustache, and with
+a voice as important as though he were at a formal session of the Ayuntamiento, said,
+“Excuse me, Señor Simoun, my respected friend, if I should say that I am not of your
+opinion. It would cost a great deal of money and might perhaps destroy some towns.”
+</p>
+<p>“Then destroy them!” rejoined Simoun coldly.
+</p>
+<p>“And the money to pay the laborers?”
+</p>
+<p>“Don’t pay them! Use the prisoners and convicts!”
+</p>
+<p>“But there aren’t enough, Señor Simoun!”
+</p>
+<p>“Then, if there aren’t enough, let all the villagers, the old men, the youths, the
+boys, work. Instead of the fifteen days of obligatory service, let them work three,
+four, five months for the State, with the additional obligation that each one provide
+his own food and tools.”
+</p>
+<p>The startled Don Custodio turned his head to see if there was any Indian within ear-shot,
+but fortunately those nearby were rustics, and the two helmsmen seemed to be very
+much occupied with the windings of the river.
+</p>
+<p>“But, Señor Simoun—”
+</p>
+<p>“Don’t fool yourself, Don Custodio,” continued Simoun dryly, “only in this way are
+great enterprises carried out with small means. Thus were constructed the Pyramids,
+Lake Moeris, and the Colosseum in Rome. Entire provinces came in from the desert,
+bringing their tubers to feed on. Old men, youths, and boys labored in transporting
+stones, hewing them, and carrying them on their shoulders under the direction of the
+official lash, and afterwards, the survivors returned to their homes or perished <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e716">[<a href="#xd32e716">9</a>]</span>in the sands of the desert. Then came other provinces, then others, succeeding one
+another in the work during years. Thus the task was finished, and now we admire them,
+we travel, we go to Egypt and to Home, we extol the Pharaohs and the Antonines. Don’t
+fool yourself—the dead remain dead, and might only is considered right by posterity.”
+</p>
+<p>“But, Señor Simoun, such measures might provoke uprisings,” objected Don Custodio,
+rather uneasy over the turn the affair had taken.
+</p>
+<p>“Uprisings, ha, ha! Did the Egyptian people ever rebel, I wonder? Did the Jewish prisoners
+rebel against the pious Titus? Man, I thought you were better informed in history!”
+</p>
+<p>Clearly Simoun was either very presumptuous or disregarded conventionalities! To say
+to Don Custodio’s face that he did not know history! It was enough to make any one
+lose his temper! So it seemed, for Don Custodio forgot himself and retorted, “But
+the fact is that you’re not among Egyptians or Jews!”
+</p>
+<p>“And these people have rebelled more than once,” added the Dominican, somewhat timidly.
+“In the times when they were forced to transport heavy timbers for the construction
+of ships, if it hadn’t been for the clerics—”
+</p>
+<p>“Those times are far away,” answered Simoun, with a laugh even drier than usual. “These
+islands will never again rebel, no matter how much work and taxes they have. Haven’t
+you lauded to me, Padre Salvi,” he added, turning to the Franciscan, “the house and
+hospital at Los Baños, where his Excellency is at present?”
+</p>
+<p>Padre Salvi gave a nod and looked up, evading the question.
+</p>
+<p>“Well, didn’t you tell me that both buildings were constructed by forcing the people
+to work on them under the whip of a lay-brother? Perhaps that wonderful bridge was
+built in the same way. Now tell me, did these people rebel?”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e727">[<a href="#xd32e727">10</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“The fact is—they have rebelled before,” replied the Dominican, “and <i lang="la">ab actu ad posse valet illatio!</i>”
+</p>
+<p>“No, no, nothing of the kind,” continued Simoun, starting down a hatchway to the cabin.
+“What’s said, is said! And you, Padre Sibyla, don’t talk either Latin or nonsense.
+What are you friars good for if the people can rebel?”
+</p>
+<p>Taking no notice of the replies and protests, Simoun descended the small companionway
+that led below, repeating disdainfully, “Bosh, bosh!”
+</p>
+<p>Padre Sibyla turned pale; this was the first time that he, Vice-Rector of the University,
+had ever been credited with nonsense. Don Custodio turned green; at no meeting in
+which he had ever found himself had he encountered such an adversary.
+</p>
+<p>“An American mulatto!” he fumed.
+</p>
+<p>“A British Indian,” observed Ben-Zayb in a low tone.
+</p>
+<p>“An American, I tell you, and shouldn’t I know?” retorted Don Custodio in ill-humor.
+“His Excellency has told me so. He’s a jeweler whom the latter knew in Havana, and,
+as I suspect, the one who got him advancement by lending him money. So to repay him
+he has had him come here to let him have a chance and increase his fortune by selling
+diamonds—imitations, who knows? And <span class="corr" id="xd32e740" title="Source: he">he’s</span> so ungrateful, that, after getting money from the Indians, he wishes—huh!” The sentence
+was concluded by a significant wave of the hand.
+</p>
+<p>No one dared to join in this diatribe. Don Custodio could discredit himself with his
+Excellency, if he wished, but neither Ben-Zayb, nor Padre Irene, nor Padre Salvi,
+nor the offended Padre Sibyla had any confidence in the discretion of the others.
+</p>
+<p>“The fact is that this man, being an American, thinks no doubt that we are dealing
+with the redskins. To talk of these matters on a steamer! Compel, force the people!
+And he’s the very person who advised the expedition to <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e746">[<a href="#xd32e746">11</a>]</span>the Carolines and the campaign in Mindanao, which is going to bring us to disgraceful
+ruin. He’s the one who has offered to superintend the building of the cruiser, and
+I say, what does a jeweler, no matter how rich and learned he may be, know about naval
+construction?”
+</p>
+<p>All this was spoken by Don Custodio in a guttural tone to his neighbor Ben-Zayb, while
+he gesticulated, shrugged his shoulders, and from time to time with his looks consulted
+the others, who were nodding their heads ambiguously. The Canon Irene indulged in
+a rather equivocal smile, which he half hid with his hand as he rubbed his nose.
+</p>
+<p>“I tell you, Ben-Zayb,” continued Don Custodio, <span class="corr" id="xd32e752" title="Source: slaping">slapping</span> the journalist on the arm, “all the trouble comes from not consulting the old-timers
+here. A project in fine words, and especially with a big appropriation, with an appropriation
+in round numbers, dazzles, meets with acceptance at once, for this!” Here, in further
+explanation, he rubbed the tip of his thumb against his middle and forefinger.<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e755src" href="#xd32e755">4</a>
+</p>
+<p>“There’s something in that, there’s something in that,” Ben-Zayb thought it his duty
+to remark, since in his capacity of journalist he had to be informed about everything.
+</p>
+<p>“Now look here, before the port works I presented a project, original, simple, useful,
+economical, and practicable, for clearing away the bar in the lake, and it hasn’t
+been accepted because there wasn’t any of that in it.” He repeated the movement of
+his fingers, shrugged his shoulders, and gazed at the others as though to say, “Have
+you ever heard of such a misfortune?”
+</p>
+<p>“May we know what it was?” asked several, drawing nearer and giving him their attention.
+The projects of Don Custodio were as renowned as quacks’ specifics.
+</p>
+<p>Don Custodio was on the point of refusing to explain it from resentment at not having
+found any supporters in his diatribe against Simoun. “When there’s no danger, <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e763">[<a href="#xd32e763">12</a>]</span>you want me to talk, eh? And when there is, you keep quiet!” he was going to say,
+but that would cause the loss of a good opportunity, and his project, now that it
+could not be carried out, might at least be known and admired.
+</p>
+<p>After blowing out two or three puffs of smoke, coughing, and spitting through a scupper,
+he slapped Ben-Zayb on the thigh and asked, “You’ve seen ducks?”
+</p>
+<p>“I rather think so—we’ve hunted them on the lake,” answered the surprised journalist.
+</p>
+<p>“No, I’m not talking about wild ducks, I’m talking of the domestic ones, of those
+that are raised in Pateros and Pasig. Do you know what they feed on?”
+</p>
+<p>Ben-Zayb, the only thinking head, did not know—he was not engaged in that business.
+</p>
+<p>“On snails, man, on snails!” exclaimed Padre Camorra. “One doesn’t have to be an Indian
+to know that; it’s sufficient to have eyes!”
+</p>
+<p>“Exactly so, on snails!” repeated Don Custodio, flourishing his forefinger. “And do
+you know where they get them?”
+</p>
+<p>Again the thinking head did not know.
+</p>
+<p>“Well, if you had been in the country as many years as I have, you would know that
+they fish them out of the bar itself, where they abound, mixed with the sand.”
+</p>
+<p>“Then your project?”
+</p>
+<p>“Well, I’m coming to that. My idea was to compel all the towns round about, near the
+bar, to raise ducks, and you’ll see how they, all by themselves, will deepen the channel
+by fishing for the snails—no more and no less, no more and no less!”
+</p>
+<p>Here Don Custodio extended his arms and gazed triumphantly at the stupefaction of
+his hearers—to none of them had occurred such an original idea.
+</p>
+<p>“Will you allow me to write an article about that?” asked Ben-Zayb. “In this country
+there is so little thinking done—”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e779">[<a href="#xd32e779">13</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“But, Don Custodio,” exclaimed Doña Victorina with smirks and grimaces, “if everybody
+takes to raising ducks the <i>balot</i><a class="noteRef" id="xd32e783src" href="#xd32e783">5</a> eggs will become abundant. Ugh, how nasty! Rather, let the bar close up entirely!”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e786">[<a href="#xd32e786">14</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e633">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e633src">1</a></span> The Spanish designation for the Christianized Malay of the Philippines was <i>indio</i> (Indian), a term used rather contemptuously, the name <i>filipino</i> being generally applied in a restricted sense to the children of Spaniards born in
+the Islands.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e633src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e672">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e672src">2</a></span> Now generally known as the Mariquina.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e672src" title="Return to note 2 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e678">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e678src">3</a></span> This bridge, constructed in Lukban under the supervision of a Franciscan friar, was
+jocularly referred to as the <i>Puente de Capricho,</i> being apparently an ignorant blunder in the right direction, since it was declared
+in an official report made by Spanish engineers in 1852 to conform to no known principle
+of scientific construction, and yet proved to be strong and durable.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e678src" title="Return to note 3 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e755">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e755src">4</a></span> Don Custodio’s gesture indicates money.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e755src" title="Return to note 4 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e783">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e783src">5</a></span> Duck eggs, that are allowed to advance well into the duckling stage, then boiled and
+eaten. The señora is sneering at a custom among some of her own people.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e783src" title="Return to note 5 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch02" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e222">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter II</h2>
+<h2 class="main">On the Lower Deck</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">There, below, other scenes were being enacted. Seated on benches or small wooden stools
+among valises, boxes, and baskets, a few feet from the engines, in the heat of the
+boilers, amid the human smells and the pestilential odor of oil, were to be seen the
+great majority of the passengers. Some were silently gazing at the changing scenes
+along the banks, others were playing cards or conversing in the midst of the scraping
+of shovels, the roar of the engine, the hiss of escaping steam, the swash of disturbed
+waters, and the shrieks of the whistle. In one corner, heaped up like corpses, slept,
+or tried to sleep, a number of Chinese pedlers, seasick, pale, frothing through half-opened
+lips, and bathed in their copious perspiration. Only a few youths, students for the
+most part, easily recognizable from their white garments and their confident bearing,
+made bold to move about from stern to bow, leaping over baskets and boxes, happy in
+the prospect of the approaching vacation. Now they commented on the movements of the
+engines, endeavoring to recall forgotten notions of physics, now they surrounded the
+young schoolgirl or the red-lipped <i>buyera</i> with her collar of <i>sampaguitas,</i> whispering into their ears words that made them smile and cover their faces with
+their fans.
+</p>
+<p>Nevertheless, two of them, instead of engaging in these fleeting gallantries, stood
+in the bow talking with a man, advanced in years, but still vigorous and erect. Both
+these youths seemed to be well known and respected, to judge from the deference shown
+them by their fellow passengers. The elder, who was dressed in complete black, was
+the medical <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e799">[<a href="#xd32e799">15</a>]</span>student, Basilio, famous for his successful cures and extraordinary treatments, while
+the other, taller and more robust, although much younger, was Isagani, one of the
+poets, or at least rimesters, who that year came from the Ateneo,<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e801src" href="#xd32e801">1</a> a curious character, ordinarily quite taciturn and uncommunicative. The man talking
+with them was the rich Capitan Basilio, who was returning from a business trip to
+Manila.
+</p>
+<p>“Capitan Tiago is getting along about the same as usual, yes, sir,” said the student
+Basilio, shaking his head. “He won’t submit to any treatment. At the advice of <i>a certain person</i> he is sending me to San Diego under the pretext of looking after his property, but
+in reality so that he may be left to smoke his opium with complete liberty.”
+</p>
+<p>When the student said <i>a certain person</i>, he really meant Padre Irene, a great friend and adviser of Capitan Tiago in his
+last days.
+</p>
+<p>“Opium is one of the plagues of modern times,” replied the capitan with the disdain
+and indignation of a Roman senator. “The ancients knew about it but never abused it.
+While the addiction to classical studies lasted—mark this well, young men—opium was
+used solely as a medicine; and besides, tell me who smoke it the most?—Chinamen, Chinamen
+who don’t understand a word of Latin! Ah, if Capitan Tiago had only devoted himself
+to Cicero—” Here the most classical disgust painted itself on his carefully-shaven
+Epicurean face. Isagani regarded him with attention: that gentleman was suffering
+from nostalgia for antiquity.
+</p>
+<p>“But to get back to this academy of Castilian,” Capitan Basilio continued, “I assure
+you, gentlemen, that you won’t materialize it.”
+</p>
+<p>“Yes, sir, from day to day we’re expecting the permit,” replied Isagani. “Padre Irene,
+whom you may have noticed above, and to whom we’ve presented a team of bays, has promised
+it to us. He’s on his way now to confer with the General.”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e816">[<a href="#xd32e816">16</a>]</span>
+“That doesn’t matter. Padre Sibyla is opposed to it.”
+</p>
+<p>“Let him oppose it! That’s why he’s here on the steamer, in order to—at Los Baños
+before the General.”
+</p>
+<p>And the student Basilio filled out his meaning by going through the pantomime of striking
+his fists together.
+</p>
+<p>“That’s understood,” observed Capitan Basilio, smiling. “But even though you get the
+permit, where’ll you get the funds?”
+</p>
+<p>“We have them, sir. Each student has contributed a real.”
+</p>
+<p>“But what about the professors?”
+</p>
+<p>“We have them: half Filipinos and half Peninsulars.”<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e826src" href="#xd32e826">2</a>
+</p>
+<p>“And the house?”
+</p>
+<p>“Makaraig, the wealthy Makaraig, has offered one of his.”
+</p>
+<p>Capitan Basilio had to give in; these young men had everything arranged.
+</p>
+<p>“For the rest,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders, “it’s not altogether bad, it’s
+not a bad idea, and now that you can’t know Latin at least you may know Castilian.
+Here you have another instance, namesake, of how we are going backwards. In our times
+we learned Latin because our books were in Latin; now you study Latin a little but
+have no Latin books. On the other hand, your books are in Castilian and that language
+is not taught—<i lang="la">aetas parentum pejor avis tulit nos nequiores!</i> as Horace said.” With this quotation he moved away majestically, like a Roman emperor.
+</p>
+<p>The youths smiled at each other. “These men of the past,” remarked Isagani, “find
+obstacles for everything. Propose a thing to them and instead of seeing its advantages
+they only fix their attention on the difficulties. They want everything to come smooth
+and round as a billiard ball.”
+</p>
+<p>“He’s right at home with your uncle,” observed Basilio.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e845">[<a href="#xd32e845">17</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“They talk of past times. But listen—speaking of uncles, what does yours say about
+Paulita?”
+</p>
+<p>Isagani blushed. “He preached me a sermon about the choosing of a wife. I answered
+him that there wasn’t in Manila another like her—beautiful, well-bred, an orphan—”
+</p>
+<p>“Very wealthy, elegant, charming, with no defect other than a ridiculous aunt,” added
+Basilio, at which both smiled.
+</p>
+<p>“In regard to the aunt, do you know that she has charged me to look for her husband?”
+</p>
+<p>“Doña Victorina? And you’ve promised, in order to keep your sweetheart.”
+</p>
+<p>“Naturally! But the fact is that her husband is actually hidden—in my uncle’s house!”
+</p>
+<p>Both burst into a laugh at this, while Isagani continued: “That’s why my uncle, being
+a conscientious man, won’t go on the upper deck, fearful that Doña Victorina will
+ask him about Don Tiburcio. Just imagine, when Doña Victorina learned that I was a
+steerage passenger she gazed at me with a disdain that—”
+</p>
+<p>At that moment Simoun came down and, catching sight of the two young men, greeted
+Basilio in a patronizing tone: “Hello, Don Basilio, you’re off for the vacation? Is
+the gentleman a townsman of yours?”
+</p>
+<p>Basilio introduced Isagani with the remark that he was not a townsman, but that their
+homes were not very far apart. Isagani lived on the seashore of the opposite coast.
+Simoun examined him with such marked attention that he was annoyed, turned squarely
+around, and faced the jeweler with a provoking stare.
+</p>
+<p>“Well, what is the province like?” the latter asked, turning again to Basilio.
+</p>
+<p>“Why, aren’t you familiar with it?”
+</p>
+<p>“How the devil am I to know it when I’ve never set foot in it? I’ve been told that
+it’s very poor and doesn’t buy jewels.”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e860">[<a href="#xd32e860">18</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“We don’t buy jewels, because we don’t need them,” rejoined Isagani dryly, piqued
+in his provincial pride.
+</p>
+<p>A smile played over Simoun’s pallid lips. “Don’t be offended, young man,” he replied.
+“I had no bad intentions, but as I’ve been assured that nearly all the money is in
+the hands of the native priests, I said to myself: the friars are dying for curacies
+and the Franciscans are satisfied with the poorest, so when they give them up to the
+native priests the truth must be that the king’s profile is unknown there. But enough
+of that! Come and have a beer with me and we’ll drink to the prosperity of your province.”
+</p>
+<p>The youths thanked him, but declined the offer.
+</p>
+<p>“You do wrong,” Simoun said to them, visibly taken aback. “Beer is a good thing, and
+I heard Padre Camorra say this morning that the lack of energy noticeable in this
+country is due to the great amount of water the inhabitants drink.”
+</p>
+<p>Isagani was almost as tall as the jeweler, and at this he drew himself up.
+</p>
+<p>“Then tell Padre Camorra,” Basilio hastened to say, while he nudged Isagani slyly,
+“tell him that if he would drink water instead of wine or beer, perhaps we might all
+be the gainers and he would not give rise to so much talk.”
+</p>
+<p>“And tell him, also,” added Isagani, paying no attention to his friend’s nudges, “that
+water is very mild and can be drunk, but that it drowns out the wine and beer and
+puts out the fire, that heated it becomes steam, and that ruffled it is the ocean,
+that it once destroyed mankind and made the earth tremble to its foundations!”<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e870src" href="#xd32e870">3</a>
+</p>
+<p>Simoun raised his head. Although his looks could not be read through the blue goggles,
+on the rest of his face surprise might be seen. “Rather a good answer,” he said. “But
+I fear that he might get facetious and ask me when the <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e875">[<a href="#xd32e875">19</a>]</span>water will be converted into steam and when into an ocean. Padre Camorra is rather
+incredulous and is a great wag.”
+</p>
+<p>“When the fire heats it, when the rivulets that are now scattered through the steep
+valleys, forced by fatality, rush together in the abyss that men are digging,” replied
+Isagani.
+</p>
+<p>“No, Señor Simoun,” interposed Basilio, changing to a jesting tone, “rather keep in
+mind the verses of my friend Isagani himself:
+</p>
+<div class="lgouter">
+<p class="line">‘Fire you, you say, and water we,
+</p>
+<p class="line">Then as you wish, so let it be;
+</p>
+<p class="line">But let us live in peace and right,
+</p>
+<p class="line">Nor shall the fire e’er see us fight;
+</p>
+<p class="line">So joined by wisdom’s glowing flame,
+</p>
+<p class="line">That without anger, hate, or blame,
+</p>
+<p class="line">We form the steam, the fifth element,
+</p>
+<p class="line">Progress and light, life and movement.’ ”</p>
+</div>
+<p class="first">“Utopia, Utopia!” responded Simoun dryly. “The engine is about to meet—in the meantime,
+I’ll drink my beer.” So, without any word of excuse, he left the two friends.
+</p>
+<p>“But what’s the matter with you today that you’re so quarrelsome?” asked Basilio.
+</p>
+<p>“Nothing. I don’t know why, but that man fills me with horror, fear almost.”
+</p>
+<p>“I was nudging you with my elbow. Don’t you know that he’s called the Brown Cardinal?”
+</p>
+<p>“The Brown Cardinal?”
+</p>
+<p>“Or Black Eminence, as you wish.”
+</p>
+<p>“I don’t understand.”
+</p>
+<p>“Richelieu had a Capuchin adviser who was called the Gray Eminence; well, that’s what
+this man is to the General.”
+</p>
+<p>“Really?”
+</p>
+<p>“That’s what I’ve heard from <i>a certain person,</i>—who always speaks ill of him behind his back and flatters him to his face.”
+</p>
+<p>“Does he also visit Capitan Tiago?”
+</p>
+<p>“From the first day after his arrival, and I’m sure that <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e906">[<a href="#xd32e906">20</a>]</span><i>a certain person</i> looks upon him as a rival—in the inheritance. I believe that he’s going to see the
+General about the question of instruction in Castilian.”
+</p>
+<p>At that moment Isagani was called away by a servant to his uncle.
+</p>
+<p>On one of the benches at the stern, huddled in among the other passengers, sat a native
+priest gazing at the landscapes that were successively unfolded to his view. His neighbors
+made room for him, the men on passing taking off their hats, and the gamblers not
+daring to set their table near where he was. He said little, but neither smoked nor
+assumed arrogant airs, nor did he disdain to mingle with the other men, returning
+the salutes with courtesy and affability as if he felt much honored and very grateful.
+Although advanced in years, with hair almost completely gray, he appeared to be in
+vigorous health, and even when seated held his body straight and his head erect, but
+without pride or arrogance. He differed from the ordinary native priests, few enough
+indeed, who at that period served merely as coadjutors or administered some curacies
+temporarily, in a certain self-possession and gravity, like one who was conscious
+of his personal dignity and the sacredness of his office. A superficial examination
+of his appearance, if not his white hair, revealed at once that he belonged to another
+epoch, another generation, when the better young men were not afraid to risk their
+dignity by becoming priests, when the native clergy looked any friar at all in the
+face, and when their class, not yet degraded and vilified, called for free men and
+not slaves, superior intelligences and not servile wills. In his sad and serious features
+was to be read the serenity of a soul fortified by study and meditation, perhaps tried
+out by deep moral suffering. This priest was Padre Florentino, Isagani’s uncle, and
+his story is easily told.
+</p>
+<p>Scion of a wealthy and influential family of Manila, of agreeable appearance and cheerful
+disposition, suited to shine in the world, he had never felt any call to the sacerdotal
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e913">[<a href="#xd32e913">21</a>]</span>profession, but by reason of some promises or vows, his mother, after not a few struggles
+and violent disputes, compelled him to enter the seminary. She was a great friend
+of the Archbishop, had a will of iron, and was as inexorable as is every devout woman
+who believes that she is interpreting the will of God. Vainly the young Florentine
+offered resistance, vainly he begged, vainly he pleaded his love affairs, even provoking
+scandals: priest he had to become at twenty-five years of age, and priest he became.
+The Archbishop ordained him, his first mass was celebrated with great pomp, three
+days were given over to feasting, and his mother died happy and content, leaving him
+all her fortune.
+</p>
+<p>But in that struggle Florentine received a wound from which he never recovered. Weeks
+before his first mass the woman he loved, in desperation, married a nobody—a blow
+the rudest he had ever experienced. He lost his moral energy, life became dull and
+insupportable. If not his virtue and the respect for his office, that unfortunate
+love affair saved him from the depths into which the regular orders and secular clergymen
+both fall in the Philippines. He devoted himself to his parishioners as a duty, and
+by inclination to the natural sciences.
+</p>
+<p>When the events of seventy-two occurred,<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e918src" href="#xd32e918">4</a> he feared that the large income his curacy yielded him would attract attention to
+him, so, desiring peace above everything, he sought and secured his release, living
+thereafter as a private individual on his patrimonial estate situated on the Pacific
+coast. He there adopted his nephew, Isagani, who was reported by the malicious to
+be his own son by his old sweetheart when she became a widow, and by the more serious
+and better informed, the natural child of a cousin, a lady in Manila.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e921">[<a href="#xd32e921">22</a>]</span></p>
+<p>The captain of the steamer caught sight of the old priest and insisted that he go
+to the upper deck, saying, “If you don’t do so, the friars will think that you don’t
+want to associate with them.”
+</p>
+<p>Padre Florentino had no recourse but to accept, so he summoned his nephew in order
+to let him know where he was going, and to charge him not to come near the upper deck
+while he was there. “If the captain notices you, he’ll invite you also, and we should
+then be abusing his kindness.”
+</p>
+<p>“My uncle’s way!” thought Isagani. “All so that I won’t have any reason for talking
+with Doña Victorina.”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e926">[<a href="#xd32e926">23</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e801">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e801src">1</a></span> The Jesuit College in Manila, established in 1859.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e801src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e826">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e826src">2</a></span> Natives of Spain; to distinguish them from the Filipinos, <i>i.e.,</i> descendants of Spaniards born in the Philippines. See Glossary: “<a href="#glindian">Indian</a>.”—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e826src" title="Return to note 2 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e870">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e870src">3</a></span> It was a common saying among the old Filipinos that the Spaniards (white men) were
+fire (activity), while they themselves were water (passivity).—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e870src" title="Return to note 3 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e918">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e918src">4</a></span> The “liberal” demonstrations in Manila, and the mutiny in the Cavite Arsenal, resulting
+in the garroting of the three native priests to whom this work was dedicated: the
+first of a series of fatal mistakes, culminating in the execution of the author, that
+cost Spain the loyalty of the Filipinos.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e918src" title="Return to note 4 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch03" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e232">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter III</h2>
+<h2 class="main">Legends</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first"></p>
+<blockquote lang="de">
+<p class="first">Ich weiss nicht was soil es bedeuten
+<br>Dass ich so traurig bin!</p>
+</blockquote><p>
+</p>
+<p>When Padre Florentino joined the group above, the bad humor provoked by the previous
+discussion had entirely disappeared. Perhaps their spirits had been raised by the
+attractive houses of the town of Pasig, or the glasses of sherry they had drunk in
+preparation for the coming meal, or the prospect of a good breakfast. Whatever the
+cause, the fact was that they were all laughing and joking, even including the lean
+Franciscan, although he made little noise and his smiles looked like death-grins.
+</p>
+<p>“Evil times, evil times!” said Padre Sibyla with a laugh.
+</p>
+<p>“Get out, don’t say that, Vice-Rector!” responded the Canon Irene, giving the other’s
+chair a shove. “In Hongkong you’re doing a fine business, putting up every building
+that—ha, ha!”
+</p>
+<p>“Tut, tut!” was the reply; “you don’t see our expenses, and the tenants on our estates
+are beginning to complain—”
+</p>
+<p>“Here, enough of complaints, <i>puñales,</i> else I’ll fall to weeping!” cried Padre Camorra gleefully. “We’re not complaining,
+and we haven’t either estates or banking-houses. You know that my Indians are beginning
+to haggle over the fees and to flash schedules on me! Just look how they cite schedules
+to me now, and none other than those of the Archbishop Basilio Sancho,<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e946src" href="#xd32e946">1</a> as if from his time <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e949">[<a href="#xd32e949">24</a>]</span>up to now prices had not risen. Ha, ha, ha! Why should a baptism cost less than a
+chicken? But I play the deaf man, collect what I can, and never complain. We’re not
+avaricious, are we, Padre Salvi?”
+</p>
+<p>At that moment Simoun’s head appeared above the hatchway.
+</p>
+<p>“Well, where’ve you been keeping yourself?” Don Custodio called to him, having forgotten
+all about their dispute. “You’re missing the prettiest part of the trip!”
+</p>
+<p>“Pshaw!” retorted Simoun, as he ascended, “I’ve seen so many rivers and landscapes
+that I’m only interested in those that call up legends.”
+</p>
+<p>“As for legends, the Pasig has a few,” observed the captain, who did not relish any
+depreciation of the river where he navigated and earned his livelihood. “Here you
+have that of <i>Malapad-na-bato,</i> a rock sacred before the coming of the Spaniards as the abode of spirits. Afterwards,
+when the superstition had been dissipated and the rock profaned, it was converted
+into a nest of tulisanes, since from its crest they easily captured the luckless bankas,
+which had to contend against both the currents and men. Later, in our time, in spite
+of human interference, there are still told stories about wrecked bankas, and if on
+rounding it I didn’t steer with my six senses, I’d be smashed against its sides. Then
+you have another legend, that of Doña Jeronima’s cave, which Padre Florentino can
+relate to you.”
+</p>
+<p>“Everybody knows that,” remarked Padre Sibyla disdainfully.
+</p>
+<p>But neither Simoun, nor Ben-Zayb, nor Padre Irene, nor Padre Camorra knew it, so they
+begged for the story, some in jest and others from genuine curiosity. The priest,
+adopting the tone of burlesque with which some had made their request, began like
+an old tutor relating a story to children.
+</p>
+<p>“Once upon a time there was a student who had made a promise of marriage to a young
+woman in his country, <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e963">[<a href="#xd32e963">25</a>]</span>but it seems that he failed to remember her. She waited for him faithfully year after
+year, her youth passed, she grew into middle age, and then one day she heard a report
+that her old sweetheart was the Archbishop of Manila. Disguising herself as a man,
+she came round the Cape and presented herself before his grace, demanding the fulfilment
+of his promise. What she asked was of course impossible, so the Archbishop ordered
+the preparation of the cave that you may have noticed with its entrance covered and
+decorated with a curtain of vines. There she lived and died and there she is buried.
+The legend states that Doña Jeronima was so fat that she had to turn sidewise to get
+into it. Her fame as an enchantress sprung from her custom of throwing into the river
+the silver dishes which she used in the sumptuous banquets that were attended by crowds
+of gentlemen. A net was spread under the water to hold the dishes and thus they were
+cleaned. It hasn’t been twenty years since the river washed the very entrance of the
+cave, but it has gradually been receding, just as the memory of her is dying out among
+the people.”
+</p>
+<p>“A beautiful legend!” exclaimed Ben-Zayb. “I’m going to write an article about it.
+It’s sentimental!”
+</p>
+<p>Doña Victorina thought of dwelling in such a cave and was about to say so, when Simoun
+took the floor instead.
+</p>
+<p>“But what’s your opinion about that, Padre Salvi?” he asked the Franciscan, who seemed
+to be absorbed in thought. “Doesn’t it seem to you as though his Grace, instead of
+giving her a cave, ought to have placed her in a nunnery—in St. Clara’s, for example?
+What do you say?”
+</p>
+<p>There was a start of surprise on Padre Sibyla’s part to notice that Padre Salvi shuddered
+and looked askance at Simoun.
+</p>
+<p>“Because it’s not a very gallant act,” continued Simoun quite naturally, “to give
+a rocky cliff as a home to one with whose hopes we have trifled. It’s hardly religious
+to expose her thus to temptation, in a cave on the banks of a river—it smacks of nymphs
+and dryads. It would <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e971">[<a href="#xd32e971">26</a>]</span>have been more gallant, more pious, more romantic, more in keeping with the customs
+of this country, to shut her up in St. Clara’s, like a new Eloise, in order to visit
+and console her from time to time.”
+</p>
+<p>“I neither can nor should pass judgment upon the conduct of archbishops,” replied
+the Franciscan sourly.
+</p>
+<p>“But you, who are the ecclesiastical governor, acting in the place of our Archbishop,
+what would you do if such a case should arise?”
+</p>
+<p>Padre Salvi shrugged his shoulders and calmly responded, “It’s not worth while thinking
+about what can’t happen. But speaking of legends, don’t overlook the most beautiful,
+since it is the truest: that of the miracle of St. Nicholas, the ruins of whose church
+you may have noticed. I’m going to relate it to Señor Simoun, as he probably hasn’t
+heard it. It seems that formerly the river, as well as the lake, was infested with
+caymans, so huge and voracious that they attacked bankas and upset them with a slap
+of the tail. Our chronicles relate that one day an infidel Chinaman, who up to that
+time had refused to be converted, was passing in front of the church, when suddenly
+the devil presented himself to him in the form of a cayman and upset the banka, in
+order to devour him and carry him off to hell. Inspired by God, the Chinaman at that
+moment called upon St. Nicholas and instantly the cayman was changed into a stone.
+The old people say that in their time the monster could easily be recognized in the
+pieces of stone that were left, and, for my part, I can assure you that I have clearly
+made out the head, to judge from which the monster must have been enormously large.”
+</p>
+<p>“Marvelous, a marvelous legend!” exclaimed Ben-Zayb. “It’s good for an article—the
+description of the monster, the terror of the Chinaman, the waters of the river, the
+bamboo brakes. Also, it’ll do for a study of comparative religions; because, look
+you, an infidel Chinaman in great distress invoked exactly the saint that he must
+know only by hearsay and in whom he did not believe. Here there’s <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e979">[<a href="#xd32e979">27</a>]</span>no room for the proverb that ‘a known evil is preferable to an unknown good.’ If I
+should find myself in China and get caught in such a difficulty, I would invoke the
+obscurest saint in the calendar before Confucius or Buddha. Whether this is due to
+the manifest superiority of Catholicism or to the inconsequential and illogical inconsistency
+in the brains of the yellow race, a profound study of anthropology alone will be able
+to elucidate.”
+</p>
+<p>Ben-Zayb had adopted the tone of a lecturer and was describing circles in the air
+with his forefinger, priding himself on his imagination, which from the most insignificant
+facts could deduce so many applications and inferences. But noticing that Simoun was
+preoccupied and thinking that he was pondering over what he, Ben-Zayb, had just said,
+he inquired what the jeweler was meditating about.
+</p>
+<p>“About two very important questions,” answered Simoun; “two questions that you might
+add to your article. First, what may have become of the devil on seeing himself suddenly
+confined within a stone? Did he escape? Did he stay there? Was he crushed? Second,
+if the petrified animals that I have seen in various European museums may not have
+been the victims of some antediluvian saint?”
+</p>
+<p>The tone in which the jeweler spoke was so serious, while he rested his forehead on
+the tip of his forefinger in an attitude of deep meditation, that Padre Camorra responded
+very gravely, “Who knows, who knows?”
+</p>
+<p>“Since we’re busy with legends and are now entering the lake,” remarked Padre Sibyla,
+“the captain must know many—”
+</p>
+<p>At that moment the steamer crossed the bar and the panorama spread out before their
+eyes was so truly magnificent that all were impressed. In front extended the beautiful
+lake bordered by green shores and blue mountains, like a huge mirror, framed in emeralds
+and sapphires, reflecting the sky in its glass. On the right were spread out the low
+shores, forming bays with graceful curves, and dim there in the distance the crags
+of Sungay, while in the <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e987">[<a href="#xd32e987">28</a>]</span>background rose Makiling, imposing and majestic, crowned with fleecy clouds. On the
+left lay Talim Island with its curious sweep of hills. A fresh breeze rippled over
+the wide plain of water.
+</p>
+<p>“By the way, captain,” said Ben-Zayb, turning around, “do you know in what part of
+the lake a certain Guevara, Navarra, or Ibarra, was killed?”
+</p>
+<p>The group looked toward the captain, with the exception of Simoun, who had turned
+away his head as though to look for something on the shore.
+</p>
+<p>“Ah, yes!” exclaimed Doña Victorina. “Where, captain? Did he leave any tracks in the
+water?”
+</p>
+<p>The good captain winked several times, an indication that he was annoyed, but reading
+the request in the eyes of all, took a few steps toward the bow and scanned the shore.
+</p>
+<p>“Look over there,” he said in a scarcely audible voice, after making sure that no
+strangers were near. “According to the officer who conducted the pursuit, Ibarra,
+upon finding himself surrounded, jumped out of his banka there near the Kinabutasan<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e996src" href="#xd32e996">2</a> and, swimming under water, covered all that distance of more than two miles, saluted
+by bullets every time that he raised his head to breathe. Over yonder is where they
+lost track of him, and a little farther on near the shore they discovered something
+like the color of blood. And now I think of it, it’s just thirteen years, day for
+day, since this happened.”
+</p>
+<p>“So that his corpse—” began Ben-Zayb.
+</p>
+<p>“Went to join his father’s,” replied Padre Sibyla. “Wasn’t he also another filibuster,
+Padre Salvi?”
+</p>
+<p>“That’s what might be called cheap funerals, Padre Camorra, eh?” remarked Ben-Zayb.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1005">[<a href="#xd32e1005">29</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“I’ve always said that those who won’t pay for expensive funerals are filibusters,”
+rejoined the person addressed, with a merry laugh.
+</p>
+<p>“But what’s the matter with you, Señor Simoun?” inquired Ben-Zayb, seeing that the
+jeweler was motionless and thoughtful. “Are you seasick—an old traveler like you?
+On such a drop of water as this!”
+</p>
+<p>“I want to tell you,” broke in the captain, who had come to hold all those places
+in great affection, “that you can’t call this a drop of water. It’s larger than any
+lake in Switzerland and all those in Spain put together. I’ve seen old sailors who
+got seasick here.”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1010">[<a href="#xd32e1010">30</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e946">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e946src">1</a></span> Archbishop of Manila from 1767 to 1787.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e946src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e996">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e996src">2</a></span> “Between this island (Talim) and Halahala point extends a strait a mile wide and a
+league long, which the Indians call ‘Kinabutasan,’ a name that in their language means
+‘place that was cleft open’; from which it is inferred that in other times the island
+was joined to the mainland and was separated from it by some severe earthquake, thus
+leaving this strait: of this there is an old tradition among the Indians.”—Fray Martinez
+de Zuñiga’s <i>Estadismo</i> (1803).&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e996src" title="Return to note 2 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch04" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e242">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter IV</h2>
+<h2 class="main">Cabesang Tales</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">Those who have read the first part of this story will perhaps remember an old wood-cutter
+who lived in the depths of the forest.<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e1017src" href="#xd32e1017">1</a> Tandang Selo is still alive, and though his hair has turned completely white, he
+yet preserves his good health. He no longer hunts or cuts firewood, for his fortunes
+have improved and he works only at making brooms.
+</p>
+<p>His son Tales (abbreviation of Telesforo) had worked at first on shares on the lands
+of a capitalist, but later, having become the owner of two carabaos and several hundred
+pesos, determined to work on his own account, aided by his father, his wife, and his
+three children. So they cut down and cleared away some thick woods which were situated
+on the borders of the town and which they believed belonged to no one. During the
+labors of cleaning and cultivating the new land, the whole family fell ill with malaria
+and the mother died, along with the eldest daughter, Lucia, in the flower of her age.
+This, which was the natural consequence of breaking up new soil infested with various
+kinds of bacteria, they attributed to the anger of the woodland spirit, so they were
+resigned and went on with their labor, believing him pacified.
+</p>
+<p>But when they began to harvest their first crop a religious corporation, which owned
+land in the neighboring town, laid claim to the fields, alleging that they fell within
+their boundaries, and to prove it they at once started to set up <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1027">[<a href="#xd32e1027">31</a>]</span>their marks. However, the administrator of the religious order left to them, for humanity’s
+sake, the usufruct of the land on condition that they pay a small sum annually—a mere
+bagatelle, twenty or thirty pesos. Tales, as peaceful a man as could be found, was
+as much opposed to lawsuits as any one and more submissive to the friars than most
+people; so, in order not to smash a <i>palyok</i> against a <i>kawali</i> (as he said, for to him the friars were iron pots and he a clay jar), he had the
+weakness to yield to their claim, remembering that he did not know Spanish and had
+no money to pay lawyers.
+</p>
+<p>Besides, Tandang Selo said to him, “Patience! You would spend more in one year of
+litigation than in ten years of paying what the white padres demand. And perhaps they’ll
+pay you back in masses! Pretend that those thirty pesos had been lost in gambling
+or had fallen into the water and been swallowed by a cayman.”
+</p>
+<p>The harvest was abundant and sold well, so Tales planned to build a wooden house in
+the barrio of Sagpang, of the town of Tiani, which adjoined San Diego.
+</p>
+<p>Another year passed, bringing another good crop, and for this reason the friars raised
+the rent to fifty pesos, which Tales paid in order not to quarrel and because he expected
+to sell his sugar at a good price.
+</p>
+<p>“Patience! Pretend that the cayman has grown some,” old Selo consoled him.
+</p>
+<p>That year he at last saw his dream realized: to live in the barrio of Sagpang in a
+wooden house. The father and grandfather then thought of providing some education
+for the two children, especially the daughter Juliana, or Juli, as they called her,
+for she gave promise of being accomplished and beautiful. A boy who was a friend of
+the family, Basilio, was studying in Manila, and he was of as lowly origin as they.
+</p>
+<p>But this dream seemed destined not to be realized. The first care the community took
+when they saw the family prospering was to appoint as cabeza de barangay its most
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1040">[<a href="#xd32e1040">32</a>]</span>industrious member, which left only Tano, the son, who was only fourteen years old.
+The father was therefore called <i>Cabesang</i> Tales and had to order a sack coat, buy a felt hat, and prepare to spend his money.
+In order to avoid any quarrel with the curate or the government, he settled from his
+own pocket the shortages in the tax-lists, paying for those who had died or moved
+away, and he lost considerable time in making the collections and on his trips to
+the capital.
+</p>
+<p>“Patience! Pretend that the cayman’s relatives have joined him,” advised Tandang Selo,
+smiling placidly.
+</p>
+<p>“Next year you’ll put on a long skirt and go to Manila to study like the young ladies
+of the town,” Cabesang Tales told his daughter every time he heard her talking of
+Basilio’s progress.
+</p>
+<p>But that next year did not come, and in its stead there was another increase in the
+rent. Cabesang Tales became serious and scratched his head. The clay jar was giving
+up all its rice to the iron pot.
+</p>
+<p>When the rent had risen to two hundred pesos, Tales was not content with scratching
+his head and sighing; he murmured and protested. The friar-administrator then told
+him that if he could not pay, some one else would be assigned to cultivate that land—many
+who desired it had offered themselves.
+</p>
+<p>He thought at first that the friar was joking, but the friar was talking seriously,
+and indicated a servant of his to take possession of the land. Poor Tales turned pale,
+he felt a buzzing in his ears, he saw in the red mist that rose before his eyes his
+wife and daughter, pallid, emaciated, dying, victims of the intermittent fevers—then
+he saw the thick forest converted into productive fields, he saw the stream of sweat
+watering its furrows, he saw himself plowing under the hot sun, bruising his feet
+against the stones and roots, while this friar had been driving about in his carriage
+with the wretch who was to get the land following like a slave behind his master.
+No, a thousand <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1051">[<a href="#xd32e1051">33</a>]</span>times, no! First let the fields sink into the depths of the earth and bury them all!
+Who was this intruder that he should have any right to his land? Had he brought from
+his own country a single handful of that soil? Had he crooked a single one of his
+fingers to pull up the roots that ran through it?
+</p>
+<p>Exasperated by the threats of the friar, who tried to uphold his authority at any
+cost in the presence of the other tenants, Cabesang Tales rebelled and refused to
+pay a single cuarto, having ever before himself that red mist, saying that he would
+give up his fields to the first man who could irrigate it with blood drawn from his
+own veins.
+</p>
+<p>Old Selo, on looking at his son’s face, did not dare to mention the cayman, but tried
+to calm him by talking of clay jars, reminding him that the winner in a lawsuit was
+left without a shirt to his back.
+</p>
+<p>“We shall all be turned to clay, father, and without shirts we were born,” was the
+reply.
+</p>
+<p>So he resolutely refused to pay or to give up a single span of his land unless the
+friars should first prove the legality of their claim by exhibiting a title-deed of
+some kind. As they had none, a lawsuit followed, and Cabesang Tales entered into it,
+confiding that some at least, if not all, were lovers of justice and respecters of
+the law.
+</p>
+<p>“I serve and have been serving the King with my money and my services,” he said to
+those who remonstrated with him. “I’m asking for justice and he is obliged to give
+it to me.”
+</p>
+<p>Drawn on by fatality, and as if he had put into play in the lawsuit the whole future
+of himself and his children, he went on spending his savings to pay lawyers, notaries,
+and solicitors, not to mention the officials and clerks who exploited his ignorance
+and his needs. He moved to and fro between the village and the capital, passed his
+days without eating and his nights without sleeping, while his talk was always about
+briefs, exhibits, and appeals. There was then seen a struggle such as was never before
+carried on under the skies of the Philippines: that of a poor Indian, <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1060">[<a href="#xd32e1060">34</a>]</span>ignorant and friendless, confiding in the justness and righteousness of his cause,
+fighting against a powerful corporation before which Justice bowed her head, while
+the judges let fall the scales and surrendered the sword. He fought as tenaciously
+as the ant which bites when it knows that it is going to be crushed, as does the fly
+which looks into space only through a pane of glass. Yet the clay jar defying the
+iron pot and smashing itself into a thousand pieces bad in it something impressive—it
+had the sublimeness of desperation!
+</p>
+<p>On the days when his journeys left him free he patrolled his fields armed with a shotgun,
+saying that the tulisanes were hovering around and he had need of defending himself
+in order not to fall into their hands and thus lose his lawsuit. As if to improve
+his marksmanship, he shot at birds and fruits, even the butterflies, with such accurate
+aim that the friar-administrator did not dare to go to Sagpang without an escort of
+civil-guards, while the friar’s hireling, who gazed from afar at the threatening figure
+of Tales wandering over the fields like a sentinel upon the walls, was terror stricken
+and refused to take the property away from him.
+</p>
+<p>But the local judges and those at the capital, warned by the experience of one of
+their number who had been summarily dismissed, dared not give him the decision, fearing
+their own dismissal. Yet they were not really bad men, those judges, they were upright
+and conscientious, good citizens, excellent fathers, dutiful sons—and they were able
+to appreciate poor Tales’ situation better than Tales himself could. Many of them
+were versed in the scientific and historical basis of property, they knew that the
+friars by their own statutes could not own property, but they also knew that to come
+from far across the sea with an appointment secured with great difficulty, to undertake
+the duties of the position with the best intentions, and now to lose it because an
+Indian fancied that justice had to be done on earth as in heaven—that surely was an
+idea! They had their <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1066">[<a href="#xd32e1066">35</a>]</span>families and greater needs surely than that Indian: one had a mother to provide for,
+and what duty is more sacred than that of caring for a mother? Another had sisters,
+all of marriageable age; that other there had many little children who expected their
+daily bread and who, like fledglings in a nest, would surely die of hunger the day
+he was out of a job; even the very least of them had there, far away, a wife who would
+be in distress if the monthly remittance failed. All these moral and conscientious
+judges tried everything in their power in the way of counsel, advising Cabesang Tales
+to pay the rent demanded. But Tales, like all simple souls, once he had seen what
+was just, went straight toward it. He demanded proofs, documents, papers, title-deeds,
+but the friars had none of these, resting their case on his concessions in the past.
+</p>
+<p>Cabesang Tales’ constant reply was: “If every day I give alms to a beggar to escape
+annoyance, who will oblige me to continue my gifts if he abuses my generosity?”
+</p>
+<p>From this stand no one could draw him, nor were there any threats that could intimidate
+him. In vain Governor M—— made a trip expressly to talk to him and frighten him. His
+reply to it all was: “You may do what you like, Mr. Governor, I’m ignorant and powerless.
+But I’ve cultivated those fields, my wife and daughter died while helping me clear
+them, and I won’t give them up to any one but him who can do more with them than I’ve
+done. Let him first irrigate them with his blood and bury in them his wife and daughter!”
+</p>
+<p>The upshot of this obstinacy was that the honorable judges gave the decision to the
+friars, and everybody laughed at him, saying that lawsuits are not won by justice.
+But Cabesang Tales appealed, loaded his shotgun, and patrolled his fields with deliberation.
+</p>
+<p>During this period his life seemed to be a wild dream. His son, Tano, a youth as tall
+as his father and as good as his sister, was conscripted, but he let the boy go rather
+than purchase a substitute.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1073">[<a href="#xd32e1073">36</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“I have to pay the lawyers,” he told his weeping daughter. “If I win the case I’ll
+find a way to get him back, and if I lose it I won’t have any need for sons.”
+</p>
+<p>So the son went away and nothing more was heard of him except that his hair had been
+cropped and that he slept under a cart. Six months later it was rumored that he had
+been seen embarking for the Carolines; another report was that he had been seen in
+the uniform of the Civil Guard.
+</p>
+<p>“Tano in the Civil Guard! <i>’Susmariosep</i>!” exclaimed several, clasping their hands. “Tano, who was so good and so honest!
+<i lang="la">Requimternam!</i>”
+</p>
+<p>The grandfather went many days without speaking to the father, Juli fell sick, but
+Cabesang Tales did not shed a single tear, although for two days he never left the
+house, as if he feared the looks of reproach from the whole village or that he would
+be called the executioner of his son. But on the third day he again sallied forth
+with his shotgun.
+</p>
+<p>Murderous intentions were attributed to him, and there were well-meaning persons who
+whispered about that he had been heard to threaten that he would bury the friar-administrator
+in the furrows of his fields, whereat the friar was frightened at him in earnest.
+As a result of this, there came a decree from the Captain-General forbidding the use
+of firearms and ordering that they be taken up. Cabesang Tales had to hand over his
+shotgun but he continued his rounds armed with a long bolo.
+</p>
+<p>“What are you going to do with that bolo when the tulisanes have firearms?” old Selo
+asked him.
+</p>
+<p>“I must watch my crops,” was the answer. “Every stalk of cane growing there is one
+of my wife’s bones.”
+</p>
+<p>The bolo was taken up on the pretext that it was too long. He then took his father’s
+old ax and with it on his shoulder continued his sullen rounds.
+</p>
+<p>Every time he left the house Tandang Selo and Juli trembled for his life. The latter
+would get up from her loom, go to the window, pray, make vows to the saints, and <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1091">[<a href="#xd32e1091">37</a>]</span>recite novenas. The grandfather was at times unable to finish the handle of a broom
+and talked of returning to the forest—life in that house was unbearable.
+</p>
+<p>At last their fears were realized. As the fields were some distance from the village,
+Cabesang Tales, in spite of his ax, fell into the hands of tulisanes who had revolvers
+and rifles. They told him that since he had money to pay judges and lawyers he must
+have some also for the outcasts and the hunted. They therefore demanded a ransom of
+five hundred pesos through the medium of a rustic, with the warning that if anything
+happened to their messenger, the captive would pay for it with his life. Two days
+of grace were allowed.
+</p>
+<p>This news threw the poor family into the wildest terror, which was augmented when
+they learned that the Civil Guard was going out in pursuit of the bandits. In case
+of an encounter, the first victim would be the captive—this they all knew. The old
+man was paralyzed, while the pale and frightened daughter tried often to talk but
+could not. Still, another thought more terrible, an idea more cruel, roused them from
+their stupor. The rustic sent by the tulisanes said that the band would probably have
+to move on, and if they were slow in sending the ransom the two days would elapse
+and Cabesang Tales would have his throat cut.
+</p>
+<p>This drove those two beings to madness, weak and powerless as they were. Tandang Selo
+got up, sat down, went outside, came back again, knowing not where to go, where to
+seek aid. Juli appealed to her images, counted and recounted her money, but her two
+hundred pesos did not increase or multiply. Soon she dressed herself, gathered together
+all her jewels, and asked the advice of her grandfather, if she should go to see the
+gobernadorcillo, the judge, the notary, the lieutenant of the Civil Guard. The old
+man said yes to everything, or when she said no, he too said no. At length came the
+neighbors, their relatives and friends, some poorer than others, in their simplicity
+magnifying <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1097">[<a href="#xd32e1097">38</a>]</span>the fears. The most active of all was Sister Bali, a great <i>panguinguera,</i> who had been to Manila to practise religious exercises in the nunnery of the Sodality.
+</p>
+<p>Juli was willing to sell all her jewels, except a locket set with diamonds and emeralds
+which Basilio had given her, for this locket had a history: a nun, the daughter of
+Capitan Tiago, had given it to a leper, who, in return for professional treatment,
+had made a present of it to Basilio. So she could not sell it without first consulting
+him.
+</p>
+<p>Quickly the shell-combs and earrings were sold, as well as Juli’s rosary, to their
+richest neighbor, and thus fifty pesos were added, but two hundred and fifty were
+still lacking. The locket might be pawned, but Juli shook her head. A neighbor suggested
+that the house be sold and Tandang Selo approved the idea, satisfied to return to
+the forest and cut firewood as of old, but Sister Bali observed that this could not
+be done because the owner was not present.
+</p>
+<p>“The judge’s wife once sold me her <i>tapis</i> for a peso, but her husband said that the sale did not hold because it hadn’t received
+his approval. <i>Abá!</i> He took back the <i>tapis</i> and she hasn’t returned the peso yet, but I don’t pay her when she wins at <i>panguingui, abá!</i> In that way I’ve collected twelve cuartos, and for that alone I’m going to play with
+her. I can’t bear to have people fail to pay what they owe me, <i>abá!</i>”
+</p>
+<p>Another neighbor was going to ask Sister Bali why then did not she settle a little
+account with her, but the quick <i>panguinguera</i> suspected this and added at once: “Do you know, Juli, what you can do? Borrow two
+hundred and fifty pesos on the house, payable when the lawsuit is won.”
+</p>
+<p>This seemed to be the best proposition, so they decided to act upon it that same day.
+Sister Bali offered to accompany her, and together they visited the houses of all
+the rich folks in Tiani, but no one would accept the proposal. The case, they said,
+was already lost, and to show favors to an enemy of the friars was to expose themselves
+to their <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1122">[<a href="#xd32e1122">39</a>]</span>vengeance. At last a pious woman took pity on the girl and lent the money on condition
+that Juli should remain with her as a servant until the debt was paid. Juli would
+not have so very much to do: sew, pray, accompany her to mass, and fast for her now
+and then. The girl accepted with tears in her eyes, received the money, and promised
+to enter her service on the following day, Christmas.
+</p>
+<p>When the grandfather heard of that sale he fell to weeping like a child. What, that
+granddaughter whom he had not allowed to walk in the sun lest her skin should be burned,
+Juli, she of the delicate fingers and rosy feet! What, that girl, the prettiest in
+the village and perhaps in the whole town, before whose window many gallants had vainly
+passed the night playing and singing! What, his only granddaughter, the sole joy of
+his fading eyes, she whom he had dreamed of seeing dressed in a long skirt, talking
+Spanish, and holding herself erect waving a painted fan like the daughters of the
+wealthy—she to become a servant, to be scolded and reprimanded, to ruin her fingers,
+to sleep anywhere, to rise in any manner whatsoever!
+</p>
+<p>So the old grandfather wept and talked of hanging or starving himself to death. “If
+you go,” he declared, “I’m going back to the forest and will never set foot in the
+town.”
+</p>
+<p>Juli soothed him by saying that it was necessary for her father to return, that the
+suit would be won, and they could then ransom her from her servitude.
+</p>
+<p>The night was a sad one. Neither of the two could taste a bite and the old man refused
+to lie down, passing the whole night seated in a corner, silent and motionless. Juli
+on her part tried to sleep, but for a long time could not close her eyes. Somewhat
+relieved about her father’s fate, she now thought of herself and fell to weeping,
+but stifled her sobs so that the old man might not hear them. The next day she would
+be a servant, and it was the very day Basilio was accustomed to come from Manila with
+presents for her. Henceforward she would have to give up that love; Basilio, who was
+going to be a doctor, couldn’t marry a <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1129">[<a href="#xd32e1129">40</a>]</span>pauper. In fancy she saw him going to the church in company with the prettiest and
+richest girl in the town, both well-dressed, happy and smiling, while she, Juli, followed
+her mistress, carrying novenas, buyos, and the cuspidor. Here the girl felt a lump
+rise in her throat, a sinking at her heart, and begged the Virgin to let her die first.
+</p>
+<p>But—said her conscience—he will at least know that I preferred to pawn myself rather
+than the locket he gave me.
+</p>
+<p>This thought consoled her a little and brought on empty dreams. Who knows but that
+a miracle might happen? She might find the two hundred and fifty pesos under the image
+of the Virgin—she had read of many similar miracles. The sun might not rise nor morning
+come, and meanwhile the suit would be won. Her father might return, or Basilio put
+in his appearance, she might find a bag of gold in the garden, the tulisanes would
+send the bag of gold, the curate, Padre Camorra, who was always teasing her, would
+come with the tulisanes. So her ideas became more and more confused, until at length,
+worn out by fatigue and sorrow, she went to sleep with dreams of her childhood in
+the depths of the forest: she was bathing in the torrent along with her two brothers,
+there were little fishes of all colors that let themselves be caught like fools, and
+she became impatient because she found no pleasure in catchnig such foolish little
+fishes! Basilio was under the water, but Basilio for some reason had the face of her
+brother Tano. Her new mistress was watching them from the bank.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1134">[<a href="#xd32e1134">41</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e1017">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e1017src">1</a></span> The reference is to the novel <i>Noli Me Tangere</i> (<i>The Social Cancer</i>), the author’s first work, of which, the present is in a way a continuation.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e1017src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch05" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e252">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter V</h2>
+<h2 class="main">A Cochero’s Christmas Eve</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">Basilio reached San Diego just as the Christmas Eve procession was passing through
+the streets. He had been delayed on the road for several hours because the cochero,
+having forgotten his cedula, was held up by the Civil Guard, had his memory jogged
+by a few blows from a rifle-butt, and afterwards was taken before the commandant.
+Now the carromata was again detained to let the procession pass, while the abused
+cochero took off his hat reverently and recited a paternoster to the first image that
+came along, which seemed to be that of a great saint. It was the figure of an old
+man with an exceptionally long beard, seated at the edge of a grave under a tree filled
+with all kinds of stuffed birds. A <i>kalan</i> with a clay jar, a mortar, and a <i>kalikut</i> for mashing buyo were his only utensils, as if to indicate that he lived on the border
+of the tomb and was doing his cooking there. This was the Methuselah of the religious
+iconography of the Philippines; his colleague and perhaps contemporary is called in
+Europe Santa Claus, and is still more smiling and agreeable.
+</p>
+<p>“In the time of the saints,” thought the cochero, “surely there were no civil-guards,
+because one can’t live long on blows from rifle-butts.”
+</p>
+<p>Behind the great old man came the three Magian Kings on ponies that were capering
+about, especially that of the negro Melchior, which seemed to be about to trample
+its companions.
+</p>
+<p>“No, there couldn’t have been any civil-guards,” decided the cochero, secretly envying
+those fortunate times, “because if there had been, that negro who is cutting up <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1149">[<a href="#xd32e1149">42</a>]</span>such capers beside those two Spaniards”—Gaspar and <span class="corr" id="xd32e1151" title="Source: Bathazar">Balthazar</span>—“would have gone to jail.”
+</p>
+<p>Then, observing that the negro wore a crown and was a king, like the other two, the
+Spaniards, his thoughts naturally turned to the king of the Indians, and he sighed.
+“Do you know, sir,” he asked Basilio respectfully, “if his right foot is loose yet?”
+</p>
+<p>Basilio had him repeat the question. “Whose right foot?”
+</p>
+<p>“The King’s!” whispered the cochero mysteriously.
+</p>
+<p>“What King’s?”
+</p>
+<p>“Our King’s, the King of the Indians.”
+</p>
+<p>Basilio smiled and shrugged his shoulders, while the cochero again sighed. The Indians
+in the country places preserve the legend that their king, imprisoned and chained
+in the cave of San Mateo, will come some day to free them. Every hundredth year he
+breaks one of his chains, so that he now has his hands and his left foot loose—only
+the right foot remains bound. This king causes the earthquakes when he struggles or
+stirs himself, and he is so strong that in shaking hands with him it is necessary
+to extend to him a bone, which he crushes in his grasp. For some unexplainable reason
+the Indians call him King Bernardo, perhaps by confusing him with Bernardo del Carpio.<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e1162src" href="#xd32e1162">1</a>
+</p>
+<p>“When he gets his right foot loose,” muttered the cochero, stifling another sigh,
+“I’ll give him my horses, and offer him my services even to death, for he’ll free
+us from the Civil Guard.” With a melancholy gaze he watched the Three Kings move on.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1167">[<a href="#xd32e1167">43</a>]</span></p>
+<p>The boys came behind in two files, sad and serious as though they were there under
+compulsion. They lighted their way, some with torches, others with tapers, and others
+with paper lanterns on bamboo poles, while they recited the rosary at the top of their
+voices, as though quarreling with somebody. Afterwards came St. Joseph on a modest
+float, with a look of sadness and resignation on his face, carrying his stalk of lilies,
+as he moved along between two civil-guards as though he were a prisoner. This enabled
+the cochero to understand the expression on the saint’s face, but whether the sight
+of the guards troubled him or he had no great respect for a saint who would travel
+in such company, he did not recite a single requiem.
+</p>
+<p>Behind St. Joseph came the girls bearing lights, their heads covered with handkerchiefs
+knotted under their chins, also reciting the rosary, but with less wrath than the
+boys. In their midst were to be seen several lads dragging along little rabbits made
+of Japanese paper, lighted by red candles, with their short paper tails erect. The
+lads brought those toys into the procession to enliven the birth of the Messiah. The
+little animals, fat and round as eggs, seemed to be so pleased that at times they
+would take a leap, lose their balance, fall, and catch fire. The owner would then
+hasten to extinguish such burning enthusiasm, puffing and blowing until he finally
+beat out the fire, and then, seeing his toy destroyed, would fall to weeping. The
+cochero observed with sadness that the race of little paper animals disappeared each
+year, as if they had been attacked by the pest like the living animals. He, the abused
+Sinong, remembered his two magnificent horses, which, at the advice of the curate,
+he had caused to be blessed to save them from plague, spending therefor ten pesos—for
+neither the government nor the curates have found any better remedy for the epizootic—and
+they had died after all. Yet he consoled himself by remembering also that after the
+shower of holy water, the Latin phrases of the padre, and the ceremonies, the horses
+had become so vain and self-important that <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1171">[<a href="#xd32e1171">44</a>]</span>they would not even allow him, Sinong, a good Christian, to put them in harness, and
+he had not dared to whip them, because a tertiary sister had said that they were <i>sanctified</i>.
+</p>
+<p>The procession was closed by the Virgin dressed as the Divine Shepherd, with a pilgrim’s
+hat of wide brim and long plumes to indicate the journey to Jerusalem. That the birth
+might be made more explicable, the curate had ordered her figure to be stuffed with
+rags and cotton under her skirt, so that no one could be in any doubt as to her condition.
+It was a very beautiful image, with the same sad expression of all the images that
+the Filipinos make, and a mien somewhat ashamed, doubtless at the way in which the
+curate had arranged her. In front came several singers and behind, some musicians
+with the usual civil-guards. The curate, as was to be expected after what he had done,
+was not in his place, for that year he was greatly displeased at having to use all
+his diplomacy and shrewdness to convince the townspeople that they should pay thirty
+pesos for each Christmas mass instead of the usual twenty. “You’re turning filibusters!”
+he had said to them.
+</p>
+<p>The cochero must have been greatly preoccupied with the sights of the procession,
+for when it had passed and Basilio ordered him to go on, he did not notice that the
+lamp on his carromata had gone out. Neither did Basilio notice it, his attention being
+devoted to gazing at the houses, which were illuminated inside and out with little
+paper lanterns of fantastic shapes and colors, stars surrounded by hoops with long
+streamers which produced a pleasant murmur when shaken by the wind, and fishes of
+movable heads and tails, having a glass of oil inside, suspended from the eaves of
+the windows in the delightful fashion of a happy and homelike fiesta. But he also
+noticed that the lights were flickering, that the stars were being eclipsed, that
+this year had fewer ornaments and hangings than the former, which in turn had had
+even fewer than the year preceding it. There was scarcely any music in the streets,
+while the agreeable noises of the kitchen were not to be heard in all <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1178">[<a href="#xd32e1178">45</a>]</span>the houses, which the youth ascribed to the fact that for some time things had been
+going badly, the sugar did not bring a good price, the rice crops had failed, over
+half the live stock had died, but the taxes rose and increased for some inexplicable
+reason, while the abuses of the Civil Guard became more frequent to kill off the happiness
+of the people in the towns.
+</p>
+<p>He was just pondering over this when an energetic “Halt!” resounded. They were passing
+in front of the barracks and one of the guards had noticed the extinguished lamp of
+the carromata, which could not go on without it. A hail of insults fell about the
+poor cochero, who vainly excused himself with the length of the procession. He would
+be arrested for violating the ordinances and afterwards advertised in the newspapers,
+so the peaceful and prudent Basilio left the carromata and went his way on foot, carrying
+his valise. This was San Diego, his native town, where he had not a single relative.
+</p>
+<p>The only, house wherein there seemed to be any mirth was Capitan Basilio’s. Hens and
+chickens cackled their death chant to the accompaniment of dry and repeated strokes,
+as of meat pounded on a chopping-block, and the sizzling of grease in the frying-pans.
+A feast was going on in the house, and even into the street there passed a certain
+draught of air, saturated with the succulent odors of stews and confections. In the
+entresol Basilio saw Sinang, as small as when our readers knew her before,<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e1183src" href="#xd32e1183">2</a> although a little rounder and plumper since her marriage. Then to his great surprise
+he made out, further in at the back of the room, chatting with Capitan Basilio, the
+curate, and the alferez of the Civil Guard, no less than the jeweler Simoun, as ever
+with his blue goggles and his nonchalant air.
+</p>
+<p>“It’s understood, Señor Simoun,” Capitan Basilio was saying, “that we’ll go to Tiani
+to see your jewels.”
+</p>
+<p>“I would also go,” remarked the alferez, “because I <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1191">[<a href="#xd32e1191">46</a>]</span>need a watch-chain, but I’m so busy—if Capitan Basilio would undertake—”
+</p>
+<p>Capitan Basilio would do so with the greatest pleasure, and as he wished to propitiate
+the soldier in order that he might not be molested in the persons of his laborers,
+he refused to accept the money which the alferez was trying to get out of his pocket.
+</p>
+<p>“It’s my Christmas gift!”
+</p>
+<p>“I can’t allow you, Capitan, I can’t permit it!”
+</p>
+<p>“All right! We’ll settle up afterwards,” replied Capitan Basilio with a lordly gesture.
+</p>
+<p>Also, the curate wanted a pair of lady’s earrings and requested the capitan to buy
+them for him. “I want them first class. Later we’ll fix up the account.”
+</p>
+<p>“Don’t worry about that, Padre,” said the good man, who wished to be at peace with
+the Church also. An unfavorable report on the curate’s part could do him great damage
+and cause him double the expense, for those earrings were a forced present. Simoun
+in the meantime was praising his jewels.
+</p>
+<p>“That fellow is fierce!” mused the student. “He does business everywhere. And if I
+can believe <i>a certain person,</i> he buys from some gentlemen for a half of their value the same jewels that he himself
+has sold for presents. Everybody in this country prospers but us!”
+</p>
+<p>He made his way to his house, or rather Capitan Tiago’s, now occupied by a trustworthy
+man who had held him in great esteem since the day when he had seen him perform a
+surgical operation with the same coolness that he would cut up a chicken. This man
+was now waiting to give him the news. Two of the laborers were prisoners, one was
+to be deported, and a number of carabaos had died.
+</p>
+<p>“The same old story,” exclaimed Basilio, in a bad humor. “You always receive me with
+the same complaints.” The youth was not overbearing, but as he was at times scolded
+by Capitan Tiago, he liked in his turn to chide those under his orders.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1207">[<a href="#xd32e1207">47</a>]</span></p>
+<p>The old man cast about for something new. “One of our tenants has died, the old fellow
+who took care of the woods, and the curate refused to bury him as a pauper, saying
+that his master is a rich man.”
+</p>
+<p>“What did he die of?”
+</p>
+<p>“Of old age.”
+</p>
+<p>“Get out! To die of old age! It must at least have been some disease.” Basilio in
+his zeal for making autopsies wanted diseases.
+</p>
+<p>“Haven’t you anything new to tell me? You take away my appetite relating the same
+old things. Do you know anything of Sagpang?”
+</p>
+<p>The old man then told him about the kidnapping of Cabesang Tales. Basilio became thoughtful
+and said nothing more—his appetite had completely left him.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1216">[<a href="#xd32e1216">48</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e1162">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e1162src">1</a></span> This legend is still current among the Tagalogs. It circulates in various forms, the
+commonest being that the king was so confined for defying the lightning; and it takes
+no great stretch of the imagination to fancy in this idea a reference to the firearms
+used by the Spanish conquerors. Quite recently (January 1909), when the nearly extinct
+volcano of Banahao shook itself and scattered a few tons of mud over the surrounding
+landscape, the people thereabout recalled this old legend, saying that it was their
+King Bernardo making another effort to get that right foot loose.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e1162src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e1183">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e1183src">2</a></span> The reference is to <i>Noli Me Tangere,</i> in which Sinang appears.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e1183src" title="Return to note 2 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch06" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e262">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter VI</h2>
+<h2 class="main">Basilio</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">When the bells began their chimes for the midnight mass and those who preferred a
+good sleep to fiestas and ceremonies arose grumbling at the noise and movement, Basilio
+cautiously left the house, took two or three turns through the streets to see that
+he was not watched or followed, and then made his way by unfrequented paths to the
+road that led to the ancient wood of the Ibarras, which had been acquired by Capitan
+Tiago when their property was confiscated and sold. As Christmas fell under the waning
+moon that year, the place was wrapped in darkness. The chimes had ceased, and only
+the tolling sounded through the darkness of the night amid the murmur of the breeze-stirred
+branches and the measured roar of the waves on the neighboring lake, like the deep
+respiration of nature sunk in profound sleep.
+</p>
+<p>Awed by the time and place, the youth moved along with his head down, as if endeavoring
+to see through the darkness. But from time to time he raised it to gaze at the stars
+through the open spaces between the treetops and went forward parting the bushes or
+tearing away the lianas that obstructed his path. At times he retraced his steps,
+his foot would get caught among the plants, he stumbled over a projecting root or
+a fallen log. At the end of a half-hour he reached a small brook on the opposite side
+of which arose a hillock, a black and shapeless mass that in the darkness took on
+the proportions of a mountain. Basilio crossed the brook on the stones that showed
+black against the shining surface of the water, ascended the hill, and made his way
+to a small space enclosed by old and <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1224">[<a href="#xd32e1224">49</a>]</span>crumbling walls. He approached the balete tree that rose in the center, huge, mysterious,
+venerable, formed of roots that extended up and down among the confusedly-interlaced
+trunks.
+</p>
+<p>Pausing before a heap of stones he took off his hat and seemed to be praying. There
+his mother was buried, and every time he came to the town his first visit was to that
+neglected and unknown grave. Since he must visit Cabesang Tales’ family the next day,
+he had taken advantage of the night to perform this duty. Seated on a stone, he seemed
+to fall into deep thought. His past rose before him like a long black film, rosy at
+first, then shadowy with spots of blood, then black, black, gray, and then light,
+ever lighter. The end could not be seen, hidden as it was by a cloud through which
+shone lights and the hues of dawn.
+</p>
+<p>Thirteen years before to the day, almost to the hour, his mother had died there in
+the deepest distress, on a glorious night when the moon shone brightly and the Christians
+of the world were engaged in rejoicing. Wounded and limping, he had reached there
+in pursuit of her—she mad and terrified, fleeing from her son as from a ghost. There
+she had died, and there had come a stranger who had commanded him to build a funeral
+pyre. He had obeyed mechanically and when he returned he found a second stranger by
+the side of the other’s corpse. What a night and what a morning those were! The stranger
+helped him raise the pyre, whereon they burned the corpse of the first, dug the grave
+in which they buried his mother, and then after giving him some pieces of money told
+him to leave the place. It was the first time that he had seen that man—tall, with
+blood-shot eyes, pale lips, and a sharp nose.
+</p>
+<p>Entirely alone in the world, without parents or brothers and sisters, he left the
+town whose authorities inspired in him such great fear and went to Manila to work
+in some rich house and study at the same time, as many do. His journey was an Odyssey
+of sleeplessness and startling surprises, in which hunger counted for little, for
+he ate the <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1230">[<a href="#xd32e1230">50</a>]</span>fruits in the woods, whither he retreated whenever he made out from afar the uniform
+of the Civil Guard, a sight that recalled the origin of all his misfortunes. Once
+in Manila, ragged and sick, he went from door to door offering his services. A boy
+from the provinces who knew not a single word of Spanish, and sickly besides! Discouraged,
+hungry, and miserable, he wandered about the streets, attracting attention by the
+wretchedness of his clothing. How often was he tempted to throw himself under the
+feet of the horses that flashed by, drawing carriages shining with silver and varnish,
+thus to end his misery at once! Fortunately, he saw Capitan Tiago, accompanied by
+Aunt Isabel. He had known them since the days in San Diego, and in his joy believed
+that in them he saw almost fellow-townsfolk. He followed the carriage until he lost
+sight of it, and then made inquiries for the house. As it was the very day that Maria
+Clara entered the nunnery and Capitan Tiago was accordingly depressed, he was admitted
+as a servant, without pay, but instead with leave to study, if he so wished, in San
+Juan de Letran.<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e1232src" href="#xd32e1232">1</a>
+</p>
+<p>Dirty, poorly dressed, with only a pair of clogs for footwear, at the end of several
+months’ stay in Manila, he entered the first year of Latin. On seeing his clothes,
+his classmates drew away from him, and the professor, a handsome Dominican, never
+asked him a question, but frowned every time he looked at him. In the eight months
+that the class continued, the only words that passed between them were his name read
+from the roll and the daily <i>adsum</i> with which the student responded. With what bitterness he left the class each day,
+and, guessing the reason for the treatment accorded him, what tears sprang into his
+eyes and what complaints were stifled in his heart! How he had wept and sobbed over
+the grave of his mother, relating to her his hidden sorrows, humiliations, and affronts,
+when at the approach of Christmas Capitan Tiago had taken him back to San Diego! Yet
+he memorized the lessons without <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1239">[<a href="#xd32e1239">51</a>]</span>omitting a comma, although he understood scarcely any part of them. But at length
+he became resigned, noticing that among the three or four hundred in his class only
+about forty merited the honor of being questioned, because they attracted the professor’s
+attention by their appearance, some prank, comicality, or other cause. The greater
+part of the students congratulated themselves that they thus escaped the work of thinking
+and understanding the subject. “One goes to college, not to learn and study, but to
+gain credit for the course, so if the book can be memorized, what more can be asked—the
+year is thus gained.”<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e1241src" href="#xd32e1241">2</a>
+</p>
+<p>Basilio passed the examinations by answering the solitary question asked him, like
+a machine, without stopping or breathing, and in the amusement of the examiners won
+the passing certificate. His nine companions—they were examined in batches of ten
+in order to save time—did not have such good luck, but were condemned to repeat the
+year of brutalization.
+</p>
+<p>In the second year the game-cock that he tended won a <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1254">[<a href="#xd32e1254">52</a>]</span>large sum and he received from Capitan Tiago a big tip, which he immediately invested
+in the purchase of shoes and a felt hat. With these and the clothes given him by his
+employer, which he made over to fit his person, his appearance became more decent,
+but did not get beyond that. In such a large class a great deal was needed to attract
+the professor’s attention, and the student who in the first year did not make himself
+known by some special quality, or did not capture the good-will of the professors,
+could with difficulty make himself known in the rest of his school-days. But Basilio
+kept on, for perseverance was his chief trait.
+</p>
+<p>His fortune seemed to change somewhat when he entered the third year. His professor
+happened to be a very jolly fellow, fond of jokes and of making the students laugh,
+complacent enough in that he almost always had his favorites recite the lessons—in
+fact, he was satisfied with anything. At this time Basilio now wore shoes and a clean
+and well-ironed camisa. As his professor noticed that he laughed very little at the
+jokes and that his large eyes seemed to be asking something like an eternal question,
+he took him for a fool, and one day decided to make him conspicuous by calling on
+him for the lesson. Basilio recited it from beginning to end, without hesitating over
+a single letter, so the professor called him a parrot and told a story to make the
+class laugh. Then to increase the hilarity and justify the epithet he asked several
+questions, at the same time winking to his favorites, as if to say to them, “You’ll
+see how we’re going to amuse ourselves.”
+</p>
+<p>Basilio now understood Spanish and answered the questions with the plain intention
+of making no one laugh. This disgusted everybody, the expected absurdity did not materialize,
+no one could laugh, and the good friar never pardoned him for having defrauded the
+hopes of the class and disappointed his own prophecies. But who would expect anything
+worth while to come from a head so badly combed and placed on an Indian poorly shod,
+classified until recently among the arboreal animals? As in other <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1260">[<a href="#xd32e1260">53</a>]</span>centers of learning, where the teachers are honestly desirous that the students should
+learn, such discoveries usually delight the instructors, so in a college managed by
+men convinced that for the most part knowledge is an evil, at least for the students,
+the episode of Basilio produced a bad impression and he was not questioned again during
+the year. Why should he be, when he made no one laugh?
+</p>
+<p>Quite discouraged and thinking of abandoning his studies, he passed to the fourth
+year of Latin. Why study at all, why not sleep like the others and trust to luck?
+</p>
+<p>One of the two professors was very popular, beloved by all, passing for a sage, a
+great poet, and a man of advanced ideas. One day when he accompanied the collegians
+on their walk, he had a dispute with some cadets, which resulted in a skirmish and
+a challenge. No doubt recalling his brilliant youth, the professor preached a crusade
+and promised good marks to all who during the promenade on the following Sunday would
+take part in the fray. The week was a lively one—there were occasional encounters
+in which canes and sabers were crossed, and in one of these Basilio distinguished
+himself. Borne in triumph by the students and presented to the professor, he thus
+became known to him and came to be his favorite. Partly for this reason and partly
+from his diligence, that year he received the highest marks, medals included, in view
+of which Capitan Tiago, who, since his daughter had become a nun, exhibited some aversion
+to the friars, in a fit of good humor induced him to transfer to the Ateneo Municipal,
+the fame of which was then in its apogee.
+</p>
+<p>Here a new world opened before his eyes—a system of instruction that he had never
+dreamed of. Except for a few superfluities and some childish things, he was filled
+with admiration for the methods there used and with gratitude for the zeal of the
+instructors. His eyes at times filled with tears when he thought of the four previous
+years during which, from lack of means, he had been unable to study at that center.
+He had to make extraordinary efforts to get <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1266">[<a href="#xd32e1266">54</a>]</span>himself to the level of those who had had a good preparatory course, and it might
+be said that in that one year he learned the whole five of the secondary curricula.
+He received his bachelor’s degree, to the great satisfaction of his instructors, who
+in the examinations showed themselves to be proud of him before the Dominican examiners
+sent there to inspect the school. One of these, as if to dampen such great enthusiasm
+a little, asked him where he had studied the first years of Latin.
+</p>
+<p>“In San Juan de Letran, Padre,” answered Basilio.
+</p>
+<p>“Aha! Of course! He’s not bad,—in Latin,” the Dominican then remarked with a slight
+smile.
+</p>
+<p>From choice and temperament he selected the course in medicine. Capitan Tiago preferred
+the law, in order that he might have a lawyer free, but knowledge of the laws is not
+sufficient to secure clientage in the Philippines—it is necessary to win the cases,
+and for this friendships are required, influence in certain spheres, a good deal of
+astuteness. Capitan Tiago finally gave in, remembering that medical students get on
+intimate terms with corpses, and for some time he had been seeking a poison to put
+on the gaffs of his game-cocks, the best he had been able to secure thus far being
+the blood of a Chinaman who had died of syphilis.
+</p>
+<p>With equal diligence, or more if possible, the young man continued this course, and
+after the third year began to render medical services with such great success that
+he was not only preparing a brilliant future for himself but also earning enough to
+dress well and save some money. This was the last year of the course and in two months
+he would be a physician; he would come back to the town, he would marry Juliana, and
+they would be happy. The granting of his licentiateship was not only assured, but
+he expected it to be the crowning act of his school-days, for he had been designated
+to deliver the valedictory at the graduation, and already he saw himself in the rostrum,
+before the whole faculty, the object of public attention. All <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1273">[<a href="#xd32e1273">55</a>]</span>those heads, leaders of Manila science, half-hidden in their colored capes; all the
+women who came there out of curiosity and who years before had gazed at him, if not
+with disdain, at least with indifference; all those men whose carriages had once been
+about to crush him down in the mud like a dog: they would listen attentively, and
+he was going to say something to them that would not be trivial, something that had
+never before resounded in that place, he was going to forget himself in order to aid
+the poor students of the future—and he would make his entrance on his work in the
+world with that speech.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1275">[<a href="#xd32e1275">56</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e1232">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e1232src">1</a></span> The Dominican school of secondary instruction in Manila.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e1232src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e1241">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e1241src">2</a></span> “The studies of secondary instruction given in Santo Tomas, in the college of San
+Juan de Letran, and of San José, and in the private schools, had the defects inherent
+in the plan of instruction which the friars developed in the Philippines. It suited
+their plans that scientific and literary knowledge should not become general nor very
+extensive, for which reason they took but little interest in the study of those subjects
+or in the quality of the instruction. Their educational establishments were places
+of luxury for the children of wealthy and well-to-do families rather than establishments
+in which to perfect and develop the minds of the Filipino youth. It is true they were
+careful to give them a religious education, tending to make them respect the omnipotent
+power (<i>sic</i>) of the monastic corporations.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote cont">“The intellectual powers were made dormant by devoting a greater part of the time
+to the study of Latin, to which they attached an extraordinary importance, for the
+purpose of discouraging pupils from studying the exact and experimental sciences and
+from gaining a knowledge of true literary studies.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote cont">“The philosophic system explained was naturally the scholastic one, with an exceedingly
+refined and subtile logic, and with deficient ideas upon physics. By the study of
+Latin, and their philosophic systems, they converted their pupils into automatic machines
+rather than into practical men prepared to battle with life.”—<i>Census of the Philippine Islands (Washington, 1905), Volume III, pp. 601, 602.</i>&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e1241src" title="Return to note 2 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch07" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e272">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter VII</h2>
+<h2 class="main">Simoun</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">Over these matters Basilio was pondering as he visited his mother’s grave. He was
+about to start back to the town when he thought he saw a light flickering among the
+trees and heard the snapping of twigs, the sound of feet, and rustling of leaves.
+The light disappeared but the noises became more distinct, coming directly toward
+where he was. Basilio was not naturally superstitious, especially after having carved
+up so many corpses and watched beside so many death-beds, but the old legends about
+that ghostly spot, the hour, the darkness, the melancholy sighing of the wind, and
+certain tales heard in his childhood, asserted their influence over his mind and made
+his heart beat violently.
+</p>
+<p>The figure stopped on the other side of the balete, but the youth could see it through
+an open space between two roots that had grown in the course of time to the proportions
+of tree-trunks. It produced from under its coat a lantern with a powerful reflecting
+lens, which it placed on the ground, thereby lighting up a pair of riding-boots, the
+rest of the figure remaining concealed in the darkness. The figure seemed to search
+its pockets and then bent over to fix a shovel-blade on the end of a stout cane. To
+his great surprise Basilio thought he could make out some of the features of the jeweler
+Simoun, who indeed it was.
+</p>
+<p>The jeweler dug in the ground and from time to time the lantern illuminated his face,
+on which were not now the blue goggles that so completely disguised him. Basilio shuddered:
+that was the same stranger who thirteen years before had dug his mother’s grave there,
+only now he had aged somewhat, his hair had turned white, he wore a beard <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1284">[<a href="#xd32e1284">57</a>]</span>and a mustache, but yet his look was the same, the bitter expression, the same cloud
+on his brow, the same muscular arms, though somewhat thinner now, the same violent
+energy. Old impressions were stirred in the boy: he seemed to feel the heat of the
+fire, the hunger, the weariness of that time, the smell of freshly turned earth. Yet
+his discovery terrified him—that jeweler Simoun, who passed for a British Indian,
+a Portuguese, an American, a mulatto, the Brown Cardinal, his Black Eminence, the
+evil genius of the Captain-General as many called him, was no other than the mysterious
+stranger whose appearance and disappearance coincided with the death of the heir to
+that land! But of the two strangers who had appeared, which was Ibarra, the living
+or the dead?
+</p>
+<p>This question, which he had often asked himself whenever Ibarra’s death was mentioned,
+again came into his mind in the presence of the human enigma he now saw before him.
+The dead man had had two wounds, which must have been made by firearms, as he knew
+from what he had since studied, and which would be the result of the chase on the
+lake. Then the dead man must have been Ibarra, who had come to die at the tomb of
+his forefathers, his desire to be cremated being explained by his residence in Europe,
+where cremation is practised. Then who was the other, the living, this jeweler Simoun,
+at that time with such an appearance of poverty and wretchedness, but who had now
+returned loaded with gold and a friend of the authorities? There was the mystery,
+and the student, with his characteristic cold-bloodedness, determined to clear it
+up at the first opportunity.
+</p>
+<p>Simoun dug away for some time, but Basilio noticed that his old vigor had declined—he
+panted and had to rest every few moments. Fearing that he might be discovered, the
+boy made a sudden resolution. Rising from his seat and issuing from his hiding-place,
+he asked in the most matter-of-fact tone, “Can I help you, sir?”
+</p>
+<p>Simoun straightened up with the spring of a tiger <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1290">[<a href="#xd32e1290">58</a>]</span>attacked at his prey, thrust his hand in his coat pocket, and stared at the student
+with a pale and lowering gaze.
+</p>
+<p>“Thirteen years ago you rendered me a great service, sir,” went on Basilio unmoved,
+“in this very place, by burying my mother, and I should consider myself happy if I
+could serve you now.”
+</p>
+<p>Without taking his eyes off the youth Simoun drew a revolver from his pocket and the
+click of a hammer being cocked was heard. “For whom do you take me?” he asked, retreating
+a few paces.
+</p>
+<p>“For a person who is sacred to me,” replied Basilio with some emotion, for he thought
+his last moment had come. “For a person whom all, except me, believe to be dead, and
+whose misfortunes I have always lamented.”
+</p>
+<p>An impressive silence followed these words, a silence that to the youth seemed to
+suggest eternity. But Simoun, after some hesitation, approached him and placing a
+hand on his shoulder said in a moving tone: “Basilio, you possess a secret that can
+ruin me and now you have just surprised me in another, which puts me completely in
+your hands, the divulging of which would upset all my plans. For my own security and
+for the good of the cause in which I labor, I ought to seal your lips forever, for
+what is the life of one man compared to the end I seek? The occasion is fitting; no
+one knows that I have come here; I am armed; you are defenceless; your death would
+be attributed to the outlaws, if not to more supernatural causes—yet I’ll let you
+live and trust that I shall not regret it. You have toiled, you have struggled with
+energetic perseverance, and like myself, you have your scores to settle with society.
+Your brother was murdered, your mother driven to insanity, and society has prosecuted
+neither the assassin nor the executioner. You and I are the dregs of justice and instead
+of destroying we ought to aid each other.”
+</p>
+<p>Simoun paused with a repressed sigh, and then slowly resumed, while his gaze wandered
+about: “Yes, I am he who came here thirteen years ago, sick and wretched, to pay <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1299">[<a href="#xd32e1299">59</a>]</span>the last tribute to a great and noble soul that was willing to die for me. The victim
+of a vicious system, I have wandered over the world, working night and day to amass
+a fortune and carry out my plan. Now I have returned to destroy that system, to precipitate
+its downfall, to hurl it into the abyss toward which it is senselessly rushing, even
+though I may have to shed oceans of tears and blood. It has condemned itself, it stands
+condemned, and I don’t want to die before I have seen it in fragments at the foot
+of the precipice!”
+</p>
+<p>Simoun extended both his arms toward the earth, as if with that gesture he would like
+to hold there the broken remains. His voice took on a sinister, even lugubrious tone,
+which made the student shudder.
+</p>
+<p>“Called by the vices of the rulers, I have returned to these islands, and under the
+cloak of a merchant have visited the towns. My gold has opened a way for me and wheresoever
+I have beheld greed in the most execrable forms, sometimes hypocritical, sometimes
+shameless, sometimes cruel, fatten on the dead organism, like a vulture on a corpse,
+I have asked myself—why was there not, festering in its vitals, the corruption, the
+ptomaine, the poison of the tombs, to kill the foul bird? The corpse was letting itself
+be consumed, the vulture was gorging itself with meat, and because it was not possible
+for me to give it life so that it might turn against its destroyer, and because the
+corruption developed slowly, I have stimulated greed, I have abetted it. The cases
+of injustice and the abuses multiplied themselves; I have instigated crime and acts
+of cruelty, so that the people might become accustomed to the idea of death. I have
+stirred up trouble so that to escape from it some remedy might be found; I have placed
+obstacles in the way of trade so that the country, impoverished and reduced to misery,
+might no longer be afraid of anything; I have excited desires to plunder the treasury,
+and as this has not been enough to bring about a popular uprising, I have wounded
+the people in their most sensitive fiber; I have <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1304">[<a href="#xd32e1304">60</a>]</span>made the vulture itself insult the very corpse that it feeds upon and hasten the corruption.
+</p>
+<p>“Now, when I was about to get the supreme rottenness, the supreme filth, the mixture
+of such foul products brewing poison, when the greed was beginning to irritate, in
+its folly hastening to seize whatever came to hand, like an old woman caught in a
+conflagration, here you come with your cries of Hispanism, with chants of confidence
+in the government, in what cannot come to pass, here you have a body palpitating with
+heat and life, young, pure, vigorous, throbbing with blood, with enthusiasm, suddenly
+come forth to offer itself again as fresh food!
+</p>
+<p>“Ah, youth is ever inexperienced and dreamy, always running after the butterflies
+and flowers! You have united, so that by your efforts you may bind your fatherland
+to Spain with garlands of roses when in reality you are forging upon it chains harder
+than the diamond! You ask for equal rights, the Hispanization of your customs, and
+you don’t see that what you are begging for is suicide, the destruction of your nationality,
+the annihilation of your fatherland, the consecration of tyranny! What will you be
+in the future? A people without character, a nation without liberty—everything you
+have will be borrowed, even your very defects! You beg for Hispanization, and do not
+pale with shame when they deny it you! And even if they should grant it to you, what
+then—what have you gained? At best, a country of pronunciamentos, a land of civil
+wars, a republic of the greedy and the malcontents, like some of the republics of
+South America! To what are you tending now, with your instruction in Castilian, a
+pretension that would be ridiculous were it not for its deplorable consequences! You
+wish to add one more language to the forty odd that are spoken in the islands, so
+that you may understand one another less and less.”
+</p>
+<p>“On the contrary,” replied Basilio, “if the knowledge of Castilian may bind us to
+the government, in exchange it may also unite the islands among themselves.”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1310">[<a href="#xd32e1310">61</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“A gross error!” rejoined Simoun. “You are letting yourselves be deceived by big words
+and never go to the bottom of things to examine the results in their final analysis.
+Spanish will never be the general language of the country, the people will never talk
+it, because the conceptions of their brains and the feelings of their hearts cannot
+be expressed in that language—each people has its own tongue, as it has its own way
+of thinking! What are you going to do with Castilian, the few of you who will speak
+it? Kill off your own originality, subordinate your thoughts to other brains, and
+instead of freeing yourselves, make yourselves slaves indeed! Nine-tenths of those
+of you who pretend to be enlightened are renegades to your country! He among you who
+talks that language neglects his own in such a way that he neither writes nor understands
+it, and how many have I not seen who pretended not to know a single word of it! But
+fortunately, you have an imbecile government! While Russia enslaves Poland by forcing
+the Russian language upon it, while Germany prohibits French in the conquered provinces,
+your government strives to preserve yours, and you in return, a remarkable people
+under an incredible government, you are trying to despoil yourselves of your own nationality!
+One and all you forget that while a people preserves its language, it preserves the
+marks of its liberty, as a man preserves his independence while he holds to his own
+way of thinking. Language is the thought of the peoples. Luckily, your independence
+is assured; human passions are looking out for that!”
+</p>
+<p>Simoun paused and rubbed his hand over his forehead. The waning moon was rising and
+sent its faint light down through the branches of the trees, and with his white locks
+and severe features, illuminated from below by the lantern, the jeweler appeared to
+be the fateful spirit of the wood planning some evil.
+</p>
+<p>Basilio was silent before such bitter reproaches and listened with bowed head, while
+Simoun resumed: “I saw this movement started and have passed whole nights of <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1315">[<a href="#xd32e1315">62</a>]</span>anguish, because I understood that among those youths there were exceptional minds
+and hearts, sacrificing themselves for what they thought to be a good cause, when
+in reality they were working against their own country. How many times have I wished
+to speak to you young men, to reveal myself and undeceive you! But in view of the
+reputation I enjoy, my words would have been wrongly interpreted and would perhaps
+have had a counter effect. How many times have I not longed to approach your Makaraig,
+your Isagani! Sometimes I thought of their death, I wished to destroy them—”
+</p>
+<p>Simoun checked himself.
+</p>
+<p>“Here’s why I let you live, Basilio, and by such imprudence I expose myself to the
+risk of being some day betrayed by you. But you know who I am, you know how much I
+must have suffered—then believe in me! You are not of the common crowd, which sees
+in the jeweler Simoun the trader who incites the authorities to commit abuses in order
+that the abused may buy jewels. I am the Judge who wishes to castigate this system
+by making use of its own defects, to make war on it by flattering it. I need your
+help, your influence among the youth, to combat these senseless desires for Hispanization,
+for assimilation, for equal rights. By that road you will become only a poor copy,
+and the people should look higher. It is madness to attempt to influence the thoughts
+of the rulers—they have their plan outlined, the bandage covers their eyes, and besides
+losing time uselessly, you are deceiving the people with vain hopes and are helping
+to bend their necks before the tyrant. What you should do is to take advantage of
+their prejudices to serve your needs. Are they unwilling that you be assimilated with
+the Spanish people? Good enough! Distinguish yourselves then by revealing yourselves
+in your own character, try to lay the foundations of the Philippine fatherland! Do
+they deny you hope? Good! Don’t depend on them, depend upon yourselves and work! Do
+they deny you representation <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1321">[<a href="#xd32e1321">63</a>]</span>in their Cortes? So much the better! Even should you succeed in sending representatives
+of your own choice, what are you going to accomplish there except to be overwhelmed
+among so many voices, and sanction with your presence the abuses and wrongs that are
+afterwards perpetrated? The fewer rights they allow you, the more reason you will
+have later to throw off the yoke, and return evil for evil. If they are unwilling
+to teach you their language, cultivate your own, extend it, preserve to the people
+their own way of thinking, and instead of aspiring to be a province, aspire to be
+a nation! Instead of subordinate thoughts, think independently, to the end that neither
+by right, nor custom, nor language, the Spaniard can be considered the master here,
+nor even be looked upon as a part of the country, but ever as an invader, a foreigner,
+and sooner or later you will have your liberty! Here’s why I let you live!”
+</p>
+<p>Basilio breathed freely, as though a great weight had been lifted from him, and after
+a brief pause, replied: “Sir, the honor you do me in confiding your plans to me is
+too great for me not to be frank with you, and tell you that what you ask of me is
+beyond my power. I am no politician, and if I have signed the petition for instruction
+in Castilian it has been because I saw in it an advantage to our studies and nothing
+more. My destiny is different; my aspiration reduces itself to alleviating the physical
+sufferings of my fellow men.”
+</p>
+<p>The jeweler smiled. “What are physical sufferings compared to moral tortures? What
+is the death of a man in the presence of the death of a society? Some day you will
+perhaps be a great physician, if they let you go your way in peace, but greater yet
+will be he who can inject a new idea into this anemic people! You, what are you doing
+for the land that gave you existence, that supports your life, that affords you knowledge?
+Don’t you realize that that is a useless life which is not consecrated to a great
+idea? It is a stone wasted in the fields without becoming a part of any edifice.”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1326">[<a href="#xd32e1326">64</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“No, no, sir!” replied Basilio modestly, “I’m not folding my arms, I’m working like
+all the rest to raise up from the ruins of the past a people whose units will be bound
+together—that each one may feel in himself the conscience and the life of the whole.
+But however enthusiastic our generation may be, we understand that in this great social
+fabric there must be a division of labor. I have chosen my task and will devote myself
+to science.”
+</p>
+<p>“Science is not the end of man,” declared Simoun.
+</p>
+<p>“The most civilized nations are tending toward it.”
+</p>
+<p>“Yes, but only as a means of seeking their welfare.”
+</p>
+<p>“Science is more eternal, it’s more human, it’s more universal!” exclaimed the youth
+in a transport of enthusiasm. “Within a few centuries, when humanity has become redeemed
+and enlightened, when there are no races, when all peoples are free, when there are
+neither tyrants nor slaves, colonies nor mother countries, when justice rules and
+man is a citizen of the world, the pursuit of science alone will remain, the word
+patriotism will be equivalent to fanaticism, and he who prides himself on patriotic
+ideas will doubtless be isolated as a dangerous disease, as a menace to the social
+order.”
+</p>
+<p>Simoun smiled sadly. “Yes, yes,” he said with a shake of his head, “yet to reach that
+condition it is necessary that there be no tyrannical and no enslaved peoples, it
+is necessary that man go about freely, that he know how to respect the rights of others
+in their own individuality, and for this there is yet much blood to be shed, the struggle
+forces itself forward. To overcome the ancient fanaticism that bound consciences it
+was necessary that many should perish in the holocausts, so that the social conscience
+in horror declared the individual conscience free. It is also necessary that all answer
+the question which with each day the fatherland asks them, with its fettered hands
+extended! Patriotism can only be a crime in a tyrannical people, because then it is
+rapine under a beautiful name, but however <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1334">[<a href="#xd32e1334">65</a>]</span>perfect humanity may become, patriotism will always be a virtue among oppressed peoples,
+because it will at all times mean love of justice, of liberty, of personal dignity—nothing
+of chimerical dreams, of effeminate idyls! The greatness of a man is not in living
+before his time, a thing almost impossible, but in understanding its desires, in responding
+to its needs, and in guiding it on its forward way. The geniuses that are commonly
+believed to have existed before their time, only appear so because those who judge
+them see from a great distance, or take as representative of the age the line of stragglers!”
+</p>
+<p>Simoun fell silent. Seeing that he could awake no enthusiasm in that unresponsive
+mind, he turned to another subject and asked with a change of tone: “And what are
+you doing for the memory of your mother and your brother? Is it enough that you come
+here every year, to weep like a woman over a grave?” And he smiled sarcastically.
+</p>
+<p>The shot hit the mark. Basilio changed color and advanced a step.
+</p>
+<p>“What do you want me to do?” he asked angrily.
+</p>
+<p>“Without means, without social position, how may I bring their murderers to justice?
+I would merely be another victim, shattered like a piece of glass hurled against a
+rock. Ah, you do ill to recall this to me, since it is wantonly reopening a wound!”
+</p>
+<p>“But what if I should offer you my aid?”
+</p>
+<p>Basilio shook his head and remained pensive. “All the tardy vindications of justice,
+all the revenge in the world, will not restore a single hair of my mother’s head,
+or recall a smile to my brother’s lips. Let them rest in peace—what should I gain
+now by avenging them?”
+</p>
+<p>“Prevent others from suffering what you have suffered, that in the future there be
+no brothers murdered or mothers driven to madness. Resignation is not always a virtue;
+it is a crime when it encourages tyrants: there are no despots where there are no
+slaves! Man is in his own nature so wicked that he always abuses complaisance. I thought
+as <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1345">[<a href="#xd32e1345">66</a>]</span>you do, and you know what my fate was. Those who caused your misfortunes are watching
+you day and night, they suspect that you are only biding your time, they take your
+eagerness to learn, your love of study, your very complaisance, for burning desires
+for revenge. The day they can get rid of you they will do with you as they did with
+me, and they will not let you grow to manhood, because they fear and hate you!”
+</p>
+<p>“Hate me? Still hate me after the wrong they have done me?” asked the youth in surprise.
+</p>
+<p>Simoun burst into a laugh. “ ‘It is natural for man to hate those whom he has wronged,’
+said Tacitus, confirming the <i lang="la">quos laeserunt et oderunt</i> of Seneca. When you wish to gauge the evil or the good that one people has done to
+another, you have only to observe whether it hates or loves. Thus is explained the
+reason why many who have enriched themselves here in the high offices they have filled,
+on their return to the Peninsula relieve themselves by slanders and insults against
+those who have been their victims. <i lang="la">Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quern laeseris!”</i>
+</p>
+<p>“But if the world is large, if one leaves them to the peaceful enjoyment of power,
+if I ask only to be allowed to work, to live—”
+</p>
+<p>“And to rear meek-natured sons to send them afterwards to submit to the yoke,” continued
+Simoun, cruelly mimicking Basilio’s tone. “A fine future you prepare for them, and
+they have to thank you for a life of humiliation and suffering! Good enough, young
+man! When a body is inert, it is useless to galvanize it. Twenty years of continuous
+slavery, of systematic humiliation, of constant prostration, finally create in the
+mind a twist that cannot be straightened by the labor of a day. Good and evil instincts
+are inherited and transmitted from father to son. Then let your idylic ideas live,
+your dreams of a slave who asks only for a bandage to wrap the chain so that it may
+rattle less and not ulcerate his skin! You hope for a little home and some ease, a
+wife and a handful of rice—here is your <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1359">[<a href="#xd32e1359">67</a>]</span>ideal man of the Philippines! Well, if they give it to you, consider yourself fortunate.”
+</p>
+<p>Basilio, accustomed to obey and bear with the caprices and humors of Capitan Tiago.
+was now dominated by Simoun, who appeared to him terrible and sinister on a background
+bathed in tears and blood. He tried to explain himself by saying that he did not consider
+himself fit to mix in politics, that he had no political opinions because he had never
+studied the question, but that he was always ready to lend his services the day they
+might be needed, that for the moment he saw only one need, the enlightenment of the
+people.
+</p>
+<p>Simoun stopped him with a gesture, and, as the dawn was coming, said to him: “Young
+man, I am not warning you to keep my secret, because I know that discretion is one
+of your good qualities, and even though you might wish to sell me, the jeweler Simoun,
+the friend of the authorities and of the religious corporations, will always be given
+more credit than the student Basilio, already suspected of filibusterism, and, being
+a native, so much the more marked and watched, and because in the profession you are
+entering upon you will encounter powerful rivals. After all, even though you have
+not corresponded to my hopes, the day on which you change your mind, look me up at
+my house in the Escolta, and I’ll be glad to help you.”
+</p>
+<p>Basilio thanked him briefly and went away.
+</p>
+<p>“Have I really made a mistake?” mused Simoun, when he found himself alone. “Is it
+that he doubts me and meditates his plan of revenge so secretly that he fears to tell
+it even in the solitude of the night? Or can it be that the years of servitude have
+extinguished in his heart every human sentiment and there remain only the animal desires
+to live and reproduce? In that case the type is deformed and will have to be cast
+over again. Then the hecatomb is preparing: let the unfit perish and only the strongest
+survive!”
+</p>
+<p>Then he added sadly, as if apostrophizing some one: <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1368">[<a href="#xd32e1368">68</a>]</span>“Have patience, you who left me a name and a home, have patience! I have lost all—country,
+future, prosperity, your very tomb, but have patience! And thou, noble spirit, great
+soul, generous heart, who didst live with only one thought and didst sacrifice thy
+life without asking the gratitude or applause of any one, have patience, have patience!
+The methods that I use may perhaps not be thine, but they are the most direct. The
+day is coming, and when it brightens I myself will come to announce it to you who
+are now indifferent. Have patience!”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1370">[<a href="#xd32e1370">69</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch08" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e282">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter VIII</h2>
+<h2 class="main">Merry Christmas!</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">When Juli opened her sorrowing eyes, she saw that the house was still dark, but the
+cocks were crowing. Her first thought was that perhaps the Virgin had performed the
+miracle and the sun was not going to rise, in spite of the invocations of the cocks.
+She rose, crossed herself, recited her morning prayers with great devotion, and with
+as little noise as possible went out on the <i>batalan.</i>
+</p>
+<p>There was no miracle—the sun was rising and promised a magnificent morning, the breeze
+was delightfully cool, the stars were paling in the east, and the cocks were crowing
+as if to see who could crow best and loudest. That had been too much to ask—it were
+much easier to request the Virgin to send the two hundred and fifty pesos. What would
+it cost the Mother of the Lord to give them? But underneath the image she found only
+the letter of her father asking for the ransom of five hundred pesos. There was nothing
+to do but go, so, seeing that her grandfather was not stirring, she thought him asleep
+and began to prepare breakfast. Strange, she was calm, she even had a desire to laugh!
+What had she had last night to afflict her so? She was not going very far, she could
+come every second day to visit the house, her grandfather could see her, and as for
+Basilio, he had known for some time the bad turn her father’s affairs had taken, since
+he had often said to her, “When I’m a physician and we are married, your father won’t
+need his fields.”
+</p>
+<p>“What a fool I was to cry so much,” she said to herself as she packed her <i>tampipi.</i> Her fingers struck against the locket and she pressed it to her lips, but immediately
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1384">[<a href="#xd32e1384">70</a>]</span>wiped them from fear of contagion, for that locket set with diamonds and emeralds
+had come from a leper. Ah, then, if she should catch that disease she could not get
+married.
+</p>
+<p>As it became lighter, she could see her grandfather seated in a corner, following
+all her movements with his eyes, so she caught up her <i>tampipi</i> of clothes and approached him smilingly to kiss his hand. The old man blessed her
+silently, while she tried to appear merry. “When father comes back, tell him that
+I have at last gone to college—my mistress talks Spanish. It’s the cheapest college
+I could find.”
+</p>
+<p>Seeing the old man’s eyes fill with tears, she placed the <i>tampipi</i> on her head and hastily went downstairs, her slippers slapping merrily on the wooden
+steps. But when she turned her head to look again at the house, the house wherein
+had faded her childhood dreams and her maiden illusions, when she saw it sad, lonely,
+deserted, with the windows half closed, vacant and dark like a dead man’s eyes, when
+she heard the low rustling of the bamboos, and saw them nodding in the fresh morning
+breeze as though bidding her farewell, then her vivacity disappeared; she stopped,
+her eyes filled with tears, and letting herself fall in a sitting posture on a log
+by the wayside she broke out into disconsolate tears.
+</p>
+<p>Juli had been gone several hours and the sun was quite high overhead when Tandang
+Selo gazed from the window at the people in their festival garments going to the town
+to attend the high mass. Nearly all led by the hand or carried in their arms a little
+boy or girl decked out as if for a fiesta.
+</p>
+<p>Christmas day in the Philippines is, according to the elders, a fiesta for the children,
+who are perhaps not of the same opinion and who, it may be supposed, have for it an
+instinctive dread. They are roused early, washed, dressed, and decked out with everything
+new, dear, and precious that they possess—high silk shoes, big hats, woolen or velvet
+suits, without overlooking four or five <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1397">[<a href="#xd32e1397">71</a>]</span>scapularies, which contain texts from St. John, and thus burdened they are carried
+to the high mass, where for almost an hour they are subjected to the heat and the
+human smells from so many crowding, perspiring people, and if they are not made to
+recite the rosary they must remain quiet, bored, or asleep. At each movement or antic
+that may soil their clothing they are pinched and scolded, so the fact is that they
+do not laugh or feel happy, while in their round eyes can be read a protest against
+so much embroidery and a longing for the old shirt of week-days.
+</p>
+<p>Afterwards, they are dragged from house to house to kiss their relatives’ hands. There
+they have to dance, sing, and recite all the amusing things they know, whether in
+the humor or not, whether comfortable or not in their fine clothes, with the eternal
+pinchings and scoldings if they play any of their tricks. Their relatives give them
+cuartos which their parents seize upon and of which they hear nothing more. The only
+positive results they are accustomed to get from the fiesta are the marks of the aforesaid
+pinchings, the vexations, and at best an attack of indigestion from gorging themselves
+with candy and cake in the houses of kind relatives. But such is the custom, and Filipino
+children enter the world through these ordeals, which afterwards prove the least sad,
+the least hard, of their lives.
+</p>
+<p>Adult persons who live independently also share in this fiesta, by visiting their
+parents and their parents’ relatives, crooking their knees, and wishing them a merry
+Christmas. Their Christmas gift consists of a sweetmeat, some fruit, a glass of water,
+or some insignificant present.
+</p>
+<p>Tandang Selo saw all his friends pass and thought sadly that this year he had no Christmas
+gift for anybody, while his granddaughter had gone without hers, without wishing him
+a merry Christinas. Was it delicacy on Juli’s part or pure forgetfulness?
+</p>
+<p>When he tried to greet the relatives who called on him, bringing their children, he
+found to his great surprise that he could not articulate a word. Vainly he tried,
+but no <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1405">[<a href="#xd32e1405">72</a>]</span>sound could he utter. He placed his hands on his throat, shook his head, but without
+effect. When he tried to laugh, his lips trembled convulsively and the only noise
+produced was a hoarse wheeze like the blowing of bellows.
+</p>
+<p>The women gazed at him in consternation. “He’s dumb, he’s dumb!” they cried in astonishment,
+raising at once a literal pandemonium.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1409">[<a href="#xd32e1409">73</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch09" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e292">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter IX</h2>
+<h2 class="main">Pilates</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">When the news of this misfortune became known in the town, some lamented it and others
+shrugged their shoulders. No one was to blame, and no one need lay it on his conscience.
+</p>
+<p>The lieutenant of the Civil Guard gave no sign: he had received an order to take up
+all the arms and he had performed his duty. He had chased the tulisanes whenever he
+could, and when they captured Cabesang Tales he had organized an expedition and brought
+into the town, with their arms bound behind them, five or six rustics who looked suspicious,
+so if Cabesang Tales did not show up it was because he was not in the pockets or under
+the skins of the prisoners, who were thoroughly shaken out.
+</p>
+<p>The friar-administrator shrugged his shoulders: he had nothing to do with it, it was
+a matter of tulisanes and he had merely done his duty. True it was that if he had
+not entered the complaint, perhaps the arms would not have been taken up, and poor
+Tales would not have been captured; but he, Fray Clemente, had to look after his own
+safety, and that Tales had a way of staring at him as if picking out a good target
+in some part of his body. Self-defense is natural. If there are tulisanes, the fault
+is not his, it is not his duty to run them down—that belongs to the Civil Guard. If
+Cabesang Tales, instead of wandering about his fields, had stayed at home, he would
+not have been captured. In short, that was a punishment from heaven upon those who
+resisted the demands of his corporation.
+</p>
+<p>When Sister Penchang, the pious old woman in whose <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1419">[<a href="#xd32e1419">74</a>]</span>service Juli had entered, learned of it, she ejaculated several <i>’Susmarioseps</i>, crossed herself, and remarked, “Often God sends these trials because we are sinners
+or have sinning relatives, to whom we should have taught piety and we haven’t done
+so.”
+</p>
+<p>Those <i>sinning relatives</i> referred to Juliana, for to this pious woman Juli was a great sinner. “Think of a
+girl of marriageable age who doesn’t yet know how to pray! <i>Jesús</i>, how scandalous! If the wretch doesn’t say the <i lang="es">Diós te salve María</i> without stopping at <i>es contigo</i>, and the <i>Santa María</i> without a pause after <i>pecadores</i>, as every good Christian who fears God ought to do! She doesn’t know the <i>oremus gratiam</i>, and says <i>mentíbus</i> for <i>méntibus</i>. Anybody hearing her would think she was talking about something else. <i>’Susmariosep!</i>”
+</p>
+<p>Greatly scandalized, she made the sign of the cross and thanked God, who had permitted
+the capture of the father in order that the daughter might be snatched from sin and
+learn the virtues which, according to the curates, should adorn every Christian woman.
+She therefore kept the girl constantly at work, not allowing her to return to the
+village to look after her grandfather. Juli had to learn how to pray, to read the
+books distributed by the friars, and to work until the two hundred and fifty pesos
+should be paid.
+</p>
+<p>When she learned that Basilio had gone to Manila to get his savings and ransom Juli
+from her servitude, the good woman believed that the girl was forever lost and that
+the devil had presented himself in the guise of the student. Dreadful as it all was,
+how true was that little book the curate had given her! Youths who go to Manila to
+study are ruined and then ruin the others. Thinking to rescue Juli, she made her read
+and re-read the book called <i>Tandang Basio Macunat</i>,<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e1452src" href="#xd32e1452">1</a> charging her always to go and see the <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1455">[<a href="#xd32e1455">75</a>]</span>curate in the convento,<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e1457src" href="#xd32e1457">2</a> as did the heroine, who is so praised by the author, a friar.
+</p>
+<p>Meanwhile, the friars had gained their point. They had certainly won the suit, so
+they took advantage of Cabesang Tales’ captivity to turn the fields over to the one
+who had asked for them, without the least thought of honor or the faintest twinge
+of shame. When the former owner returned and learned what had happened, when he saw
+his fields in another’s possession,—those fields that had cost the lives of his wife
+and daughter,—when he saw his father dumb and his daughter working as a servant, and
+when he himself received an order from the town council, transmitted through the headman
+of the village, to move out of the house within three days, he said nothing; he sat
+down at his father’s side and spoke scarcely once during the whole day.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1462">[<a href="#xd32e1462">76</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e1452">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e1452src">1</a></span> The nature of this booklet, in Tagalog, is made clear in several passages. It was
+issued by the Franciscans, but proved too outspoken for even Latin refinement, and
+was suppressed by the Order itself.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e1452src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e1457">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e1457src">2</a></span> The rectory or parish house.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e1457src" title="Return to note 2 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch10" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e302">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter X</h2>
+<h2 class="main">Wealth and Want</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">On the following day, to the great surprise of the village, the jeweler Simoun, followed
+by two servants, each carrying a canvas-covered chest, requested the hospitality of
+Cabesang Tales, who even in the midst of his wretchedness did not forget the good
+Filipino customs—rather, he was troubled to think that he had no way of properly entertaining
+the stranger. But Simoun brought everything with him, servants and provisions, and
+merely wished to spend the day and night in the house because it was the largest in
+the village and was situated between San Diego and Tiani, towns where he hoped to
+find many customers.
+</p>
+<p>Simoun secured information about the condition of the roads and asked Cabesang Tales
+if his revolver was a sufficient protection against the tulisanes.
+</p>
+<p>“They have rifles that shoot a long way,” was the rather absent-minded reply.
+</p>
+<p>“This revolver does no less,” remarked Simoun, firing at an areca-palm some two hundred
+paces away.
+</p>
+<p>Cabesang Tales noticed that some nuts fell, but remained silent and thoughtful.
+</p>
+<p>Gradually the families, drawn by the fame of the jeweler’s wares, began to collect.
+They wished one another merry Christmas, they talked of masses, saints, poor crops,
+but still were there to spend their savings for jewels and trinkets brought from Europe.
+It was known that the jeweler was the friend of the Captain-General, so it wasn’t
+lost labor to get on good terms with him, and thus be prepared for contingencies.
+</p>
+<p>Capitan Basilio came with his wife, daughter, and son-in-law, <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1475">[<a href="#xd32e1475">77</a>]</span>prepared to spend at least three thousand pesos. Sister Penchang was there to buy
+a diamond ring she had promised to the Virgin of Antipolo. She had left Juli at home
+memorizing a booklet the curate had sold her for four cuartos, with forty days of
+indulgence granted by the Archbishop to every one who read it or listened to it read.
+</p>
+<p>“<i>Jesús!</i>” said the pious woman to Capitana Tika, “that poor girl has grown up like a mushroom
+planted by the <i>tikbalang.</i> I’ve made her read the book at the top of her voice at least fifty times and she
+doesn’t remember a single word of it. She has a head like a sieve—full when it’s in
+the water. All of us hearing her, even the dogs and cats, have won at least twenty
+years of indulgence.”
+</p>
+<p>Simoun arranged his two chests on the table, one being somewhat larger than the other.
+“You don’t want plated jewelry or imitation gems. This lady,” turning to Sinang, “wants
+real diamonds.”
+</p>
+<p>“That’s it, yes, sir, diamonds, old diamonds, antique stones, you know,” she responded.
+“Papa will pay for them, because he likes antique things, antique stones.” Sinang
+was accustomed to joke about the great deal of Latin her father understood and the
+little her husband knew.
+</p>
+<p>“It just happens that I have some antique jewels,” replied Simoun, taking the canvas
+cover from the smaller chest, a polished steel case with bronze trimmings and stout
+locks. “I have necklaces of Cleopatra’s, real and genuine, discovered in the Pyramids;
+rings of Roman senators and knights, found in the ruins of Carthage.”
+</p>
+<p>“Probably those that Hannibal sent back after the battle of Cannae!” exclaimed Capitan
+Basilio seriously, while he trembled with pleasure. The good man, thought he had read
+much about the ancients, had never, by reason of the lack of museums in Filipinas,
+seen any of the objects of those times.
+</p>
+<p>“I have brought besides costly earrings of Roman ladies, <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1490">[<a href="#xd32e1490">78</a>]</span>discovered in the villa of Annius Mucius Papilinus in Pompeii.”
+</p>
+<p>Capitan Easilio nodded to show that he understood and was eager to see such precious
+relics. The women remarked that they also wanted things from Rome, such as rosaries
+blessed by the Pope, holy relics that would take away sins without the need of confessions,
+and so on.
+</p>
+<p>When the chest was opened and the cotton packing removed, there was exposed a tray
+filled with rings, reliquaries, lockets, crucifixes, brooches, and such like. The
+diamonds set in among variously colored stones flashed out brightly and shimmered
+among golden flowers of varied hues, with petals of enamel, all of peculiar designs
+and rare Arabesque workmanship.
+</p>
+<p>Simoun lifted the tray and exhibited another filled with quaint jewels that would
+have satisfied the imaginations of seven débutantes on the eves of the balls in their
+honor. Designs, one more fantastic than the other, combinations of precious stones
+and pearls worked into the figures of insects with azure backs and transparent forewings,
+sapphires, emeralds, rubies, turquoises, diamonds, joined to form dragon-flies, wasps,
+bees, butterflies, beetles, serpents, lizards, fishes, sprays of flowers. There were
+diadems, necklaces of pearls and diamonds, so that some of the girls could not withhold
+a <i>nakú</i> of admiration, and Sinang gave a cluck with her tongue, whereupon her mother pinched
+her to prevent her from encouraging the jeweler to raise his prices, for Capitana
+Tika still pinched her daughter even after the latter was married.
+</p>
+<p>“Here you have some old diamonds,” explained the jeweler. “This ring belonged to the
+Princess Lamballe and those earrings to one of Marie Antoinette’s ladies.” They consisted
+of some beautiful solitaire diamonds, as large as grains of corn, with somewhat bluish
+lights, and pervaded with a severe elegance, as though they still reflected in their
+sparkles the shuddering of the Reign of Terror.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1500">[<a href="#xd32e1500">79</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“Those two earrings!” exclaimed Sinang, looking at her father and instinctively covering
+the arm next to her mother.
+</p>
+<p>“Something more ancient yet, something Roman,” said Capitan Basilio with a wink.
+</p>
+<p>The pious Sister Penchang thought that with such a gift the Virgin of Antipolo would
+be softened and grant her her most vehement desire: for some time she had begged for
+a wonderful miracle to which her name would be attached, so that her name might be
+immortalized on earth and she then ascend into heaven, like the Capitana Ines of the
+curates. She inquired the price and Simoun asked three thousand pesos, which made
+the good woman cross herself—<i>’Susmariosep!</i>
+</p>
+<p>Simoun now exposed the third tray, which was filled with watches, cigar- and match-cases
+decorated with the rarest enamels, reliquaries set with diamonds and containing the
+most elegant miniatures.
+</p>
+<p>The fourth tray, containing loose gems, stirred a murmur of admiration. Sinang again
+clucked with her tongue, her mother again pinched her, although at the same time herself
+emitting a <i>’Susmaría</i> of wonder.
+</p>
+<p>No one there had ever before seen so much wealth. In that chest lined with dark-blue
+velvet, arranged in trays, were the wonders of the <i>Arabian Nights,</i> the dreams of Oriental fantasies. Diamonds as large as peas glittered there, throwing
+out attractive rays as if they were about to melt or burn with all the hues of the
+spectrum; emeralds from Peru, of varied forms and shapes; rubies from India, red as
+drops of blood; sapphires from Ceylon, blue and white; turquoises from Persia; Oriental
+pearls, some rosy, some lead-colored, others black. Those who have at night seen a
+great rocket burst in the azure darkness of the sky into thousands of colored lights,
+so bright that they make the eternal stars look dim, can imagine the aspect the tray
+presented.
+</p>
+<p>As if to increase the admiration of the beholders, Simoun <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1519">[<a href="#xd32e1519">80</a>]</span>took the stones out with his tapering brown fingers, gloating over their crystalline
+hardness, their luminous stream, as they poured from his hands like drops of water
+reflecting the tints of the rainbow. The reflections from so many facets, the thought
+of their great value, fascinated the gaze of every one.
+</p>
+<p>Cabesang Tales, who had approached out of curiosity, closed his eyes and drew back
+hurriedly, as if to drive away an evil thought. Such great riches were an insult to
+his misfortunes; that man had come there to make an exhibition of his immense wealth
+on the very day that he, Tales, for lack of money, for lack of protectors, had to
+abandon the house raised by his own hands.
+</p>
+<p>“Here you have two black diamonds, among the largest in existence,” explained the
+jeweler. “They’re very difficult to cut because they’re the very hardest. This somewhat
+rosy stone is also a diamond, as is this green one that many take for an emerald.
+Quiroga the Chinaman offered me six thousand pesos for it in order to present it to
+a very influential lady, and yet it is not the green ones that are the most valuable,
+but these blue ones.”
+</p>
+<p>He selected three stones of no great size, but thick and well-cut, of a delicate azure
+tint.
+</p>
+<p>“For all that they are smaller than the green,” he continued, “they cost twice as
+much. Look at this one, the smallest of all, weighing not more than two carats, which
+cost me twenty thousand pesos and which I won’t sell for less than thirty. I had to
+make a special trip to buy it. This other one, from the mines of Golconda, weighs
+three and a half carats and is worth over seventy thousand. The Viceroy of India,
+in a letter I received the day before yesterday, offers me twelve thousand pounds
+sterling for it.”
+</p>
+<p>Before such great wealth, all under the power of that man who talked so unaffectedly,
+the spectators felt a kind of awe mingled with dread. Sinang clucked several times
+and her mother did not pinch her, perhaps because she too was overcome, or perhaps
+because she reflected that a <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1527">[<a href="#xd32e1527">81</a>]</span>jeweler like Simoun was not going to try to gain five pesos more or less as a result
+of an exclamation more or less indiscreet. All gazed at the gems, but no one showed
+any desire to handle them, they were so awe-inspiring. Curiosity was blunted by wonder.
+Cabesang Tales stared out into the field, thinking that with a single diamond, perhaps
+the very smallest there, he could recover his daughter, keep his house, and perhaps
+rent another farm. Could it be that those gems were worth more than a man’s home,
+the safety of a maiden, the peace of an old man in his declining days?
+</p>
+<p>As if he guessed the thought, Simoun remarked to those about him: “Look here—with
+one of these little blue stones, which appear so innocent and inoffensive, pure as
+sparks scattered over the arch of heaven, with one of these, seasonably presented,
+a man was able to have his enemy deported, the father of a family, as a disturber
+of the peace; and with this other little one like it, red as one’s heart-blood, as
+the feeling of revenge, and bright as an orphan’s tears, he was restored to liberty,
+the man was returned to his home, the father to his children, the husband to the wife,
+and a whole family saved from a wretched future.”
+</p>
+<p>He slapped the chest and went on in a loud tone in bad Tagalog: “Here I have, as in
+a medicine-chest, life and death, poison and balm, and with this handful I can drive
+to tears all the inhabitants of the Philippines!”
+</p>
+<p>The listeners gazed at him awe-struck, knowing him to be right. In his voice there
+could be detected a strange ring, while sinister flashes seemed to issue from behind
+the blue goggles.
+</p>
+<p>Then as if to relieve the strain of the impression made by the gems on such simple
+folk, he lifted up the tray and exposed at the bottom the <i>sanctum sanctorum</i>. Cases of Russian leather, separated by layers of cotton, covered a bottom lined
+with gray velvet. All expected wonders, and Sinang’s husband thought he saw carbuncles,
+gems that <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1537">[<a href="#xd32e1537">82</a>]</span>flashed fire and shone in the midst of the shadows. Capitan Basilio was on the threshold
+of immortality: he was going to behold something real, something beyond his dreams.
+</p>
+<p>“This was a necklace of Cleopatra’s,” said Simoun, taking out carefully a flat case
+in the shape of a half-moon. “It’s a jewel that can’t be appraised, an object for
+a museum, only for a rich government.”
+</p>
+<p>It was a necklace fashioned of bits of gold representing little idols among green
+and blue beetles, with a vulture’s head made from a single piece of rare jasper at
+the center between two extended wings—the symbol and decoration of Egyptian queens.
+</p>
+<p>Sinang turned up her nose and made a grimace of childish depreciation, while Capitan
+Basilio, with all his love for antiquity, could not restrain an exclamation of disappointment.
+</p>
+<p>“It’s a magnificent jewel, well-preserved, almost two thousand years old.”
+</p>
+<p>“Pshaw!” Sinang made haste to exclaim, to prevent her father’s falling into temptation.
+</p>
+<p>“Fool!” he chided her, after overcoming his first disappointment. “How do you know
+but that to this necklace is due the present condition of the world? With this Cleopatra
+may have captivated Caesar, Mark Antony! This has heard the burning declarations of
+love from the greatest warriors of their time, it has listened to speeches in the
+purest and most elegant Latin, and yet you would want to wear it!”
+</p>
+<p>“I? I wouldn’t give three pesos for it.”
+</p>
+<p>“You could give twenty, silly,” said Capitana Tika in a judicial tone. “The gold is
+good and melted down would serve for other jewelry.”
+</p>
+<p>“This is a ring that must have belonged to Sulla,” continued Simoun, exhibiting a
+heavy ring of solid gold with a seal on it.
+</p>
+<p>“With that he must have signed the death-wrarrants during his dictatorship!” exclaimed
+Capitan Basilio, pale <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1551">[<a href="#xd32e1551">83</a>]</span>with emotion. He examined it and tried to decipher the seal, but though he turned
+it over and over he did not understand paleography, so he could not read it.
+</p>
+<p>“What a finger Sulla had!” he observed finally. “This would fit two of ours—as I’ve
+said, we’re degenerating!”
+</p>
+<p>“I still have many other jewels—”
+</p>
+<p>“If they’re all that kind, never mind!” interrupted Sinang. “I think I prefer the
+modern.”
+</p>
+<p>Each one selected some piece of jewelry, one a ring, another a watch, another a locket.
+Capitana Tika bought a reliquary that contained a fragment of the stone on which Our
+Saviour rested at his third fall; Sinang a pair of earrings; and Capitan Basilio the
+watch-chain for the alferez, the lady’s earrings for the curate, and other gifts.
+The families from the town of Tiani, not to be outdone by those of San Diego, in like
+manner emptied their purses.
+</p>
+<p>Simoun bought or exchanged old jewelry, brought there by economical mothers, to whom
+it was no longer of use.
+</p>
+<p>“You, haven’t you something to sell?” he asked Cabesang Tales, noticing the latter
+watching the sales and exchanges with covetous eyes, but the reply was that all his
+daughter’s jewels had been sold, nothing of value remained.
+</p>
+<p>“What about Maria Clara’s locket?” inquired Sinang.
+</p>
+<p>“True!” the man exclaimed, and his eyes blazed for a moment.
+</p>
+<p>“It’s a locket set with diamonds and emeralds,” Sinang told the jeweler. “My old friend
+wore it before she became a nun.”
+</p>
+<p>Simoun said nothing, but anxiously watched Cabesang Tales, who, after opening several
+boxes, found the locket. He examined it carefully, opening and shutting it repeatedly.
+It was the same locket that Maria Clara had worn during the fiesta in San Diego and
+which she had in a moment of compassion given to a leper.
+</p>
+<p>“I like the design,” said Simoun. “How much do you want for it?”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1566">[<a href="#xd32e1566">84</a>]</span></p>
+<p>Cabesang Tales scratched his head in perplexity, then his ear, then looked at the
+women.
+</p>
+<p>“I’ve taken a fancy to this locket,” Simoun went on. “Will you take a hundred, five
+hundred pesos? Do you want to exchange it for something else? Take your choice here!”
+</p>
+<p>Tales stared foolishly at Simoun, as if in doubt of what he heard. “Five hundred pesos?”
+he murmured.
+</p>
+<p>“Five hundred,” repeated the jeweler in a voice shaking with emotion.
+</p>
+<p>Cabesang Tales took the locket and made several turns about the room, with his heart
+beating violently and his hands trembling. Dared he ask more? That locket could save
+him, this was an excellent opportunity, such as might not again present itself.
+</p>
+<p>The women winked at him to encourage him to make the sale, excepting Penchang, who,
+fearing that Juli would be ransomed, observed piously: “I would keep it as a relic.
+Those who have seen Maria Clara in the nunnery say she has got so thin and weak that
+she can scarcely talk and it’s thought that she’ll die a saint. Padre Salvi speaks
+very highly of her and he’s her confessor. That’s why Juli didn’t want ito give it
+up, but rather preferred to pawn herself.”
+</p>
+<p>This speech had its effect—the thought of his daughter restrained Tales. “If you will
+allow me,” he said, “I’ll go to the town to consult my daughter. I’ll be back before
+night.”
+</p>
+<p>This was agreed upon and Tales set out at once. But when he found himself outside
+of the village, he made out at a distance, on a path, that entered the woods, the
+friar-administrator and a man whom he recognized as the usurper of his land. A husband
+seeing his wife enter a private room with another man could not feel more wrath or
+jealousy than Cabesang Tales experienced when he saw them moving over his fields,
+the fields cleared by him, which he had thought to leave to his children. It seemed
+to him that <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1576">[<a href="#xd32e1576">85</a>]</span>they were mocking him, laughing at his powerlessness. There flashed into his memory
+what he had said about never giving up his fields except to him who irrigated them
+with his own blood and buried in them his wife and daughter.
+</p>
+<p>He stopped, rubbed his hand over his forehead, and shut his eyes. When he again opened
+them, he saw that the man had turned to laugh and that the friar had caught his sides
+as though to save himself from bursting with merriment, then he saw them point toward
+his house and laugh again.
+</p>
+<p>A buzz sounded in his ears, he felt the crack of a whip around his chest, the red
+mist reappeared before his eyes, he again saw the corpses of his wife and daughter,
+and beside them the usurper with the friar laughing and holding his sides. Forgetting
+everything else, he turned aside into the path they had taken, the one leading to
+his fields.
+</p>
+<p>Simoun waited in vain for Cabesang Tales to return that night. But the next morning
+when he arose he noticed that the leather holster of his revolver was empty. Opening
+it he found inside a scrap of paper wrapped around the locket set with emeralds and
+diamonds, with these few lines written on it in Tagalog:
+</p>
+<blockquote>
+<p class="first">“Pardon, sir, that in my own house I relieve you of what belongs to you, but necessity
+drives me to it. In exchange for your revolver I leave the locket you desired so much.
+I need the weapon, for I am going out to join the tulisanes.
+</p>
+<p>“I advise you not to keep on your present road, because if you fall into our power,
+not then being my guest, we will require of you a large ransom.
+</p>
+<p class="xd32e144">Telesforo Juan de Dios.”</p>
+</blockquote><p>
+</p>
+<p>“At last I’ve found my man!” muttered Simoun with a deep breath. “He’s somewhat scrupulous,
+but so much the better—he’ll keep his promises.”
+</p>
+<p>He then ordered a servant to go by boat over the lake to Los Baños with the larger
+chest and await him there. He would go on overland, taking the smaller chest, the
+one <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1592">[<a href="#xd32e1592">86</a>]</span>containing his famous jewels. The arrival of four civil-guards completed his good
+humor. They came to arrest Cabesang Tales and not finding him took Tandang Selo away
+instead.
+</p>
+<p>Three murders had been committed during the night. The friar-administrator and the
+new tenant of Cabesang Tales’ land had been found dead, with their heads split open
+and their mouths full of earth, on the border of the fields. In the town the wife
+of the usurper was found dead at dawn, her mouth also filled with earth and her throat
+cut, with a fragment of paper beside her, on which was the name <i>Tales</i>, written in blood as though traced by a finger.
+</p>
+<p>Calm yourselves, peaceful inhabitants of Kalamba! None of you are named Tales, none
+of you have committed any crime! You are called Luis Habaña, Matías Belarmino, Nicasio
+Eigasani, Cayetano de Jesús, Mateo Elejorde, Leandro Lopez, Antonino Lopez, Silvestre
+Ubaldo, Manuel Hidalgo, Paciano Mercado, your name is the whole village of Kalamba.<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e1600src" href="#xd32e1600">1</a> You cleared your fields, on them you have spent the labor of your whole lives, your
+savings, your vigils and privations, and you have been despoiled of them, driven from
+your homes, with the rest forbidden to show you hospitality! Not content with outraging
+justice, they<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e1603src" href="#xd32e1603">2</a> have trampled upon the sacred traditions of your country! You have served Spain and
+the King, and when in their name you have asked for justice, you were banished without
+trial, torn from your wives’ arms and your children’s caresses! Any one of you has
+suffered more than Cabesang Tales, and yet none, not one of you, has received justice!
+Neither pity nor humanity has been shown you—you have been persecuted beyond <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1606">[<a href="#xd32e1606">87</a>]</span>the tomb, as was Mariano Herbosa!<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e1608src" href="#xd32e1608">3</a> Weep or laugh, there in those lonely isles where you wander vaguely, uncertain of
+the future! Spain, the generous Spain, is watching over you, and sooner or later you
+will have justice!
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1611">[<a href="#xd32e1611">88</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e1600">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e1600src">1</a></span> Friends of the author, who suffered in Weyler’s expedition, mentioned below.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e1600src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e1603">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e1603src">2</a></span> The Dominican corporation, at whose instigation Captain-General Valeriano Weyler sent
+a battery of artillery to Kalamba to destroy the property of tenants who were contesting
+in the courts the friars’ titles to land there. The author’s family were the largest
+sufferers.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e1603src" title="Return to note 2 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e1608">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e1608src">3</a></span> A relative of the author, whose body was dragged from the tomb and thrown to the dogs,
+on the pretext that he had died without receiving final absolution.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e1608src" title="Return to note 3 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch11" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e313">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XI</h2>
+<h2 class="main">Los Baños</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">His Excellency, the Captain-General and Governor of the Philippine Islands, had been
+hunting in Bosoboso. But as he had to be accompanied by a band of music,—since such
+an exalted personage was not to be esteemed less than the wooden images carried in
+the processions,—and as devotion to the divine art of St. Cecilia has not yet been
+popularized among the deer and wild boars of Bosoboso, his Excellency, with the band
+of music and train of friars, soldiers, and clerks, had not been able to catch a single
+rat or a solitary bird.
+</p>
+<p>The provincial authorities foresaw dismissals and transfers, the poor gobernadorcillos
+and cabezas de barangay were restless and sleepless, fearing that the mighty hunter
+in his wrath might have a notion to make up with their persons for the lack of submissiveness
+on the part of the beasts of the forest, as had been done years before by an alcalde
+who had traveled on the shoulders of impressed porters because he found no horses
+gentle enough to guarantee his safety. There was not lacking an evil rumor that his
+Excellency had decided to take some action, since in this he saw the first symptoms
+of a rebellion which should be strangled in its infancy, that a fruitless hunt hurt
+the prestige of the Spanish name, that he already had his eye on a wretch to be dressed
+up as a deer, when his Excellency, with clemency that Ben-Zayb lacked words to extol
+sufficiently, dispelled all the fears by declaring that it pained him to sacrifice
+to his pleasure the beasts of the forest.
+</p>
+<p>But to tell the truth, his Excellency was secretly very well satisfied, for what would
+have happened had he missed <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1620">[<a href="#xd32e1620">89</a>]</span>a shot at a deer, one of those not familiar with political etiquette? What would the
+prestige of the sovereign power have come to then? A Captain-General of the Philippines
+missing a shot, like a raw hunter? What would have been said by the Indians, among
+whom there were some fair huntsmen? The integrity of the fatherland would have been
+endangered.
+</p>
+<p>So it was that his Excellency, with a sheepish smile, and posing as a disappointed
+hunter, ordered an immediate return to Los Baños. During the journey he related with
+an indifferent air his hunting exploits in this or that forest of the Peninsula, adopting
+a tone somewhat depreciative, as suited the case, toward hunting in Filipinas. The
+bath in Dampalit, the hot springs on the shore of the lake, card-games in the palace,
+with an occasional excursion to some neighboring waterfall, or the lake infested with
+caymans, offered more attractions and fewer risks to the integrity of the fatherland.
+</p>
+<p>Thus on one of the last days of December, his Excellency found himself in the sala,
+taking a hand at cards while he awaited the breakfast hour. He had come from the bath,
+with the usual glass of coconut-milk and its soft meat, so he was in the best of humors
+for granting favors and privileges. His good humor was increased by his winning a
+good many hands, for Padre Irene and Padre Sibyla, with whom he was playing, were
+exercising all their skill in secretly trying to lose, to the great irritation of
+Padre Camorra, who on account of his late arrival only that morning was not informed
+as to the game they were playing on the General. The friar-artilleryman was playing
+in good faith and with great care, so he turned red and bit his lip every time Padre
+Sibyla seemed inattentive or blundered, but he dared not say a word by reason of the
+respect he felt for the Dominican. In exchange he took his revenge out on Padre Irene,
+whom he looked upon as a base fawner and despised for his coarseness. Padre Sibyla
+let him scold, while the humbler Padre Irene tried to excuse himself <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1625">[<a href="#xd32e1625">90</a>]</span>by rubbing his long nose. His Excellency was enjoying it and took advantage, like
+the good tactician that the Canon hinted he was, of all the mistakes of his opponents.
+Padre Camorra was ignorant of the fact that across the table they were playing for
+the intellectual development of the Filipinos, the instruction in Castilian, but had
+he known it he would doubtless have joyfully entered into that <i>game</i>.
+</p>
+<p>The open balcony admitted the fresh, pure breeze and revealed the lake, whose waters
+murmured sweetly around the base of the edifice, as if rendering homage. On the right,
+at a distance, appeared Talim Island, a deep blue in the midst of the lake, while
+almost in front lay the green and deserted islet of Kalamba, in the shape of a half-moon.
+To the left the picturesque shores were fringed with clumps of bamboo, then a hill
+overlooking the lake, with wide ricefields beyond, then red roofs amid the deep green
+of the trees,—the town of Kalamba,—and beyond the shore-line fading into the distance,
+with the horizon at the back closing down over the water, giving the lake the appearance
+of a sea and justifying the name the Indians give it of <i>dagat na tabang</i>, or fresh-water sea.
+</p>
+<p>At the end of the sala, seated before a table covered with documents, was the secretary.
+His Excellency was a great worker and did not like to lose time, so he attended to
+business in the intervals of the game or while dealing the cards. Meanwhile, the bored
+secretary yawned and despaired. That morning he had worked, as usual, over transfers,
+suspensions of employees, deportations, pardons, and the like, but had not yet touched
+the great question that had stirred so much interest—the petition of the students
+requesting permission to establish an academy of Castilian. Pacing from one end of
+the room to the other and conversing animatedly but in low tones were to be seen Don
+Custodio, a high official, and a friar named Padre Fernandez, who hung his head with
+an air either of meditation or annoyance. From an adjoining room issued the <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1635">[<a href="#xd32e1635">91</a>]</span>click of balls striking together and bursts of laughter, amid which might be heard
+the sharp, dry voice of Simoun, who was playing billiards with Ben-Zayb.
+</p>
+<p>Suddenly Padre Camorra arose. “The devil with this game, <i>puñales!</i>” he exclaimed, throwing his cards at Padre Irene’s head. “<i>Puñales</i>, that trick, if not all the others, was assured and we lost by default! <i>Puñales!</i> The devil with this game!”
+</p>
+<p>He explained the situation angrily to all the occupants of the sala, addressing himself
+especially to the three walking about, as if he had selected them for judges. The
+general played thus, he replied with such a card, Padre Irene had a certain card;
+he led, and then that fool of a Padre Irene didn’t play his card! Padre Irene was
+giving the game away! It was a devil of a way to play! His mother’s son had not come
+here to rack his brains for nothing and lose his money!
+</p>
+<p>Then he added, turning very red, “If the booby thinks my money grows on every bush!…
+On top of the fact that my Indians are beginning to haggle over payments!” Fuming,
+and disregarding the excuses of Padre Irene, who tried to explain while he rubbed
+the tip of his beak in order to conceal his sly smile, he went into the billiardroom.
+</p>
+<p>“Padre Fernandez, would you like to take a hand?” asked Fray Sibyla.
+</p>
+<p>“I’m a very poor player,” replied the friar with a grimace.
+</p>
+<p>“Then get Simoun,” said the General. “Eh, Simoun! Eh, Mister, won’t you try a hand?”
+</p>
+<p>“What is your disposition concerning the arms for sporting purposes?” asked the secretary,
+taking advantage of the pause.
+</p>
+<p>Simoun thrust his head through the doorway.
+</p>
+<p>“Don’t you want to take Padre Camorra’s place, Señor Sindbad?” inquired Padre Irene.
+“You can bet diamonds instead of chips.”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1655">[<a href="#xd32e1655">92</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“I don’t care if I do,” replied Simoun, advancing while he brushed the chalk from
+his hands. “What will you bet?”
+</p>
+<p>“What should we bet?” returned Padre Sibyla. “The General can bet what he likes, but
+we priests, clerics—”
+</p>
+<p>“Bah!” interrupted Simoun ironically. “You and Padre Irene can pay with deeds of charity,
+prayers, and virtues, eh?”
+</p>
+<p>“You know that the virtues a person may possess,” gravely argued Padre Sibyla, “are
+not like the diamonds that may pass from hand to hand, to be sold and resold. They
+are inherent in the being, they are essential attributes of the subject—”
+</p>
+<p>“I’ll be satisfied then if you pay me with promises,” replied Simoun jestingly. “You,
+Padre Sibyla, instead of paying me five something or other in money, will say, for
+example: for five days I renounce poverty, humility, and obedience. You, Padre Irene:
+I renounce chastity, liberality, and so on. Those are small matters, and I’m putting
+up my diamonds.”
+</p>
+<p>“What a peculiar man this Simoun is, what notions he has!” exclaimed Padre Irene with
+a smile.
+</p>
+<p>“And <i>he</i>,” continued Simoun, slapping his Excellency familiarly on the shoulder, “he will
+pay me with an order for five days in prison, or five months, or an order of deportation
+made out in blank, or let us say a summary execution by the Civil Guard while my man
+is being conducted from one town to another.”
+</p>
+<p>This was a strange proposition, so the three who had been pacing about gathered around.
+</p>
+<p>“But, Señor Simoun,” asked the high official, “what good will you get out of winning
+promises of virtues, or lives and deportations and summary executions?”
+</p>
+<p>“A great deal! I’m tired of hearing virtues talked about and would like to have the
+whole of them, all there are in the world, tied up in a sack, in order to throw them
+into the sea, even though I had to use my diamonds for sinkers.”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1671">[<a href="#xd32e1671">93</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“What an idea!” exclaimed Padre Irene with another smile. “And the deportations and
+executions, what of them?”
+</p>
+<p>“Well, to clean the country and destroy every evil seed.”
+</p>
+<p>“Get out! You’re still sore at the tulisanes. But you were lucky that they didn’t
+demand a larger ransom or keep all your jewels. Man, don’t be ungrateful!”
+</p>
+<p>Simoun proceeded to relate how he had been intercepted by a band of tulisanes, who,
+after entertaining him for a day, had let him go on his way without exacting other
+ransom than his two fine revolvers and the two boxes of cartridges he carried with
+him. He added that the tulisanes had charged him with many kind regards for his Excellency,
+the Captain-General.
+</p>
+<p>As a result of this, and as Simoun reported that the tulisanes were well provided
+with shotguns, rifles, and revolvers, and against such persons one man alone, no matter
+how well armed, could not defend himself, his Excellency, to prevent the tulisanes
+from getting weapons in the future, was about to dictate a new decree forbidding the
+introduction of sporting arms.
+</p>
+<p>“On the contrary, on the contrary!” protested Simoun, “for me the tulisanes are the
+most respectable men in the country, they’re the only ones who earn their living honestly.
+Suppose I had fallen into the hands—well, of you yourselves, for example, would you
+have let me escape without taking half of my jewels, at least?”
+</p>
+<p>Don Custodio was on the point of protesting; that Simoun was really a rude American
+mulatto taking advantage of his friendship with the Captain-General to insult Padre
+Irene, although it may be true also that Padre Irene would hardly have set him free
+for so little.
+</p>
+<p>“The evil is not,” went on Simoun, “in that there are tulisanes in the mountains and
+uninhabited parts—the evil lies in the tulisanes in the towns and cities.”
+</p>
+<p>“Like yourself,” put in the Canon with a smile.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1683">[<a href="#xd32e1683">94</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“Yes, like myself, like all of us! Let’s be frank, for no Indian is listening to us
+here,” continued the jeweler. “The evil is that we’re not all openly declared tulisanes.
+When that happens and we all take to the woods, on that day the country will be saved,
+on that day will rise a new social order which will take care of itself, and his Excellency
+will be able to play his game in peace, without the necessity of having his attention
+diverted by his secretary.”
+</p>
+<p>The person mentioned at that moment yawned, extending his folded arms above his head
+and stretching his crossed legs under the table as far as possible, upon noticing
+which all laughed. His Excellency wished to change the course of the conversation,
+so, throwing down the cards he had been shuffling, he said half seriously: “Come,
+come, enough of jokes and cards! Let’s get to work, to work in earnest, since we still
+have a half-hour before breakfast. Are there many matters to be got through with?”
+</p>
+<p>All now gave their attention. That was the day for joining battle over the question
+of instruction in Castilian, for which purpose Padre Sibyla and Padre Irene had been
+there several days. It was known that the former, as Vice-Rector, was opposed to the
+project and that the latter supported it, and his activity was in turn supported by
+the Countess.
+</p>
+<p>“What is there, what is there?” asked his Excellency impatiently.
+</p>
+<p>“The petition about sporting arms,” replied the secretary with a stifled yawn.
+</p>
+<p>“Forbidden!”
+</p>
+<p>“Pardon, General,” said the high official gravely, “your Excellency will permit me
+to invite your attention to the fact that the use of sporting arms is permitted in
+all the countries of the world.”
+</p>
+<p>The General shrugged his shoulders and remarked dryly, “We are not imitating any nation
+in the world.”
+</p>
+<p>Between his Excellency and the high official there was always a difference of opinion,
+so it was sufficient that <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1695">[<a href="#xd32e1695">95</a>]</span>the latter offer any suggestion whatsoever to have the former remain stubborn.
+</p>
+<p>The high official tried another tack. “Sporting arms can harm only rats and chickens.
+They’ll say—”
+</p>
+<p>“But are we chickens?” interrupted the General, again shrugging his shoulders. “Am
+I? I’ve demonstrated that I’m not.”
+</p>
+<p>“But there’s another thing,” observed the secretary. “Four months ago, when the possession
+of arms was prohibited, the foreign importers were assured that sporting arms would
+be admitted.”
+</p>
+<p>His Excellency knitted his brows.
+</p>
+<p>“That can be arranged,” suggested Simoun.
+</p>
+<p>“How?”
+</p>
+<p>“Very simply. Sporting arms nearly all have a caliber of six millimeters, at least
+those now in the market. Authorize only the sale of those that haven’t these six millimeters.”
+</p>
+<p>All approved this idea of Simoun’s, except the high official, who muttered into Padre
+Fernandez’s ear that this was not dignified, nor was it the way to govern.
+</p>
+<p>“The schoolmaster of Tiani,” proceeded the secretary, shuffling some papers about,
+“asks for a better location for—”
+</p>
+<p>“What better location can he want than the storehouse that he has all to himself?”
+interrupted Padre Camorra, who had returned, having forgotten about the card-game.
+</p>
+<p>“He says that it’s roofless,” replied the secretary, “and that having purchased out
+of his own pocket some maps and pictures, he doesn’t want to expose them to the weather.”
+</p>
+<p>“But I haven’t anything to do with that,” muttered his Excellency. “He should address
+the head secretary,<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e1711src" href="#xd32e1711">1</a> the governor of the province, or the nuncio.”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1714">[<a href="#xd32e1714">96</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“I want to tell you,” declared Padre Camorra, “that this little schoolmaster is a
+discontented filibuster. Just imagine—the heretic teaches that corpses rot just the
+same, whether buried with great pomp or without any! Some day I’m going to punch him!”
+Here he doubled up his fists.
+</p>
+<p>“To tell the truth,” observed Padre Sibyla, as if speaking only to Padre Irene, “he
+who wishes to teach, teaches everywhere, in the open air. Socrates taught in the public
+streets, Plato in the gardens of the Academy, even Christ among the mountains and
+lakes.”
+</p>
+<p>“I’ve heard several complaints against this schoolmaster,” said his Excellency, exchanging
+a glance with Simoun. “I think the best thing would be to suspend him.”
+</p>
+<p>“Suspended!” repeated the secretary.
+</p>
+<p>The luck of that unfortunate, who had asked for help and received his dismissal, pained
+the high official and he tried to do something for him.
+</p>
+<p>“It’s certain,” he insinuated rather timidly, “that education is not at all well provided
+for—”
+</p>
+<p>“I’ve already decreed large sums for the purchase of supplies,” exclaimed his Excellency
+haughtily, as if to say, “I’ve done more than I ought to have done.”
+</p>
+<p>“But since suitable locations are lacking, the supplies purchased get ruined.”
+</p>
+<p>“Everything can’t be done at once,” said his Excellency dryly. “The schoolmasters
+here are doing wrong in asking for buildings when those in Spain starve to death.
+It’s great presumption to be better off here than in the mother country itself!”
+</p>
+<p>“Filibusterism—”
+</p>
+<p>“Before everything the fatherland! Before everything else we are Spaniards!” added
+Ben-Zayb, his eyes glowing with patriotism, but he blushed somewhat when he noticed
+that he was speaking alone.
+</p>
+<p>“In the future,” decided the General, “all who complain will be suspended.”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1729">[<a href="#xd32e1729">97</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“If my project were accepted—” Don Custodio ventured to remark, as if talking to himself.
+</p>
+<p>“For the construction of schoolhouses?”
+</p>
+<p>“It’s simple, practical, economical, and, like all my projects, derived from long
+experience and knowledge of the country. The towns would have schools without costing
+the government a cuarto.”
+</p>
+<p>“That’s easy,” observed the secretary sarcastically. “Compel the towns to construct
+them at their own expense,” whereupon all laughed.
+</p>
+<p>“No, sir! No, sir!” cried the exasperated Don Custodio, turning very red. “The buildings
+are already constructed and only wait to be utilized. Hygienic, unsurpassable, spacious—”
+</p>
+<p>The friars looked at one another uneasily. Would Don Custodio propose that the churches
+and conventos be converted into schoolhouses?
+</p>
+<p>“Let’s hear it,” said the General with a frown.
+</p>
+<p>“Well, General, it’s very simple,” replied Don Custodio, drawing himself up and assuming
+his hollow voice of ceremony. “The schools are open only on week-days and the cockpits
+on holidays. Then convert these into schoolhouses, at least during the week.”
+</p>
+<p>“Man, man, man!”
+</p>
+<p>“What a lovely idea!”
+</p>
+<p>“What’s the matter with you, Don Custodio?”
+</p>
+<p>“That’s a grand suggestion!”
+</p>
+<p>“That beats them all!”
+</p>
+<p>“But, gentlemen,” cried Don Custodio, in answer to so many exclamations, “let’s be
+practical—what places are more suitable than the cockpits? They’re large, well constructed,
+and under a curse for the use to which they are put during the week-days. From a moral
+standpoint my project would be acceptable, by serving as a kind of expiation and weekly
+purification of the temple of chance, as we might say.”
+</p>
+<p>“But the fact remains that sometimes there are cockfights <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1747">[<a href="#xd32e1747">98</a>]</span>during the week,” objected Padre Camorra, “and it wouldn’t be right when the contractors
+of the cockpits pay the government—”<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e1749src" href="#xd32e1749">2</a>
+</p>
+<p>“Well, on those days close the school!”
+</p>
+<p>“Man, man!” exclaimed the scandalized Captain-General. “Such an outrage shall never
+be perpetrated while I govern! To close the schools in order to gamble! Man, man,
+I’ll resign first!” His Excellency was really horrified.
+</p>
+<p>“But, General, it’s better to close them for a few days than for months.”
+</p>
+<p>“It would be immoral,” observed Padre Irene, more indignant even than his Excellency.
+</p>
+<p>“It’s more immoral that vice has good buildings and learning none. Let’s be practical,
+gentlemen, and not be carried away by sentiment. In politics there’s nothing worse
+than sentiment. While from humane considerations we forbid the cultivation of opium
+in our colonies, we tolerate the smoking of it, and the result is that we do not combat
+the vice but impoverish ourselves.”
+</p>
+<p>“But remember that it yields to the government, without any effort, more than four
+hundred and fifty thousand pesos,” objected Padre Irene, who was getting more and
+more on the governmental side.
+</p>
+<p>“Enough, enough, enough!” exclaimed his Excellency, to end the discussion. “I have
+my own plans in this regard and will devote special attention to the matter of public
+instruction. Is there anything else?”
+</p>
+<p>The secretary looked uneasily toward Padre Sibyla and Padre Irene. The cat was about
+to come out of the bag. Both prepared themselves.
+</p>
+<p>“The petition of the students requesting authorization to open an academy of Castilian,”
+answered the secretary.
+</p>
+<p>A general movement was noted among those in the room. After glancing at one another
+they fixed their eyes on the <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1764">[<a href="#xd32e1764">99</a>]</span>General to learn what his disposition would be. For six months the petition had lain
+there awaiting a decision and had become converted into a kind of <i>casus belli</i> in certain circles. His Excellency had lowered his eyes, as if to keep his thoughts
+from being read.
+</p>
+<p>The silence became embarrassing, as the General understood, so he asked the high official,
+“What do you think?”
+</p>
+<p>“What should I think, General?” responded the person addressed, with a shrug of his
+shoulders and a bitter smile. “What should I think but that the petition is just,
+very just, and that I am surprised that six months should have been taken to consider
+it.”
+</p>
+<p>“The fact is that it involves other considerations,” said Padre Sibyla coldly, as
+he half closed his eyes.
+</p>
+<p>The high official again shrugged his shoulders, like one who did not comprehend what
+those considerations could be.
+</p>
+<p>“Besides the intemperateness of the demand,” went on the Dominican, “besides the fact
+that it is in the nature of an infringement on our prerogatives—”
+</p>
+<p>Padre Sibyla dared not go on, but looked at Simoun.
+</p>
+<p>“The petition has a somewhat suspicious character,” corroborated that individual,
+exchanging a look with the Dominican, who winked several times.
+</p>
+<p>Padre Irene noticed these things and realized that his cause was almost lost—Simoun
+was against him.
+</p>
+<p>“It’s a peaceful rebellion, a revolution on stamped paper,” added Padre Sibyla.
+</p>
+<p>“Revolution? Rebellion?” inquired the high official, staring from one to the other
+as if he did not understand what they could mean.
+</p>
+<p>“It’s headed by some young men charged with being too radical and too much interested
+in reforms, not to use stronger terms,” remarked the secretary, with a look at the
+Dominican. “Among them is a certain Isagani, a poorly balanced head, nephew of a native
+priest—”
+</p>
+<p>“He’s a pupil of mine,” put in Padre Fernandez, “and I’m much pleased with him.”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1782">[<a href="#xd32e1782">100</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“<i>Puñales,</i> I like your taste!” exclaimed Padre Camorra. “On the steamer we nearly had a fight.
+He’s so insolent that when I gave him a shove aside he returned it.”
+</p>
+<p>“There’s also one Makaragui or Makarai—”
+</p>
+<p>“Makaraig,” Padre Irene joined in. “A very pleasant and agreeable young man.”
+</p>
+<p>Then he murmured into the General’s ear, “He’s the one I’ve talked to you about, he’s
+very rich. The Countess recommends him strongly.”
+</p>
+<p>“Ah!”
+</p>
+<p>“A medical student, one Basilio—”
+</p>
+<p>“Of that Basilio, I’ll say nothing,” observed Padre Irene, raising his hands and opening
+them, as if to say <i lang="la">Dominus vobiscum</i>. “He’s too deep for me. I’ve never succeeded in fathoming what he wants or what he
+is thinking about. It’s a pity that Padre Salvi isn’t present to tell us something
+about his antecedents. I believe that I’ve heard that when a boy he got into trouble
+with the Civil Guard. His father was killed in—I don’t remember what disturbance.”
+</p>
+<p>Simoun smiled faintly, silently, showing his sharp white teeth.
+</p>
+<p>“Aha! Aha!” said his Excellency nodding. “That’s the kind we have! Make a note of
+that name.”
+</p>
+<p>“But, General,” objected the high official, seeing that the matter was taking a bad
+turn, “up to now nothing positive is known against these young men. Their position
+is a very just one, and we have no right to deny it on the ground of mere conjectures.
+My opinion is that the government, by exhibiting confidence in the people and in its
+own stability, should grant what is asked, then it could freely revoke the permission
+when it saw that its kindness was being abused—reasons and pretexts would not be wanting,
+we can watch them. Why cause disaffection among some young men, who later on may feel
+resentment, when what they ask is commanded by royal decrees?”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1802">[<a href="#xd32e1802">101</a>]</span></p>
+<p>Padre Irene, Don Custodio, and Padre Fernandez nodded in agreement.
+</p>
+<p>“But the Indians must not understand Castilian, you know,” cried Padre Camorra. “They
+mustn’t learn it, for then they’ll enter into arguments with us, and the Indians must
+not argue, but obey and pay. They mustn’t try to interpret the meaning of the laws
+and the books, they’re so tricky and pettifogish! Just as soon as they learn Castilian
+they become enemies of God and of Spain. Just read the <i lang="tl">Tandang Basio Macunat</i>—that’s a book! It tells truths like this!” And he held up his clenched fists.
+</p>
+<p>Padre Sibyla rubbed his hand over his tonsure in sign of impatience. “One word,” he
+began in the most conciliatory tone, though fuming with irritation, “here we’re not
+dealing with the instruction in Castilian alone. Here there is an underhand fight
+between the students and the University of Santo Tomas. If the students win this,
+our prestige will be trampled in the dirt, they will say that they’ve beaten us and
+will exult accordingly. Then, good-by to moral strength, good-by to everything! The
+first dike broken down, who will restrain this youth? With our fall we do no more
+than signal your own. After us, the government!”
+</p>
+<p>“<i>Puñales</i>, that’s not so!” exclaimed Padre Camorra. “We’ll see first who has the biggest fists!”
+</p>
+<p>At this point Padre Fernandez, who thus far in the discussion had merely contented
+himself with smiling, began to talk. All gave him their attention, for they knew him
+to be a thoughtful man.
+</p>
+<p>“Don’t take it ill of me, Padre Sibyla, if I differ from your view of the affair,
+but it’s my peculiar fate to be almost always in opposition to my brethren. I say,
+then, that we ought not to be so pessimistic. The instruction in Castilian can be
+allowed without any risk whatever, and in order that it may not appear to be a defeat
+of the University, we Dominicans ought to put forth our efforts and <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1818">[<a href="#xd32e1818">102</a>]</span>be the first to rejoice over it—that should be our policy. To what end are we to be
+engaged in an everlasting struggle with the people, when after all we are the few
+and they are the many, when we need them and they do not need us? Wait, Padre Camorra,
+wait! Admit that now the people may be weak and ignorant—I also believe that—but it
+will not be true tomorrow or the day after. Tomorrow and the next day they will be
+the stronger, they will know what is good for them, and we cannot keep it from them,
+just as it is not possible to keep from children the knowledge of many things when
+they reach a certain age. I say, then, why should we not take advantage of this condition
+of ignorance to change our policy completely, to place it upon a basis solid and enduring—on
+the basis of justice, for example, instead of on the basis of ignorance? There’s nothing
+like being just; that I’ve always said to my brethren, but they won’t believe me.
+The Indian idolizes justice, like every race in its youth; he asks for punishment
+when he has done wrong, just as he is exasperated when he has not deserved it. Is
+theirs a just desire? Then grant it! Let’s give them all the schools they want, until
+they are tired of them. Youth is lazy, and what urges them to activity is our opposition.
+Our bond of prestige, Padre Sibyla, is about worn out, so let’s prepare another, the
+bond of gratitude, for example. Let’s not be fools, let’s do as the crafty Jesuits—”
+</p>
+<p>“Padre Fernandez!” Anything could be tolerated by Padre Sibyla except to propose the
+Jesuits to him as a model. Pale and trembling, he broke out into bitter recrimination.
+“A Franciscan first! Anything before a Jesuit!” He was beside himself.
+</p>
+<p>“Oh, oh!”
+</p>
+<p>“Eh, Padre—”
+</p>
+<p>A general discussion broke out, regardless of the Captain-General. All talked at once,
+they yelled, they misunderstood and contradicted one another. Ben-Zayb and Padre Camorra
+shook their fists in each other’s faces, one talking <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1825">[<a href="#xd32e1825">103</a>]</span>of simpletons and the other of ink-slingers, Padre Sibyla kept harping on the <i>Capitulum</i>, and Padre Fernandez on the <i>Summa</i> of St. Thomas, until the curate of Los Baños entered to announce that breakfast was
+served.
+</p>
+<p>His Excellency arose and so ended the discussion. “Well, gentlemen,” he said, “we’ve
+worked like niggers and yet we’re on a vacation. Some one has said that grave matters
+should be considered at dessert. I’m entirely of that opinion.”
+</p>
+<p>“We might get indigestion,” remarked the secretary, alluding to the heat of the discussion.
+</p>
+<p>“Then we’ll lay it aside until tomorrow.”
+</p>
+<p>As they rose the high official whispered to the General, “Your Excellency, the daughter
+of Cabesang Tales has been here again begging for the release of her sick grandfather,
+who was arrested in place of her father.”
+</p>
+<p>His Excellency looked at him with an expression of impatience and rubbed his hand
+across his broad forehead. “<i>Carambas</i>! Can’t one be left to eat his breakfast in peace?”
+</p>
+<p>“This is the third day she has come. She’s a poor girl—”
+</p>
+<p>“Oh, the devil!” exclaimed Padre Camorra. “I’ve just thought of it. I have something
+to say to the General about that—that’s what I came over for—to support that girl’s
+petition.”
+</p>
+<p>The General scratched the back of his ear and said, “Oh, go along! Have the secretary
+make out an order to the lieutenant of the Civil Guard for the old man’s release.
+They sha’n’t say that we’re not clement and merciful.”
+</p>
+<p>He looked at Ben-Zayb. The journalist winked.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1845">[<a href="#xd32e1845">104</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e1711">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e1711src">1</a></span> Under the Spanish régime the government paid no attention to education, the schools
+(!) being under the control of the religious orders and the friar-curates of the towns.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e1711src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e1749">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e1749src">2</a></span> The cockpits are farmed out annually by the local governments, the terms “contract,”
+and “contractor,” having now been softened into “license” and “licensee.”—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e1749src" title="Return to note 2 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch12" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e323">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XII</h2>
+<h2 class="main">Placido Penitente</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">Reluctantly, and almost with tearful eyes, Placido Penitente was going along the Escolta
+on his way to the University of Santo Tomas. It had hardly been a week since he had
+come from his town, yet he had already written to his mother twice, reiterating his
+desire to abandon his studies and go back there to work. His mother answered that
+he should have patience, that at the least he must be graduated as a bachelor of arts,
+since it would be unwise to desert his books after four years of expense and sacrifices
+on both their parts.
+</p>
+<p>Whence came to Penitente this aversion to study, when he had been one of the most
+diligent in the famous college conducted by Padre Valerio in Tanawan? There Penitente
+had been considered one of the best Latinists and the subtlest disputants, one who
+could tangle or untangle the simplest as well as the most abstruse questions. His
+townspeople considered him very clever, and his curate, influenced by that opinion,
+already classified him as a filibuster—a sure proof that he was neither foolish nor
+incapable. His friends could not explain those desires for abandoning his studies
+and returning: he had no sweethearts, was not a gambler, hardly knew anything about
+<i>hunkían</i> and rarely tried his luck at the more familiar <i lang="es">revesino</i>. He did not believe in the advice of the curates, laughed at <i lang="tl">Tandang Basio Macunat</i>, had plenty of money and good clothes, yet he went to school reluctantly and looked
+with repugnance on his books.
+</p>
+<p>On the Bridge of Spain, a bridge whose name alone came from Spain, since even its
+ironwork came from foreign <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1864">[<a href="#xd32e1864">105</a>]</span>countries, he fell in with the long procession of young men on their way to the Walled
+City to their respective schools. Some were dressed in the European fashion and walked
+rapidly, carrying books and notes, absorbed in thoughts of their lessons and essays—these
+were the students of the Ateneo. Those from San Juan de Letran were nearly all dressed
+in the Filipino costume, but were more numerous and carried fewer books. Those from
+the University are dressed more carefully and elegantly and saunter along carrying
+canes instead of books. The collegians of the Philippines are not very noisy or turbulent.
+They move along in a preoccupied manner, such that upon seeing them one would say
+that before their eyes shone no hope, no smiling future. Even though here and there
+the line is brightened by the attractive appearance of the schoolgirls of the <i>Escuela Municipal</i>,<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e1868src" href="#xd32e1868">1</a> with their sashes across their shoulders and their books in their hands, followed
+by their servants, yet scarcely a laugh resounds or a joke can be heard—nothing of
+song or jest, at best a few heavy jokes or scuffles among the smaller boys. The older
+ones nearly always proceed seriously and composedly, like the German students.
+</p>
+<p>Placido was proceeding along the Paseo de Magallanes toward the breach—formerly the
+gate—of Santo Domingo, when he suddenly felt a slap on the shoulder, which made him
+turn quickly in ill humor.
+</p>
+<p>“Hello, Penitente! Hello, Penitente!”
+</p>
+<p>It was his schoolmate Juanito Pelaez, the <i>barbero</i> or pet of the professors, as big a rascal as he could be, with a roguish look and
+a clownish smile. The son of a Spanish mestizo—a rich merchant in one of the suburbs,
+who based all his hopes and joys on the boy’s talent—he promised well with his roguery,
+and, thanks to his custom of playing tricks on every one and then hiding behind his
+companions, <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1879">[<a href="#xd32e1879">106</a>]</span>he had acquired a peculiar hump, which grew larger whenever he was laughing over his
+deviltry.
+</p>
+<p>“What kind of time did you have, Penitente?” was his question as he again slapped
+him on the shoulder.
+</p>
+<p>“So, so,” answered Placido, rather bored. “And you?”
+</p>
+<p>“Well, it was great! Just imagine—the curate of Tiani invited me to spend the vacation
+in his town, and I went. Old man, you know Padre Camorra, I suppose? Well, he’s a
+liberal curate, very jolly, frank, very frank, one of those like Padre Paco. As there
+were pretty girls, we serenaded them all, he with his guitar and songs and I with
+my violin. I tell you, old man, we had a great time—there wasn’t a house we didn’t
+try!”
+</p>
+<p>He whispered a few words in Placido’s ear and then broke out into laughter. As the
+latter exhibited some surprise, he resumed: “I’ll swear to it! They can’t help themselves,
+because with a governmental order you get rid of the father, husband, or brother,
+and then—merry Christmas! However, we did run up against a little fool, the sweetheart,
+I believe, of Basilio, you know? Look, what a fool this Basilio is! To have a sweetheart
+who doesn’t know a word of Spanish, who hasn’t any money, and who has been a servant!
+She’s as shy as she can be, but pretty. Padre Camorra one night started to club two
+fellows who were serenading her and I don’t know how it was he didn’t kill them, yet
+with all that she was just as shy as ever. But it’ll result for her as it does with
+all the women, all of them!”
+</p>
+<p>Juanito Pelaez laughed with a full mouth, as though he thought this a glorious thing,
+while Placido stared at him in disgust.
+</p>
+<p>“Listen, what did the professor explain yesterday?” asked Juanito, changing the conversation.
+</p>
+<p>“Yesterday there was no class.”
+</p>
+<p>“Oho, and the day before yesterday?”
+</p>
+<p>“Man, it was Thursday!”
+</p>
+<p>“Right! What an ass I am! Don’t you know, Placido, <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1893">[<a href="#xd32e1893">107</a>]</span>that I’m getting to be a regular ass? What about Wednesday?”
+</p>
+<p>“Wednesday? Wait—Wednesday, it was a little wet.”
+</p>
+<p>“Fine! What about Tuesday, old man?”
+</p>
+<p>“Tuesday was the professor’s nameday and we went to entertain him with an orchestra,
+present him flowers and some gifts.”
+</p>
+<p>“Ah, <i>carambas!</i>” exclaimed Juanito, “that I should have forgotten about it! What an ass I am! Listen,
+did he ask for me?”
+</p>
+<p>Penitente shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know, but they gave him a list of his entertainers.”
+</p>
+<p>“<i>Carambas!</i> Listen—Monday, what happened?”
+</p>
+<p>“As it was the first school-day, he called the roll and assigned the lesson—about
+mirrors. Look, from here to here, by memory, word for word. We jump all this section,
+we take that.” He was pointing out with his finger in the “Physics” the portions that
+were to be learned, when suddenly the book flew through the air, as a result of the
+slap Juanito gave it from below.
+</p>
+<p>“Thunder, let the lessons go! Let’s have a <i>dia pichido!</i>”
+</p>
+<p>The students in Manila call <i>dia pichido</i> a school-day that falls between two holidays and is consequently suppressed, as though
+forced out by their wish.
+</p>
+<p>“Do you know that you really are an ass?” exclaimed Placido, picking up his book and
+papers.
+</p>
+<p>“Let’s have a <i>dia pichido!</i>” repeated Juanito.
+</p>
+<p>Placido was unwilling, since for only two the authorities were hardly going to suspend
+a class of more than a hundred and fifty. He recalled the struggles and privations
+his mother was suffering in order to keep him in Manila, while she went without even
+the necessities of life.
+</p>
+<p>They were just passing through the breach of Santo Domingo, and Juanito, gazing across
+the little plaza<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e1925src" href="#xd32e1925">2</a> in <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1928">[<a href="#xd32e1928">108</a>]</span>front of the old Customs building, exclaimed, “Now I think of it, I’m appointed to
+take up the collection.”
+</p>
+<p>“What collection?”
+</p>
+<p>“For the monument.”
+</p>
+<p>“What monument?”
+</p>
+<p>“Get out! For Padre Balthazar, you know.”
+</p>
+<p>“And who was Padre Balthazar?”
+</p>
+<p>“Fool! A Dominican, of course—that’s why the padres call on the students. Come on
+now, loosen up with three or four pesos, so that they may see we are sports. Don’t
+let them say afterwards that in order to erect a statue they had to dig down into
+their own pockets. Do, Placido, it’s not money thrown away.”
+</p>
+<p>He accompanied these words with a significant wink. Placido recalled the case of a
+student who had passed through the entire course by presenting canary-birds, so he
+subscribed three pesos.
+</p>
+<p>“Look now, I’ll write your name plainly so that the professor will read it, you see—Placido
+Penitente, three pesos. Ah, listen! In a couple of weeks comes the nameday of the
+professor of natural history. You know that he’s a good fellow, never marks absences
+or asks about the lesson. Man, we must show our appreciation!”
+</p>
+<p>“That’s right!”
+</p>
+<p>“Then don’t you think that we ought to give him a celebration? The orchestra must
+not be smaller than the one you had for the professor of physics.”
+</p>
+<p>“That’s right!”
+</p>
+<p>“What do you think about making the contribution two pesos? Come, Placido, you start
+it, so you’ll be at the head of the list.”
+</p>
+<p>Then, seeing that Placido gave the two pesos without hesitation, he added, “Listen,
+put up four, and afterwards I’ll return you two. They’ll serve as a decoy.”
+</p>
+<p>“Well, if you’re going to return them to me, why give them to you? It’ll be sufficient,
+for you to write four.”
+</p>
+<p>“Ah, that’s right! What an ass I am! Do you know, <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1948">[<a href="#xd32e1948">109</a>]</span>I’m getting to be a regular ass! But let me have them anyhow, so that I can show them.”
+</p>
+<p>Placido, in order not to give the lie to the priest who christened him, gave what
+was asked, just as they reached the University.
+</p>
+<p>In the entrance and along the walks on each side of it were gathered the students,
+awaiting the appearance of the professors. Students of the preparatory year of law,
+of the fifth of the secondary course, of the preparatory in medicine, formed lively
+groups. The latter were easily distinguished by their clothing and by a certain air
+that was lacking in the others, since the greater part of them came from the Ateneo
+Municipal. Among them could be seen the poet Isagani, explaining to a companion the
+theory of the refraction of light. In another group they were talking, disputing,
+citing the statements of the professor, the text-books, and scholastic principles;
+in yet another they were gesticulating and waving their books in the air or making
+demonstrations with their canes by drawing diagrams on the ground; farther on, they
+were entertaining themselves in watching the pious women go into the neighboring church,
+all the students making facetious remarks. An old woman leaning on a young girl limped
+piously, while the girl moved along with downcast eyes, timid and abashed to pass
+before so many curious eyes. The old lady, catching up her coffee-colored skirt, of
+the Sisterhood of St. Rita, to reveal her big feet and white stockings, scolded her
+companion and shot furious glances at the staring bystanders.
+</p>
+<p>“The rascals!” she grunted. “Don’t look at them, keep your eyes down.”
+</p>
+<p>Everything was noticed; everything called forth jokes and comments. Now it was a magnificent
+victoria which stopped at the door to set down a family of votaries on their way to
+visit the Virgin of the Rosary<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e1955src" href="#xd32e1955">3</a> on her favorite <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1958">[<a href="#xd32e1958">110</a>]</span>day, while the inquisitive sharpened their eyes to get a glimpse of the shape and
+size of the young ladies’ feet as they got out of the carriages; now it was a student
+who came out of the door with devotion still shining in his eyes, for he had passed
+through the church to beg the Virgin’s help in understanding his lesson and to see
+if his sweetheart was there, to exchange a few glances with her and go on to his class
+with the recollection of her loving eyes.
+</p>
+<p>Soon there was noticed some movement in the groups, a certain air of expectancy, while
+Isagani paused and turned pale. A carriage drawn by a pair of well-known white horses
+had stopped at the door. It was that of Paulita Gomez, and she had already jumped
+down, light as a bird, without giving the rascals time to see her foot. With a bewitching
+whirl of her body and a sweep of her hand she arranged the folds of her skirt, shot
+a rapid and apparently careless glance toward Isagani, spoke to him and smiled. Doña
+Victorina descended in her turn, gazed over her spectacles, saw Juanito Pelaez, smiled,
+and bowed to him affably.
+</p>
+<p>Isagani, flushed with excitement, returned a timid salute, while Juanito bowed profoundly,
+took off his hat, and made the same gesture as the celebrated clown and caricaturist
+Panza when he received applause.
+</p>
+<p>“Heavens, what a girl!” exclaimed one of the students, starting forward. “Tell the
+professor that I’m seriously ill.” So Tadeo, as this invalid youth was known, entered
+the church to follow the girl.
+</p>
+<p>Tadeo went to the University every day to ask if the classes would be held and each
+time seemed to be more and more astonished that they would. He had a fixed idea of
+a latent and eternal <i>holiday</i>, and expected it to come any day. So each morning, after vainly proposing that they
+play truant, he would go away alleging important business, an appointment, or illness,
+just at the very moment when his companions were going to their classes. But by some
+occult, thaumaturgic art Tadeo passed the examinations, was beloved <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1967">[<a href="#xd32e1967">111</a>]</span>by the professors, and had before him a promising future.
+</p>
+<p>Meanwhile, the groups began to move inside, for the professor of physics and chemistry
+had put in his appearance. The students appeared to be cheated in their hopes and
+went toward the interior of the building with exclamations of discontent. Placido
+went along with the crowd.
+</p>
+<p>“Penitente, Penitente!” called a student with a certain mysterious air. “Sign this!”
+</p>
+<p>“What is it?”
+</p>
+<p>“Never mind—sign it!”
+</p>
+<p>It seemed to Placido that some one was twitching his ears. He recalled the story of
+a cabeza de barangay in his town who, for having signed a document that he did not
+understand, was kept a prisoner for months and months, and came near to deportation.
+An uncle of Placido’s, in order to fix the lesson in his memory, had given him a severe
+ear-pulling, so that always whenever he heard signatures spoken of, his ears reproduced
+the sensation.
+</p>
+<p>“Excuse me, but I can’t sign anything without first understanding what it’s about.”
+</p>
+<p>“What a fool you are! If two <i>celestial carbineers</i> have signed it, what have you to fear?”
+</p>
+<p>The name of <i>celestial carbineers</i> inspired confidence, being, as it was, a sacred company created to aid God in the
+warfare against the evil spirit and to prevent the smuggling of heretical contraband
+into the markets of the New Zion.<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e1984src" href="#xd32e1984">4</a>
+</p>
+<p>Placido was about to sign to make an end of it, because he was in a hurry,—already
+his classmates were reciting the <i>O Thoma</i>,—but again his ears twitched, so he said, “After the class! I want to read it first.”
+</p>
+<p>“It’s very long, don’t you see? It concerns the presentation of a counter-petition,
+or rather, a protest. Don’t <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e1995">[<a href="#xd32e1995">112</a>]</span>you understand? Makaraig and some others have asked that an academy of Castilian be
+opened, which is a piece of genuine foolishness—”
+</p>
+<p>“All right, all right, after awhile. They’re already beginning,” answered Placido,
+trying to get away.
+</p>
+<p>“But your professor may not call the roll—”
+</p>
+<p>“Yes, yes; but he calls it sometimes. Later on, later on! Besides, I don’t want to
+put myself in opposition to Makaraig.”
+</p>
+<p>“But it’s not putting yourself in opposition, it’s only—”
+</p>
+<p>Placido heard no more, for he was already far away, hurrying to his class. He heard
+the different voices—<i>adsum, adsum</i>—the roll was being called! Hastening his steps he got to the door just as the letter
+Q was reached.
+</p>
+<p>“<i>Tinamáan ñg—!</i>”<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e2010src" href="#xd32e2010">5</a> he muttered, biting his lips.
+</p>
+<p>He hesitated about entering, for the mark was already down against him and was not
+to be erased. One did not go to the class to learn but in order not to get this absence
+mark, for the class was reduced to reciting the lesson from memory, reading the book,
+and at the most answering a few abstract, profound, captious, enigmatic questions.
+True, the usual preachment was never lacking—the same as ever, about humility, submission,
+and respect to the clerics, and he, Placido, was humble, submissive, and respectful.
+So he was about to turn away when he remembered that the examinations were approaching
+and his professor had not yet asked him a question nor appeared to notice him—this
+would be a good opportunity to attract his attention and become known! To be known
+was to gain a year, for if it cost nothing to suspend one who was not known, it required
+a hard heart not to be touched by the sight of a youth who by his daily presence was
+a reproach over a year of his life wasted.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2015">[<a href="#xd32e2015">113</a>]</span></p>
+<p>So Placido went in, not on tiptoe as was his custom, but noisily on his heels, and
+only too well did he succeed in his intent! The professor stared at him, knitted his
+brows, and shook his head, as though to say, “Ah, little impudence, you’ll pay for
+that!”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2018">[<a href="#xd32e2018">114</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e1868">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e1868src">1</a></span> The “Municipal School for Girls” was founded by the municipality of Manila in 1864.…
+The institution was in charge of the Sisters of Charity.—<i>Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. III, p. 615</i>.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e1868src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e1925">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e1925src">2</a></span> Now known as Plaza España.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e1925src" title="Return to note 2 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e1955">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e1955src">3</a></span> Patroness of the Dominican Order. She was formally and sumptuously recrowned a queen
+of the skies in 1907.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e1955src" title="Return to note 3 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e1984">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e1984src">4</a></span> A burlesque on an association of students known as the <i>Milicia Angelica</i>, organized by the Dominicans to strengthen their hold on the people. The name used
+is significant, “carbineers” being the local revenue officers, notorious in their
+later days for graft and abuse.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e1984src" title="Return to note 4 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e2010">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e2010src">5</a></span> “Tinamáan ñg lintik!”—a Tagalog exclamation of anger, disappointment, or dismay, regarded
+as a very strong expression, equivalent to profanity. Literally, “May the lightning
+strike you!”—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e2010src" title="Return to note 5 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch13" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e333">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XIII</h2>
+<h2 class="main">The Class in Physics</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">The classroom was a spacious rectangular hall with large grated windows that admitted
+an abundance of light and air. Along the two sides extended three wide tiers of stone
+covered with wood, filled with students arranged in alphabetical order. At the end
+opposite the entrance, under a print of St. Thomas Aquinas, rose the professor’s chair
+on an elevated platform with a little stairway on each side. With the exception of
+a beautiful blackboard in a narra frame, scarcely ever used, since there was still
+written on it the <i>viva</i> that had appeared on the opening day, no furniture, either useful or useless, was
+to be seen. The walls, painted white and covered with glazed tiles to prevent scratches,
+were entirely bare, having neither a drawing nor a picture, nor even an outline of
+any physical apparatus. The students had no need of any, no one missed the practical
+instruction in an extremely experimental science; for years and years it has been
+so taught and the country has not been upset, but continues just as ever. Now and
+then some little instrument descended from heaven and was exhibited to the class from
+a distance, like the monstrance to the prostrate worshipers—look, but touch not! From
+time to time, when some complacent professor appeared, one day in the year was set
+aside for visiting the mysterious laboratory and gazing from without at the puzzling
+apparatus arranged in glass cases. No one could complain, for on that day there were
+to be seen quantities of brass and glassware, tubes, disks, wheels, bells, and the
+like—the exhibition did not get beyond that, and the country was not upset.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2027">[<a href="#xd32e2027">115</a>]</span></p>
+<p>Besides, the students were convinced that those instruments had not been purchased
+for them—the friars would be fools! The laboratory was intended to be shown to the
+visitors and the high officials who came from the Peninsula, so that upon seeing it
+they would nod their heads with satisfaction, while their guide would smile, as if
+to say, “Eh, you thought you were going to find some backward monks! Well, we’re right
+up with the times—we have a laboratory!”
+</p>
+<p>The visitors and high officials, after being handsomely entertained, would then write
+in their <i>Travels</i> or <i>Memoirs</i>: “The Royal and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas of Manila, in charge of the
+enlightened Dominican Order, possesses a magnificent physical laboratory for the instruction
+of youth. Some two hundred and fifty students annually study this subject, but whether
+from apathy, indolence, the limited capacity of the Indian, or some other ethnological
+or incomprehensible reason, up to now there has not developed a Lavoisier, a Secchi,
+or a Tyndall, not even in miniature, in the Malay-Filipino race.”
+</p>
+<p>Yet, to be exact, we will say that in this laboratory are held the classes of thirty
+or forty <i>advanced</i> students, under the direction of an instructor who performs his duties well enough,
+but as the greater part of these students come from the Ateneo of the Jesuits, where
+science is taught practically in the laboratory itself, its utility does not come
+to be so great as it would be if it could be utilized by the two hundred and fifty
+who pay their matriculation fees, buy their books, memorize them, and waste a year
+to know nothing afterwards. As a result, with the exception of some rare usher or
+janitor who has had charge of the museum for years, no one has ever been known to
+get any advantage from the lessons memorized with so great effort.
+</p>
+<p>But let us return to the class. The professor was a young Dominican, who had filled
+several chairs in San Juan de Letran with zeal and good repute. He had the reputation
+of being a great logician as well as a profound <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2041">[<a href="#xd32e2041">116</a>]</span>philosopher, and was one of the most promising in his clique. His elders treated him
+with consideration, while the younger men envied him, for there were also cliques
+among them. This was the third year of his professorship and, although the first in
+which he had taught physics and chemistry, he already passed for a sage, not only
+with the complaisant students but also among the other nomadic professors. Padre Millon
+did not belong to the common crowd who each year change their subject in order to
+acquire scientific knowledge, students among other students, with the difference only
+that they follow a single course, that they quiz instead of being quizzed, that they
+have a better knowledge of Castilian, and that they are not examined at the completion
+of the course. Padre Millon went deeply into science, knew the physics of Aristotle
+and Padre Amat, read carefully his “Ramos,” and sometimes glanced at “Ganot.” With
+all that, he would often shake his head with an air of doubt, as he smiled and murmured:
+“<i>transeat</i>.” In regard to chemistry, no common knowledge was attributed to him after he had
+taken as a premise the statement of St. Thomas that water is a mixture and proved
+plainly that the Angelic Doctor had long forestalled Berzelius, Gay-Lussac, Bunsen,
+and other more or less presumptuous materialists. Moreover, in spite of having been
+an instructor in geography, he still entertained certain doubts as to the rotundity
+of the earth and smiled maliciously when its rotation and revolution around the sun
+were mentioned, as he recited the verses
+</p>
+<div lang="es" class="lgouter">
+<p class="line">“El mentir de las estrellas
+</p>
+<p class="line">Es un cómodo mentir.”<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e2049src" href="#xd32e2049">1</a></p>
+</div>
+<p class="first">He also smiled maliciously in the presence of certain physical theories and considered
+visionary, if not actually insane, the Jesuit Secchi, to whom he imputed the making
+of triangulations on the host as a result of his astronomical mania, for which reason
+it was said that he had been forbidden <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2053">[<a href="#xd32e2053">117</a>]</span>to celebrate mass. Many persons also noticed in him some aversion to the sciences
+that he taught, but these vagaries were trifles, scholarly and religious prejudices
+that were easily explained, not only by the fact that the physical sciences were eminently
+practical, of pure observation and deduction, while his forte was philosophy, purely
+speculative, of abstraction and induction, but also because, like any good Dominican,
+jealous of the fame of his order, he could hardly feel any affection for a science
+in which none of his brethren had excelled—he was the first who did not accept the
+chemistry of St. Thomas Aquinas—and in which so much renown had been acquired by hostile,
+or rather, let us say, rival orders.
+</p>
+<p>This was the professor who that morning called the roll and directed many of the students
+to recite the lesson from memory, word for word. The phonographs got into operation,
+some well, some ill, some stammering, and received their grades. He who recited without
+an error earned a good mark and he who made more than three mistakes a bad mark.
+</p>
+<p>A fat boy with a sleepy face and hair as stiff and hard as the bristles of a brush
+yawned until he seemed to be about to dislocate his jaws, and stretched himself with
+his arms extended as though he were in his bed. The professor saw this and wished
+to startle him.
+</p>
+<p>“Eh, there, sleepy-head! What’s this? Lazy, too, so it’s sure you<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e2060src" href="#xd32e2060">2</a> don’t know the lesson, ha?”
+</p>
+<p>Padre Millon not only used the depreciative <i>tu</i> with the students, like a good friar, but he also addressed them in the slang of
+the markets, a practise that he had acquired from the professor of canonical law:
+whether that reverend gentleman wished to humble the students or the sacred decrees
+of the councils is a question not yet settled, in spite of the great attention that
+has been given to it.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2069">[<a href="#xd32e2069">118</a>]</span></p>
+<p>This question, instead of offending the class, amused them, and many laughed—it was
+a daily occurrence. But the sleeper did not laugh; he arose with a bound, rubbed his
+eyes, and, as though a steam-engine were turning the phonograph, began to recite.
+</p>
+<p>“The name of mirror is applied to all polished surfaces intended to produce by the
+reflection of light the images of the objects placed before said surfaces. From the
+substances that form these surfaces, they are divided into metallic mirrors and glass
+mirrors—”
+</p>
+<p>“Stop, stop, stop!” interrupted the professor. “Heavens, what a rattle! We are at
+the point where the mirrors are divided into metallic and glass, eh? Now if I should
+present to you a block of wood, a piece of kamagon for instance, well polished and
+varnished, or a slab of black marble well burnished, or a square of jet, which would
+reflect the images of objects placed before them, how would you classify those mirrors?”
+</p>
+<p>Whether he did not know what to answer or did not understand the question, the student
+tried to get out of the difficulty by demonstrating that he knew the lesson, so he
+rushed on like a torrent.
+</p>
+<p>“The first are composed of brass or an alloy of different metals and the second of
+a sheet of glass, with its two sides well polished, one of which has an amalgam of
+tin adhering to it.”
+</p>
+<p>“Tut, tut, tut! That’s not it! I say to you ‘<i lang="la">Dominus vobiscum</i>,’ and you answer me with ‘<i lang="la">Requiescat in pace!</i>’ ”
+</p>
+<p>The worthy professor then repeated the question in the vernacular of the markets,
+interspersed with <i>cosas</i> and <i>abás</i> at every moment.
+</p>
+<p>The poor youth did not know how to get out of the quandary: he doubted whether to
+include the kamagon with the metals, or the marble with glasses, and leave the jet
+as a neutral substance, until Juanito Pelaez maliciously prompted him:
+</p>
+<p>“The mirror of kamagon among the wooden mirrors.”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2092">[<a href="#xd32e2092">119</a>]</span></p>
+<p>The incautious youth repeated this aloud and half the class was convulsed with laughter.
+</p>
+<p>“A good sample of wood you are yourself!” exclaimed the professor, laughing in spite
+of himself. “Let’s see from what you would define a mirror—from a surface <i lang="la">per se, in quantum est superficies</i>, or from a substance that forms the surface, or from the substance upon which the
+surface rests, the raw material, modified by the attribute ‘surface,’ since it is
+clear that, surface being an accidental property of bodies, it cannot exist without
+substance. Let’s see now—what do you say?”
+</p>
+<p>“I? Nothing!” the wretched boy was about to reply, for he did not understand what
+it was all about, confused as he was by so many surfaces and so many accidents that
+smote cruelly on his ears, but a sense of shame restrained him. Filled with anguish
+and breaking into a cold perspiration, he began to repeat between his teeth: “The
+name of mirror is applied to all polished surfaces—”
+</p>
+<p>“<i lang="la">Ergo, per te</i>, the mirror is the surface,” angled the professor. “Well, then, clear up this difficulty.
+If the surface is the mirror, it must be of no consequence to the ‘essence’ of the
+mirror what may be found behind this surface, since what is behind it does not affect
+the ‘essence’ that is before it, <i lang="la">id est</i>, the surface, <i lang="la">quae super faciem est, quia vocatur superficies, facies ea quae supra videtur</i>. Do you admit that or do you not admit it?”
+</p>
+<p>The poor youth’s hair stood up straighter than ever, as though acted upon by some
+magnetic force.
+</p>
+<p>“Do you admit it or do you not admit it?”
+</p>
+<p>“Anything! Whatever you wish, Padre,” was his thought, but he did not dare to express
+it from fear of ridicule. That was a dilemma indeed, and he had never been in a worse
+one. He had a vague idea that the most innocent thing could not be admitted to the
+friars but that they, or rather their estates and curacies, would get out of it all
+the results and advantages imaginable. So his good angel prompted him to deny everything
+with all the energy <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2116">[<a href="#xd32e2116">120</a>]</span>of his soul and refractoriness of his hair, and he was about to shout a proud <i>nego</i>, for the reason that he who denies everything does not compromise himself in anything,
+as a certain lawyer had once told him; but the evil habit of disregarding the dictates
+of one’s own conscience, of having little faith in legal folk, and of seeking aid
+from others where one is sufficient unto himself, was his undoing. His companions,
+especially Juanito Pelaez, were making signs to him to admit it, so he let himself
+be carried away by his evil destiny and exclaimed, “<i lang="la">Concedo</i>, Padre,” in a voice as faltering as though he were saying, “<i lang="la">In manus tuas commendo spiritum meum.</i>”
+</p>
+<p>“<i lang="la">Concedo antecedentum</i>,” echoed the professor, smiling maliciously. “<i>Ergo</i>, I can scratch the mercury off a looking-glass, put in its place a piece of <i>bibinka</i>, and we shall still have a mirror, eh? Now what shall we have?”
+</p>
+<p>The youth gazed at his prompters, but seeing them surprised and speechless, contracted
+his features into an expression of bitterest reproach. “<i lang="la">Deus meus, Deus meus, quare dereliquiste me,</i>” said his troubled eyes, while his lips muttered “<i>Linintikan!</i>” Vainly he coughed, fumbled at his shirt-bosom, stood first on one foot and then
+on the other, but found no answer.
+</p>
+<p>“Come now, what have we?” urged the professor, enjoying the effect of his reasoning.
+</p>
+<p>“<i>Bibinka!</i>” whispered Juanito Pelaez. “<i>Bibinka!</i>”
+</p>
+<p>“Shut up, you fool!” cried the desperate youth, hoping to get out of the difficulty
+by turning it into a complaint.
+</p>
+<p>“Let’s see, Juanito, if you can answer the question for me,” the professor then said
+to Pelaez, who was one of his pets.
+</p>
+<p>The latter rose slowly, not without first giving Penitente, who followed him on the
+roll, a nudge that meant, “Don’t forget to prompt me.”
+</p>
+<p>“<i lang="la">Nego consequentiam</i>, Padre,” he replied resolutely.
+</p>
+<p>“Aha, then <i lang="la">probo consequentiam! Per te</i>, the polished surface constitutes the ‘essence’ of the mirror—”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2163">[<a href="#xd32e2163">121</a>]</span></p>
+<p><i lang="la">“Nego suppositum!”</i> interrupted Juanito, as he felt Placido pulling at his coat.
+</p>
+<p>“How? <i lang="la">Per te</i>—”
+</p>
+<p>“<i>Nego!</i>”
+</p>
+<p>“<i>Ergo,</i> you believe that what is behind affects what is in front?”
+</p>
+<p><i>“Nego!”</i> the student cried with still more ardor, feeling another jerk at his coat.
+</p>
+<p>Juanito, or rather Placido, who was prompting him, was unconsciously adopting Chinese
+tactics: not to admit the most inoffensive foreigner in order not to be invaded.
+</p>
+<p>“Then where are we?” asked the professor, somewhat disconcerted, and looking uneasily
+at the refractory student. “Does the substance behind affect, or does it not affect,
+the surface?”
+</p>
+<p>To this precise and categorical question, a kind of ultimatum, Juanito did not know
+what to reply and his coat offered no suggestions. In vain he made signs to Placido,
+but Placido himself was in doubt. Juanito then took advantage of a moment in which
+the professor was staring at a student who was cautiously and secretly taking off
+the shoes that hurt his feet, to step heavily on Placido’s toes and whisper, “Tell
+me, hurry up, tell me!”
+</p>
+<p>“I distinguish—Get out! What an ass you are!” yelled Placido unreservedly, as he stared
+with angry eyes and rubbed his hand over his patent-leather shoe.
+</p>
+<p>The professor heard the cry, stared at the pair, and guessed what had happened.
+</p>
+<p>“Listen, you meddler,” he addressed Placido, “I wasn’t questioning you, but since
+you think you can save others, let’s see if you can save yourself, <i>salva te ipsum,</i> and decide this question.”
+</p>
+<p>Juanito sat down in content, and as a mark of gratitude stuck out his tongue at his
+prompter, who had arisen blushing with shame and muttering incoherent excuses.
+</p>
+<p>For a moment Padre Millon regarded him as one gloating over a favorite dish. What
+a good thing it would be <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2197">[<a href="#xd32e2197">122</a>]</span>to humiliate and hold up to ridicule that dudish boy, always smartly dressed, with
+head erect and serene look! It would be a deed of charity, so the charitable professor
+applied himself to it with all his heart, slowly repeating the question.
+</p>
+<p>“The book says that the metallic mirrors are made of brass and an alloy of different
+metals—is that true or is it not true?”
+</p>
+<p>“So the book says, Padre.”
+</p>
+<p>“<i lang="la">Liber dixit, ergo ita est</i>. Don’t pretend that you know more than the book does. It then adds that the glass
+mirrors are made of a sheet of glass whose two surfaces are well polished, one of
+them having applied to it an amalgam of tin, <i>nota bene</i>, an amalgam of tin! Is that true?”
+</p>
+<p>“If the book says so, Padre.”
+</p>
+<p>“Is tin a metal?”
+</p>
+<p>“It seems so, Padre. The book says so.”
+</p>
+<p>“It is, it is, and the word amalgam means that it is compounded with mercury, which
+is also a metal. <i>Ergo</i>, a glass mirror is a metallic mirror; <i>ergo</i>, the terms of the distinction are confused; <i>ergo</i>, the classification is imperfect—how do you explain that, meddler?”
+</p>
+<p>He emphasized the <i>ergos</i> and the familiar “you’s” with indescribable relish, at the same time winking, as
+though to say, “You’re done for.”
+</p>
+<p>“It means that, it means that—” stammered Placido.
+</p>
+<p>“It means that you haven’t learned the lesson, you petty meddler, you don’t understand
+it yourself, and yet you prompt your neighbor!”
+</p>
+<p>The class took no offense, but on the contrary many thought the epithet funny and
+laughed. Placido bit his lips.
+</p>
+<p>“What’s your name?” the professor asked him.
+</p>
+<p>“Placido,” was the curt reply.
+</p>
+<p>“Aha! Placido Penitente, although you look more like Placido the Prompter—or the Prompted.
+But, <i>Penitent</i>, I’m going to impose some <i>penance</i> on you for your promptings.”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2235">[<a href="#xd32e2235">123</a>]</span></p>
+<p>Pleased with his play on words, he ordered the youth to recite the lesson, and the
+latter, in the state of mind to which he was reduced, made more than three mistakes.
+Shaking his head up and down, the professor slowly opened the register and slowly
+scanned it while he called off the names in a low voice.
+</p>
+<p>“Palencia—Palomo—Panganiban—Pedraza—Pelado—Pelaez—Penitents, aha! Placido Penitente,
+fifteen unexcused absences—”
+</p>
+<p>Placido started up. “Fifteen absences, Padre?”
+</p>
+<p>“Fifteen unexcused absences,” continued the professor, “so that you only lack one
+to be dropped from the roll.”
+</p>
+<p>“Fifteen absences, fifteen absences,” repeated Placido in amazement. “I’ve never been
+absent more than four times, and with today, perhaps five.”
+</p>
+<p>“Jesso, jesso, monseer,”<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e2244src" href="#xd32e2244">3</a> replied the professor, examining the youth over his gold eye-glasses. “You confess
+that you have missed five times, and God knows if you may have missed oftener. <i>Atqui</i>, as I rarely call the roll, every time I catch any one I put five marks against him;
+<i>ergo</i>, how many are five times five? Have you forgotten the multiplication table? Five
+times five?”
+</p>
+<p>“Twenty-five.”
+</p>
+<p>“Correct, correct! Thus you’ve still got away with ten, because I have caught you
+only three times. Huh, if I had caught you every time—Now, how many are three times
+five?”
+</p>
+<p>“Fifteen.”
+</p>
+<p>“Fifteen, right you are!” concluded the professor, closing the register. “If you miss
+once more—out of doors with you, get out! Ah, now a mark for the failure in the daily
+lesson.”
+</p>
+<p>He again opened the register, sought out the name, and entered the mark. “Come, only
+one mark,” he said, “since you hadn’t any before.”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2257">[<a href="#xd32e2257">124</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“But, Padre,” exclaimed Placido, restraining himself, “if your Reverence puts a mark
+against me for failing in the lesson, your Reverence owes it to me to erase the one
+for absence that you have put against me for today.”
+</p>
+<p>His Reverence made no answer. First he slowly entered the mark, then contemplated
+it with his head on one side,—the mark must be artistic,—closed the register, and
+asked with great sarcasm, “<i>Abá</i>, and why so, sir?”
+</p>
+<p>“Because I can’t conceive, Padre, how one can be absent from the class and at the
+same time recite the lesson in it. Your Reverence is saying that to be is not to be.”
+</p>
+<p>“<i>Nakú</i>, a metaphysician, but a rather premature one! So you can’t conceive of it, eh? <i lang="la">Sed patet experientia</i> and <i lang="la">contra experientiam negantem, fusilibus est arguendum</i>, do you understand? And can’t you conceive, with your philosophical head, that one
+can be absent from the class and not know the lesson at the same time? Is it a fact
+that absence necessarily implies knowledge? What do you say to that, philosophaster?”
+</p>
+<p>This last epithet was the drop of water that made the full cup overflow. Placido enjoyed
+among his friends the reputation of being a philosopher, so he lost his patience,
+threw down his book, arose, and faced the professor.
+</p>
+<p>“Enough, Padre, enough! Your Reverence can put all the marks against me that you wish,
+but you haven’t the right to insult me. Your Reverence may stay with the class, I
+can’t stand any more.” Without further farewell, he stalked away.
+</p>
+<p>The class was astounded; such an assumption of dignity had scarcely ever been seen,
+and who would have thought it of Placido Penitente? The surprised professor bit his
+lips and shook his head threateningly as he watched him depart. Then in a trembling
+voice he began his preachment on the same old theme, delivered however with more energy
+and more eloquence. It dealt with the growing arrogance, the innate ingratitude, the
+presumption, the lack of respect for superiors, the pride that the spirit of darkness
+infused in the <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2279">[<a href="#xd32e2279">125</a>]</span>young, the lack of manners, the absence of courtesy, and so on. From this he passed
+to coarse jests and sarcasm over the presumption which some good-for-nothing “prompters”
+had of teaching their teachers by establishing an academy for instruction in Castilian.
+</p>
+<p>“Aha, aha!” he moralized, “those who the day before yesterday scarcely knew how to
+say, ‘Yes, Padre,’ ‘No, Padre,’ now want to know more than those who have grown gray
+teaching them. He who wishes to learn, will learn, academies or no academies! Undoubtedly
+that fellow who has just gone out is one of those in the project. Castilian is in
+good hands with such guardians! When are you going to get the time to attend the academy
+if you have scarcely enough to fulfill your duties in the regular classes? We wish
+that you may all know Spanish and that you pronounce it well, so that you won’t split
+our ear-drums with your twist of expression and your ‘p’s’;<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e2283src" href="#xd32e2283">4</a> but first business and then pleasure: finish your studies first, and afterwards learn
+Castilian, and all become clerks, if you so wish.”
+</p>
+<p>So he went on with his harangue until the bell rang and the class was over. The two
+hundred and thirty-four students, after reciting their prayers, went out as ignorant
+as when they went in, but breathing more freely, as if a great weight had been lifted
+from them. Each youth had lost another hour of his life and with it a portion of his
+dignity and self-respect, and in exchange there was an increase of discontent, of
+aversion to study, of resentment in their hearts. After all this ask for knowledge,
+dignity, gratitude!
+</p>
+<p><i lang="la">De nobis, post haec, tristis sententia fertur</i>!
+</p>
+<p>Just as the two hundred and thirty-four spent their class hours, so the thousands
+of students who preceded them have spent theirs, and, if matters do not mend, so will
+those yet to come spend theirs, and be brutalized, while wounded dignity and youthful
+enthusiasm will be converted into <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2297">[<a href="#xd32e2297">126</a>]</span>hatred and sloth, like the waves that become polluted along one part of the shore
+and roll on one after another, each in succession depositing a larger sediment of
+filth. But yet He who from eternity watches the consequences of a deed develop like
+a thread through the loom of the centuries, He who weighs the value of a second and
+has ordained for His creatures as an elemental law progress and development, He, if
+He is just, will demand a strict accounting from those who must render it, of the
+millions of intelligences darkened and blinded, of human dignity trampled upon in
+millions of His creatures, and of the incalculable time lost and effort wasted! And
+if the teachings of the Gospel are based on truth, so also will these have to answer—the
+millions and millions who do not know how to preserve the light of their intelligences
+and their dignity of mind, as the master demanded an accounting from the cowardly
+servant for the talent that he let be taken from him.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2299">[<a href="#xd32e2299">127</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e2049" lang="en">
+<p class="footnote" lang="en"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e2049src">1</a></span> “To lie about the stars is a safe kind of lying.”—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e2049src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e2060">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e2060src">2</a></span> Throughout this chapter the professor uses the familiar <i>tu</i> in addressing the students, thus giving his remarks a contemptuous tone.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e2060src" title="Return to note 2 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e2244">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e2244src">3</a></span> The professor speaks these words in vulgar dialect.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e2244src" title="Return to note 3 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e2283">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e2283src">4</a></span> To confuse the letters <i>p</i> and <i>f</i> in speaking Spanish was a common error among uneducated Filipinos.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e2283src" title="Return to note 4 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch14" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e343">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XIV</h2>
+<h2 class="main">In the House of the Students</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">The house where Makaraig lived was worth visiting. Large and spacious, with two entresols
+provided with elegant gratings, it seemed to be a school during the first hours of
+the morning and pandemonium from ten o’clock on. During the boarders’ recreation hours,
+from the lower hallway of the spacious entrance up to the main floor, there was a
+bubbling of laughter, shouts, and movement. Boys in scanty clothing played <i>sipa</i> or practised gymnastic exercises on improvised trapezes, while on the staircase a
+fight was in progress between eight or nine armed with canes, sticks, and ropes, but
+neither attackers nor attacked did any great damage, their blows generally falling
+sidewise upon the shoulders of the Chinese pedler who was there selling his outlandish
+mixtures and indigestible pastries. Crowds of boys surrounded him, pulled at his already
+disordered queue, snatched pies from him, haggled over the prices, and committed a
+thousand deviltries. The Chinese yelled, swore, forswore, in all the languages he
+could jabber, not omitting his own; he whimpered, laughed, pleaded, put on a smiling
+face when an ugly one would not serve, or the reverse.
+</p>
+<p>He cursed them as devils, savages, <i>no kilistanos</i><a class="noteRef" id="xd32e2311src" href="#xd32e2311">1</a> but that mattered nothing. A whack would bring his face around smiling, and if the
+blow fell only upon his shoulders he would calmly continue his business transactions,
+contenting himself with crying out to them that he was not in the game, but if it
+struck the flat basket on which were placed his wares, then he would swear never to
+come again, as he <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2317">[<a href="#xd32e2317">128</a>]</span>poured out upon them all the imprecations and anathemas imaginable. Then the boys
+would redouble their efforts to make him rage the more, and when at last his vocabulary
+was exhausted and they were satiated with his fearful mixtures, they paid him religiously,
+and sent him away happy, winking, chuckling to himself, and receiving as caresses
+the light blows from their canes that the students gave him as tokens of farewell.
+</p>
+<p>Concerts on the piano and violin, the guitar, and the accordion, alternated with the
+continual clashing of blades from the fencing lessons. Around a long, wide table the
+students of the Ateneo prepared their compositions or solved their problems by the
+side of others writing to their sweethearts on pink perforated note-paper covered
+with drawings. Here one was composing a melodrama at the side of another practising
+on the flute, from which he drew wheezy notes. Over there, the older boys, students
+in professional courses, who affected silk socks and embroidered slippers, amused
+themselves in teasing the smaller boys by pulling their ears, already red from repeated
+fillips, while two or three held down a little fellow who yelled and cried, defending
+himself with his feet against being reduced to the condition in which he was born,
+kicking and howling. In one room, around a small table, four were playing <i lang="es">revesino</i> with laughter and jokes, to the great annoyance of another who pretended to be studying
+his lesson but who was in reality waiting his turn to play.
+</p>
+<p>Still another came in with exaggerated wonder, scandalized as he approached the table.
+“How wicked you are! So early in the morning and already gambling! Let’s see, let’s
+see! You fool, take it with the three of spades!” Closing his book, he too joined
+in the game.
+</p>
+<p>Cries and blows were heard. Two boys were fighting in the adjoining room—a lame student
+who was very sensitive about his infirmity and an unhappy newcomer from the provinces
+who was just commencing his studies. He was working over a treatise on philosophy
+and reading innocently <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2327">[<a href="#xd32e2327">129</a>]</span>in a loud voice, with a wrong accent, the Cartesian principle: “<i lang="la">Cogito, ergo sum!</i>”
+</p>
+<p>The little lame boy (<i>el cojito</i>) took this as an insult and the others intervened to restore peace, but in reality
+only to sow discord and come to blows themselves.
+</p>
+<p>In the dining-room a young man with a can of sardines, a bottle of wine, and the provisions
+that he had just brought from his town, was making heroic efforts to the end that
+his friends might participate in his lunch, while they were offering in their turn
+heroic resistance to his invitation. Others were bathing on the azotea, playing firemen
+with the water from the well, and joining in combats with pails of water, to the great
+delight of the spectators.
+</p>
+<p>But the noise and shouts gradually died away with the coming of leading students,
+summoned by Makaraig to report to them the progress of the academy of Castilian. Isagani
+was cordially greeted, as was also the Peninsular, Sandoval, who had come to Manila
+as a government employee and was finishing his studies, and who had completely identified
+himself with the cause of the Filipino students. The barriers that politics had established
+between the races had disappeared in the schoolroom as though dissolved by the zeal
+of science and youth.
+</p>
+<p>From lack of lyceums and scientific, literary, or political centers, Sandoval took
+advantage of all the meetings to cultivate his great oratorical gifts, delivering
+speeches and arguing on any subject, to draw forth applause from his friends and listeners.
+At that moment the subject of conversation was the instruction in Castilian, but as
+Makaraig had not yet arrived conjecture was still the order of the day.
+</p>
+<p>“What can have happened?”
+</p>
+<p>“What has the General decided?”
+</p>
+<p>“Has he refused the permit?”
+</p>
+<p>“Has Padre Irene or Padre Sibyla won?”
+</p>
+<p>Such were the questions they asked one another, questions that could be answered only
+by Makaraig.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2346">[<a href="#xd32e2346">130</a>]</span></p>
+<p>Among the young men gathered together there were optimists like Isagani and Sandoval,
+who saw the thing already accomplished and talked of congratulations and praise from
+the government for the patriotism of the students—outbursts of optimism that led Juanito
+Pelaez to claim for himself a large part of the glory of founding the society.
+</p>
+<p>All this was answered by the pessimist Pecson, a chubby youth with a wide, clownish
+grin, who spoke of outside influences, whether the Bishop A., the Padre B., or the
+Provincial C., had been consulted or not, whether or not they had advised that the
+whole association should be put in jail—a suggestion that made Juanito Pelaez so uneasy
+that he stammered out, “<i>Carambas</i>, don’t you drag me into—”
+</p>
+<p>Sandoval, as a Peninsular and a liberal, became furious at this. “But pshaw!” he exclaimed,
+“that is holding a bad opinion of his Excellency! I know that he’s quite a friar-lover,
+but in such a matter as this he won’t let the friars interfere. Will you tell me,
+Pecson, on what you base your belief that the General has no judgment of his own?”
+</p>
+<p>“I didn’t say that, Sandoval,” replied Pecson, grinning until he exposed his wisdom-tooth.
+“For me the General has <i>his own</i> judgment, that is, the judgment of all those within his reach. That’s plain!”
+</p>
+<p>“You’re dodging—cite me a fact, cite me a fact!” cried Sandoval. “Let’s get away from
+hollow arguments, from empty phrases, and get on the solid ground of facts,”—this
+with an elegant gesture. “Facts, gentlemen, facts! The rest is prejudice—I won’t call
+it filibusterism.”
+</p>
+<p>Pecson smiled like one of the blessed as he retorted, “There comes the filibusterism.
+But can’t we enter into a discussion without resorting to accusations?”
+</p>
+<p>Sandoval protested in a little extemporaneous speech, again demanding facts.
+</p>
+<p>“Well, not long ago there was a dispute between some private persons and certain friars,
+and the acting Governor <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2363">[<a href="#xd32e2363">131</a>]</span>rendered a decision that it should be settled by the Provincial of the Order concerned,”
+replied Pecson, again breaking out into a laugh, as though he were dealing with an
+insignificant matter, he cited names and dates, and promised documents that would
+prove how justice was dispensed.
+</p>
+<p>“But, on what ground, tell me this, on what ground can they refuse permission for
+what plainly appears to be extremely useful and necessary?” asked Sandoval.
+</p>
+<p>Pecson shrugged his shoulders. “It’s that it endangers the integrity of the fatherland,”
+he replied in the tone of a notary reading an allegation.
+</p>
+<p>“That’s pretty good! What has the integrity of the fatherland to do with the rules
+of syntax?”
+</p>
+<p>“The Holy Mother Church has learned doctors—what do I know? Perhaps it is feared that
+we may come to understand the laws so that we can obey them. What will become of the
+Philippines on the day when we understand one another?”
+</p>
+<p>Sandoval did not relish the dialectic and jesting turn of the conversation; along
+that path could rise no speech worth the while. “Don’t make a joke of things!” he
+exclaimed. “This is a serious matter.”
+</p>
+<p>“The Lord deliver me from joking when there are friars concerned!”
+</p>
+<p>“But, on what do you base—”
+</p>
+<p>“On the fact that, the hours for the classes having to come at night,” continued Pecson
+in the same tone, as if he were quoting known and recognized formulas, “there may
+be invoked as an obstacle the immorality of the thing, as was done in the case of
+the school at Malolos.”
+</p>
+<p>“Another! But don’t the classes of the Academy of Drawing, and the novenaries and
+the processions, cover themselves with the mantle of night?”
+</p>
+<p>“The scheme affects the dignity of the University,” went on the chubby youth, taking
+no notice of the question.
+</p>
+<p>“Affects nothing! The University has to accommodate <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2378">[<a href="#xd32e2378">132</a>]</span>itself to the needs of the students. And granting that, what is a university then?
+Is it an institution to discourage study? Have a few men banded themselves together
+in the name of learning and instruction in order to prevent others from becoming enlightened?”
+</p>
+<p>“The fact is that movements initiated from below are regarded as discontent—”
+</p>
+<p>“What about projects that come from above?” interpolated one of the students. “There’s
+the School of Arts and Trades!”
+</p>
+<p>“Slowly, slowly, gentlemen,” protested Sandoval. “I’m not a friar-lover, my liberal
+views being well known, but render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. Of that School
+of Arts and Trades, of which I have been the most enthusiastic supporter and the realization
+of which I shall greet as the first streak of dawn for these fortunate islands, of
+that School of Arts and Trades the friars have taken charge—”
+</p>
+<p>“Or the cat of the canary, which amounts to the same thing,” added Pecson, in his
+turn interrupting the speech.
+</p>
+<p>“Get out!” cried Sandoval, enraged at the interruption, which had caused him to lose
+the thread of his long, well-rounded sentence. “As long as we hear nothing bad, let’s
+not be pessimists, let’s not be unjust, doubting the liberty and independence of the
+government.”
+</p>
+<p>Here he entered upon a defense in beautiful phraseology of the government and its
+good intentions, a subject that Pecson dared not break in upon.
+</p>
+<p>“The Spanish government,” he said among other things, “has given you everything, it
+has denied you nothing! We had absolutism in Spain and you had absolutism here; the
+friars covered our soil with conventos, and conventos occupy a third part of Manila;
+in Spain the garrote prevails and here the garrote is the extreme punishment; we are
+Catholics and we have made you Catholics; we were scholastics and scholasticism sheds
+its light in your college halls; in short, gentlemen, we weep when you weep, we suffer
+when <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2388">[<a href="#xd32e2388">133</a>]</span>you suffer, we have the same altars, the same courts, the same punishments, and it
+is only just that we should give you our rights and our joys.”
+</p>
+<p>As no one interrupted him, he became more and more enthusiastic, until he came to
+speak of the future of the Philippines.
+</p>
+<p>“As I have said, gentlemen, the dawn is not far distant. Spain is now breaking the
+eastern sky for her beloved Philippines, and the times are changing, as I positively
+know, faster than we imagine. This government, which, according to you, is vacillating
+and weak, should be strengthened by our confidence, that we may make it see that it
+is the custodian of our hopes. Let us remind it by our conduct (should it ever forget
+itself, which I do not believe can happen) that we have faith in its good intentions
+and that it should be guided by no other standard than justice and the welfare of
+all the governed. No, gentlemen,” he went on in a tone more and more declamatory,
+“we must not admit at all in this matter the possibility of a consultation with other
+more or less hostile entities, as such a supposition would imply our resignation to
+the fact. Your conduct up to the present has been frank, loyal, without vacillation,
+above suspicion; you have addressed it simply and directly; the reasons you have presented
+could not be more sound; your aim is to lighten the labor of the teachers in the first
+years and to facilitate study among the hundreds of students who fill the college
+halls and for whom one solitary professor cannot suffice. If up to the present the
+petition has not been granted, it has been for the reason, as I feel sure, that there
+has been a great deal of material accumulated, but I predict that the campaign is
+won, that the summons of Makaraig is to announce to us the victory, and tomorrow we
+shall see our efforts crowned with the applause and appreciation of the country, and
+who knows, gentlemen, but that the government may confer upon you some handsome decoration
+of merit, benefactors as you are of the fatherland!”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2393">[<a href="#xd32e2393">134</a>]</span></p>
+<p>Enthusiastic applause resounded. All immediately believed in the triumph, and many
+in the decoration.
+</p>
+<p>“Let it be remembered, gentlemen,” observed Juanito, “that I was one of the first
+to propose it.”
+</p>
+<p>The pessimist Pecson was not so enthusiastic. “Just so we don’t get that decoration
+on our ankles,” he remarked, but fortunately for Pelaez this comment was not heard
+in the midst of the applause.
+</p>
+<p>When they had quieted down a little, Pecson replied, “Good, good, very good, but one
+supposition: if in spite of all that, the General consults and consults and consults,
+and afterwards refuses the permit?”
+</p>
+<p>This question fell like a dash of cold water. All turned to Sandoval, who was taken
+aback. “Then—” he stammered.
+</p>
+<p>“Then?”
+</p>
+<p>“Then,” he exclaimed in a burst of enthusiasm, still excited by the applause, “seeing
+that in writing and in printing it boasts of desiring your enlightenment, and yet
+hinders and denies it when called upon to make it a reality—then, gentlemen, your
+efforts will not have been in vain, you will have accomplished what no one else has
+been able to do. Make them drop the mask and fling down the gauntlet to you!”
+</p>
+<p>“Bravo, bravo!” cried several enthusiastically.
+</p>
+<p>“Good for Sandoval! Hurrah for the gauntlet!” added others.
+</p>
+<p>“Let them fling down the gauntlet to us!” repeated Pecson disdainfully. “But afterwards?”
+</p>
+<p>Sandoval seemed to be cut short in his triumph, but with the vivacity peculiar to
+his race and his oratorical temperament he had an immediate reply.
+</p>
+<p>“Afterwards?” he asked. “Afterwards, if none of the Filipinos dare to accept the challenge,
+then I, Sandoval, in the name of Spain, will take up the gauntlet, because such a
+policy would give the lie to the good intentions that she has always cherished toward
+her provinces, and because <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2409">[<a href="#xd32e2409">135</a>]</span>he who is thus faithless to the trust reposed in him and abuses his unlimited authority
+deserves neither the protection of the fatherland nor the support of any Spanish citizen!”
+</p>
+<p>The enthusiasm of his hearers broke all bounds. Isagani embraced him, the others following
+his example. They talked of the fatherland, of union, of fraternity, of fidelity.
+The Filipinos declared that if there were only Sandovals in Spain all would be Sandovals
+in the Philippines. His eyes glistened, and it might well be believed that if at that
+moment any kind of gauntlet had been flung at him he would have leaped upon any kind
+of horse to ride to death for the Philippines.
+</p>
+<p>The “cold water” alone replied: “Good, that’s very good, Sandoval. I could also say
+the same if I were a Peninsular, but not being one, if I should say one half of what
+you have, you yourself would take me for a filibuster.”
+</p>
+<p>Sandoval began a speech in protest, but was interrupted.
+</p>
+<p>“Rejoice, friends, rejoice! Victory!” cried a youth who entered at that moment and
+began to embrace everybody.
+</p>
+<p>“Rejoice, friends! Long live the Castilian tongue!”
+</p>
+<p>An outburst of applause greeted this announcement. They fell to embracing one another
+and their eyes filled with tears. Pecson alone preserved his skeptical smile.
+</p>
+<p>The bearer of such good news was Makaraig, the young man at the head of the movement.
+This student occupied in that house, by himself, two rooms, luxuriously furnished,
+and had his servant and a cochero to look after his carriage and horses. He was of
+robust carriage, of refined manners, fastidiously dressed, and very rich. Although
+studying law only that he might have an academic degree, he enjoyed a reputation for
+diligence, and as a logician in the scholastic way had no cause to envy the most frenzied
+quibblers of the University faculty. Nevertheless he was not very far behind in regard
+to modern ideas and progress, for his fortune enabled him to have all the books and
+magazines that <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2419">[<a href="#xd32e2419">136</a>]</span>a watchful censor was unable to keep out. With these qualifications and his reputation
+for courage, his fortunate associations in his earlier years, and his refined and
+delicate courtesy, it was not strange that he should exercise such great influence
+over his associates and that he should have been chosen to carry out such a difficult
+undertaking as that of the instruction in Castilian.
+</p>
+<p>After the first outburst of enthusiasm, which in youth always takes hold in such exaggerated
+forms, since youth finds everything beautiful, they wanted to be informed how the
+affair had been managed.
+</p>
+<p>“I saw Padre Irene this morning,” said Makaraig with a certain air of mystery.
+</p>
+<p>“Hurrah for Padre Irene!” cried an enthusiastic student.
+</p>
+<p>“Padre Irene,” continued Makaraig, “has told me about everything that took place at
+Los Baños. It seems that they disputed for at least a week, he supporting and defending
+our case against all of them, against Padre Sibyla, Padre Fernandez, Padre Salvi,
+the General, the jeweler Simoun—”
+</p>
+<p>“The jeweler Simoun!” interrupted one of his listeners. “What has that Jew to do with
+the affairs of our country? We enrich him by buying—”
+</p>
+<p>“Keep quiet!” admonished another impatiently, anxious to learn how Padre Irene had
+been able to overcome such formidable opponents.
+</p>
+<p>“There were even high officials who were opposed to our project, the Head Secretary,
+the Civil Governor, Quiroga the Chinaman—”
+</p>
+<p>“Quiroga the Chinaman! The pimp of the—”
+</p>
+<p>“Shut up!”
+</p>
+<p>“At last,” resumed Makaraig, “they were going to pigeonhole the petition and let it
+sleep for months and months, when Padre Irene remembered the Superior Commission of
+Primary Instruction and proposed, since the matter concerned the teaching of the Castilian
+tongue, that <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2433">[<a href="#xd32e2433">137</a>]</span>the petition be referred to that body for a report upon it.”
+</p>
+<p>“But that Commission hasn’t been in operation for a long time,” observed Pecson.
+</p>
+<p>“That’s exactly what they replied to Padre Irene, and he answered that this was a
+good opportunity to revive it, and availing himself of the presence of Don Custodio,
+one of its members, he proposed on the spot that a committee should be appointed.
+Don Custodio’s activity being known and recognized, he was named as arbiter and the
+petition is now in his hands. He promised that he would settle it this month.”
+</p>
+<p>“Hurrah for Don Custodio!”
+</p>
+<p>“But suppose Don Custodio should report unfavorably upon it?” inquired the pessimist
+Pecson.
+</p>
+<p>Upon this they had not reckoned, being intoxicated with the thought that the matter
+would not be pigeonholed, so they all turned to Makaraig to learn how it could be
+arranged.
+</p>
+<p>“The same objection I presented to Padre Irene, but with his sly smile he said to
+me: ‘We’ve won a great deal, we have succeeded in getting the matter on the road to
+a decision, the opposition sees itself forced to join battle.’ If we can bring some
+influence to bear upon Don Custodio so that he, in accordance with his liberal tendencies,
+may report favorably, all is won, for the General showed himself to be absolutely
+neutral.”
+</p>
+<p>Makaraig paused, and an impatient listener asked, “How can we influence him?”
+</p>
+<p>“Padre Irene pointed out to me two ways—”
+</p>
+<p>“Quiroga,” some one suggested.
+</p>
+<p>“Pshaw, great use Quiroga—”
+</p>
+<p>“A fine present.”
+</p>
+<p>“No, that won’t do, for he prides himself upon being incorruptible.”
+</p>
+<p>“Ah, yes, I know!” exclaimed Pecson with a laugh. “Pepay the dancing girl.”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2450">[<a href="#xd32e2450">138</a>]</span>
+“Ah, yes, Pepay the dancing girl,” echoed several.
+</p>
+<p>This Pepay was a showy girl, supposed to be a great friend of Don Custodio. To her
+resorted the contractors, the employees, the intriguers, when they wanted to get something
+from the celebrated councilor. Juanito Pelaez, who was also a great friend of the
+dancing girl, offered to look after the matter, but Isagani shook his head, saying
+that it was sufficient that they had made use of Padre Irene and that it would be
+going too far to avail themselves of Pepay in such an affair.
+</p>
+<p>“Show us the other way.”
+</p>
+<p>“The other way is to apply to his attorney and adviser, Señor Pasta, the oracle before
+whom Don Custodio bows.”
+</p>
+<p>“I prefer that,” said Isagani. “Señor Pasta is a Filipino, and was a schoolmate of
+my uncle’s. But how can we interest him?”
+</p>
+<p>“There’s the <i>quid</i>,” replied Makaraig, looking earnestly at Isagani. “Señor Pasta has a dancing girl—I
+mean, a seamstress.”
+</p>
+<p>Isagani again shook his head.
+</p>
+<p>“Don’t be such a puritan,” Juanito Pelaez said to him. “The end justifies the means!
+I know the seamstress, Matea, for she has a shop where a lot of girls work.”
+</p>
+<p>“No, gentlemen,” declared Isagani, “let’s first employ decent methods. I’ll go to
+Señor Pasta and, if I don’t accomplish anything, then you can do what you wish with
+the dancing girls and seamstresses.”
+</p>
+<p>They had to accept this proposition, agreeing that Isagani should talk to Señor Pasta
+that very day, and in the afternoon report to his associates at the University the
+result of the interview.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2466">[<a href="#xd32e2466">139</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e2311">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e2311src">1</a></span> <i>No cristianos</i>, not Christians, <i>i.e</i>., savages.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e2311src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch15" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e353">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XV</h2>
+<h2 class="main">Señor Pasta</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">Isagani presented himself in the house of the lawyer, one of the most talented minds
+in Manila, whom the friars consulted in their great difficulties. The youth had to
+wait some time on account of the numerous clients, but at last his turn came and he
+entered the office, or <i>bufete</i>, as it is generally called in the Philippines. The lawyer received him with a slight
+cough, looking down furtively at his feet, but he did not rise or offer a seat, as
+he went on writing. This gave Isagani an opportunity for observation and careful study
+of the lawyer, who had aged greatly. His hair was gray and his baldness extended over
+nearly the whole crown of his head. His countenance was sour and austere.
+</p>
+<p>There was complete silence in the study, except for the whispers of the clerks and
+understudies who were at work in an adjoining room. Their pens scratched as though
+quarreling with the paper.
+</p>
+<p>At length the lawyer finished what he was writing, laid down his pen, raised his head,
+and, recognizing the youth, let his face light up with a smile as he extended his
+hand affectionately.
+</p>
+<p>“Welcome, young man! But sit down, and excuse me, for I didn’t know that it was you.
+How is your uncle?”
+</p>
+<p>Isagani took courage, believing that his case would get on well. He related briefly
+what had been done, the while studying the effect of his words. Señor Pasta listened
+impassively at first and, although he was informed of the efforts of the students,
+pretended ignorance, as if to show that he had nothing to do with such childish matters,
+but when he began to suspect what was wanted of him and <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2480">[<a href="#xd32e2480">140</a>]</span>heard mention of the Vice-Rector, friars, the Captain-General, a project, and so on,
+his face slowly darkened and he finally exclaimed, “This is the land of projects!
+But go on, go on!”
+</p>
+<p>Isagani was not yet discouraged. He spoke of the manner in which a decision was to
+be reached and concluded with an expression of the confidence which the young men
+entertained that he, Señor Pasta, would <i>intercede</i> in their behalf in case Don Custodio should consult him, as was to be expected. He
+did not dare to say would <i>advise</i>, deterred by the wry face the lawyer put on.
+</p>
+<p>But Señor Pasta had already formed his resolution, and it was not to mix at all in
+the affair, either as consulter or consulted. He was familiar with what had occurred
+at Los Baños, he knew that there existed two factions, and that Padre Irene was not
+the only champion on the side of the students, nor had he been the one who proposed
+submitting the petition to the Commission of Primary Instruction, but quite the contrary.
+Padre Irene, Padre Fernandez, the Countess, a merchant who expected to sell the materials
+for the new academy, and the high official who had been citing royal decree after
+royal decree, were about to triumph, when Padre Sibyla, wishing to gain time, had
+thought of the Commission. All these facts the great lawyer had present in his mind,
+so that when Isagani had finished speaking, he determined to confuse him with evasions,
+tangle the matter up, and lead the conversation to other subjects.
+</p>
+<p>“Yes,” he said, pursing his lips and scratching his head, “there is no one who surpasses
+me in love for the country and in aspirations toward progress, but—I can’t compromise
+myself, I don’t know whether you clearly understand my position, a position that is
+very delicate, I have so many interests, I have to labor within the limits of strict
+prudence, it’s a risk—”
+</p>
+<p>The lawyer sought to bewilder the youth with an exuberance of words, so he went on
+speaking of laws and <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2492">[<a href="#xd32e2492">141</a>]</span>decrees, and talked so much that instead of confusing the youth, he came very near
+to entangling himself in a labyrinth of citations.
+</p>
+<p>“In no way do we wish to compromise you,” replied Isagani with great calmness. “God
+deliver us from injuring in the least the persons whose lives are so useful to the
+rest of the Filipinos! But, as little versed as I may be in the laws, royal decrees,
+writs, and resolutions that obtain in this country, I can’t believe that there can
+be any harm in furthering the high purposes of the government, in trying to secure
+a proper interpretation of these purposes. We are seeking the same end and differ
+only about the means.”
+</p>
+<p>The lawyer smiled, for the youth had allowed himself to wander away from the subject,
+and there where the former was going to entangle him he had already entangled himself.
+</p>
+<p>“That’s exactly the <i>quid</i>, as is vulgarly said. It’s clear that it is laudable to aid the government, when
+one aids it submissively, following out its desires and the true spirit of the laws
+in agreement with the just beliefs of the governing powers, and when not in contradiction
+to the fundamental and general way of thinking of the persons to whom is intrusted
+the common welfare of the individuals that form a social organism. Therefore, it is
+criminal, it is punishable, because it is offensive to the high principle of authority,
+to attempt any action contrary to its initiative, even supposing it to be better than
+the governmental proposition, because such action would injure its prestige, which
+is the elementary basis upon which all colonial edifices rest.”
+</p>
+<p>Confident that this broadside had at least stunned Isagani, the old lawyer fell back
+in his armchair, outwardly very serious, but laughing to himself.
+</p>
+<p>Isagani, however, ventured to reply. “I should think that governments, the more they
+are threatened, would be all the more careful to seek bases that are impregnable.
+The basis of prestige for colonial governments is the weakest <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2504">[<a href="#xd32e2504">142</a>]</span>of all, since it does not depend upon themselves but upon the consent of the governed,
+while the latter are willing to recognize it. The basis of justice or reason would
+seem to be the most durable.”
+</p>
+<p>The lawyer raised his head. How was this—did that youth dare to reply and argue with
+him, <i>him</i>, Señor Pasta? Was he not yet bewildered with his big words?
+</p>
+<p>“Young man, you must put those considerations aside, for they are dangerous,” he declared
+with a wave of his hand. “What I advise is that you let the government attend to its
+own business.”
+</p>
+<p>“Governments are established for the welfare of the peoples, and in order to accomplish
+this purpose properly they have to follow the suggestions of the citizens, who are
+the ones best qualified to understand their own needs.”
+</p>
+<p>“Those who constitute the government are also citizens, and among the most enlightened.”
+</p>
+<p>“But, being men, they are fallible, and ought not to disregard the opinions of others.”
+</p>
+<p>“They must be trusted, they have to attend to everything.”
+</p>
+<p>“There is a Spanish proverb which says, ‘No tears, no milk,’ in other words, ‘To him
+who does not ask, nothing is given.’ ”
+</p>
+<p>“Quite the reverse,” replied the lawyer with a sarcastic smile; “with the government
+exactly the reverse occurs—”
+</p>
+<p>But he suddenly checked himself, as if he had said too much and wished to correct
+his imprudence. “The government has given us things that we have not asked for, and
+that we could not ask for, because to ask—to ask, presupposes that it is in some way
+incompetent and consequently is not performing its functions. To suggest to it a course
+of action, to try to guide it, when not really antagonizing it, is to presuppose that
+it is capable of erring, and as I have already said to you such suppositions are menaces
+to the existence of colonial governments. The common crowd overlooks this and the
+young men who set to work thoughtlessly <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2520">[<a href="#xd32e2520">143</a>]</span>do not know, do not comprehend, do not try to comprehend the counter-effect of asking,
+the menace to order there is in that idea—”
+</p>
+<p>“Pardon me,” interrupted Isagani, offended by the arguments the jurist was using with
+him, “but when by legal methods people ask a government for something, it is because
+they think it good and disposed to grant a blessing, and such action, instead of irritating
+it, should flatter it —to the mother one appeals, never to the stepmother. The government,
+in my humble opinion, is not an omniscient being that can see and anticipate everything,
+and even if it could, it ought not to feel offended, for here you have the church
+itself doing nothing but asking and begging of God, who sees and knows everything,
+and you yourself ask and demand many things in the courts of this same government,
+yet neither God nor the courts have yet taken offense. Every one realizes that the
+government, being the human institution that it is, needs the support of all the people,
+it needs to be made to see and feel the reality of things. You yourself are not convinced
+of the truth of your objection, you yourself know that it is a tyrannical and despotic
+government which, in order to make a display of force and independence, denies everything
+through fear or distrust, and that the tyrannized and enslaved peoples are the only
+ones whose duty it is never to ask for anything. A people that hates its government
+ought to ask for nothing but that it abdicate its power.”
+</p>
+<p>The old lawyer grimaced and shook his head from side to side, in sign of discontent,
+while he rubbed his hand over his bald pate and said in a tone of condescending pity:
+“Ahem! those are bad doctrines, bad theories, ahem! How plain it is that you are young
+and inexperienced in life. Look what is happening with the inexperienced young men
+who in Madrid are asking for so many reforms. They are accused of filibusterism, many
+of them don’t dare return here, and yet, what are they asking for? Things holy, ancient,
+and recognized as quite harmless. But there <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2525">[<a href="#xd32e2525">144</a>]</span>are matters that can’t be explained, they’re so delicate. Let’s see—I confess to you
+that there are other reasons besides those expressed that might lead a sensible government
+to deny systematically the wishes of the people—no—but it may happen that we find
+ourselves under rulers so fatuous and ridiculous—but there are always other reasons,
+even though what is asked be quite just—different governments encounter different
+conditions—”
+</p>
+<p>The old man hesitated, stared fixedly at Isagani, and then with a sudden resolution
+made a sign with his hand as though he would dispel some idea.
+</p>
+<p>“I can guess what you mean,” said Isagani, smiling sadly. “You mean that a colonial
+government, for the very reason that it is imperfectly constituted and that it is
+based on premises—”
+</p>
+<p>“No, no, not that, no!” quickly interrupted the old lawyer, as he sought for something
+among his papers. “No, I meant—but where are my spectacles?”
+</p>
+<p>“There they are,” replied Isagani.
+</p>
+<p>The old man put them on and pretended to look over some papers, but seeing that the
+youth was waiting, he mumbled, “I wanted to tell you something, I wanted to say—but
+it has slipped from my mind. You interrupted me in your eagerness—but it was an insignificant
+matter. If you only knew what a whirl my head is in, I have so much to do!”
+</p>
+<p>Isagani understood that he was being dismissed. “So,” he said, rising, “we—”
+</p>
+<p>“Ah, you will do well to leave the matter in the hands of the government, which will
+settle it as it sees fit. You say that the Vice-Rector is opposed to the teaching
+of Castilian. Perhaps he may be, not as to the fact but as to the form. It is said
+that the Rector who is on his way will bring a project for reform in education. Wait
+a while, give time a chance, apply yourself to your studies as the examinations are
+near, and—<i>carambas!</i>—you who already speak Castilian and express yourself easily, what <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2538">[<a href="#xd32e2538">145</a>]</span>are you bothering yourself about? What interest have you in seeing it specially taught?
+Surely Padre Florentino thinks as I do! Give him my regards.”
+</p>
+<p>“My uncle,” replied Isagani, “has always admonished me to think of others as much
+as of myself. I didn’t come for myself, I came in the name of those who are in worse
+condition.”
+</p>
+<p>“What the devil! Let them do as you have done, let them singe their eyebrows studying
+and come to be bald like myself, stuffing whole paragraphs into their memories! I
+believe that if you talk Spanish it is because you have studied it—you’re not of Manila
+or of Spanish parents! Then let them learn it as you have, and do as I have done:
+I’ve been a servant to all the friars, I’ve prepared their chocolate, and while with
+my right hand I stirred it, with the left I held a grammar, I learned, and, thank
+God! have never needed other teachers or academies or permits from the government.
+Believe me, he who wishes to learn, learns and becomes wise!”
+</p>
+<p>“But how many among those who wish to learn come to be what you are? One in ten thousand,
+and more!”
+</p>
+<p>“Pish! Why any more?” retorted the old man, shrugging his shoulders. “There are too
+many lawyers now, many of them become mere clerks. Doctors? They insult and abuse
+one another, and even kill each other in competition for a patient. Laborers, sir,
+laborers, are what we need, for agriculture!”
+</p>
+<p>Isagani realized that he was losing time, but still could not forbear replying: “Undoubtedly,
+there are many doctors and lawyers, but I won’t say there are too many, since we have
+towns that lack them entirely, and if they do abound in quantity, perhaps they are
+deficient in quality. Since the young men can’t be prevented from studying, and no
+other professions are open to us, why let them waste their time and effort? And if
+the instruction, deficient as it is, does not keep many from becoming lawyers and
+doctors, if we must finally have them, why not have good <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2546">[<a href="#xd32e2546">146</a>]</span>ones? After all, even if the sole wish is to make the country a country of farmers
+and laborers, and condemn in it all intellectual activity, I don’t see any evil in
+enlightening those same farmers and laborers, in giving them at least an education
+that will aid them in perfecting themselves and in perfecting their work, in placing
+them in a condition to understand many things of which they are at present ignorant.”
+</p>
+<p>“Bah, bah, bah!” exclaimed the lawyer, drawing circles in the air with his hand to
+dispel the ideas suggested. “To be a good farmer no great amount of rhetoric is needed.
+Dreams, illusions, fancies! Eh, will you take a piece of advice?”
+</p>
+<p>He arose and placed his hand affectionately on the youth’s shoulder, as he continued:
+“I’m going to give you one, and a very good one, because I see that you are intelligent
+and the advice will not be wasted. You’re going to study medicine? Well, confine yourself
+to learning how to put on plasters and apply leeches, and don’t ever try to improve
+or impair the condition of your kind. When you become a licentiate, marry a rich and
+devout girl, try to make cures and charge well, shun everything that has any relation
+to the general state of the country, attend mass, confession, and communion when the
+rest do, and you will see afterwards how you will thank me, and I shall see it, if
+I am still alive. Always remember that charity begins at home, for man ought not to
+seek on earth more than the greatest amount of happiness for himself, as Bentham says.
+If you involve yourself in quixotisms you will have no career, nor will you get married,
+nor will you ever amount to anything. All will abandon you, your own countrymen will
+be the first to laugh at your simplicity. Believe me, you will remember me and see
+that I am right, when you have gray hairs like myself, gray hairs such as these!”
+</p>
+<p>Here the old lawyer stroked his scanty white hair, as he smiled sadly and shook his
+head.
+</p>
+<p>“When I have gray hairs like those, sir,” replied Isagani <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2553">[<a href="#xd32e2553">147</a>]</span>with equal sadness, “and turn my gaze back over my past and see that I have worked
+only for myself, without having done what I plainly could and should have done for
+the country that has given me everything, for the citizens that have helped me to
+live—then, sir, every gray hair will be a thorn, and instead of rejoicing, they will
+shame me!”
+</p>
+<p>So saying, he took his leave with a profound bow. The lawyer remained motionless in
+his place, with an amazed look on his face. He listened to the footfalls that gradually
+died away, then resumed his seat.
+</p>
+<p>“Poor boy!” he murmured, “similar thoughts also crossed my mind once! What more could
+any one desire than to be able to say: ‘I have done this for the good of the fatherland,
+I have consecrated my life to the welfare of others!’ A crown of laurel, steeped in
+aloes, dry leaves that cover thorns and worms! That is not life, that does not get
+us our daily bread, nor does it bring us honors— the laurel would hardly serve for
+a salad, nor produce ease, nor aid us in winning lawsuits, but quite the reverse!
+Every country has its code of ethics, as it has its climate and its diseases, different
+from the climate and the diseases of other countries.”
+</p>
+<p>After a pause, he added: “Poor boy! If all should think and act as he does, I don’t
+say but that—Poor boy! Poor Florentino!”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2560">[<a href="#xd32e2560">148</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch16" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e363">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XVI</h2>
+<h2 class="main">The Tribulations of a Chinese</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">In the evening of that same Saturday, Quiroga, the Chinese, who aspired to the creation
+of a consulate for his nation, gave a dinner in the rooms over his bazaar, located
+in the Escolta. His feast was well attended: friars, government employees, soldiers,
+merchants, all of them his customers, partners or patrons, were to be seen there,
+for his store supplied the curates and the conventos with all their necessities, he
+accepted the chits of all the employees, and he had servants who were discreet, prompt,
+and complaisant. The friars themselves did not disdain to pass whole hours in his
+store, sometimes in view of the public, sometimes in the chambers with agreeable company.
+</p>
+<p>That night, then, the sala presented a curious aspect, being filled with friars and
+clerks seated on Vienna chairs, stools of black wood, and marble benches of Cantonese
+origin, before little square tables, playing cards or conversing among themselves,
+under the brilliant glare of the gilt chandeliers or the subdued light of the Chinese
+lanterns, which were brilliantly decorated with long silken tassels. On the walls
+there was a lamentable medley of landscapes in dim and gaudy colors, painted in Canton
+or Hongkong, mingled with tawdry chromos of odalisks, half-nude women, effeminate
+lithographs of Christ, the deaths of the just and of the sinners—made by Jewish houses
+in Germany to be sold in the Catholic countries. Nor were there lacking the Chinese
+prints on red paper representing a man seated, of venerable aspect, with a calm, smiling
+face, behind whom stood a servant, ugly, horrible, diabolical, threatening, armed
+with a lance having a wide, <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2568">[<a href="#xd32e2568">149</a>]</span>keen blade. Among the Indians some call this figure Mohammed, others Santiago,<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e2570src" href="#xd32e2570">1</a> we do not know why, nor do the Chinese themselves give a very clear explanation of
+this popular pair. The pop of champagne corks, the rattle of glasses, laughter, cigar
+smoke, and that odor peculiar to a Chinese habitation—a mixture of punk, opium, and
+dried fruits—completed the collection.
+</p>
+<p>Dressed as a Chinese mandarin in a blue-tasseled cap, Quiroga moved from room to room,
+stiff and straight, but casting watchful glances here and there as though to assure
+himself that nothing was being stolen. Yet in spite of this natural distrust, he exchanged
+handshakes with each guest, greeted some with a smile sagacious and humble, others
+with a patronizing air, and still others with a certain shrewd look that seemed to
+say, “I know! You didn’t come on my account, you came for the dinner!”
+</p>
+<p>And Quiroga was right! That fat gentleman who is now praising him and speaking of
+the advisability of a Chinese consulate in Manila, intimating that to manage it there
+could be no one but Quiroga, is the Señor Gonzalez who hides behind the pseudonym
+<i>Pitilí</i> when he attacks Chinese immigration through the columns of the newspapers. That other,
+an elderly man who closely examines the lamps, pictures, and other furnishings with
+grimaces and ejaculations of disdain, is Don Timoteo Pelaez, Juanito’s father, a merchant
+who inveighs against the Chinese competition that is ruining his business. The one
+over there, that thin, brown individual with a sharp look and a pale smile, is the
+celebrated originator of the dispute over Mexican pesos, which so troubled one of
+Quiroga’s protéges: that government clerk is regarded in Manila as very clever. That
+one farther on, he of the frowning look and unkempt mustache, is a government official
+who passes for a most meritorious fellow because he has the courage to speak ill of
+the business in lottery tickets carried on between Quiroga <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2578">[<a href="#xd32e2578">150</a>]</span>and an exalted dame in Manila society. The fact is that two thirds of the tickets
+go to China and the few that are left in Manila are sold at a premium of a half-real.
+The honorable gentleman entertains the conviction that some day he will draw the first
+prize, and is in a rage at finding himself confronted with such tricks.
+</p>
+<p>The dinner, meanwhile, was drawing to an end. From the dining-room floated into the
+sala snatches of toasts, interruptions, bursts and ripples of laughter. The name of
+Quiroga was often heard mingled with the words “consul,” “equality,” “justice.” The
+amphitryon himself did not eat European dishes, so he contented himself with drinking
+a glass of wine with his guests from time to time, promising to dine with those who
+were not seated at the first table.
+</p>
+<p>Simoun, who was present, having already dined, was in the sala talking with some merchants,
+who were complaining of business conditions: everything was going wrong, trade was
+paralyzed, the European exchanges were exorbitantly high. They sought information
+from the jeweler or insinuated to him a few ideas, with the hope that these would
+be communicated to the Captain-General. To all the remedies suggested Simoun responded
+with a sarcastic and unfeeling exclamation about nonsense, until one of them in exasperation
+asked him for his opinion.
+</p>
+<p>“My opinion?” he retorted. “Study how other nations prosper, and then do as they do.”
+</p>
+<p>“And why do they prosper, Señor Simoun?”
+</p>
+<p>Simoun replied with a shrug of his shoulders.
+</p>
+<p>“The port works, which weigh so heavily upon commerce, and the port not yet completed!”
+sighed Don Timoteo Pelaez. “A Penelope’s web, as my son says, that is spun and unspun.
+The taxes—”
+</p>
+<p>“You complaining!” exclaimed another. “Just as the General has decreed the destruction
+of houses of light materials!<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e2589src" href="#xd32e2589">2</a> And you with a shipment of galvanized iron!”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2592">[<a href="#xd32e2592">151</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“Yes,” rejoined Don Timoteo, “but look what that decree cost me! Then, the destruction
+will not be carried out for a month, not until Lent begins, and other shipments may
+arrive. I would have wished them destroyed right away, but—Besides, what are the owners
+of those houses going to buy from me if they are all poor, all equally beggars?”
+</p>
+<p>“You can always buy up their shacks for a trifle.”
+</p>
+<p>“And afterwards have the decree revoked and sell them back at double the price—that’s
+business!”
+</p>
+<p>Simoun smiled his frigid smile. Seeing Quiroga approach, he left the querulous merchants
+to greet the future consul, who on catching sight of him lost his satisfied expression
+and assigned a countenance like those of the merchants, while he bent almost double.
+</p>
+<p>Quiroga respected the jeweler greatly, not only because he knew him to be very wealthy,
+but also on account of his rumored influence with the Captain-General. It was reported
+that Simoun favored Quiroga’s ambitions, that he was an advocate for the consulate,
+and a certain newspaper hostile to the Chinese had alluded to him in many paraphrases,
+veiled allusions, and suspension points, in the celebrated controversy with another
+sheet that was favorable to the queued folk. Some prudent persons added with winks
+and half-uttered words that his Black Eminence was advising the General to avail himself
+of the Chinese in order to humble the tenacious pride of the natives.
+</p>
+<p>“To hold the people in subjection,” he was reported to have said, “there’s nothing
+like humiliating them and humbling them in their own eyes.”
+</p>
+<p>To this end an opportunity had soon presented itself. The guilds of mestizos and natives
+were continually watching one another, venting their bellicose spirits and their activities
+in jealousy and distrust. At mass one day the gobernadorcillo of the natives was seated
+on a bench to the right, and, being extremely thin, happened to cross one of his legs
+over the other, thus adopting a nonchalant <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2601">[<a href="#xd32e2601">152</a>]</span>attitude, in order to expose his thighs more and display his pretty shoes. The gobernadorcillo
+of the guild of mestizos, who was seated on the opposite bench, as he had bunions,
+and could not cross his legs on account of his obesity, spread his legs wide apart
+to expose a plain waistcoat adorned with a beautiful gold chain set with diamonds.
+The two cliques comprehended these maneuvers and joined battle. On the following Sunday
+all the mestizos, even the thinnest, had large paunches and spread their legs wide
+apart as though on horseback, while the natives placed one leg over the other, even
+the fattest, there being one cabeza de barangay who turned a somersault. Seeing these
+movements, the Chinese all adopted their own peculiar attitude, that of sitting as
+they do in their shops, with one leg drawn back and upward, the other swinging loose.
+There resulted protests and petitions, the police rushed to arms ready to start a
+civil war, the curates rejoiced, the Spaniards were amused and made money out of everybody,
+until the General settled the quarrel by ordering that every one should sit as the
+Chinese did, since they were the heaviest contributors, even though they were not
+the best Catholics. The difficulty for the mestizos and natives then was that their
+trousers were too tight to permit of their imitating the Chinese. But to make the
+intention of humiliating them the more evident, the measure was carried out with great
+pomp and ceremony, the church being surrounded by a troop of cavalry, while all those
+within were sweating. The matter was carried to the Cortes, but it was repeated that
+the Chinese, as the ones who paid, should have their way in the religious ceremonies,
+even though they apostatized and laughed at Christianity immediately after. The natives
+and the mestizos had to be content, learning thus not to waste time over such fatuity.<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e2603src" href="#xd32e2603">3</a>
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2615">[<a href="#xd32e2615">153</a>]</span></p>
+<p>Quiroga, with his smooth tongue and humble smile, was lavishly and flatteringly attentive
+to Simoun. His voice was caressing and his bows numerous, but the jeweler cut his
+blandishments short by asking brusquely:
+</p>
+<p>“Did the bracelets suit her?”
+</p>
+<p>At this question all Quiroga’s liveliness vanished like a dream. His caressing voice
+became plaintive; he bowed lower, gave the Chinese salutation of raising his clasped
+hands to the height of his face, and groaned: “Ah, Señor Simoun! I’m lost, I’m ruined!”<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e2621src" href="#xd32e2621">4</a>
+</p>
+<p>“How, Quiroga, lost and ruined when you have so many bottles of champagne and so many
+guests?”
+</p>
+<p>Quiroga closed his eyes and made a grimace. Yes, the affair of that afternoon, that
+affair of the bracelets, had ruined him. Simoun smiled, for when a Chinese merchant
+complains it is because all is going well, and when he makes a show that things are
+booming it is quite certain that he is planning an assignment or flight to his own
+country.
+</p>
+<p>“You didn’t know that I’m lost, I’m ruined? Ah, Señor Simoun, I’m <i>busted!</i>” To make his condition <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2634">[<a href="#xd32e2634">154</a>]</span>plainer, he illustrated the word by making a movement as though he were falling in
+collapse.
+</p>
+<p>Simoun wanted to laugh, but restrained himself and said that he knew nothing, nothing
+at all, as Quiroga led him to a room and closed the door. He then explained the cause
+of his misfortune.
+</p>
+<p>Three diamond bracelets that he had secured from Simoun on pretense of showing them
+to his wife were not for her, a poor native shut up in her room like a Chinese woman,
+but for a beautiful and charming lady, the friend of a powerful man, whose influence
+was needed by him in a certain deal in which he could clear some six thousand pesos.
+As he did not understand feminine tastes and wished to be gallant, the Chinese had
+asked for the three finest bracelets the jeweler had, each priced at three to four
+thousand pesos. With affected simplicity and his most caressing smile, Quiroga had
+begged the lady to select the one she liked best, and the lady, more simple and caressing
+still, had declared that she liked all three, and had kept them.
+</p>
+<p>Simoun burst out into laughter.
+</p>
+<p>“Ah, sir, I’m lost, I’m ruined!” cried the Chinese, slapping himself lightly with
+his delicate hands; but the jeweler continued his laughter.
+</p>
+<p>“Ugh, bad people, surely not a real lady,” went on the Chinaman, shaking his head
+in disgust. “What! She has no decency, while me, a Chinaman, me always polite! Ah,
+surely she not a real lady—a <i>cigarrera</i> has more decency!”
+</p>
+<p>“They’ve caught you, they’ve caught you!” exclaimed Simoun, poking him in the chest.
+</p>
+<p>“And everybody’s asking for loans and never pays—what about that? Clerks, officials,
+lieutenants, soldiers—” he checked them off on his long-nailed fingers—“ah, Señor
+Simoun, I’m lost, I’m <i>busted</i>!”
+</p>
+<p>“Get out with your complaints,” said Simoun. “I’ve saved you from many officials that
+wanted money from you. I’ve lent it to them so that they wouldn’t bother you, even
+when I knew that they couldn’t pay.”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2652">[<a href="#xd32e2652">155</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“But, Señor Simoun, you lend to officials; I lend to women, sailors, everybody.”
+</p>
+<p>“I bet you get your money back.”
+</p>
+<p>“Me, money back? Ah, surely you don’t understand! When it’s lost in gambling they
+never pay. Besides, you have a consul, you can force them, but I haven’t.”
+</p>
+<p>Simoun became thoughtful. “Listen, Quiroga,” he said, somewhat abstractedly, “I’ll
+undertake to collect what the officers and sailors owe you. Give me their notes.”
+</p>
+<p>Quiroga again fell to whining: they had never given him any notes.
+</p>
+<p>“When they come to you asking for money, send them to me. I want to help you.”
+</p>
+<p>The grateful Quiroga thanked him, but soon fell to lamenting again about the bracelets.
+“A <i>cigarrera</i> wouldn’t be so shameless!” he repeated.
+</p>
+<p>“The devil!” exclaimed Simoun, looking askance at the Chinese, as though studying
+him. “Exactly when I need the money and thought that you could pay me! But it can
+all be arranged, as I don’t want you to fail for such a small amount. Come, a favor,
+and I’ll reduce to seven the nine thousand pesos you owe me. You can get anything
+you wish through the Customs—boxes of lamps, iron, copper, glassware, Mexican pesos—you
+furnish arms to the conventos, don’t you?”
+</p>
+<p>The Chinese nodded affirmation, but remarked that he had to do a good deal of bribing.
+“I furnish the padres everything!”
+</p>
+<p>“Well, then,” added Simoun in a low voice, “I need you to get in for me some boxes
+of rifles that arrived this evening. I want you to keep them in your warehouse; there
+isn’t room for all of them in my house.”
+</p>
+<p>Quiroga began to show symptoms of fright.
+</p>
+<p>“Don’t get scared, you don’t run any risk. These rifles are to be concealed, a few
+at a time, in various dwellings, then a search will be instituted, and many people
+will be <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2670">[<a href="#xd32e2670">156</a>]</span>sent to prison. You and I can make a haul getting them set free. Understand me?”
+</p>
+<p>Quiroga wavered, for he was afraid of firearms. In his desk he had an empty revolver
+that he never touched without turning his head away and closing his eyes.
+</p>
+<p>“If you can’t do it, I’ll have to apply to some one else, but then I’ll need the nine
+thousand pesos to cross their palms and shut their eyes.”
+</p>
+<p>“All right, all right!” Quiroga finally agreed. “But many people will be arrested?
+There’ll be a search, eh?”
+</p>
+<p>When Quiroga and Simoun returned to the sala they found there, in animated conversation,
+those who had finished their dinner, for the champagne had loosened their tongues
+and stirred their brains. They were talking rather freely.
+</p>
+<p>In a group where there were a number of government clerks, some ladies, and Don Custodio,
+the topic was a commission sent to India to make certain investigations about footwear
+for the soldiers.
+</p>
+<p>“Who compose it?” asked an elderly lady.
+</p>
+<p>“A colonel, two other officers, and his Excellency’s nephew.”
+</p>
+<p>“Four?” rejoined a clerk. “What a commission! Suppose they disagree—are they competent?”
+</p>
+<p>“That’s what I asked,” replied a clerk. “It’s said that one civilian ought to go,
+one who has no military prejudices—a shoemaker, for instance.”
+</p>
+<p>“That’s right,” added an importer of shoes, “but it wouldn’t do to send an Indian
+or a Chinaman, and the only Peninsular shoemaker demanded such large fees—”
+</p>
+<p>“But why do they have to make any investigations about footwear?” inquired the elderly
+lady. “It isn’t for the Peninsular artillerymen. The Indian soldiers can go barefoot,
+as they do in their towns.”<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e2685src" href="#xd32e2685">5</a>
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2688">[<a href="#xd32e2688">157</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“Exactly so, and the treasury would save more,” corroborated another lady, a widow
+who was not satisfied with her pension.
+</p>
+<p>“But you must remember,” remarked another in the group, a friend of the officers on
+the commission, “that while it’s true they go barefoot in the towns, it’s not the
+same as moving about under orders in the service. They can’t choose the hour, nor
+the road, nor rest when they wish. Remember, madam, that, with the noonday sun overhead
+and the earth below baking like an oven, they have to march over sandy stretches,
+where there are stones, the sun above and fire below, bullets in front—”
+</p>
+<p>“It’s only a question of getting used to it!”
+</p>
+<p>“Like the donkey that got used to not eating! In our present campaign the greater
+part of our losses have been due to wounds on the soles of the feet. Remember the
+donkey, madam, remember the donkey!”
+</p>
+<p>“But, my dear sir,” retorted the lady, “look how much money is wasted on shoe-leather.
+There’s enough to pension many widows and orphans in order to maintain our prestige.
+Don’t smile, for I’m not talking about myself, and I have my pension, even though
+a very small one, insignificant considering the services my husband rendered, but
+I’m talking of others who are dragging out miserable lives! It’s not right that after
+so much persuasion to come and so many hardships in crossing the sea they should end
+here by dying of hunger. What you say about the soldiers may be true, but the fact
+is that I’ve been in the country more than three years, and I haven’t seen any soldier
+limping.”
+</p>
+<p>“In that I agree with the lady,” said her neighbor. “Why issue them shoes when they
+were born without them?”
+</p>
+<p>“And why shirts?”
+</p>
+<p>“And why trousers?”
+</p>
+<p>“Just calculate what we should economize on soldiers clothed only in their skins!”
+concluded he who was defending the army.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2699">[<a href="#xd32e2699">158</a>]</span></p>
+<p>In another group the conversation was more heated. Ben-Zayb was talking and declaiming,
+while Padre Camorra, as usual, was constantly interrupting him. The friar-journalist,
+in spite of his respect for the cowled gentry, was always at loggerheads with Padre
+Camorra, whom he regarded as a silly half-friar, thus giving himself the appearance
+of being independent and refuting the accusations of those who called him Fray Ibañez.
+Padre Camorra liked his adversary, as the latter was the only person who would take
+seriously what he styled his arguments. They were discussing magnetism, spiritualism,
+magic, and the like. Their words flew through the air like the knives and balls of
+jugglers, tossed back and forth from one to the other.
+</p>
+<p>That year great attention had been attracted in the Quiapo fair by a head, wrongly
+called a sphinx, exhibited by Mr. Leeds, an American. Glaring advertisements covered
+the walls of the houses, mysterious and funereal, to excite the curiosity of the public.
+Neither Ben-Zayb nor any of the padres had yet seen it; Juanito Pelaez was the only
+one who had, and he was describing his wonderment to the party.
+</p>
+<p>Ben-Zayb, as a journalist, looked for a natural explanation. Padre Camorra talked
+of the devil, Padre Irene smiled, Padre Salvi remained grave.
+</p>
+<p>“But, Padre, the devil doesn’t need to come—we are sufficient to damn ourselves—”
+</p>
+<p>“It can’t be explained any other way.”
+</p>
+<p>“If science—”
+</p>
+<p>“Get out with science, <i>puñales</i>!”
+</p>
+<p>“But, listen to me and I’ll convince you. It’s all a question of optics. I haven’t
+yet seen the head nor do I know how it looks, but this gentleman”—indicating Juanito
+Pelaez—“tells us that it does not look like the talking heads that are usually exhibited.
+So be it! But the principle is the same—it’s all a question of optics. Wait! A mirror
+is placed thus, another mirror behind it, <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2713">[<a href="#xd32e2713">159</a>]</span>the image is reflected—I say, it is purely a problem in physics.”
+</p>
+<p>Taking down from the walls several mirrors, he arranged them, turned them round and
+round, but, not getting the desired result, concluded: “As I say, it’s nothing more
+or less than a question of optics.”
+</p>
+<p>“But what do you want mirrors for, if Juanito tells us that the head is inside a box
+placed on the table? I see in it spiritualism, because the spiritualists always make
+use of tables, and I think that Padre Salvi, as the ecclesiastical governor, ought
+to prohibit the exhibition.”
+</p>
+<p>Padre Salvi remained silent, saying neither yes nor no.
+</p>
+<p>“In order to learn if there are devils or mirrors inside it,” suggested Simoun, “the
+best thing would be for you to go and see the famous sphinx.”
+</p>
+<p>The proposal was a good one, so it was accepted, although Padre Salvi and Don Custodio
+showed some repugnance. They at a fair, to rub shoulders with the public, to see sphinxes
+and talking heads! What would the natives say? These might take them for mere men,
+endowed with the same passions and weaknesses as others. But Ben-Zayb, with his journalistic
+ingenuity, promised to request Mr. Leeds not to admit the public while they were inside.
+They would be honoring him sufficiently by the visit not to admit of his refusal,
+and besides he would not charge any admission fee. To give a show of probability to
+this, he concluded: “Because, remember, if I should expose the trick of the mirrors
+to the public, it would ruin the poor American’s business.” Ben-Zayb was a conscientious
+individual.
+</p>
+<p>About a dozen set out, among them our acquaintances, Padres Salvi, Camorra, and Irene,
+Don Custodio, Ben-Zayb, and Juanito Pelaez. Their carriages set them down at the entrance
+to the Quiapo Plaza.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2723">[<a href="#xd32e2723">160</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e2570">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e2570src">1</a></span> The patron saint of Spain, St. James.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e2570src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e2589">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e2589src">2</a></span> Houses of bamboo and nipa, such as form the homes of the masses of the natives.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e2589src" title="Return to note 2 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e2603">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e2603src">3</a></span> “In this paragraph Rizal alludes to an incident that had very serious results. There
+was annually celebrated in Binondo a certain religious festival, principally at the
+expense of the Chinese mestizos. The latter finally petitioned that their gobernadorcillo
+be given the presidency <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2606">[<a href="#xd32e2606">153</a>]</span>of it, and this was granted, thanks to the fact that the parish priest (the Dominican,
+Fray José Hevia Campomanes) held to the opinion that the presidency belonged to those
+who paid the most. The Tagalogs protested, alleging their better right to it, as the
+genuine sons of the country, not to mention the historical precedent, but the friar,
+who was looking after his own interests, did not yield. General Terrero (Governor,
+1885–1888), at the advice of his liberal councilors, finally had the parish priest
+removed and for the time being decided the affair in favor of the Tagalogs. The matter
+reached the Colonial Office (<i lang="es">Ministerio de Ultramar</i>) and the Minister was not even content merely to settle it in the way the friars
+desired, but made amends to Padre Hevia by appointing him a bishop.”—<i>W.&nbsp;E. Retana, who was a journalist in Manila at the time, in a note to this chapter.</i>
+</p>
+<p class="footnote cont">Childish and ridiculous as this may appear now, it was far from being so at the time,
+especially in view of the supreme contempt with which the pugnacious Tagalog looks
+down upon the meek and complaisant Chinese and the mortal antipathy that exists between
+the two races.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e2603src" title="Return to note 3 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e2621">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e2621src">4</a></span> It is regrettable that Quiroga’s picturesque butchery of Spanish and Tagalog—the dialect
+of the Manila Chinese—cannot be reproduced here. Only the thought can be given. There
+is the same difficulty with <i>r’s, d’s</i>, and <i>l’s</i> that the Chinese show in English.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e2621src" title="Return to note 4 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e2685">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e2685src">5</a></span> Up to the outbreak of the insurrection in 1896, the only genuinely Spanish troops
+in the islands were a few hundred artillerymen, the rest being natives, with Spanish
+officers.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e2685src" title="Return to note 5 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch17" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e373">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XVII</h2>
+<h2 class="main">The Quiapo Fair</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">It was a beautiful night and the plaza presented a most animated aspect. Taking advantage
+of the freshness of the breeze and the splendor of the January moon, the people filled
+the fair to see, be seen, and amuse themselves. The music of the cosmoramas and the
+lights of the lanterns gave life and merriment to every one. Long rows of booths,
+brilliant with tinsel and gauds, exposed to view clusters of balls, masks strung by
+the eyes, tin toys, trains, carts, mechanical horses, carriages, steam-engines with
+diminutive boilers, Lilliputian tableware of porcelain, pine Nativities, dolls both
+foreign and domestic, the former red and smiling, the latter sad and pensive like
+little ladies beside gigantic children. The beating of drums, the roar of tin horns,
+the wheezy music of the accordions and the hand-organs, all mingled in a carnival
+concert, amid the coming and going of the crowd, pushing, stumbling over one another,
+with their faces turned toward the booths, so that the collisions were frequent and
+often amusing. The carriages were forced to move slowly, with the <i>tabí</i> of the cocheros repeated every moment. Met and mingled government clerks, soldiers,
+friars, students, Chinese, girls with their mammas or aunts, all greeting, signaling,
+calling to one another merrily.
+</p>
+<p>Padre Camorra was in the seventh heaven at the sight of so many pretty girls. He stopped,
+looked back, nudged Ben-Zayb, chuckled and swore, saying, “And that one, and that
+one, my ink-slinger? And that one over there, what say you?” In his contentment he
+even fell to using the familiar <i>tu</i> toward his friend and adversary. Padre <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2736">[<a href="#xd32e2736">161</a>]</span>Salvi stared at him from time to time, but he took little note of Padre Salvi. On
+the contrary, he pretended to stumble so that he might brush against the girls, he
+winked and made eyes at them.
+</p>
+<p>“<i>Puñales!</i>” he kept saying to himself. “When shall I be the curate of Quiapo?”
+</p>
+<p>Suddenly Ben-Zayb let go an oath, jumped aside, and slapped his hand on his arm; Padre
+Camorra in his excess of enthusiasm had pinched him. They were approaching a dazzling
+señorita who was attracting the attention of the whole plaza, and Padre Camorra, unable
+to restrain his delight, had taken Ben-Zayb’s arm as a substitute for the girl’s.
+</p>
+<p>It was Paulita Gomez, the prettiest of the pretty, in company with Isagani, followed
+by Doña Victorina. The young woman was resplendent in her beauty: all stopped and
+craned their necks, while they ceased their conversation and followed her with their
+eyes—even Doña Victorina was respectfully saluted.
+</p>
+<p>Paulita was arrayed in a rich camisa and pañuelo of embroidered piña, different from
+those she had worn that morning to the church. The gauzy texture of the piña set off
+her shapely head, and the Indians who saw her compared her to the moon surrounded
+by fleecy clouds. A silk rose-colored skirt, caught up in rich and graceful folds
+by her little hand, gave majesty to her erect figure, the movement of which, harmonizing
+with her curving neck, displayed all the triumphs of vanity and satisfied coquetry.
+Isagani appeared to be rather disgusted, for so many curious eyes fixed upon the beauty
+of his sweetheart annoyed him. The stares seemed to him robbery and the girl’s smiles
+faithlessness.
+</p>
+<p>Juanito saw her and his hump increased when he spoke to her. Paulita replied negligently,
+while Doña Victorina called to him, for Juanito was her favorite, she preferring him
+to Isagani.
+</p>
+<p>“What a girl, what a girl!” muttered the entranced Padre Camorra.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2748">[<a href="#xd32e2748">162</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“Come, Padre, pinch yourself and let me alone,” said Ben-Zayb fretfully.
+</p>
+<p>“What a girl, what a girl!” repeated the friar. “And she has for a sweetheart a pupil
+of mine, the boy I had the quarrel with.”
+</p>
+<p>“Just my luck that she’s not of my town,” he added, after turning his head several
+times to follow her with his looks. He was even tempted to leave his companions to
+follow the girl, and Ben-Zayb had difficulty in dissuading him. Paulita’s beautiful
+figure moved on, her graceful little head nodding with inborn coquetry.
+</p>
+<p>Our promenaders kept on their way, not without sighs on the part of the friar-artilleryman,
+until they reached a booth surrounded by sightseers, who quickly made way for them.
+It was a shop of little wooden figures, of local manufacture, representing in all
+shapes and sizes the costumes, races, and occupations of the country: Indians, Spaniards,
+Chinese, mestizos, friars, clergymen, government clerks, gobernadorcillos, students,
+soldiers, and so on.
+</p>
+<p>Whether the artists had more affection for the priests, the folds of whose habits
+were better suited to their esthetic purposes, or whether the friars, holding such
+an important place in Philippine life, engaged the attention of the sculptor more,
+the fact was that, for one cause or another, images of them abounded, well-turned
+and finished, representing them in the sublimest moments of their lives—the opposite
+of what is done in Europe, where they are pictured as sleeping on casks of wine, playing
+cards, emptying tankards, rousing themselves to gaiety, or patting the cheeks of a
+buxom girl. No, the friars of the Philippines were different: elegant, handsome, well-dressed,
+their tonsures neatly shaven, their features symmetrical and serene, their gaze meditative,
+their expression saintly, somewhat rosy-cheeked, cane in hand and patent-leather shoes
+on their feet, inviting adoration and a place in a glass case. Instead of the symbols
+of gluttony and incontinence of their brethren in <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2756">[<a href="#xd32e2756">163</a>]</span>Europe, those of Manila carried the book, the crucifix, and the palm of martyrdom;
+instead of kissing the simple country lasses, those of Manila gravely extended the
+hand to be kissed by children and grown men doubled over almost to kneeling; instead
+of the full refectory and dining-hall, their stage in Europe, in Manila they had the
+oratory, the study-table; instead of the mendicant friar who goes from door to door
+with his donkey and sack, begging alms, the friars of the Philippines scattered gold
+from full hands among the miserable Indians.
+</p>
+<p>“Look, here’s Padre Camorra!” exclaimed Ben-Zayb, upon whom the effect of the champagne
+still lingered. He pointed to a picture of a lean friar of thoughtful mien who was
+seated at a table with his head resting on the palm of his hand, apparently writing
+a sermon by the light of a lamp. The contrast suggested drew laughter from the crowd.
+</p>
+<p>Padre Camorra, who had already forgotten about Paulita, saw what was meant and laughing
+his clownish laugh, asked in turn, “Whom does this other figure resemble, Ben-Zayb?”
+</p>
+<p>It was an old woman with one eye, with disheveled hair, seated on the ground like
+an Indian idol, ironing clothes. The sad-iron was carefully imitated, being of copper
+with coals of red tinsel and smoke-wreaths of dirty twisted cotton.
+</p>
+<p>“Eh, Ben-Zayb, it wasn’t a fool who designed that” asked Padre Camorra with a laugh.
+</p>
+<p>“Well, I don’t see the point,” replied the journalist.
+</p>
+<p>“But, <i>puñales</i>, don’t you see the title, <i>The Philippine Press</i>? That utensil with which the old woman is ironing is here called the press!”
+</p>
+<p>All laughed at this, Ben-Zayb himself joining in good-naturedly.
+</p>
+<p>Two soldiers of the Civil Guard, appropriately labeled, were placed behind a man who
+was tightly bound and had his face covered by his hat. It was entitled <i>The Country of <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2775">[<a href="#xd32e2775">164</a>]</span>Abaka</i>,<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e2778src" href="#xd32e2778">1</a> and from appearances they were going to shoot him.
+</p>
+<p>Many of our visitors were displeased with the exhibition. They talked of rules of
+art, they sought proportion—one said that this figure did not have seven heads, that
+the face lacked a nose, having only three, all of which made Padre Camorra somewhat
+thoughtful, for he did not comprehend how a figure, to be correct, need have four
+noses and seven heads. Others said, if they were muscular, that they could not be
+Indians; still others remarked that it was not sculpture, but mere carpentry. Each
+added his spoonful of criticism, until Padre Camorra, not to be outdone, ventured
+to ask for at least thirty legs for each doll, because, if the others wanted noses,
+couldn’t he require feet? So they fell to discussing whether the Indian had or had
+not any aptitude for sculpture, and whether it would be advisable to encourage that
+art, until there arose a general dispute, which was cut short by Don Custodio’s declaration
+that the Indians had the aptitude, but that they should devote themselves exclusively
+to the manufacture of saints.
+</p>
+<p>“One would say,” observed Ben-Zayb, who was full of bright ideas that night, “that
+this Chinaman is Quiroga, but on close examination it looks like Padre Irene. And
+what do you say about that British Indian? He looks like Simoun!”
+</p>
+<p>Fresh peals of laughter resounded, while Padre Irene rubbed his nose.
+</p>
+<p>“That’s right!”
+</p>
+<p>“It’s the very image of him!”
+</p>
+<p>“But where is Simoun? Simoun should buy it.”
+</p>
+<p>But the jeweler had disappeared, unnoticed by any one.
+</p>
+<p>“<i>Puñales!</i>” exclaimed Padre Camorra, “how stingy the American is! He’s afraid we would make
+him pay the admission for all of us into Mr. Leeds’ show.”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2794">[<a href="#xd32e2794">165</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“No!” rejoined Ben-Zayb, “what he’s afraid of is that he’ll compromise himself. He
+may have foreseen the joke in store for his friend Mr. Leeds and has got out of the
+way.”
+</p>
+<p>Thus, without purchasing the least trifle, they continued on their way to see the
+famous sphinx. Ben-Zayb offered to manage the affair, for the American would not rebuff
+a journalist who could take revenge in an unfavorable article. “You’ll see that it’s
+all a question of mirrors,” he said, “because, you see—” Again he plunged into a long
+demonstration, and as he had no mirrors at hand to discredit his theory he tangled
+himself up in all kinds of blunders and wound up by not knowing himself what he was
+saying. “In short, you’ll see how it’s all a question of optics.”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2798">[<a href="#xd32e2798">166</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e2778">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e2778src">1</a></span> Abaka is the fiber obtained from the leaves of the <i>Musa textilis</i> and is known commercially as Manila hemp. As it is exclusively a product of the Philippines,
+it may be taken here to symbolize the country.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e2778src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch18" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e383">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XVIII</h2>
+<h2 class="main">Legerdemain</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">Mr. Leeds, a genuine Yankee, dressed completely in black, received his visitors with
+great deference. He spoke Spanish well, from having been for many years in South America,
+and offered no objection to their request, saying that they might examine everything,
+both before and after the exhibition, but begged that they remain quiet while it was
+in progress. Ben-Zayb smiled in pleasant anticipation of the vexation he had prepared
+for the American.
+</p>
+<p>The room, hung entirely in black, was lighted by ancient lamps burning alcohol. A
+rail wrapped in black velvet divided it into two almost equal parts, one of which
+was filled with seats for the spectators and the other occupied by a platform covered
+with a checkered carpet. In the center of this platform was placed a table, over which
+was spread a piece of black cloth adorned with skulls and cabalistic signs. The <i>mise en scène</i> was therefore lugubrious and had its effect upon the merry visitors. The jokes died
+away, they spoke in whispers, and however much some tried to appear indifferent, their
+lips framed no smiles. All felt as if they had entered a house where there was a corpse,
+an illusion accentuated by an odor of wax and incense. Don Custodio and Padre Salvi
+consulted in whispers over the expediency of prohibiting such shows.
+</p>
+<p>Ben-Zayb, in order to cheer the dispirited group and embarrass Mr. Leeds, said to
+him in a familiar tone: “Eh, Mister, since there are none but ourselves here and we
+aren’t Indians who can be fooled, won’t you let us see <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2810">[<a href="#xd32e2810">167</a>]</span>the trick? We know of course that it’s purely a question of optics, but as Padre Camorra
+won’t be convinced—”
+</p>
+<p>Here he started to jump over the rail, instead of going through the proper opening,
+while Padre Camorra broke out into protests, fearing that Ben-Zayb might be right.
+</p>
+<p>“And why not, sir?” rejoined the American. “But don’t break anything, will you?”
+</p>
+<p>The journalist was already on the platform. “You will allow me, then?” he asked, and
+without waiting for the permission, fearing that it might not be granted, raised the
+cloth to look for the mirrors that he expected should be between the legs of the table.
+Ben-Zayb uttered an exclamation and stepped back, again placed both hands under the
+table and waved them about; he encountered only empty space. The table had three thin
+iron legs, sunk into the floor.
+</p>
+<p>The journalist looked all about as though seeking something.
+</p>
+<p>“Where are the mirrors?” asked Padre Camorra.
+</p>
+<p>Ben-Zayb looked and looked, felt the table with his fingers, raised the cloth again,
+and rubbed his hand over his forehead from time to time, as if trying to remember
+something.
+</p>
+<p>“Have you lost anything?” inquired Mr. Leeds.
+</p>
+<p>“The mirrors, Mister, where are the mirrors?”
+</p>
+<p>“I don’t know where yours are—mine are at the hotel. Do you want to look at yourself?
+You’re somewhat pale and excited.”
+</p>
+<p>Many laughed, in spite of their weird impressions, on seeing the jesting coolness
+of the American, while Ben-Zayb retired, quite abashed, to his seat, muttering, “It
+can’t be. You’ll see that he doesn’t do it without mirrors. The table will have to
+be changed later.”
+</p>
+<p>Mr. Leeds placed the cloth on the table again and turning toward his illustrious audience,
+asked them, “Are you satisfied? May we begin?”
+</p>
+<p>“Hurry up! How cold-blooded he is!” said the widow.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2826">[<a href="#xd32e2826">168</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“Then, ladies and gentlemen, take your seats and get your questions ready.”
+</p>
+<p>Mr. Leeds disappeared through a doorway and in a few moments returned with a black
+box of worm-eaten wood, covered with inscriptions in the form of birds, beasts, and
+human heads.
+</p>
+<p>“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began solemnly, “once having had occasion to visit the
+great pyramid of Khufu, a Pharaoh of the fourth dynasty, I chanced upon a sarcophagus
+of red granite in a forgotten chamber. My joy was great, for I thought that I had
+found a royal mummy, but what was my disappointment on opening the coffin, at the
+cost of infinite labor, to find nothing more than this box, which you may examine.”
+</p>
+<p>He handed the box to those in the front row. Padre Camorra drew back in loathing,
+Padre Salvi looked at it closely as if he enjoyed sepulchral things, Padre Irene smiled
+a knowing smile, Don Custodio affected gravity and disdain, while Ben-Zayb hunted
+for his mirrors—there they must be, for it was a question of mirrors.
+</p>
+<p>“It smells like a corpse,” observed one lady, fanning herself furiously. “Ugh!”
+</p>
+<p>“It smells of forty centuries,” remarked some one with emphasis.
+</p>
+<p>Ben-Zayb forgot about his mirrors to discover who had made this remark. It was a military
+official who had read the history of Napoleon.
+</p>
+<p>Ben-Zayb felt jealous and to utter another epigram that might annoy Padre Camorra
+a little said, “It smells of the Church.”
+</p>
+<p>“This box, ladies and gentlemen,” continued the American, “contained a handful of
+ashes and a piece of papyrus on which were written some words. Examine them yourselves,
+but I beg of you not to breathe heavily, because if any of the dust is lost my sphinx
+will appear in a mutilated condition.”
+</p>
+<p>The humbug, described with such seriousness and conviction, <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2839">[<a href="#xd32e2839">169</a>]</span>was gradually having its effect, so much so that when the box was passed around, no
+one dared to breathe. Padre Camorra, who had so often depicted from the pulpit of
+Tiani the torments and sufferings of hell, while he laughed in his sleeves at the
+terrified looks of the sinners, held his nose, and Padre Salvi—the same Padre Salvi
+who had on All Souls’ Day prepared a phantasmagoria of the souls in purgatory with
+flames and transparencies illuminated with alcohol lamps and covered with tinsel,
+on the high altar of the church in a suburb, in order to get alms and orders for masses—the
+lean and taciturn Padre Salvi held his breath and gazed suspiciously at that handful
+of ashes.
+</p>
+<p>“<i lang="la">Memento, homo, quia pulvis es</i>!” muttered Padre Irene with a smile.
+</p>
+<p>“Pish!” sneered Ben-Zayb—the same thought had occurred to him, and the Canon had taken
+the words out of his mouth.
+</p>
+<p>“Not knowing what to do,” resumed Mr. Leeds, closing the box carefully, “I examined
+the papyrus and discovered two words whose meaning was unknown to me. I deciphered
+them, and tried to pronounce them aloud. Scarcely had I uttered the first word when
+I felt the box slipping from my hands, as if pressed down by an enormous weight, and
+it glided along the floor, whence I vainly endeavored to remove it. But my surprise
+was converted into terror when it opened and I found within a human head that stared
+at me fixedly. Paralyzed with fright and uncertain what to do in the presence of such
+a phenomenon, I remained for a time stupefied, trembling like a person poisoned with
+mercury, but after a while recovered myself and, thinking that it was a vain illusion,
+tried to divert my attention by reading the second word. Hardly had I pronounced it
+when the box closed, the head disappeared, and in its place I again found the handful
+of ashes. Without suspecting it I had discovered the two most potent words in nature,
+the words of creation and destruction, of life and of death!”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2849">[<a href="#xd32e2849">170</a>]</span></p>
+<p>He paused for a few moments to note the effect of his story, then with grave and measured
+steps approached the table and placed the mysterious box upon it.
+</p>
+<p>“The cloth, Mister!” exclaimed the incorrigible Ben-Zayb.
+</p>
+<p>“Why not?” rejoined Mr. Leeds, very complaisantly.
+</p>
+<p>Lifting the box with his right hand, he caught up the cloth with his left, completely
+exposing the table sustained by its three legs. Again he placed the box upon the center
+and with great gravity turned to his audience.
+</p>
+<p>“Here’s what I want to see,” said Ben-Zayb to his neighbor. “You notice how he makes
+some excuse.”
+</p>
+<p>Great attention was depicted on all countenances and silence reigned. The noise and
+roar of the street could be distinctly heard, but all were so affected that a snatch
+of dialogue which reached them produced no effect.
+</p>
+<p>“Why can’t we go in?” asked a woman’s voice.
+</p>
+<p>“<i>Abá</i>, there’s a lot of friars and clerks in there,” answered a man. “The sphinx is for
+them only.”
+</p>
+<p>“The friars are inquisitive too,” said the woman’s voice, drawing away. “They don’t
+want us to know how they’re being fooled. Why, is the head a friar’s <i>querida</i>?”
+</p>
+<p>In the midst of a profound silence the American announced in a tone of emotion: “Ladies
+and gentlemen, with a word I am now going to reanimate the handful of ashes, and you
+will talk with a being that knows the past, the present, and much of the future!”
+</p>
+<p>Here the prestidigitator uttered a soft cry, first mournful, then lively, a medley
+of sharp sounds like imprecations and hoarse notes like threats, which made Ben-Zayb’s
+hair stand on end.
+</p>
+<p>“<i>Deremof</i>!” cried the American.
+</p>
+<p>The curtains on the wall rustled, the lamps burned low, the table creaked. A feeble
+groan responded from the interior of the box. Pale and uneasy, all stared at one another,
+while one terrified señora caught hold of Padre Salvi.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2874">[<a href="#xd32e2874">171</a>]</span></p>
+<p>The box then opened of its own accord and presented to the eyes of the audience a
+head of cadaverous aspect, surrounded by long and abundant black hair. It slowly opened
+its eyes and looked around the whole audience. Those eyes had a vivid radiance, accentuated
+by their cavernous sockets, and, as if deep were calling unto deep, fixed themselves
+upon the profound, sunken eyes of the trembling Padre Salvi, who was staring unnaturally,
+as though he saw a ghost.
+</p>
+<p>“Sphinx,” commanded Mr. Leeds, “tell the audience who you are.”
+</p>
+<p>A deep silence prevailed, while a chill wind blew through the room and made the blue
+flames of the sepulchral lamps flicker. The most skeptical shivered.
+</p>
+<p>“I am Imuthis,” declared the head in a funereal, but strangely menacing, voice. “I
+was born in the time of Amasis and died under the Persian domination, when Cambyses
+was returning from his disastrous expedition into the interior of Libya. I had come
+to complete my education after extensive travels through Greece, Assyria, and Persia,
+and had returned to my native laud to dwell in it until Thoth should call me before
+his terrible tribunal. But to my undoing, on passing through Babylonia, I discovered
+an awful secret—the secret of the false Smerdis who usurped the throne, the bold Magian
+Gaumata who governed as an impostor. Fearing that I would betray him to Cambyses,
+he determined upon my ruin through the instrumentality of the Egyptian priests, who
+at that time ruled my native country. They were the owners of two-thirds of the land,
+the monopolizers of learning, they held the people down in ignorance and tyranny,
+they brutalized them, thus making them fit to pass without resistance from one domination
+to another. The invaders availed themselves of them, and knowing their usefulness,
+protected and enriched them. The rulers not only depended on their will, but some
+were reduced to mere instruments of theirs. The Egyptian priests hastened to execute
+Gaumata’s orders, with greater <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2881">[<a href="#xd32e2881">172</a>]</span>zeal from their fear of me, because they were afraid that I would reveal their impostures
+to the people. To accomplish their purpose, they made use of a young priest of Abydos,
+who passed for a saint.”
+</p>
+<p>A painful silence followed these words. That head was talking of priestly intrigues
+and impostures, and although referring to another age and other creeds, all the friars
+present were annoyed, possibly because they could see in the general trend of the
+speech some analogy to the existing situation. Padre Salvi was in the grip of convulsive
+shivering; he worked his lips and with bulging eyes followed the gaze of the head
+as though fascinated. Beads of sweat began to break out on his emaciated face, but
+no one noticed this, so deeply absorbed and affected were they.
+</p>
+<p>“What was the plot concocted by the priests of your country against you?” asked Mr.
+Leeds.
+</p>
+<p>The head uttered a sorrowful groan, which seemed to come from the bottom of the heart,
+and the spectators saw its eyes, those fiery eyes, clouded and filled with tears.
+Many shuddered and felt their hair rise. No, that was not an illusion, it was not
+a trick: the head was the victim and what it told was its own story.
+</p>
+<p>“Ay!” it moaned, shaking with affliction, “I loved a maiden, the daughter of a priest,
+pure as light, like the freshly opened lotus! The young priest of Abydos also desired
+her and planned a rebellion, using my name and some papyri that he had secured from
+my beloved. The rebellion broke out at the time when Cambyses was returning in rage
+over the disasters of his unfortunate campaign. I was accused of being a rebel, was
+made a prisoner, and having effected my escape was killed in the chase on Lake Moeris.
+From out of eternity I saw the imposture triumph. I saw the priest of Abydos night
+and day persecuting the maiden, who had taken refuge in a temple of Isis on the island
+of Philae. I saw him persecute and harass her, even in the subterranean chambers,
+I saw him drive her mad with terror and suffering, like a huge bat pursuing a white
+dove. <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2888">[<a href="#xd32e2888">173</a>]</span>Ah, priest, priest of Abydos, I have returned to life to expose your infamy, and after
+so many years of silence, I name thee murderer, hypocrite, liar!”
+</p>
+<p>A dry, hollow laugh accompanied these words, while a choked voice responded, “No!
+Mercy!”
+</p>
+<p>It was Padre Salvi, who had been overcome with terror and with arms extended was slipping
+in collapse to the floor.
+</p>
+<p>“What’s the matter with your Reverence? Are you ill?” asked Padre Irene.
+</p>
+<p>“The heat of the room—”
+</p>
+<p>“This odor of corpses we’re breathing here—”
+</p>
+<p>“Murderer, slanderer, hypocrite!” repeated the head. “I accuse you—murderer, murderer,
+murderer!”
+</p>
+<p>Again the dry laugh, sepulchral and menacing, resounded, as though that head were
+so absorbed in contemplation of its wrongs that it did not see the tumult that prevailed
+in the room.
+</p>
+<p>“Mercy! She still lives!” groaned Padre Salvi, and then lost consciousness. He was
+as pallid as a corpse. Some of the ladies thought it their duty to faint also, and
+proceeded to do so.
+</p>
+<p>“He is out of his head! Padre Salvi!”
+</p>
+<p>“I told him not to eat that bird’s-nest soup,” said Padre Irene. “It has made him
+sick.”
+</p>
+<p>“But he didn’t eat anything,” rejoined Don Custodio shivering. “As the head has been
+staring at him fixedly, it has mesmerized him.”
+</p>
+<p>So disorder prevailed, the room seemed to be a hospital or a battlefield. Padre Salvi
+looked like a corpse, and the ladies, seeing that no one was paying them any attention,
+made the best of it by recovering.
+</p>
+<p>Meanwhile, the head had been reduced to ashes, and Mr. Leeds, having replaced the
+cloth on the table, bowed his audience out.
+</p>
+<p>“This show must be prohibited,” said Don Custodio on leaving. “It’s wicked and highly
+immoral.”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2906">[<a href="#xd32e2906">174</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“And above all, because it doesn’t use mirrors,” added Ben-Zayb, who before going
+out of the room tried to assure himself finally, so he leaped over the rail, went
+up to the table, and raised the cloth: nothing, absolutely nothing!<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e2909src" href="#xd32e2909">1</a> On the following day he wrote an article in which he spoke of occult sciences, spiritualism,
+and the like.
+</p>
+<p>An order came immediately from the ecclesiastical governor prohibiting the show, but
+Mr. Leeds had already disappeared, carrying his secret with him to Hongkong.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2916">[<a href="#xd32e2916">175</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e2909">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e2909src">1</a></span> Yet Ben-Zayb was not very much mistaken. The three legs of the table have grooves
+in them in which slide the mirrors hidden below the platform and covered by the squares
+of the carpet. By placing the box upon the table a spring is pressed and the mirrors
+rise gently. The cloth is then removed, with care to raise it instead of letting it
+slide off, and then there is the ordinary table of the talking heads. The table is
+connected with the bottom of the box. The exhibition ended, the prestidigitator again
+covers the table, presses another spring, and the mirrors descend.—<i>Author’s note.</i>&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e2909src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch19" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e393">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XIX</h2>
+<h2 class="main">The Fuse</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">Placido Penitente left the class with his heart overflowing with bitterness and sullen
+gloom in his looks. He was worthy of his name when not driven from his usual course,
+but once irritated he was a veritable torrent, a wild beast that could only be stopped
+by the death of himself or his foe. So many affronts, so many pinpricks, day after
+day, had made his heart quiver, lodging in it to sleep the sleep of lethargic vipers,
+and they now were awaking to shake and hiss with fury. The hisses resounded in his
+ears with the jesting epithets of the professor, the phrases in the slang of the markets,
+and he seemed to hear blows and laughter. A thousand schemes for revenge rushed into
+his brain, crowding one another, only to fade immediately like phantoms in a dream.
+His vanity cried out to him with desperate tenacity that he must do something.
+</p>
+<p>“Placido Penitente,” said the voice, “show these youths that you have dignity, that
+you are the son of a valiant and noble province, where wrongs are washed out with
+blood. You’re a Batangan, Placido Penitente! Avenge yourself, Placido Penitente!”
+</p>
+<p>The youth groaned and gnashed his teeth, stumbling against every one in the street
+and on the Bridge of Spain, as if he were seeking a quarrel. In the latter place he
+saw a carriage in which was the Vice-Rector, Padre Sibyla, accompanied by Don Custodio,
+and he had a great mind to seize the friar and throw him into the river.
+</p>
+<p>He proceeded along the Escolta and was tempted to assault two Augustinians who were
+seated in the doorway <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2926">[<a href="#xd32e2926">176</a>]</span>of Quiroga’s bazaar, laughing and joking with other friars who must have been inside
+in joyous conversation, for their merry voices and sonorous laughter could be heard.
+Somewhat farther on, two cadets blocked up the sidewalk, talking with the clerk of
+a warehouse, who was in his shirtsleeves. Penitents moved toward them to force a passage
+and they, perceiving his dark intention, good-humoredly made way for him. Placido
+was by this time under the influence of the <i>amok</i>, as the Malayists say.
+</p>
+<p>As he approached his home—the house of a silversmith where he lived as a boarder—he
+tried to collect his thoughts and make a plan—to return to his town and avenge himself
+by showing the friars that they could not with impunity insult a youth or make a joke
+of him. He decided to write a letter immediately to his mother, Cabesang Andang, to
+inform her of what had happened and to tell her that the schoolroom had closed forever
+for him. Although there was the Ateneo of the Jesuits, where he might study that year,
+yet it was not very likely that the Dominicans would grant him the transfer, and,
+even though he should secure it, in the following year he would have to return to
+the University.
+</p>
+<p>“They say that we don’t know how to avenge ourselves!” he muttered. “Let the lightning
+strike and we’ll see!”
+</p>
+<p>But Placido was not reckoning upon what awaited him in the house of the silversmith.
+Cabesang Andang had just arrived from Batangas, having come to do some shopping, to
+visit her son, and to bring him money, jerked venison, and silk handkerchiefs.
+</p>
+<p>The first greetings over, the poor woman, who had at once noticed her son’s gloomy
+look, could no longer restrain her curiosity and began to ask questions. His first
+explanations Cabesang Andang regarded as some subterfuge, so she smiled and soothed
+her son, reminding him of their sacrifices and privations. She spoke of Capitana Simona’s
+son, who, having entered the seminary, now carried himself in the town like a bishop,
+and Capitana Simona already <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2935">[<a href="#xd32e2935">177</a>]</span>considered herself a Mother of God, clearly so, for her son was going to be another
+Christ.
+</p>
+<p>“If the son becomes a priest,” said she, “the mother won’t have to pay us what she
+owes us. Who will collect from her then?”
+</p>
+<p>But on seeing that Placido was speaking seriously and reading in his eyes the storm
+that raged within him, she realized that what he was telling her was unfortunately
+the strict truth. She remained silent for a while and then broke out into lamentations.
+</p>
+<p>“Ay!” she exclaimed. “I promised your father that I would care for you, educate you,
+and make a lawyer of you! I’ve deprived myself of everything so that you might go
+to school! Instead of joining the <i>panguingui</i> where the stake is a half peso, I Ve gone only where it’s a half real, enduring the
+bad smells and the dirty cards. Look at my patched camisa; for instead of buying new
+ones I’ve spent the money in masses and presents to St. Sebastian, even though I don’t
+have great confidence in his power, because the curate recites the masses fast and
+hurriedly, he’s an entirely new saint and doesn’t yet know how to perform miracles,
+and isn’t made of <i>batikulin</i> but of <i>lanete.</i> Ay, what will your father say to me when I die and see him again!”
+</p>
+<p>So the poor woman lamented and wept, while Placido became gloomier and let stifled
+sighs escape from his breast.
+</p>
+<p>“What would I get out of being a lawyer?” was his response.
+</p>
+<p>“What will become of you?” asked his mother, clasping her hands. “They’ll call you
+a filibuster and garrote you. I’ve told you that you must have patience, that you
+must be humble. I don’t tell you that you must kiss the hands of the curates, for
+I know that you have a delicate sense of smell, like your father, who couldn’t endure
+European cheese.<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e2952src" href="#xd32e2952">1</a> But we have to suffer, to be silent, to say yes <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2957">[<a href="#xd32e2957">178</a>]</span>to everything. What are we going to do? The friars own everything, and if they are
+unwilling, no one will become a lawyer or a doctor. Have patience, my son, have patience!”
+</p>
+<p>“But I’ve had a great deal, mother, I’ve suffered for months and months.”
+</p>
+<p>Cabesang Andang then resumed her lamentations. She did not ask that he declare himself
+a partizan of the friars, she was not one herself—it was enough to know that for one
+good friar there were ten bad, who took the money from the poor and deported the rich.
+But one must be silent, suffer, and endure—there was no other course. She cited this
+man and that one, who by being <i>patient</i> and humble, even though in the bottom of his heart he hated his masters, had risen
+from servant of the friars to high office; and such another who was rich and could
+commit abuses, secure of having patrons who would protect him from the law, yet who
+had been nothing more than a poor sacristan, humble and obedient, and who had married
+a pretty girl whose son had the curate for a godfather. So Cabesang Andang continued
+her litany of humble and <i>patient</i> Filipinos, as she called them, and was about to cite others who by not being so had
+found themselves persecuted and exiled, when Placido on some trifling pretext left
+the house to wander about the streets.
+</p>
+<p>He passed through Sibakong,<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e2968src" href="#xd32e2968">2</a> Tondo, San Nicolas, and Santo Cristo, absorbed in his ill-humor, without taking note
+of the sun or the hour, and only when he began to feel hungry and discovered that
+he had no money, having given it all for celebrations and contributions, did he return
+to the house. He had expected that he would not meet his mother there, as she was
+in the habit, when in Manila, of going out at that hour to a neighboring house where
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2971">[<a href="#xd32e2971">179</a>]</span><i>panguingui</i> was played, but Cabesang Andang was waiting to propose her plan. She would avail
+herself of the procurator of the Augustinians to restore her son to the good graces
+of the Dominicans.
+</p>
+<p>Placido stopped her with a gesture. “I’ll throw myself into the sea first,” he declared.
+“I’ll become a tulisan before I’ll go back to the University.”
+</p>
+<p>Again his mother began her preachment about patience and humility, so he went away
+again without having eaten anything, directing his steps toward the quay where the
+steamers tied up. The sight of a steamer weighing anchor for Hongkong inspired him
+with an idea—to go to Hongkong, to run away, get rich there, and make war on the friars.
+</p>
+<p>The thought of Hongkong awoke in his mind the recollection of a story about frontals,
+cirials, and candelabra of pure silver, which the piety of the faithful had led them
+to present to a certain church. The friars, so the silversmith told, had sent to Hongkong
+to have duplicate frontals, cirials, and candelabra made of German silver, which they
+substituted for the genuine ones, these being melted down and coined into Mexican
+pesos. Such was the story he had heard, and though it was no more than a rumor or
+a story, his resentment gave it the color of truth and reminded him of other tricks
+of theirs in that same style. The desire to live free, and certain half-formed plans,
+led him to decide upon Hongkong. If the corporations sent all their money there, commerce
+must be flourishing and he could enrich himself.
+</p>
+<p>“I want to be free, to live free!”
+</p>
+<p>Night surprised him wandering along San Fernando, but not meeting any sailor he knew,
+he decided to return home. As the night was beautiful, with a brilliant moon transforming
+the squalid city into a fantastic fairy kingdom, he went to the fair. There he wandered
+back and forth, passing booths without taking any notice of the articles in them,
+ever with the thought of Hongkong, of living free, of enriching himself.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2981">[<a href="#xd32e2981">180</a>]</span></p>
+<p>He was about to leave the fair when he thought he recognized the jeweler Simoun bidding
+good-by to a foreigner, both of them speaking in English. To Placido every language
+spoken in the Philippines by Europeans, when not Spanish, had to be English, and besides,
+he caught the name Hongkong. If only the jeweler would recommend him to that foreigner,
+who must be setting out for Hongkong!
+</p>
+<p>Placido paused. He was acquainted with the jeweler, as the latter had been in his
+town peddling his wares, and he had accompanied him on one of his trips, when Simoun
+had made himself very amiable indeed, telling him of the life in the universities
+of the free countries—what a difference!
+</p>
+<p>So he followed the jeweler. “Señor Simoun, Señor Simoun!” he called.
+</p>
+<p>The jeweler was at that moment entering his carriage. Recognizing Placido, he checked
+himself.
+</p>
+<p>“I want to ask a favor of you, to say a few words to you.”
+</p>
+<p>Simoun made a sign of impatience which Placido in his perturbation did not observe.
+In a few words the youth related what had happened and made known his desire to go
+to Hongkong.
+</p>
+<p>“Why?” asked Simoun, staring fixedly at Placido through his blue goggles.
+</p>
+<p>Placido did not answer, so Simoun threw back his head, smiled his cold, silent smile
+and said, “All right! Come with me. To Calle Iris!” he directed the cochero.
+</p>
+<p>Simoun remained silent throughout the whole drive, apparently absorbed in meditation
+of a very important nature. Placido kept quiet, waiting for him to speak first, and
+entertained himself in watching the promenaders who were enjoying the clear moonlight:
+pairs of infatuated lovers, followed by watchful mammas or aunts; groups of students
+in white clothes that the moonlight made whiter still; half-drunken soldiers in a
+carriage, six together, on their way to visit some nipa temple dedicated to Cytherea;
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2992">[<a href="#xd32e2992">181</a>]</span>children playing their games and Chinese selling sugar-cane. All these filled the
+streets, taking on in the brilliant moonlight fantastic forms and ideal outlines.
+In one house an orchestra was playing waltzes, and couples might be seen dancing under
+the bright lamps and chandeliers—what a sordid spectacle they presented in comparison
+with the sight the streets afforded! Thinking of Hongkong, he asked himself if the
+moonlit nights in that island were so poetical and sweetly melancholy as those of
+the Philippines, and a deep sadness settled down over his heart.
+</p>
+<p>Simoun ordered the carriage to stop and both alighted, just at the moment when Isagani
+and Paulita Gomez passed them murmuring sweet inanities. Behind them came Doña Victorina
+with Juanito Pelaez, who was talking in a loud voice, busily gesticulating, and appearing
+to have a larger hump than ever. In his preoccupation Pelaez did not notice his former
+schoolmate.
+</p>
+<p>“There’s a fellow who’s happy!” muttered Placido with a sigh, as he gazed toward the
+group, which became converted into vaporous silhouettes, with Juanito’s arms plainly
+visible, rising and falling like the arms of a windmill.
+</p>
+<p>“That’s all he’s good for,” observed Simoun. “It’s fine to be young!”
+</p>
+<p>To whom did Placido and Simoun each allude?
+</p>
+<p>The jeweler made a sign to the young man, and they left the street to pick their way
+through a labyrinth of paths and passageways among various houses, at times leaping
+upon stones to avoid the mudholes or stepping aside from the sidewalks that were badly
+constructed and still more badly tended. Placido was surprised to see the rich jeweler
+move through such places as if he were familiar with them. They at length reached
+an open lot where a wretched hut stood off by itself surrounded by banana-plants and
+areca-palms. Some bamboo frames and sections of the same material led Placido to suspect
+that they were approaching the house of a pyrotechnist.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3001">[<a href="#xd32e3001">182</a>]</span></p>
+<p>Simoun rapped on the window and a man’s face appeared.
+</p>
+<p>“Ah, sir!” he exclaimed, and immediately came outside.
+</p>
+<p>“Is the powder here?” asked Simoun.
+</p>
+<p>“In sacks. I’m waiting for the shells.”
+</p>
+<p>“And the bombs?”
+</p>
+<p>“Are all ready.”
+</p>
+<p>“All right, then. This very night you must go and inform the lieutenant and the corporal.
+Then keep on your way, and in Lamayan you will find a man in a banka. You will say
+<i>Cabesa</i> and he will answer <i>Tales</i>. It’s necessary that he be here tomorrow. There’s no time to be lost.”
+</p>
+<p>Saying this, he gave him some gold coins.
+</p>
+<p>“How’s this, sir?” the man inquired in very good Spanish. “Is there any news?”
+</p>
+<p>“Yes, it’ll be done within the coming week.”
+</p>
+<p>“The coming week!” exclaimed the unknown, stepping backward. “The suburbs are not
+yet ready, they hope that the General will withdraw the decree. I thought it was postponed
+until the beginning of Lent.”
+</p>
+<p>Simoun shook his head. “We won’t need the suburbs,” he said. “With Cabesang Tales’
+people, the ex-carbineers, and a regiment, we’ll have enough. Later, Maria Clara may
+be dead. Start at once!”
+</p>
+<p>The man disappeared. Placido, who had stood by and heard all of this brief interview,
+felt his hair rise and stared with startled eyes at Simoun, who smiled.
+</p>
+<p>“You’re surprised,” he said with his icy smile, “that this Indian, so poorly dressed,
+speaks Spanish well? He was a schoolmaster who persisted in teaching Spanish to the
+children and did not stop until he had lost his position and had been deported as
+a disturber of the public peace, and for having been a friend of the unfortunate Ibarra.
+I got him back from his deportation, where he had been working as a pruner of coconut-palms,
+and have made him a pyrotechnist.”
+</p>
+<p>They returned to the street and set out for Trozo. Before <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3024">[<a href="#xd32e3024">183</a>]</span>a wooden house of pleasant and well-kept appearance was a Spaniard on crutches, enjoying
+the moonlight. When Simoun accosted him, his attempt to rise was accompanied by a
+stifled groan.
+</p>
+<p>“You’re ready?” Simoun inquired of him.
+</p>
+<p>“I always am!”
+</p>
+<p>“The coming week?”
+</p>
+<p>“So soon?”
+</p>
+<p>“At the first cannon-shot!”
+</p>
+<p>He moved away, followed by Placido, who was beginning to ask himself if he were not
+dreaming.
+</p>
+<p>“Does it surprise you,” Simoun asked him, “to see a Spaniard so young and so afflicted
+with disease? Two years ago he was as robust as you are, but his enemies succeeded
+in sending him to Balabak to work in a penal settlement, and there he caught the rheumatism
+and fever that are dragging him into the grave. The poor devil had married a very
+beautiful woman.”
+</p>
+<p>As an empty carriage was passing, Simoun hailed it and with Placido directed it to
+his house in the Escolta, just at the moment when the clocks were striking half-past
+ten.
+</p>
+<p>Two hours later Placido left the jeweler’s house and walked gravely and thoughtfully
+along the Escolta, then almost deserted, in spite of the fact that the cafés were
+still quite animated. Now and then a carriage passed rapidly, clattering noisily over
+the worn pavement.
+</p>
+<p>From a room in his house that overlooked the Pasig, Simoun turned his gaze toward
+the Walled City, which could be seen through the open windows, with its roofs of galvanized
+iron gleaming in the moonlight and its somber towers showing dull and gloomy in the
+midst of the serene night. He laid aside his blue goggles, and his white hair, like
+a frame of silver, surrounded his energetic bronzed features, dimly lighted by a lamp
+whose flame was dying out from lack of oil. Apparently wrapped in thought, he took
+no notice of the fading light and impending darkness.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3038">[<a href="#xd32e3038">184</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“Within a few days,” he murmured, “when on all sides that accursed city is burning,
+den of presumptuous nothingness and impious exploitation of the ignorant and the distressed,
+when the tumults break out in the suburbs and there rush into the terrorized streets
+my avenging hordes, engendered by rapacity and wrongs, then will I burst the walls
+of your prison, I will tear you from the clutches of fanaticism, and my white dove,
+you will be the Phoenix that will rise from the glowing embers! A revolution plotted
+by men in darkness tore me from your side—another revolution will sweep me into your
+arms and revive me! That moon, before reaching the apogee of its brilliance, will
+light the Philippines cleansed of loathsome filth!”
+</p>
+<p>Simoun, stopped suddenly, as though interrupted. A voice in his inner consciousness
+was asking if he, Simoun, were not also a part of the filth of that accursed city,
+perhaps its most poisonous ferment. Like the dead who are to rise at the sound of
+the last trumpet, a thousand bloody specters—desperate shades of murdered men, women
+violated, fathers torn from their families, vices stimulated and encouraged, virtues
+mocked, now rose in answer to the mysterious question. For the first time in his criminal
+career, since in Havana he had by means of corruption and bribery set out to fashion
+an instrument for the execution of his plans—a man without faith, patriotism, or conscience—for
+the first time in that life, something within rose up and protested against his actions.
+He closed his eyes and remained for some time motionless, then rubbed his hand over
+his forehead, tried to be deaf to his conscience, and felt fear creeping over him.
+No, he must not analyze himself, he lacked the courage to turn his gaze toward his
+past. The idea of his courage, his conviction, his self-confidence failing him at
+the very moment when his work was set before him! As the ghosts of the wretches in
+whose misfortunes he had taken a hand continued to hover before his eyes, as if issuing
+from the shining surface of the river to invade the room with appeals and hands extended
+toward <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3042">[<a href="#xd32e3042">185</a>]</span>him, as reproaches and laments seemed to fill the air with threats and cries for vengeance,
+he turned his gaze from the window and for the first time began to tremble.
+</p>
+<p>“No, I must be ill, I can’t be feeling well,” he muttered. “There are many who hate
+me, who ascribe their misfortunes to me, but—”
+</p>
+<p>He felt his forehead begin to burn, so he arose to approach the window and inhale
+the fresh night breeze. Below him the Pasig dragged along its silvered stream, on
+whose bright surface the foam glittered, winding slowly about, receding and advancing,
+following the course of the little eddies. The city loomed up on the opposite bank,
+and its black walls looked fateful, mysterious, losing their sordidness in the moonlight
+that idealizes and embellishes everything. But again Simoun shivered; he seemed to
+see before him the severe countenance of his father, dying in prison, but dying for
+having done good; then the face of another man, severer still, who had given his life
+for him because he believed that he was going to bring about the regeneration of his
+country.
+</p>
+<p>“No, I can’t turn back,” he exclaimed, wiping the perspiration from his forehead.
+“The work is at hand and its success will justify me! If I had conducted myself as
+you did, I should have succumbed. Nothing of idealism, nothing of fallacious theories!
+Fire and steel to the cancer, chastisement to vice, and afterwards destroy the instrument,
+if it be bad! No, I have planned well, but now I feel feverish, my reason wavers,
+it is natural—If I have done ill, it has been that I may do good, and the end justifies
+the means. What I will do is not to expose myself—”
+</p>
+<p>With his thoughts thus confused he lay down, and tried to fall asleep.
+</p>
+<p>On the following morning Placido listened submissively, with a smile on his lips,
+to his mother’s preachment. When she spoke of her plan of interesting the Augustinian
+procurator he did not protest or object, but on the contrary offered himself to carry
+it out, in order to save trouble for <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3051">[<a href="#xd32e3051">186</a>]</span>his mother, whom he begged to return at once to the province, that very day, if possible.
+Cabesang Andang asked him the reason for such haste.
+</p>
+<p>“Because—because if the procurator learns that you are here he won’t do anything until
+you send him a present and order some masses.”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3055">[<a href="#xd32e3055">187</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e2952">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e2952src">1</a></span> The Malay method of kissing is quite different from the Occidental. The mouth is placed
+close to the object and a deep breath taken, often <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e2954">[<a href="#xd32e2954">178</a>]</span>without actually touching the object, being more of a sniff than a kiss.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e2952src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e2968">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e2968src">2</a></span> Now Calle Tetuan, Santa Cruz. The other names are still in use.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e2968src" title="Return to note 2 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch20" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e403">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XX</h2>
+<h2 class="main">The Arbiter</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">True it was that Padre Irene had said: the question of the academy of Castilian, so
+long before broached, was on the road to a solution. Don Custodio, the active Don
+Custodio, the most active of all the arbiters in the world, according to Ben-Zayb,
+was occupied with it, spending his days reading the petition and falling asleep without
+reaching any decision, waking on the following day to repeat the same performance,
+dropping off to sleep again, and so on continuously.
+</p>
+<p>How the good man labored, the most active of all the arbiters in the world! He wished
+to get out of the predicament by pleasing everybody—the friars, the high official,
+the Countess, Padre Irene, and his own liberal principles. He had consulted with Señor
+Pasta, and Señor Pasta had left him stupefied and confused, after advising him to
+do a million contradictory and impossible things. He had consulted with Pepay the
+dancing girl, and Pepay, who had no idea what he was talking about, executed a pirouette
+and asked him for twenty-five pesos to bury an aunt of hers who had suddenly died
+for the fifth time, or the fifth aunt who had suddenly died, according to fuller explanations,
+at the same time requesting that he get a cousin of hers who could read, write, and
+play the violin, a job as assistant on the public works—all things that were far from
+inspiring Don Custodio with any saving idea.
+</p>
+<p>Two days after the events in the Quiapo fair, Don Custodio was as usual busily studying
+the petition, without hitting upon the happy solution. While he yawns, coughs, smokes,
+and thinks about Pepay’s legs and her pirouettes, <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3064">[<a href="#xd32e3064">188</a>]</span>let us give some account of this exalted personage, in order to understand Padre Sibyla’s
+reason for proposing him as the arbiter of such a vexatious matter and why the other
+clique accepted him.
+</p>
+<p>Don Custodio de Salazar y Sanchez de Monteredondo, often referred to as <i>Good Authority</i>, belonged to that class of Manila society which cannot take a step without having
+the newspapers heap titles upon them, calling each <i>indedefatigable, distinguished, zealous, active, profound, intelligent, well-informed,
+influential</i>, and so on, as if they feared that he might be confused with some idle and ignorant
+possessor of the same name. Besides, no harm resulted from it, and the watchful censor
+was not disturbed. The <i>Good Authority</i> resulted from his friendship with Ben-Zayb, when the latter, in his two noisiest
+controversies, which he carried on for weeks and months in the columns of the newspapers
+about whether it was proper to wear a high hat, a derby, or a <i>salakot,</i> and whether the plural of <i>carácter</i> should be <i>carácteres</i> or <i>caractéres,</i> in order to strengthen his argument always came out with, “We have this on good authority,”
+“We learn this from good authority,” later letting it be known, for in Manila everything
+becomes known, that this <i>Good Authority</i> was no other than Don Custodio de Salazar y Sanchez de Monteredondo.
+</p>
+<p>He had come to Manila very young, with a good position that had enabled him to marry
+a pretty mestiza belonging to one of the wealthiest families of the city. As he had
+natural talent, boldness, and great self-possession, and knew how to make use of the
+society in which he found himself, he launched into business with his wife’s money,
+filling contracts for the government, by reason of which he was made alderman, afterwards
+alcalde, member of the Economic Society,<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e3087src" href="#xd32e3087">1</a> councilor of the administration, president <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3093">[<a href="#xd32e3093">189</a>]</span>of the directory of the <i lang="es">Obras Pias</i>,<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e3098src" href="#xd32e3098">2</a> member of the Society of Mercy, director of the Spanish-Filipino Bank, etc., etc.
+Nor are these <i>etceteras</i> to be taken like those ordinarily placed after a long enumeration of titles: Don
+Custodio, although never having seen a treatise on hygiene, came to be vice-chairman
+of the Board of Health, for the truth was that of the eight who composed this board
+only one had to be a physician and he could not be that one. So also he was a member
+of the Vaccination Board, which was composed of three physicians and seven laymen,
+among these being the Archbishop and three Provincials. He was a brother in all the
+confraternities of the common and of the most exalted dignity, and, as we have seen,
+director of the Superior Commission of Primary Instruction, which usually did not
+do anything—all these being quite sufficient reason for the newspapers to heap adjectives
+upon him no less when he traveled than when he sneezed.
+</p>
+<p>In spite of so many offices, Don Custodio was not among those who slept through the
+sessions, contenting themselves, like lazy and timid delegates, in voting with the
+majority. The opposite of the numerous kings of Europe who bear the title of King
+of Jerusalem, Don Custodio made his dignity felt and got from it all the benefit possible,
+often frowning, making his voice impressive, coughing out his words, often taking
+up the whole session telling a story, presenting a project, or disputing with a colleague
+who had placed himself in open opposition to him. Although not past forty, he already
+talked of acting with circumspection, of letting the figs ripen (adding under his
+breath “pumpkins”), of pondering deeply and of stepping with careful tread, of the
+necessity for understanding the country, because the nature of the Indians, because
+the prestige of the Spanish name, because they were first of all Spaniards, because
+religion—and so on. Remembered yet in Manila is a speech of his when for the first
+time it was proposed to <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3105">[<a href="#xd32e3105">190</a>]</span>light the city with kerosene in place of the old coconut oil: in such an innovation,
+far from seeing the extinction of the coconut-oil industry, he merely discerned the
+interests of a certain alderman—because Don Custodio saw a long way—and opposed it
+with all the resonance of his bucal cavity, considering the project too premature
+and predicting great social cataclysms. No less celebrated was his opposition to a
+sentimental serenade that some wished to tender a certain governor on the eve of his
+departure. Don Custodio, who felt a little resentment over some slight or other, succeeded
+in insinuating the idea that the rising star was the mortal enemy of the setting one,
+whereat the frightened promoters of the serenade gave it up.
+</p>
+<p>One day he was advised to return to Spain to be cured of a liver complaint, and the
+newspapers spoke of him as an Antaeus who had to set foot in the mother country to
+gain new strength. But the Manila Antaeus found himself a small and insignificant
+person at the capital. There he was nobody, and he missed his beloved adjectives.
+He did not mingle with the upper set, and his lack of education prevented him from
+amounting to much in the academies and scientific centers, while his backwardness
+and his parish-house politics drove him from the clubs disgusted, vexed, seeing nothing
+clearly but that there they were forever borrowing money and gambling heavily. He
+missed the submissive servants of Manila, who endured all his peevishness, and who
+now seemed to be far preferable; when a winter kept him between a fireplace and an
+attack of pneumonia, he sighed for the Manila winter during which a single quilt is
+sufficient, while in summer he missed the easy-chair and the boy to fan him. In short,
+in Madrid he was only one among many, and in spite of his diamonds he was once taken
+for a rustic who did not know how to comport himself and at another time for an <i>Indiano</i>. His scruples were scoffed at, and he was shamelessly flouted by some borrowers whom
+he offended. Disgusted with the conservatives, who took no great notice of his advice,
+as well as with the <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3111">[<a href="#xd32e3111">191</a>]</span>sponges who rifled his pockets, he declared himself to be of the liberal party and
+returned within a year to the Philippines, if not sound in his liver, yet completely
+changed in his beliefs.
+</p>
+<p>The eleven months spent at the capital among café politicians, nearly all retired
+half-pay office-holders, the various speeches caught here and there, this or that
+article of the opposition, all the political life that permeates the air, from the
+barber-shop where amid the scissors-clips the Figaro announces his program to the
+banquets where in harmonious periods and telling phrases the different shades of political
+opinion, the divergences and disagreements, are adjusted—all these things awoke in
+him the farther he got from Europe, like the life-giving sap within the sown seed
+prevented from bursting out by the thick husk, in such a way that when he reached
+Manila he believed that he was going to regenerate it and actually had the holiest
+plans and the purest ideals.
+</p>
+<p>During the first months after his return he was continually talking about the capital,
+about his good friends, about Minister So-and-So, ex-Minister Such-a-One, the delegate
+C., the author B., and there was not a political event, a court scandal, of which
+he was not informed to the last detail, nor was there a public man the secrets of
+whose private life were unknown to him, nor could anything occur that he had not foreseen,
+nor any reform be ordered but he had first been consulted. All this was seasoned with
+attacks on the conservatives in righteous indignation, with apologies of the liberal
+party, with a little anecdote here, a phrase there from some great man, dropped in
+as one who did not wish offices and employments, which same he had refused in order
+not to be beholden to the conservatives. Such was his enthusiasm in these first days
+that various cronies in the grocery-store which he visited from time to time affiliated
+themselves with the liberal party and began to style themselves liberals: Don Eulogio
+Badana, a retired sergeant of carbineers; the honest Armendia, by <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3116">[<a href="#xd32e3116">192</a>]</span>profession a pilot, and a rampant Carlist; Don Eusebio Picote, customs inspector;
+and Don Bonifacio Tacon, shoe- and harness-maker.<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e3118src" href="#xd32e3118">3</a>
+</p>
+<p>But nevertheless, from lack of encouragement and of opposition, his enthusiasm gradually
+waned. He did not read the newspapers that came from Spain, because they arrived in
+packages, the sight of which made him yawn. The ideas that he had caught having been
+all expended, he needed reinforcement, and his orators were not there, and although
+in the casinos of Manila there was enough gambling, and money was borrowed as in Madrid,
+no speech that would nourish his political ideas was permitted in them. But Don Custodio
+was not lazy, he did more than wish—he worked. Foreseeing that he was going to leave
+his bones in the Philippines, he began to consider that country his proper sphere
+and to devote his efforts to its welfare. Thinking to liberalize it, he commenced
+to draw up a series of reforms or projects, which were ingenious, to say the least.
+It was he who, having heard in Madrid mention of the wooden street pavements of Paris,
+not yet adopted in Spain, proposed the introduction of them in Manila by covering
+the streets with boards nailed down as they are on the sides of houses; it was he
+who, deploring the accidents to two-wheeled vehicles, planned to avoid them by putting
+on at least three wheels; it was also he who, while acting as vice-president of the
+Board of Health, ordered everything fumigated, even the telegrams that came from infected
+places; it was also he who, in compassion for the convicts that worked in the sun
+and with a desire of saving to the government the cost of their equipment, suggested
+that they be clothed in a simple breech-clout and set to work not by day but at night.
+He marveled, he stormed, that his projects should encounter objectors, but consoled
+himself with the reflection that the man who is worth enemies has them, and revenged
+himself by attacking and <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3124">[<a href="#xd32e3124">193</a>]</span>tearing to pieces any project, good or bad, presented by others.
+</p>
+<p>As he prided himself on being a liberal, upon being asked what he thought of the Indians
+he would answer, like one conferring a great favor, that they were fitted for manual
+labor and the <i>imitative arts</i> (meaning thereby music, painting, and sculpture), adding his old postscript that
+to know them one must have resided many, many years in the country. Yet when he heard
+of any one of them excelling in something that was not manual labor or an <i>imitative art</i>—in chemistry, medicine, or philosophy, for example—he would exclaim: “Ah, he promises
+fairly, fairly well, he’s not a fool!” and feel sure that a great deal of Spanish
+blood must flow in the veins of such an <i>Indian</i>. If unable to discover any in spite of his good intentions, he then sought a Japanese
+origin, for it was at that time the fashion began of attributing to the Japanese or
+the Arabs whatever good the Filipinos might have in them. For him the native songs
+were Arabic music, as was also the alphabet of the ancient Filipinos—he was certain
+of this, although he did not know Arabic nor had he ever seen that alphabet.
+</p>
+<p>“Arabic, the purest Arabic,” he said to Ben-Zayb in a tone that admitted no reply.
+“At best, Chinese!”
+</p>
+<p>Then he would add, with a significant wink: “Nothing can be, nothing ought to be,
+original with the Indians, you understand! I like them greatly, but they mustn’t be
+allowed to pride themselves upon anything, for then they would take heart and turn
+into a lot of wretches.”
+</p>
+<p>At other times he would say: “I love the Indians fondly, I’ve constituted myself their
+father and defender, but it’s necessary to keep everything in its proper place. Some
+were born to command and others to serve—plainly, that is a truism which can’t be
+uttered very loudly, but it can be put into practise without many words. For look,
+the trick depends upon trifles. When you wish to reduce a people to subjection, assure
+it that it is in subjection. The <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3138">[<a href="#xd32e3138">194</a>]</span>first day it will laugh, the second protest, the third doubt, and the fourth be convinced.
+To keep the Filipino docile, he must have repeated to him day after day what he is,
+to convince him that he is incompetent. What good would it do, besides, to have him
+believe in something else that would make him wretched? Believe me, it’s an act of
+charity to hold every creature in his place—that is order, harmony. That constitutes
+the <i>science</i> of government.”
+</p>
+<p>In referring to his policies, Don Custodio was not satisfied with the word <i>art</i>, and upon pronouncing the word <i>government</i>, he would extend his hand downwards to the height of a man bent over on his knees.
+</p>
+<p>In regard to his religious ideas, he prided himself on being a Catholic, very much
+a Catholic—ah, Catholic Spain, the land of <i>María Santísima</i>! A liberal could be and ought to be a Catholic, when the reactionaries were setting
+themselves up as gods or saints, just as a mulatto passes for a white man in Kaffirland.
+But with all that, he ate meat during Lent, except on Good Friday, never went to confession,
+believed neither in miracles nor the infallibility of the Pope, and when he attended
+mass, went to the one at ten o’clock, or to the shortest, the military mass. Although
+in Madrid he had spoken ill of the religious orders, so as not to be out of harmony
+with his surroundings, considering them anachronisms, and had hurled curses against
+the Inquisition, while relating this or that lurid or droll story wherein the habits
+danced, or rather friars without habits, yet in speaking of the Philippines, which
+should be ruled by special laws, he would cough, look wise, and again extend his hand
+downwards to that mysterious altitude.
+</p>
+<p>“The friars are necessary, they’re a necessary evil,” he would declare.
+</p>
+<p>But how he would rage when any Indian dared to doubt the miracles or did not acknowledge
+the Pope! All the tortures of the Inquisition were insufficient to punish such temerity.
+</p>
+<p>When it was objected that to rule or to live at the expense <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3156">[<a href="#xd32e3156">195</a>]</span>of ignorance has another and somewhat ugly name and is punished by law when the culprit
+is a single person, he would justify his position by referring to other colonies.
+“We,” he would announce in his official tone, “can speak out plainly! We’re not like
+the British and the Dutch who, in order to hold people in subjection, make use of
+the lash. We avail ourselves of other means, milder and surer. The salutary influence
+of the friars is superior to the British lash.”
+</p>
+<p>This last remark made his fortune. For a long time Ben-Zayb continued to use adaptations
+of it, and with him all Manila. The thinking part of Manila applauded it, and it even
+got to Madrid, where it was quoted in the Parliament as from <i>a liberal of long residence there</i>. The friars, flattered by the comparison and seeing their prestige enhanced, sent
+him sacks of chocolate, presents which the incorruptible Don Custodio returned, so
+that Ben-Zayb immediately compared him to Epaminondas. Nevertheless, this modern Epaminondas
+made use of the rattan in his choleric moments, and advised its use!
+</p>
+<p>At that time the conventos, fearful that he would render a decision favorable to the
+petition of the students, increased their gifts, so that on the afternoon when we
+see him he was more perplexed than ever, his reputation for energy was being compromised.
+It had been more than a fortnight since he had had the petition in his hands, and
+only that morning the high official, after praising his zeal, had asked for a decision.
+Don Custodio had replied with mysterious gravity, giving him to understand that it
+was not yet completed. The high official had smiled a smile that still worried and
+haunted him.
+</p>
+<p>As we were saying, he yawned and yawned. In one of these movements, at the moment
+when he opened his eyes and closed his mouth, his attention was caught by a file of
+red envelopes, arranged in regular order on a magnificent kamagon desk. On the back
+of each could be read in large letters: PROJECTS.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3166">[<a href="#xd32e3166">196</a>]</span></p>
+<p>For a moment he forgot his troubles and Pepay’s pirouettes, to reflect upon all that
+those files contained, which had issued from his prolific brain in his hours of inspiration.
+How many original ideas, how many sublime thoughts, how many means of ameliorating
+the woes of the Philippines! Immortality and the gratitude of the country were surely
+his!
+</p>
+<p>Like an old lover who discovers a moldy package of amorous epistles, Don Custodio
+arose and approached the desk. The first envelope, thick, swollen, and plethoric,
+bore the title: PROJECTS IN PROJECT.
+</p>
+<p>“No,” he murmured, “they’re excellent things, but it would take a year to read them
+over.”
+</p>
+<p>The second, also quite voluminous, was entitled: PROJECTS UNDER CONSIDERATION. “No,
+not those either.”
+</p>
+<p>Then came the PROJECTS NEARING COMPLETION, PROJECTS PRESENTED, PROJECTS REJECTED,
+PROJECTS APPROVED, PROJECTS POSTPONED. These last envelopes held little, but the least
+of all was that of the PROJECTS EXECUTED.
+</p>
+<p>Don Custodio wrinkled up his nose—what did it contain? He had completely forgotten
+what was in it. A sheet of yellowish paper showed from under the flap, as though the
+envelope were sticking out its tongue. This he drew out and unfolded: it was the famous
+project for the School of Arts and Trades!
+</p>
+<p>“What the devil!” he exclaimed. “If the Augustinian padres took charge of it—”
+</p>
+<p>Suddenly he slapped his forehead and arched his eyebrows, while a look of triumph
+overspread his face. “I have reached a decision!” he cried with an oath that was not
+exactly <i>eureka</i>. “My decision is made!”
+</p>
+<p>Repeating his peculiar <i>eureka</i> five or six times, which struck the air like so many gleeful lashes, he sat down
+at his desk, radiant with joy, and began to write furiously.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3182">[<a href="#xd32e3182">197</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e3087">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e3087src">1</a></span> The <i lang="es">Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País</i> for the encouragement of agricultural and industrial development, was established
+by Basco de Vargas in 1780.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e3087src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e3098">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e3098src">2</a></span> Funds managed by the government for making loans and supporting charitable enterprises.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e3098src" title="Return to note 2 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e3118">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e3118src">3</a></span> The names are fictitious burlesques.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e3118src" title="Return to note 3 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch21" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e413">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XXI</h2>
+<h2 class="main">Manila Types</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">That night there was a grand function at the Teatro de Variedades. Mr. Jouay’s French
+operetta company was giving its initial performance, <i>Les Cloches de Corneville</i>. To the eyes of the public was to be exhibited his select troupe, whose fame the
+newspapers had for days been proclaiming. It was reported that among the actresses
+was a very beautiful voice, with a figure even more beautiful, and if credit could
+be given to rumor, her amiability surpassed even her voice and figure.
+</p>
+<p>At half-past seven in the evening there were no more tickets to be had, not even though
+they had been for Padre Salvi himself in his direct need, and the persons waiting
+to enter the general admission already formed a long queue. In the ticket-office there
+were scuffles and fights, talk of filibusterism and races, but this did not produce
+any tickets, so that by a quarter before eight fabulous prices were being offered
+for them. The appearance of the building, profusely illuminated, with flowers and
+plants in all the doors and windows, enchanted the new arrivals to such an extent
+that they burst out into exclamations and applause. A large crowd surged about the
+entrance, gazing enviously at those going in, those who came early from fear of missing
+their seats. Laughter, whispering, expectation greeted the later arrivals, who disconsolately
+joined the curious crowd, and now that they could not get in contented themselves
+with watching those who did.
+</p>
+<p>Yet there was one person who seemed out of place amid such great eagerness and curiosity.
+He was a tall, meager man, who dragged one leg stiffly when he walked, dressed <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3194">[<a href="#xd32e3194">198</a>]</span>in a wretched brown coat and dirty checkered trousers that fitted his lean, bony limbs
+tightly. A straw sombrero, artistic in spite of being broken, covered an enormous
+head and allowed his dirty gray, almost red, hair to straggle out long and kinky at
+the end like a poet’s curls. But the most notable thing about this man was not his
+clothing or his European features, guiltless of beard or mustache, but his fiery red
+face, from which he got the nickname by which he was known, <i>Camaroncocido</i>.<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e3198src" href="#xd32e3198">1</a> He was a curious character belonging to a prominent Spanish family, but he lived
+like a vagabond and a beggar, scoffing at the prestige which he flouted indifferently
+with his rags. He was reputed to be a kind of reporter, and in fact his gray goggle-eyes,
+so cold and thoughtful, always showed up where anything publishable was happening.
+His manner of living was a mystery to all, as no one seemed to know where he ate and
+slept. Perhaps he had an empty hogshead somewhere.
+</p>
+<p>But at that moment Camaroncocido lacked his usual hard and indifferent expression,
+something like mirthful pity being reflected in his looks. A funny little man accosted
+him merrily.
+</p>
+<p>“Friend!” exclaimed the latter, in a raucous voice, as hoarse as a frog’s, while he
+displayed several Mexican pesos, which Camaroncocido merely glanced at and then shrugged
+his shoulders. What did they matter to him?
+</p>
+<p>The little old man was a fitting contrast to him. Small, very small, he wore on his
+head a high hat, which presented the appearance of a huge hairy worm, and lost himself
+in an enormous frock coat, too wide and too long for him, to reappear in trousers
+too short, not reaching below his calves. His body seemed to be the grandfather and
+his legs the grandchildren, while as for his shoes he appeared to be floating on the
+land, for they were of an enormous sailor type, apparently protesting against the
+hairy worm <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3205">[<a href="#xd32e3205">199</a>]</span>worn on his head with all the energy of a convento beside a World’s Exposition. If
+Camaroncocido was red, he was brown; while the former, although of Spanish extraction,
+had not a single hair on his face, yet he, an Indian, had a goatee and mustache, both
+long, white, and sparse. His expression was lively. He was known as <i>Tio Quico</i>,<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e3209src" href="#xd32e3209">2</a> and like his friend lived on publicity, advertising the shows and posting the theatrical
+announcements, being perhaps the only Filipino who could appear with impunity in a
+silk hat and frock coat, just as his friend was the first Spaniard who laughed at
+the prestige of his race.
+</p>
+<p>“The Frenchman has paid me well,” he said smiling and showing his picturesque gums,
+which looked like a street after a conflagration. “I did a good job in posting the
+bills.”
+</p>
+<p>Camaroncocido shrugged his shoulders again. “Quico,” he rejoined in a cavernous voice,
+“if they’ve given you six pesos for your work, how much will they give the friars?”
+</p>
+<p>Tio Quico threw back his head in his usual lively manner. “To the friars?”
+</p>
+<p>“Because you surely know,” continued Camaroncocido, “that all this crowd was secured
+for them by the conventos.”
+</p>
+<p>The fact was that the friars, headed by Padre Salvi, and some lay brethren captained
+by Don Custodio, had opposed such shows. Padre Camorra, who could not attend, watered
+at the eyes and mouth, but argued with Ben-Zayb, who defended them feebly, thinking
+of the free tickets they would send his newspaper. Don Custodio spoke of morality,
+religion, good manners, and the like.
+</p>
+<p>“But,” stammered the writer, “if our own farces with their plays on words and phrases
+of double meaning—”
+</p>
+<p>“But at least they’re in Castilian!” the virtuous councilor interrupted with a roar,
+inflamed to righteous wrath. “Obscenities in French, man, Ben-Zayb, for God’s sake,
+in French! Never!”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3221">[<a href="#xd32e3221">200</a>]</span></p>
+<p>He uttered this <i>never</i> with the energy of three Guzmans threatened with being killed like fleas if they
+did not surrender twenty Tarifas. Padre Irene naturally agreed with Don Custodio and
+execrated French operetta. Whew, he had been in Paris, but had never set foot in a
+theater, the Lord deliver him!
+</p>
+<p>Yet the French operetta also counted numerous partizans. The officers of the army
+and navy, among them the General’s aides, the clerks, and many society people were
+anxious to enjoy the delicacies of the French language from the mouths of genuine
+<i>Parisiennes</i>, and with them were affiliated those who had traveled by the M.M.<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e3230src" href="#xd32e3230">3</a> and had jabbered a little French during the voyage, those who had visited Paris,
+and all those who wished to appear learned.
+</p>
+<p>Hence, Manila society was divided into two factions, operettists and anti-operettists.
+The latter were supported by the elderly ladies, wives jealous and careful of their
+husbands’ love, and by those who were engaged, while those who were free and those
+who were beautiful declared themselves enthusiastic operettists. Notes and then more
+notes were exchanged, there were goings and comings, mutual recriminations, meetings,
+lobbyings, arguments, even talk of an insurrection of the natives, of their indolence,
+of inferior and superior races, of prestige and other humbugs, so that after much
+gossip and more recrimination, the permit was granted, Padre Salvi at the same time
+publishing a pastoral that was read by no one but the proof-reader. There were questionings
+whether the General had quarreled with the Countess, whether she spent her time in
+the halls of pleasure, whether His Excellency was greatly annoyed, whether there had
+been presents exchanged, whether the French consul—, and so on and on. Many names
+were bandied about: Quiroga the Chinaman’s, Simoun’s, and even those of many actresses.
+</p>
+<p>Thanks to these scandalous preliminaries, the people’s <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3236">[<a href="#xd32e3236">201</a>]</span>impatience had been aroused, and since the evening before, when the troupe arrived,
+there was talk of nothing but attending the first performance. From the hour when
+the red posters announced <i lang="fr">Les Cloches de Corneville</i> the victors prepared to celebrate their triumph. In some offices, instead of the
+time being spent in reading newspapers and gossiping, it was devoted to devouring
+the synopsis and spelling out French novels, while many feigned business outside to
+consult their pocket-dictionaries on the sly. So no business was transacted, callers
+were told to come back the next day, but the public could not take offense, for they
+encountered some very polite and affable clerks, who received and dismissed them with
+grand salutations in the French style. The clerks were practising, brushing the dust
+off their French, and calling to one another <i lang="fr">oui, monsieur, s’il vous plait</i>, and <i lang="fr">pardon</i>! at every turn, so that it was a pleasure to see and hear them.
+</p>
+<p>But the place where the excitement reached its climax was the newspaper office. Ben-Zayb,
+having been appointed critic and translator of the synopsis, trembled like a poor
+woman accused of witchcraft, as he saw his enemies picking out his blunders and throwing
+up to his face his deficient knowledge of French. When the Italian opera was on, he
+had very nearly received a challenge for having mistranslated a tenor’s name, while
+an envious rival had immediately published an article referring to him as an ignoramus—him,
+the foremost thinking head in the Philippines! All the trouble he had had to defend
+himself! He had had to write at least seventeen articles and consult fifteen dictionaries,
+so with these salutary recollections, the wretched Ben-Zayb moved about with leaden
+hands, to say nothing of his feet, for that would be plagiarizing Padre Camorra, who
+had once intimated that the journalist wrote with them.
+</p>
+<p>“You see, Quico?” said Camaroncocido. “One half of the people have come because the
+friars told them not to, making it a kind of public protest, and the other half because
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3250">[<a href="#xd32e3250">202</a>]</span>they say to themselves, ‘Do the friars object to it? Then it must be instructive!’
+Believe me, Quico, your advertisements are a good thing but the pastoral was better,
+even taking into consideration the fact that it was read by no one.”
+</p>
+<p>“Friend, do you believe,” asked Tio Quico uneasily, “that on account of the competition
+with Padre Salvi my business will in the future be prohibited?”
+</p>
+<p>“Maybe so, Quico, maybe so,” replied the other, gazing at the sky. “Money’s getting
+scarce.”
+</p>
+<p>Tio Quico muttered some incoherent words: if the friars were going to turn theatrical
+advertisers, he would become a friar. After bidding his friend good-by, he moved away
+coughing and rattling his silver coins.
+</p>
+<p>With his eternal indifference Camaroncocido continued to wander about here and there
+with his crippled leg and sleepy looks. The arrival of unfamiliar faces caught his
+attention, coming as they did from different parts and signaling to one another with
+a wink or a cough. It was the first time that he had ever seen these individuals on
+such an occasion, he who knew all the faces and features in the city. Men with dark
+faces, humped shoulders, uneasy and uncertain movements, poorly disguised, as though
+they had for the first time put on sack coats, slipped about among the shadows, shunning
+attention, instead of getting in the front rows where they could see well.
+</p>
+<p>“Detectives or thieves?” Camaroncocido asked himself and immediately shrugged his
+shoulders. “But what is it to me?”
+</p>
+<p>The lamp of a carriage that drove up lighted in passing a group of four or five of
+these individuals talking with a man who appeared to be an army officer.
+</p>
+<p>“Detectives! It must be a new corps,” he muttered with his shrug of indifference.
+Soon, however, he noticed that the officer, after speaking to two or three more groups,
+approached a carriage and seemed to be talking vigorously with some person inside.
+Camaroncocido took a few steps <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3261">[<a href="#xd32e3261">203</a>]</span>forward and without surprise thought that he recognized the jeweler Simoun, while
+his sharp ears caught this short dialogue.
+</p>
+<p>“The signal will be a gunshot!”
+</p>
+<p>“Yes, sir.”
+</p>
+<p>“Don’t worry—it’s the General who is ordering it, but be careful about saying so.
+If you follow my instructions, you’ll get a promotion.”
+</p>
+<p>“Yes, sir.”
+</p>
+<p>“So, be ready!”
+</p>
+<p>The voice ceased and a second later the carriage drove away. In spite of his indifference
+Camaroncocido could not but mutter, “Something’s afoot—hands on pockets!”
+</p>
+<p>But feeling his own to be empty, he again shrugged his shoulders. What did it matter
+to him, even though the heavens should fall?
+</p>
+<p>So he continued his pacing about. On passing near two persons engaged in conversation,
+he caught what one of them, who had rosaries and scapularies around his neck, was
+saying in Tagalog: “The friars are more powerful than the General, don’t be a fool!
+He’ll go away and they’ll stay here. So, if we do well, we’ll get rich. The signal
+is a gunshot.”
+</p>
+<p>“Hold hard, hold hard,” murmured Camaroncocido, tightening his fingers. “On that side
+the General, on this Padre Salvi. Poor country! But what is it to me?”
+</p>
+<p>Again shrugging his shoulders and expectorating at the same time, two actions that
+with him were indications of supreme indifference, he continued his observations.
+</p>
+<p>Meanwhile, the carriages were arriving in dizzy streams, stopping directly before
+the door to set down the members of the select society. Although the weather was scarcely
+even cool, the ladies sported magnificent shawls, silk neckerchiefs, and even light
+cloaks. Among the escorts, some who were in frock coats with white ties wore overcoats,
+while others carried them on their arms to display the rich silk linings.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3276">[<a href="#xd32e3276">204</a>]</span></p>
+<p>In a group of spectators, Tadeo, he who was always taken ill the moment the professor
+appeared, was accompanied by a fellow townsman of his, the novice whom we saw suffer
+evil consequences from reading wrongly the Cartesian principle. This novice was very
+inquisitive and addicted to tiresome questions, and Tadeo was taking advantage of
+his ingenuousness and inexperience to relate to him the most stupendous lies. Every
+Spaniard that spoke to him, whether clerkling or underling, was presented as a leading
+merchant, a marquis, or a count, while on the other hand any one who passed him by
+was a greenhorn, a petty official, a nobody! When pedestrians failed him in keeping
+up the novice’s astonishment, he resorted to the resplendent carriages that came up.
+Tadeo would bow politely, wave his hand in a friendly manner, and call out a familiar
+greeting.
+</p>
+<p>“Who’s he?”
+</p>
+<p>“Bah!” was the negligent reply. “The Civil Governor, the Vice-Governor, Judge ——,
+Señora ——, all friends of mine!”
+</p>
+<p>The novice marveled and listened in fascination, taking care to keep on the left.
+Tadeo the friend of judges and governors!
+</p>
+<p>Tadeo named all the persons who arrived, when he did not know them inventing titles,
+biographies, and interesting sketches.
+</p>
+<p>“You see that tall gentleman with dark whiskers, somewhat squint-eyed, dressed in
+black—he’s Judge A ——, an intimate friend of the wife of Colonel B ——. One day if
+it hadn’t been for me they would have come to blows. Hello, here comes that Colonel!
+What if they should fight?”
+</p>
+<p>The novice held his breath, but the colonel and the judge shook hands cordially, the
+soldier, an old bachelor, inquiring about the health of the judge’s family.
+</p>
+<p>“Ah, thank heaven!” breathed Tadeo. “I’m the one who made them friends.”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3287">[<a href="#xd32e3287">205</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“What if they should invite us to go in?” asked the novice timidly.
+</p>
+<p>“Get out, boy! I never accept favors!” retorted Tadeo majestically. “I confer them,
+but disinterestedly.”
+</p>
+<p>The novice bit his lip and felt smaller than ever, while he placed a respectful distance
+between himself and his fellow townsman.
+</p>
+<p>Tadeo resumed: “That is the musician H——; that one, the lawyer J——, who delivered
+as his own a speech printed in all the books and was congratulated and admired for
+it; Doctor K——, that man just getting out of a hansom, is a specialist in diseases
+of children, so he’s called Herod; that’s the banker L——, who can talk only of his
+money and his hoards; the poet M——, who is always dealing with the stars and <i>the beyond</i>. There goes the beautiful wife of N——, whom Padre Q——is accustomed to meet when he
+calls upon the absent husband; the Jewish merchant P——, who came to the islands with
+a thousand pesos and is now a millionaire. That fellow with the long beard is the
+physician R——, who has become rich by making invalids more than by curing them.”
+</p>
+<p>“Making invalids?”
+</p>
+<p>“Yes, boy, in the examination of the conscripts. Attention! That finely dressed gentleman
+is not a physician but a homeopathist <i>sui generis</i>—he professes completely the <i>similis similibus</i>. The young cavalry captain with him is his chosen disciple. That man in a light suit
+with his hat tilted back is the government clerk whose maxim is never to be polite
+and who rages like a demon when he sees a hat on any one else’s head—they say that
+he does it to ruin the German hatters. The man just arriving with his family is the
+wealthy merchant C——, who has an income of over a hundred thousand pesos. But what
+would you say if I should tell you that he still owes me four pesos, five reales,
+and twelve cuartos? But who would collect from a rich man like him?”
+</p>
+<p>“That gentleman in debt to you?”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3304">[<a href="#xd32e3304">206</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“Sure! One day I got him out of a bad fix. It was on a Friday at half-past six in
+the morning, I still remember, because I hadn’t breakfasted. That lady who is followed
+by a duenna is the celebrated Pepay, the dancing girl, but she doesn’t dance any more
+now that a very Catholic gentleman and a great friend of mine has—forbidden it. There’s
+the death’s-head Z——, who’s surely following her to get her to dance again. He’s a
+good fellow, and a great friend of mine, but has one defect—he’s a Chinese mestizo
+and yet calls himself a Peninsular Spaniard. Sssh! Look at Ben-Zayb, him with the
+face of a friar, who’s carrying a pencil and a roll of paper in his hand. He’s the
+great writer, Ben-Zayb, a good friend of mine—he has talent!”
+</p>
+<p>“You don’t say! And that little man with white whiskers?”
+</p>
+<p>“He’s the official who has appointed his daughters, those three little girls, assistants
+in his department, so as to get their names on the pay-roll. He’s a clever man, very
+clever! When he makes a mistake he blames it on somebody else, he buys things and
+pays for them out of the treasury. He’s clever, very, very clever!”
+</p>
+<p>Tadeo was about to say more, but suddenly checked himself.
+</p>
+<p>“And that gentleman who has a fierce air and gazes at everybody over his shoulders?”
+inquired the novice, pointing to a man who nodded haughtily.
+</p>
+<p>But Tadeo did not answer. He was craning his neck to see Paulita Gomez, who was approaching
+with a friend, Doña Victorina, and Juanito Pelaez. The latter had presented her with
+a box and was more humped than ever.
+</p>
+<p>Carriage after carriage drove up; the actors and actresses arrived and entered by
+a separate door, followed by their friends and admirers.
+</p>
+<p>After Paulita had gone in, Tadeo resumed: “Those are the nieces of the rich Captain
+D——, those coming up in a landau; you see how pretty and healthy they are? Well, <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3315">[<a href="#xd32e3315">207</a>]</span>in a few years they’ll be dead or crazy. Captain D—— is opposed to their marrying,
+and the insanity of the uncle is appearing in the nieces. That’s the Señorita E——,
+the rich heiress whom the world and the conventos are disputing over. Hello, I know
+that fellow! It’s Padre Irene, in disguise, with a false mustache. I recognize him
+by his nose. And he was so greatly opposed to this!”
+</p>
+<p>The scandalized novice watched a neatly cut coat disappear behind a group of ladies.
+</p>
+<p>“The Three Fates!” went on Tadeo, watching the arrival of three withered, bony, hollow-eyed,
+wide-mouthed, and shabbily dressed women. “They’re called—”
+</p>
+<p>“Atropos?” ventured the novice, who wished to show that he also knew somebody, at
+least in mythology.
+</p>
+<p>“No, boy, they’re called the Weary Waiters—old, censorious, and dull. They pretend
+to hate everybody—men, women, and children. But look how the Lord always places beside
+the evil a remedy, only that sometimes it comes late. There behind the Fates, the
+frights of the city, come those three girls, the pride of their friends, among whom
+I count myself. That thin young man with goggle-eyes, somewhat stooped, who is wildly
+gesticulating because he can’t get tickets, is the chemist S——, author of many essays
+and scientific treatises, some of which are notable and have captured prizes. The
+Spaniards say of him, ‘There’s some hope for him, some hope for him.’ The fellow who
+is soothing him with his Voltairian smile is the poet T——, a young man of talent,
+a great friend of mine, and, for the very reason that he has talent, he has thrown
+away his pen. That fellow who is trying to get in with the actors by the other door
+is the young physician U——, who has effected some remarkable cures—it’s also said
+of him that he promises well. He’s not such a scoundrel as Pelaez but he’s cleverer
+and slyer still. I believe that he’d shake dice with death and win.”
+</p>
+<p>“And that brown gentleman with a mustache like hog-bristles?”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3324">[<a href="#xd32e3324">208</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“Ah, that’s the merchant F——, who forges everything, even his baptismal certificate.
+He wants to be a Spanish mestizo at any cost, and is making heroic efforts to forget
+his native language.”
+</p>
+<p>“But his daughters are very white.”
+</p>
+<p>“Yes, that’s the reason rice has gone up in price, and yet they eat nothing but bread.”
+</p>
+<p>The novice did not understand the connection between the price of rice and the whiteness
+of those girls, but he held his peace.
+</p>
+<p>“There goes the fellow that’s engaged to one of them, that thin brown youth who is
+following them with a lingering movement and speaking with a protecting air to the
+three friends who are laughing at him. He’s a martyr to his beliefs, to his consistency.”
+</p>
+<p>The novice was filled with admiration and respect for the young man.
+</p>
+<p>“He has the look of a fool, and he is one,” continued Tadeo. “He was born in San Pedro
+Makati and has inflicted many privations upon himself. He scarcely ever bathes or
+eats pork, because, according to him, the Spaniards don’t do those things, and for
+the same reason he doesn’t eat rice and dried fish, although he may be watering at
+the mouth and dying of hunger. Anything that comes from Europe, rotten or preserved,
+he considers divine—a month ago Basilio cured him of a severe attack of gastritis,
+for he had eaten a jar of mustard to prove that he’s a European.”
+</p>
+<p>At that moment the orchestra struck up a waltz.
+</p>
+<p>“You see that gentleman—that hypochondriac who goes along turning his head from side
+to side, seeking salutes? That’s the celebrated governor of Pangasinan, a good man
+who loses his appetite whenever any Indian fails to salute him. He would have died
+if he hadn’t issued the proclamation about salutes to which he owes his celebrity.
+Poor fellow, it’s only been three days since he came from the province and look how
+thin he has become! Oh, here’s the great man, the illustrious—open your eyes!”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3335">[<a href="#xd32e3335">209</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“Who? That man with knitted brows?”
+</p>
+<p>“Yes, that’s Don Custodio, the liberal, Don Custodio. His brows are knit because he’s
+meditating over some important project. If the ideas he has in his head were carried
+out, this would be a different world! Ah, here comes Makaraig, your housemate.”
+</p>
+<p>It was in fact Makaraig, with Pecson, Sandoval, and Isagani. Upon seeing them, Tadeo
+advanced and spoke to them.
+</p>
+<p>“Aren’t you coming in?” Makaraig asked him.
+</p>
+<p>“We haven’t been able to get tickets.”
+</p>
+<p>“Fortunately, we have a box,” replied Makaraig. “Basilio couldn’t come. Both of you,
+come in with us.”
+</p>
+<p>Tadeo did not wait for the invitation to be repeated, but the novice, fearing that
+he would intrude, with the timidity natural to the provincial Indian, excused himself,
+nor could he be persuaded to enter.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3345">[<a href="#xd32e3345">210</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e3198">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e3198src">1</a></span> “Boiled Shrimp”—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e3198src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e3209">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e3209src">2</a></span> “Uncle Frank.”—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e3209src" title="Return to note 2 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e3230">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e3230src">3</a></span> Messageries Maritimes, a French line of steamers in the Oriental trade.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e3230src" title="Return to note 3 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch22" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e424">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XXII</h2>
+<h2 class="main">The Performance</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">The interior of the theater presented a lively aspect. It was filled from top to bottom,
+with people standing in the corridors and in the aisles, fighting to withdraw a head
+from some hole where they had inserted it, or to shove an eye between a collar and
+an ear. The open boxes, occupied for the most part by ladies, looked like baskets
+of flowers, whose petals—the fans—shook in a light breeze, wherein hummed a thousand
+bees. However, just as there are flowers of strong or delicate fragrance, flowers
+that kill and flowers that console, so from our baskets were exhaled like emanations:
+there were to be heard dialogues, conversations, remarks that bit and stung. Three
+or four boxes, however, were still vacant, in spite of the lateness of the hour. The
+performance had been advertised for half-past eight and it was already a quarter to
+nine, but the curtain did not go up, as his Excellency had not yet arrived. The gallery-gods,
+impatient and uncomfortable in their seats, started a racket, clapping their hands
+and pounding the floor with their canes.
+</p>
+<p>“Boom—boom—boom! Ring up the curtain! Boom—boom—boom!”
+</p>
+<p>The artillerymen were not the least noisy. Emulators of Mars, as Ben-Zayb called them,
+they were not satisfied with this music; thinking themselves perhaps at a bullfight,
+they made remarks at the ladies who passed before them in words that are euphemistically
+called flowers in Madrid, although at times they seem more like foul weeds. Without
+heeding the furious looks of the husbands, they <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3354">[<a href="#xd32e3354">211</a>]</span>bandied from one to another the sentiments and longings inspired by so many beauties.
+</p>
+<p>In the reserved seats, where the ladies seemed to be afraid to venture, as few were
+to be seen there, a murmur of voices prevailed amid suppressed laughter and clouds
+of tobacco smoke. They discussed the merits of the players and talked scandal, wondering
+if his Excellency had quarreled with the friars, if his presence at such a show was
+a defiance or mere curiosity. Others gave no heed to these matters, but were engaged
+in attracting the attention of the ladies, throwing themselves into attitudes more
+or less interesting and statuesque, flashing diamond rings, especially when they thought
+themselves the foci of insistent opera-glasses, while yet another would address a
+respectful salute to this or that señora or señorita, at the same time lowering his
+head gravely to whisper to a neighbor, “How ridiculous she is! And such a bore!”
+</p>
+<p>The lady would respond with one of her most gracious smiles and an enchanting nod
+of her head, while murmuring to a friend sitting near, amid lazy flourishes of her
+fan, “How impudent he is! He’s madly in love, my dear.”
+</p>
+<p>Meanwhile, the noise increased. There remained only two vacant boxes, besides that
+of his Excellency, which was distinguished by its curtains of red velvet. The orchestra
+played another waltz, the audience protested, when fortunately there arose a charitable
+hero to distract their attention and relieve the manager, in the person of a man who
+had occupied a reserved seat and refused to give it up to its owner, the philosopher
+Don Primitivo. Finding his own arguments useless, Don Primitivo had appealed to an
+usher. “I don’t care to,” the hero responded to the latter’s protests, placidly puffing
+at his cigarette. The usher appealed to the manager. “I don’t care to,” was the response,
+as he settled back in the seat. The manager went away, while the artillerymen in the
+gallery began to sing out encouragement to the usurper.
+</p>
+<p>Our hero, now that he had attracted general attention, <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3361">[<a href="#xd32e3361">212</a>]</span>thought that to yield would be to lower himself, so he held on to the seat, while
+he repeated his answer to a pair of guards the manager had called in. These, in consideration
+of the rebel’s rank, went in search of their corporal, while the whole house broke
+out into applause at the firmness of the hero, who remained seated like a Roman senator.
+</p>
+<p>Hisses were heard, and the inflexible gentleman turned angrily to see if they were
+meant for him, but the galloping of horses resounded and the stir increased. One might
+have said that a revolution had broken out, or at least a riot, but no, the orchestra
+had suspended the waltz and was playing the royal march: it was his Excellency, the
+Captain-General and Governor of the islands, who was entering. All eyes sought and
+followed him, then lost sight of him, until he finally appeared in his box. After
+looking all about him and making some persons happy with a lordly salute, he sat down,
+as though he were indeed the man for whom the chair was waiting. The artillerymen
+then became silent and the orchestra tore into the prelude.
+</p>
+<p>Our students occupied a box directly facing that of Pepay, the dancing girl. Her box
+was a present from Makaraig, who had already got on good terms with her in order to
+propitiate Don Custodio. Pepay had that very afternoon written a note to the illustrious
+arbiter, asking for an answer and appointing an interview in the theater. For this
+reason, Don Custodio, in spite of the active opposition he had manifested toward the
+French operetta, had gone to the theater, which action won him some caustic remarks
+on the part of Don Manuel, his ancient adversary in the sessions of the Ayuntamiento.
+</p>
+<p>“I’ve come to judge the operetta,” he had replied in the tone of a Cato whose conscience
+was clear.
+</p>
+<p>So Makaraig was exchanging looks of intelligence with Pepay, who was giving him to
+understand that she had something to tell him. As the dancing girl’s face wore a happy
+expression, the students augured that a favorable outcome was assured. Sandoval, who
+had just returned <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3369">[<a href="#xd32e3369">213</a>]</span>from making calls in other boxes, also assured them that the decision had been favorable,
+that that very afternoon the Superior Commission had considered and approved it. Every
+one was jubilant, even Pecson having laid aside his pessimism when he saw the smiling
+Pepay display a note. Sandoval and Makaraig congratulated one another, Isagani alone
+remaining cold and unsmiling. What had happened to this young man?
+</p>
+<p>Upon entering the theater, Isagani had caught sight of Paulita in a box, with Juanito
+Pelaez talking to her. He had turned pale, thinking that he must be mistaken. But
+no, it was she herself, she who greeted him with a gracious smile, while her beautiful
+eyes seemed to be asking pardon and promising explanations. The fact was that they
+had agreed upon Isagani’s going first to the theater to see if the show contained
+anything improper for a young woman, but now he found her there, and in no other company
+than that of his rival. What passed in his mind is indescribable: wrath, jealousy,
+humiliation, resentment raged within him, and there were moments even when he wished
+that the theater would fall in; he had a violent desire to laugh aloud, to insult
+his sweetheart, to challenge his rival, to make a scene, but finally contented himself
+with sitting quiet and not looking at her at all. He was conscious of the beautiful
+plans Makaraig and Sandoval were making, but they sounded like distant echoes, while
+the notes of the waltz seemed sad and lugubrious, the whole audience stupid and foolish,
+and several times he had to make an effort to keep back the tears. Of the trouble
+stirred up by the hero who refused to give up the seat, of the arrival of the Captain-General,
+he was scarcely conscious. He stared toward the drop-curtain, on which was depicted
+a kind of gallery with sumptuous red hangings, affording a view of a garden in which
+a fountain played, yet how sad the gallery looked to him and how melancholy the painted
+landscape! A thousand vague recollections surged into his memory like distant echoes
+of music heard in the night, <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3373">[<a href="#xd32e3373">214</a>]</span>like songs of infancy, the murmur of lonely forests and gloomy rivulets, moonlit nights
+on the shore of the sea spread wide before his eyes. So the enamored youth considered
+himself very wretched and stared fixedly at the ceiling so that the tears should not
+fall from his eyes.
+</p>
+<p>A burst of applause drew him from these meditations. The curtain had just risen, and
+the merry chorus of peasants of Corneville was presented, all dressed in cotton caps,
+with heavy wooden sabots on their feet. Some six or seven girls, well-rouged on the
+lips and cheeks, with large black circles around their eyes to increase their brilliance,
+displayed white arms, fingers covered with diamonds, round and shapely limbs. While
+they were chanting the Norman phrase “<i lang="fr">Allez, marchez! Allez, marchez!</i>” they smiled at their different admirers in the reserved seats with such openness
+that Don Custodio, after looking toward Pepay’s box to assure himself that she was
+not doing the same thing with some other admirer, set down in his note-book this indecency,
+and to make sure of it lowered his head a little to see if the actresses were not
+showing their knees.
+</p>
+<p>“Oh, these Frenchwomen!” he muttered, while his imagination lost itself in considerations
+somewhat more elevated, as he made comparisons and projects.
+</p>
+<p>“<i lang="fr">Quoi v’la tous les cancans d’la s’maine!</i>” sang Gertrude, a proud damsel, who was looking roguishly askance at the Captain-General.
+</p>
+<p>“We’re going to have the cancan!” exclaimed Tadeo, the winner of the first prize in
+the French class, who had managed to make out this word. “Makaraig, they’re going
+to dance the cancan!”
+</p>
+<p>He rubbed his hands gleefully. From the moment the curtain rose, Tadeo had been heedless
+of the music. He was looking only for the prurient, the indecent, the immoral in actions
+and dress, and with his scanty French was sharpening his ears to catch the obscenities
+that the austere guardians of the fatherland had foretold.
+</p>
+<p>Sandoval, pretending to know French, had converted himself <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3390">[<a href="#xd32e3390">215</a>]</span>into a kind of interpreter for his friends. He knew as much about it as Tadeo, but
+the published synopsis helped him and his fancy supplied the rest. “Yes,” he said,
+“they’re going to dance the cancan—she’s going to lead it.”
+</p>
+<p>Makaraig and Pecson redoubled their attention, smiling in anticipation, while Isagani
+looked away, mortified to think that Paulita should be present at such a show and
+reflecting that it was his duty to challenge Juanito Pelaez the next day.
+</p>
+<p>But the young men waited in vain. Serpolette came on, a charming girl, in her cotton
+cap, provoking and challenging. “<i lang="fr">Hein, qui parle de Serpolette?</i>” she demanded of the gossips, with her arms akimbo in a combative attitude. Some
+one applauded, and after him all those in the reserved seats. Without changing her
+girlish attitude, Serpolette gazed at the person who had started the applause and
+paid him with a smile, displaying rows of little teeth that looked like a string of
+pearls in a case of red velvet.
+</p>
+<p>Tadeo followed her gaze and saw a man in a false mustache with an extraordinarily
+large nose. “By the monk’s cowl!” he exclaimed. “It’s Irene!”
+</p>
+<p>“Yes,” corroborated Sandoval, “I saw him behind the scenes talking with the actresses.”
+</p>
+<p>The truth was that Padre Irene, who was a melomaniac of the first degree and knew
+French well, had been sent to the theater by Padre Salvi as a sort of religious detective,
+or so at least he told the persons who recognized him. As a faithful critic, who should
+not be satisfied with viewing the piece from a distance, he wished to examine the
+actresses at first hand, so he had mingled in the groups of admirers and gallants,
+had penetrated into the greenroom, where was whispered and talked a French required
+by the situation, a <i>market French</i>, a language that is readily comprehensible for the vender when the buyer seems disposed
+to pay well.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3405">[<a href="#xd32e3405">216</a>]</span></p>
+<p>Serpolette was surrounded by two gallant officers, a sailor, and a lawyer, when she
+caught sight of him moving about, sticking the tip of his long nose into all the nooks
+and corners, as though with it he were ferreting out all the mysteries of the stage.
+She ceased her chatter, knitted her eyebrows, then raised them, opened her lips and
+with the vivacity of a <i lang="fr">Parisienne</i> left her admirers to hurl herself like a torpedo upon our critic.
+</p>
+<p>“<i lang="fr">Tiens, tiens, Toutou! Mon lapin!</i>” she cried, catching Padre Irene’s arm and shaking it merrily, while the air rang
+with her silvery laugh.
+</p>
+<p>“Tut, tut!” objected Padre Irene, endeavoring to conceal himself.
+</p>
+<p>“<i lang="fr">Mais, comment! Toi ici, grosse bête! Et moi qui t’croyais—</i>”
+</p>
+<p>“<i lang="fr">’Tais pas d’tapage, Lily! Il faut m’respecter! ’Suis ici l’Pape!</i>”
+</p>
+<p>With great difficulty Padre Irene made her listen to reason, for Lily was <i lang="fr">enchanteé</i> to meet in Manila an old friend who reminded her of the <i lang="fr">coulisses</i> of the Grand Opera House. So it was that Padre Irene, fulfilling at the same time
+his duties as a friend and a critic, had initiated the applause to encourage her,
+for Serpolette deserved it.
+</p>
+<p>Meanwhile, the young men were waiting for the cancan. Pecson became all eyes, but
+there was everything except cancan. There was presented the scene in which, but for
+the timely arrival of the representatives of the law, the women would have come to
+blows and torn one another’s hair out, incited thereto by the mischievous peasants,
+who, like our students, hoped to see something more than the cancan.
+</p>
+<div lang="fr" class="lgouter">
+<p class="line">Scit, scit, scit, scit, scit, scit,
+</p>
+<p class="line">Disputez-vous, battez-vous,
+</p>
+<p class="line">Scit, scit, scit, scit, scit, scit,
+</p>
+<p class="line">Nous allons compter les coups.</p>
+</div>
+<p class="first">The music ceased, the men went away, the women returned, a few at a time, and started
+a conversation among <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3444">[<a href="#xd32e3444">217</a>]</span>themselves, of which our friends understood nothing. They were slandering some absent
+person.
+</p>
+<p>“They look like the Chinamen of the <i>pansiteria!</i>” whispered Pecson.
+</p>
+<p>“But, the cancan?” asked Makaraig.
+</p>
+<p>“They’re talking about the most suitable place to dance it,” gravely responded Sandoval.
+</p>
+<p>“They look like the Chinamen of the <i>pansiteria</i>,” repeated Pecson in disgust.
+</p>
+<p>A lady accompanied by her husband entered at that moment and took her place in one
+of the two vacant boxes. She had the air of a queen and gazed disdainfully at the
+whole house, as if to say, “I’ve come later than all of you, you crowd of upstarts
+and provincials, I’ve come later than you!” There are persons who go to the theater
+like the contestants in a mule-race: the last one in, wins, and we know very sensible
+men who would ascend the scaffold rather than enter a theater before the first act.
+But the lady’s triumph was of short duration—she caught sight of the other box that
+was still empty, and began to scold her better half, thus starting such a disturbance
+that many were annoyed.
+</p>
+<p>“Ssh! Ssh!”
+</p>
+<p>“The blockheads! As if they understood French!” remarked the lady, gazing with supreme
+disdain in all directions, finally fixing her attention on Juanito’s box, whence she
+thought she had heard an impudent hiss.
+</p>
+<p>Juanito was in fact guilty, for he had been pretending to understand everything, holding
+himself up proudly and applauding at times as though nothing that was said escaped
+him, and this too without guiding himself by the actors’ pantomime, because he scarcely
+looked toward the stage. The rogue had intentionally remarked to Paulita that, as
+there was so much more beautiful a woman close at hand, he did not care to strain
+his eyes looking beyond her. Paulita had blushed, covered her face with her fan, and
+glanced stealthily toward where Isagani, silent and morose, was abstractedly watching
+the show.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3461">[<a href="#xd32e3461">218</a>]</span></p>
+<p>Paulita felt nettled and jealous. Would Isagani fall in love with any of those alluring
+actresses? The thought put her in a bad humor, so she scarcely heard the praises that
+Doña Victorina was heaping upon her own favorite.
+</p>
+<p>Juanito was playing his part well: he shook his head at times in sign of disapproval,
+and then there could be heard coughs and murmurs in some parts, at other times he
+smiled in approbation, and a second later applause resounded. Doña Victorina was charmed,
+even conceiving some vague ideas of marrying the young man the day Don Tiburcio should
+die—Juanito knew French and De Espadaña didn’t! Then she began to flatter him, nor
+did he perceive the change in the drift of her talk, so occupied was he in watching
+a Catalan merchant who was sitting next to the Swiss consul. Having observed that
+they were conversing in French, Juanito was getting his inspiration from their countenances,
+and thus grandly giving the cue to those about him.
+</p>
+<p>Scene followed scene, character succeeded character, comic and ridiculous like the
+bailiff and Grenicheux, imposing and winsome like the marquis and Germaine. The audience
+laughed heartily at the slap delivered by Gaspard and intended for the coward Grenicheux,
+which was received by the grave bailiff, whose wig went flying through the air, producing
+disorder and confusion as the curtain dropped.
+</p>
+<p>“Where’s the cancan?” inquired Tadeo.
+</p>
+<p>But the curtain rose again immediately, revealing a scene in a servant market, with
+three posts on which were affixed signs bearing the announcements: <i>servantes</i>, <i>cochers</i>, and <i>domestiques</i>. Juanito, to improve the opportunity, turned to Doña Victorina and said in a loud
+voice, so that Paulita might hear and be convinced of his learning:
+</p>
+<p>“<i>Servantes</i> means servants, <i>domestiques</i> domestics.”
+</p>
+<p>“And in what way do the <i>servantes</i> differ from the <i>domestiques</i>?” asked Paulita.
+</p>
+<p>Juanito was not found wanting. “<i>Domestiques</i> are those <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3491">[<a href="#xd32e3491">219</a>]</span>that are domesticated—haven’t you noticed that some of them have the air of savages?
+Those are the <i>servantes</i>.”
+</p>
+<p>“That’s right,” added Doña Victorina, “some have very bad manners—and yet I thought
+that in Europe everybody was cultivated. But as it happens in France,—well, I see!”
+</p>
+<p>“Ssh! Ssh!”
+</p>
+<p>But what was Juanito’s predicament when the time came for the opening of the market
+and the beginning of the sale, and the servants who were to be hired placed themselves
+beside the signs that indicated their class! The men, some ten or twelve rough characters
+in livery, carrying branches in their hands, took their place under the sign <i>domestiques</i>!
+</p>
+<p>“Those are the domestics,” explained Juanito.
+</p>
+<p>“Really, they have the appearance of being only recently domesticated,” observed Doña
+Victorina. “Now let’s have a look at the savages.”
+</p>
+<p>Then the dozen girls headed by the lively and merry Serpolette, decked out in their
+best clothes, each wearing a big bouquet of flowers at the waist, laughing, smiling,
+fresh and attractive, placed themselves, to Juanito’s great desperation, beside the
+post of the <i>servantes</i>.
+</p>
+<p>“How’s this?” asked Paulita guilelessly. “Are those the savages that you spoke of?”
+</p>
+<p>“No,” replied the imperturbable Juanito, “there’s a mistake—they’ve got their places
+mixed—those coming behind—”
+</p>
+<p>“Those with the whips?”
+</p>
+<p>Juanito nodded assent, but he was rather perplexed and uneasy.
+</p>
+<p>“So those girls are the <i>cochers</i>?”
+</p>
+<p>Here Juanito was attacked by such a violent fit of coughing that some of the spectators
+became annoyed.
+</p>
+<p>“Put him out! Put the consumptive out!” called a voice.
+</p>
+<p>Consumptive! To be called a consumptive before Paulita! Juanito wanted to find the
+blackguard and make <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3520">[<a href="#xd32e3520">220</a>]</span>him swallow that “consumptive.” Observing that the women were trying to hold him back,
+his bravado increased, and he became more conspicuously ferocious. But fortunately
+it was Don Custodio who had made the diagnosis, and he, fearful of attracting attention
+to himself, pretended to hear nothing, apparently busy with his criticism of the play.
+</p>
+<p>“If it weren’t that I am with you,” remarked Juanito, rolling his eyes like some dolls
+that are moved by clockwork, and to make the resemblance more real he stuck out his
+tongue occasionally.
+</p>
+<p>Thus that night he acquired in Doña Victorina’s eyes the reputation of being brave
+and punctilious, so she decided in her heart that she would marry him just as soon
+as Don Tiburcio was out of the way. Paulita became sadder and sadder in thinking about
+how the girls called <i>cochers</i> could occupy Isagani’s attention, for the name had certain disagreeable associations
+that came from the slang of her convent school-days.
+</p>
+<p>At length the first act was concluded, the marquis taking away as servants Serpolette
+and Germaine, the representative of timid beauty in the troupe, and for coachman the
+stupid Grenicheux. A burst of applause brought them out again holding hands, those
+who five seconds before had been tormenting one another and were about to come to
+blows, bowing and smiling here and there to the gallant Manila public and exchanging
+knowing looks with various spectators.
+</p>
+<p>While there prevailed the passing tumult occasioned by those who crowded one another
+to get into the greenroom and felicitate the actresses and by those who were going
+to make calls on the ladies in the boxes, some expressed their opinions of the play
+and the players.
+</p>
+<p>“Undoubtedly, Serpolette is the best,” said one with a knowing air.
+</p>
+<p>“I prefer Germaine, she’s an ideal blonde.”
+</p>
+<p>“But she hasn’t any voice.”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3534">[<a href="#xd32e3534">221</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“What do I care about the voice?”
+</p>
+<p>“Well, for shape, the tall one.”
+</p>
+<p>“Pshaw,” said Ben-Zayb, “not a one is worth a straw, not a one is an artist!”
+</p>
+<p>Ben-Zayb was the critic for <i>El Grito de la Integridad</i>, and his disdainful air gave him great importance in the eyes of those who were satisfied
+with so little.
+</p>
+<p>“Serpolette hasn’t any voice, nor Germaine grace, nor is that music, nor is it art,
+nor is it anything!” he concluded with marked contempt. To set oneself up as a great
+critic there is nothing like appearing to be discontented with everything. Besides,
+the management had sent only two seats for the newspaper staff.
+</p>
+<p>In the boxes curiosity was aroused as to who could be the possessor of the empty one,
+for that person, would surpass every one in chic, since he would be the last to arrive.
+The rumor started somewhere that it belonged to Simoun, and was confirmed: no one
+had seen the jeweler in the reserved seats, the greenroom, or anywhere else.
+</p>
+<p>“Yet I saw him this afternoon with Mr. Jouay,” some one said. “He presented a necklace
+to one of the actresses.”
+</p>
+<p>“To which one?” asked some of the inquisitive ladies.
+</p>
+<p>“To the finest of all, the one who made eyes at his Excellency.”
+</p>
+<p>This information was received with looks of intelligence, winks, exclamations of doubt,
+of confirmation, and half-uttered commentaries.
+</p>
+<p>“He’s trying to play the Monte Cristo,” remarked a lady who prided herself on being
+literary.
+</p>
+<p>“Or purveyor to the Palace!” added her escort, jealous of Simoun.
+</p>
+<p>In the students’ box, Pecson, Sandoval, and Isagani had remained, while Tadeo had
+gone to engage Don Custodio in conversation about his projects, and Makaraig to hold
+an interview with Pepay.
+</p>
+<p>“In no way, as I have observed to you before, friend <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3554">[<a href="#xd32e3554">222</a>]</span>Isagani,” declared Sandoval with violent gestures and a sonorous voice, so that the
+ladies near the box, the daughters of the rich man who was in debt to Tadeo, might
+hear him, “in no way does the French language possess the rich sonorousness or the
+varied and elegant cadence of the Castilian tongue. I cannot conceive, I cannot imagine,
+I cannot form any idea of French orators, and I doubt that they have ever had any
+or can have any now in the strict construction of the term orator, because we must
+not confuse the name orator with the words babbler and charlatan, for these can exist
+in any country, in all the regions of the inhabited world, among the cold and curt
+Englishmen as among the lively and impressionable Frenchmen.”
+</p>
+<p>Thus he delivered a magnificent review of the nations, with his poetical characterizations
+and most resounding epithets. Isagani nodded assent, with his thoughts fixed on Paulita,
+whom he had surprised gazing at him with an expressive look which contained a wealth
+of meaning. He tried to divine what those eyes were expressing—those eyes that were
+so eloquent and not at all deceptive.
+</p>
+<p>“Now you who are a poet, a slave to rhyme and meter, a son of the Muses,” continued
+Sandoval, with an elegant wave of his hand, as though he were saluting, on the horizon,
+the Nine Sisters, “do you comprehend, can you conceive, how a language so harsh and
+unmusical as French can give birth to poets of such gigantic stature as our Garcilasos,
+our Herreras, our Esproncedas, our Calderons?”
+</p>
+<p>“Nevertheless,” objected Pecson, “Victor Hugo—”
+</p>
+<p>“Victor Hugo, my friend Pecson, if Victor Hugo is a poet, it is because he owes it
+to Spain, because it is an established fact, it is a matter beyond all doubt, a thing
+admitted even by the Frenchmen themselves, so envious of Spain, that if Victor Hugo
+has genius, if he really is a poet, it is because his childhood was spent in Madrid;
+there he drank in his first impressions, there his brain was molded, there his imagination
+was colored, his heart modeled, and the most beautiful concepts of his mind born.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3562">[<a href="#xd32e3562">223</a>]</span>And after all, who is Victor Hugo? Is he to be compared at all with our modern—”
+</p>
+<p>This peroration was cut short by the return of Makaraig with a despondent air and
+a bitter smile on his lips, carrying in his hand a note, which he offered silently
+to Sandoval, who read:
+</p>
+<blockquote>
+<p class="first">“MY DOVE: Your letter has reached me late, for I have already handed in my decision,
+and it has been approved. However, as if I had guessed your wish, I have decided the
+matter according to the desires of your protégés. I’ll be at the theater and wait
+for you after the performance.
+</p>
+<p class="xd32e144">“Your duckling,
+</p>
+<p class="xd32e3570">“CUSTODINING.”</p>
+</blockquote><p>
+</p>
+<p>“How tender the man is!” exclaimed Tadeo with emotion.
+</p>
+<p>“Well?” said Sandoval. “I don’t see anything wrong about this—quite the reverse!”
+</p>
+<p>“Yes,” rejoined Makaraig with his bitter smile, “decided favorably! I’ve just seen
+Padre Irene.”
+</p>
+<p>“What does Padre Irene say?” inquired Pecson.
+</p>
+<p>“The same as Don Custodio, and the rascal still had the audacity to congratulate me.
+The Commission, which has taken as its own the decision of the arbiter, approves the
+idea and felicitates the students on their patriotism and their thirst for knowledge—”
+</p>
+<p>“Well?”
+</p>
+<p>“Only that, considering our duties—in short, it says that in order that the idea may
+not be lost, it concludes that the direction and execution of the plan should be placed
+in charge of one of the religious corporations, in case the Dominicans do not wish
+to incorporate the academy with the University.”
+</p>
+<p>Exclamations of disappointment greeted the announcement. Isagani rose, but said nothing.
+</p>
+<p>“And in order that we may participate in the management of the academy,” Makaraig
+went on, “we are intrusted with the collection of contributions and dues, with <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3583">[<a href="#xd32e3583">224</a>]</span>the obligation of turning them over to the treasurer whom the corporation may designate,
+which treasurer will issue us receipts.”
+</p>
+<p>“Then we’re tax-collectors!” remarked Tadeo.
+</p>
+<p>“Sandoval,” said Pecson, “there’s the gauntlet—take it up!”
+</p>
+<p>“Huh! That’s not a gauntlet—from its odor it seems more like a sock.”
+</p>
+<p>“The funniest, part of it,” Makaraig added, “is that Padre Irene has advised us to
+celebrate the event with a banquet or a torchlight procession—a public demonstration
+of the students <i>en masse</i> to render thanks to all the persons who have intervened in the affair.”
+</p>
+<p>“Yes, after the blow, let’s sing and give thanks. <i>Super flumina Babylonis sedimus</i>!”
+</p>
+<p>“Yes, a banquet like that of the convicts,” said Tadeo.
+</p>
+<p>“A banquet at which we all wear mourning and deliver funeral orations,” added Sandoval.
+</p>
+<p>“A serenade with the Marseillaise and funeral marches,” proposed Isagani.
+</p>
+<p>“No, gentlemen,” observed Pecson with his clownish grin, “to celebrate the event there’s
+nothing like a banquet in a <i>pansitería</i>, served by the Chinamen without camisas. I insist, without camisas!”
+</p>
+<p>The sarcasm and grotesqueness of this idea won it ready acceptance, Sandoval being
+the first to applaud it, for he had long wished to see the interior of one of those
+establishments which at night appeared to be so merry and cheerful.
+</p>
+<p>Just as the orchestra struck up for the second act, the young men arose and left the
+theater, to the scandal of the whole house.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3607">[<a href="#xd32e3607">225</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch23" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e434">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XXIII</h2>
+<h2 class="main">A Corpse</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">Simoun had not, in fact, gone to the theater. Already, at seven o’clock in the evening,
+he had left his house looking worried and gloomy. His servants saw him return twice,
+accompanied by different individuals, and at eight o’clock Makaraig encountered him
+pacing along Calle Hospital near the nunnery of St. Clara, just when the bells of
+its church were ringing a funeral knell. At nine Camaroncocido saw him again, in the
+neighborhood of the theater, speak with a person who seemed to be a student, pay the
+latter’s admission to the show, and again disappear among the shadows of the trees.
+</p>
+<p>“What is it to me?” again muttered Camaroncocido. “What do I get out of watching over
+the populace?”
+</p>
+<p>Basilio, as Makaraig said, had not gone to the show. The poor student, after returning
+from San Diego, whither he had gone to ransom Juli, his future bride, from her servitude,
+had turned again to his studies, spending his time in the hospital, in studying, or
+in nursing Capitan Tiago, whose affliction he was trying to cure.
+</p>
+<p>The invalid had become an intolerable character. During his bad spells, when he felt
+depressed from lack of opium, the doses of which Basilio was trying to reduce, he
+would scold, mistreat, and abuse the boy, who bore it resignedly, conscious that he
+was doing good to one to whom he owed so much, and yielded only in the last extremity.
+His vicious appetite satisfied, Capitan Tiago would fall into a good humor, become
+tender, and call him his son, tearfully recalling the youth’s services, how well he
+administered the estates, and would even talk of making <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3618">[<a href="#xd32e3618">226</a>]</span>him his heir. Basilio would smile bitterly and reflect that in this world complaisance
+with vice is rewarded better than fulfilment of duty. Not a few times did he feel
+tempted to give free rein to the craving and conduct his benefactor to the grave by
+a path of flowers and smiling illusions rather than lengthen his life along a road
+of sacrifice.
+</p>
+<p>“What a fool I am!” he often said to himself. “People are stupid and then pay for
+it.”
+</p>
+<p>But he would shake his head as he thought of Juli, of the wide future before him.
+He counted upon living without a stain on his conscience, so he continued the treatment
+prescribed, and bore everything patiently.
+</p>
+<p>Yet with all his care the sick man, except for short periods of improvement, grew
+worse. Basilio had planned gradually to reduce the amount of the dose, or at least
+not to let him injure himself by increasing it, but on returning from the hospital
+or some visit he would find his patient in the heavy slumber produced by the opium,
+driveling, pale as a corpse. The young man could not explain whence the drug came:
+the only two persons who visited the house were Simoun and Padre Irene, the former
+rarely, while the latter never ceased exhorting him to be severe and inexorable with
+the treatment, to take no notice of the invalid’s ravings, for the main object was
+to save him.
+</p>
+<p>“Do your duty, young man,” was Padre Irene’s constant admonition. “Do your duty.”
+Then he would deliver a sermon on this topic with such great conviction and enthusiasm
+that Basilio would begin to feel kindly toward the preacher. Besides, Padre Irene
+promised to get him a fine assignment, a good province, and even hinted at the possibility
+of having him appointed a professor. Without being carried away by illusions, Basilio
+pretended to believe in them and went on obeying the dictates of his own conscience.
+</p>
+<p>That night, while <i>Les Cloches de Corneville</i> was being presented, Basilio was studying at an old table by the light <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3628">[<a href="#xd32e3628">227</a>]</span>of an oil-lamp, whose thick glass globe partly illuminated his melancholy features.
+An old skull, some human bones, and a few books carefully arranged covered the table,
+whereon there was also a pan of water with a sponge. The smell of opium that proceeded
+from the adjoining bedroom made the air heavy and inclined him to sleep, but he overcame
+the desire by bathing his temples and eyes from time to time, determined not to go
+to sleep until he had finished the book, which he had borrowed and must return as
+soon as possible. It was a volume of the <i lang="es">Medicina Legal y Toxicología</i> of Dr. Friata, the only book that the professor would use, and Basilio lacked money
+to buy a copy, since, under the pretext of its being forbidden by the censor in Manila
+and the necessity for bribing many government employees to get it in, the booksellers
+charged a high price for it.
+</p>
+<p>So absorbed was the youth in his studies that he had not given any attention at all
+to some pamphlets that had been sent to him from some unknown source, pamphlets that
+treated of the Philippines, among which figured those that were attracting the greatest
+notice at the time because of their harsh and insulting manner of referring to the
+natives of the country. Basilio had no time to open them, and he was perhaps restrained
+also by the thought that there is nothing pleasant about receiving an insult or a
+provocation without having any means of replying or defending oneself. The censorship,
+in fact, permitted insults to the Filipinos but prohibited replies on their part.
+</p>
+<p>In the midst of the silence that reigned in the house, broken only by a feeble snore
+that issued now and then from the adjoining bedroom, Basilio heard light footfalls
+on the stairs, footfalls that soon crossed the hallway and approached the room where
+he was. Raising his head, he saw the door open and to his great surprise appeared
+the sinister figure of the jeweler Simoun, who since the scene in San Diego had not
+come to visit either himself or Capitan Tiago.
+</p>
+<p>“How is the sick man?” he inquired, throwing a rapid <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3638">[<a href="#xd32e3638">228</a>]</span>glance about the room and fixing his attention on the pamphlets, the leaves of which
+were still uncut.
+</p>
+<p>“The beating of his heart is scarcely perceptible, his pulse is very weak, his appetite
+entirely gone,” replied Basilio in a low voice with a sad smile. “He sweats profusely
+in the early morning.”
+</p>
+<p>Noticing that Simoun kept his face turned toward the pamphlets and fearing that he
+might reopen the subject of their conversation in the wood, he went on: “His system
+is saturated with poison. He may die any day, as though struck by lightning. The least
+irritation, any excitement may kill him.”
+</p>
+<p>“Like the Philippines!” observed Simoun lugubriously.
+</p>
+<p>Basilio was unable to refrain from a gesture of impatience, but he was determined
+not to recur to the old subject, so he proceeded as if he had heard nothing: “What
+weakens him the most is the nightmares, his terrors—”
+</p>
+<p>“Like the government!” again interrupted Simoun.
+</p>
+<p>“Several nights ago he awoke in the dark and thought that he had gone blind. He raised
+a disturbance, lamenting and scolding me, saying that I had put his eyes out. When
+I entered his room with a light he mistook me for Padre Irene and called me his saviour.”
+</p>
+<p>“Like the government, exactly!”
+</p>
+<p>“Last night,” continued Basilio, paying no attention, “he got up begging for his favorite
+game-cock, the one that died three years ago, and I had to give him a chicken. Then
+he heaped blessings upon me and promised me many thousands—”
+</p>
+<p>At that instant a clock struck half-past ten. Simoun shuddered and stopped the youth
+with a gesture.
+</p>
+<p>“Basilio,” he said in a low, tense voice, “listen to me carefully, for the moments
+are precious. I see that you haven’t opened the pamphlets that I sent you. You’re
+not interested in your country.”
+</p>
+<p>The youth started to protest.
+</p>
+<p>“It’s useless,” went on Simoun dryly. “Within an <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3654">[<a href="#xd32e3654">229</a>]</span>hour the revolution is going to break out at a signal from me, and tomorrow there’ll
+be no studies, there’ll be no University, there’ll be nothing but fighting and butchery.
+I have everything ready and my success is assured. When we triumph, all those who
+could have helped us and did not do so will be treated as enemies. Basilio, I’ve come
+to offer you death or a future!”
+</p>
+<p>“Death or a future!” the boy echoed, as though he did not understand.
+</p>
+<p>“With us or with the government,” rejoined Simoun. “With your country or with your
+oppressors. Decide, for time presses! I’ve come to save you because of the memories
+that unite us!”
+</p>
+<p>“With my country or with the oppressors!” repeated Basilio in a low tone. The youth
+was stupefied. He gazed at the jeweler with eyes in which terror was reflected, he
+felt his limbs turn cold, while a thousand confused ideas whirled about in his mind.
+He saw the streets running blood, he heard the firing, he found himself among the
+dead and wounded, and by the peculiar force of his inclinations fancied himself in
+an operator’s blouse, cutting off legs and extracting bullets.
+</p>
+<p>“The will of the government is in my hands,” said Simoun. “I’ve diverted and wasted
+its feeble strength and resources on foolish expeditions, dazzling it with the plunder
+it might seize. Its heads are now in the theater, calm and unsuspecting, thinking
+of a night of pleasure, but not one shall again repose upon a pillow. I have men and
+regiments at my disposition: some I have led to believe that the uprising is ordered
+by the General; others that the friars are bringing it about; some I have bought with
+promises, with employments, with money; many, very many, are acting from revenge,
+because they are oppressed and see it as a matter of killing or being killed. Cabesang
+Tales is below, he has come with me here! Again I ask you—will you come with us or
+do you prefer to expose yourself to the resentment of my followers? In critical moments,
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3661">[<a href="#xd32e3661">230</a>]</span>to declare oneself neutral is to be exposed to the wrath of both the contending parties.”
+</p>
+<p>Basilio rubbed his hand over his face several times, as if he were trying to wake
+from a nightmare. He felt that his brow was cold.
+</p>
+<p>“Decide!” repeated Simoun.
+</p>
+<p>“And what—what would I have to do?” asked the youth in a weak and broken voice.
+</p>
+<p>“A very simple thing,” replied Simoun, his face lighting up with a ray of hope. “As
+I have to direct the movement, I cannot get away from the scene of action. I want
+you, while the attention of the whole city is directed elsewhere, at the head of a
+company to force the doors of the nunnery of St. Clara and take from there a person
+whom only you, besides myself and Capitan Tiago, can recognize. You’ll run no risk
+at all.”
+</p>
+<p>“Maria Clara!” exclaimed Basilio.
+</p>
+<p>“Yes, Maria Clara,” repeated Simoun, and for the first time his voice became human
+and compassionate. “I want to save her; to save her I have wished to live, I have
+returned. I am starting the revolution, because only a revolution can open the doors
+of the nunneries.”
+</p>
+<p>“Ay!” sighed Basilio, clasping his hands. “You’ve come late, too late!”
+</p>
+<p>“Why?” inquired Simoun with a frown.
+</p>
+<p>“Maria Clara is dead!”
+</p>
+<p>Simoun arose with a bound and stood over the youth. “She’s dead?” he demanded in a
+terrible voice.
+</p>
+<p>“This afternoon, at six. By now she must be—”
+</p>
+<p>“It’s a lie!” roared Simoun, pale and beside himself. “It’s false! Maria Clara lives,
+Maria Clara must live! It’s a cowardly excuse! She’s not dead, and this night I’ll
+free her or tomorrow you die!”
+</p>
+<p>Basilio shrugged his shoulders. “Several days ago she was taken ill and I went to
+the nunnery for news of her. Look, here is Padre Salvi’s letter, brought by Padre
+Irene. Capitan Tiago wept all the evening, kissing his daughter’s <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3678">[<a href="#xd32e3678">231</a>]</span>picture and begging her forgiveness, until at last he smoked an enormous quantity
+of opium. This evening her knell was tolled.”
+</p>
+<p>“Ah!” exclaimed Simoun, pressing his hands to his head and standing motionless. He
+remembered to have actually heard the knell while he was pacing about in the vicinity
+of the nunnery.
+</p>
+<p>“Dead!” he murmured in a voice so low that it seemed to be a ghost whispering. “Dead!
+Dead without my having seen her, dead without knowing that I lived for her—dead!”
+</p>
+<p>Feeling a terrible storm, a tempest of whirlwind and thunder without a drop of water,
+sobs without tears, cries without words, rage in his breast and threaten to burst
+out like burning lava long repressed, he rushed precipitately from the room. Basilio
+heard him descend the stairs with unsteady tread, stepping heavily, he heard a stifled
+cry, a cry that seemed to presage death, so solemn, deep, and sad that he arose from
+his chair pale and trembling, but he could hear the footsteps die away and the noisy
+closing of the door to the street.
+</p>
+<p>“Poor fellow!” he murmured, while his eyes filled with tears. Heedless now of his
+studies, he let his gaze wander into space as he pondered over the fate of those two
+beings: he—young, rich, educated, master of his fortunes, with a brilliant future
+before him; she—fair as a dream, pure, full of faith and innocence, nurtured amid
+love and laughter, destined to a happy existence, to be adored in the family and respected
+in the world; and yet of those two beings, filled with love, with illusions and hopes,
+by a fatal destiny he wandered over the world, dragged ceaselessly through a whirl
+of blood and tears, sowing evil instead of doing good, undoing virtue and encouraging
+vice, while she was dying in the mysterious shadows of the cloister where she had
+sought peace and perhaps found suffering, where she entered pure and stainless and
+expired like a crushed flower!
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3686">[<a href="#xd32e3686">232</a>]</span></p>
+<p>Sleep in peace, ill-starred daughter of my hapless fatherland! Bury in the grave the
+enchantments of youth, faded in their prime! When a people cannot offer its daughters
+a tranquil home under the protection of sacred liberty, when a man can only leave
+to his widow blushes, tears to his mother, and slavery to his children, you do well
+to condemn yourself to perpetual chastity, stifling within you the germ of a future
+generation accursed! Well for you that you have not to shudder in your grave, hearing
+the cries of those who groan in darkness, of those who feel that they have wings and
+yet are fettered, of those who are stifled from lack of liberty! Go, go with your
+poet’s dreams into the regions of the infinite, spirit of woman dim-shadowed in the
+moonlight’s beam, whispered in the bending arches of the bamboo-brakes! Happy she
+who dies lamented, she who leaves in the heart that loves her a pure picture, a sacred
+remembrance, unspotted by the base passions engendered by the years! Go, we shall
+remember you! In the clear air of our native land, under its azure sky, above the
+billows of the lake set amid sapphire hills and emerald shores, in the crystal streams
+shaded by the bamboos, bordered by flowers, enlivened by the beetles and butterflies
+with their uncertain and wavering flight as though playing with the air, in the silence
+of our forests, in the singing of our rivers, in the diamond showers of our waterfalls,
+in the resplendent light of our moon, in the sighs of the night breeze, in all that
+may call up the vision of the beloved, we must eternally see you as we dreamed of
+you, fair, beautiful, radiant with hope, pure as the light, yet still sad and melancholy
+in the contemplation of our woes!
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3689">[<a href="#xd32e3689">233</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch24" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e444">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XXIV</h2>
+<h2 class="main">Dreams</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first"></p>
+<blockquote lang="es">Amor, qué astro eres?</blockquote><p>
+</p>
+<p>On the following day, Thursday, at the hour of sunset, Isagani was walking along the
+beautiful promenade of Maria Cristina in the direction of the Malecon to keep an appointment
+which Paulita had that morning given him. The young man had no doubt that they were
+to talk about what had happened on the previous night, and as he was determined to
+ask for an explanation, and knew how proud and haughty she was, he foresaw an estrangement.
+In view of this eventuality he had brought with him the only two letters he had ever
+received from Paulita, two scraps of paper, whereon were merely a few hurriedly written
+lines with various blots, but in an even handwriting, things that did not prevent
+the enamored youth from preserving them with more solicitude than if they had been
+the autographs of Sappho and the Muse Polyhymnia.
+</p>
+<p>This decision to sacrifice his love on the altar of dignity, the consciousness of
+suffering in the discharge of duty, did not prevent a profound melancholy from taking
+possession of Isagani and brought back into his mind the beautiful days, and nights
+more beautiful still, when they had whispered sweet nothings through the flowered
+gratings of the entresol, nothings that to the youth took on such a character of seriousness
+and importance that they seemed to him the only matters worthy of meriting the attention
+of the most exalted human understanding. He recalled the walks on moonlit nights,
+the fair, the dark December mornings after the mass of Nativity, the holy water that
+he used to offer her, when she would thank him with a look charged <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3701">[<a href="#xd32e3701">234</a>]</span>with a whole epic of love, both of them trembling as their fingers touched. Heavy
+sighs, like small rockets, issued from his breast and brought back to him all the
+verses, all the sayings of poets and writers about the inconstancy of woman. Inwardly
+he cursed the creation of theaters, the French operetta, and vowed to get revenge
+on Pelaez at the first opportunity. Everything about him appeared under the saddest
+and somberest colors: the bay, deserted and solitary, seemed more solitary still on
+account of the few steamers that were anchored in it; the sun was dying behind Mariveles
+without poetry or enchantment, without the capricious and richly tinted clouds of
+happier evenings; the Anda monument, in bad taste, mean and squat, without style,
+without grandeur, looked like a lump of ice-cream or at best a chunk of cake; the
+people who were promenading along the Malecon, in spite of their complacent and contented
+air, appeared distant, haughty, and vain; mischievous and bad-mannered, the boys that
+played on the beach, skipping flat stones over the surface of the water or searching
+in the sand for mollusks and crustaceans which they caught for the mere fun of catching
+and killed without benefit to themselves; in short, even the eternal port works to
+which he had dedicated more than three odes, looked to him absurd, ridiculous child’s
+play.
+</p>
+<p>The port, ah, the port of Manila, a bastard that since its conception had brought
+tears of humiliation and shame to all! If only after so many tears there were not
+being brought forth a useless abortion!
+</p>
+<p>Abstractedly he saluted two Jesuits, former teachers of his, and scarcely noticed
+a tandem in which an American rode and excited the envy of the gallants who were in
+calesas only. Near the Anda monument he heard Ben-Zayb talking with another person
+about Simoun, learning that the latter had on the previous night been taken suddenly
+ill, that he refused to see any one, even the very aides of the General. “Yes!” exclaimed
+Isagani with a bitter smile, “for him attentions because he is rich. The soldiers
+return <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3706">[<a href="#xd32e3706">235</a>]</span>from their expeditions sick and wounded, but no one visits them.”
+</p>
+<p>Musing over these expeditions, over the fate of the poor soldiers, over the resistance
+offered by the islanders to the foreign yoke, he thought that, death for death, if
+that of the soldiers was glorious because they were obeying orders, that of the islanders
+was sublime because they were defending their homes.<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e3710src" href="#xd32e3710">1</a>
+</p>
+<p>“A strange destiny, that of some peoples!” he mused. “Because a traveler arrives at
+their shores, they lose their liberty and become subjects and slaves, not only of
+the traveler, not only of his heirs, but even of all his countrymen, and not for a
+generation, but for all time! A strange conception of justice! Such a state of affairs
+gives ample right to exterminate every foreigner as the most ferocious monster that
+the sea can cast up!”
+</p>
+<p>He reflected that those islanders, against whom his country was waging war, after
+all were guilty of no crime other than that of weakness. The travelers also arrived
+at the shores of other peoples, but finding them strong made no display of their strange
+pretension. With all their weakness the spectacle they presented seemed beautiful
+to him, and the names of the enemies, whom the newspapers did not fail to call cowards
+and traitors, appeared glorious to him, as they succumbed with glory amid the ruins
+of their crude fortifications, with greater glory even than the ancient Trojan heroes,
+for those islanders had carried away no Philippine Helen! In his poetic enthusiasm
+he thought of the young men of those islands who could cover themselves with glory
+in the eyes of their women, and in his amorous desperation he envied them because
+they could find a brilliant suicide.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3719">[<a href="#xd32e3719">236</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“Ah, I should like to die,” he exclaimed, “be reduced to nothingness, leave to my
+native land a glorious name, perish in its cause, defending it from foreign invasion,
+and then let the sun afterwards illumine my corpse, like a motionless sentinel on
+the rocks of the sea!”
+</p>
+<p>The conflict with the Germans<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e3724src" href="#xd32e3724">2</a> came into his mind and he almost felt sorry that it had been adjusted: he would gladly
+have died for the Spanish-Filipino banner before submitting to the foreigner.
+</p>
+<p>“Because, after all,” he mused, “with Spain we are united by firm bonds—the past,
+history, religion, language—”
+</p>
+<p>Language, yes, language! A sarcastic smile curled his lips. That very night they would
+hold a banquet in the <i>pansitería</i> to <i>celebrate</i> the demise of the academy of Castilian.
+</p>
+<p>“Ay!” he sighed, “provided the liberals in Spain are like those we have here, in a
+little while the mother country will be able to count the number of the faithful!”
+</p>
+<p>Slowly the night descended, and with it melancholy settled more heavily upon the heart
+of the young man, who had almost lost hope of seeing Paulita. The promenaders one
+by one left the Malecon for the Luneta, the music from which was borne to him in snatches
+of melodies on the fresh evening breeze; the sailors on a warship anchored in the
+river performed their evening drill, skipping about among the slender ropes like spiders;
+the boats one by one lighted their lamps, thus giving signs of life; while the beach,
+</p>
+<div lang="es" class="lgouter">
+<p class="line">Do el viento riza las calladas olas
+</p>
+<p class="line">Que con blando murmullo en la ribera
+</p>
+<p class="line">Se deslizan veloces por sí solas.<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e3741src" href="#xd32e3741">3</a></p>
+</div>
+<p><span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3743">[<a href="#xd32e3743">237</a>]</span></p>
+<p class="first">as Alaejos says, exhaled in the distance thin, vapors that the moon, now at its full,
+gradually converted into mysterious transparent gauze.
+</p>
+<p>A distant sound became audible, a noise that rapidly approached. Isagani turned his
+head and his heart began to beat violently. A carriage was coming, drawn by white
+horses, the white horses that he would know among a hundred thousand. In the carriage
+rode Paulita and her friend of the night before, with Doña Victorina.
+</p>
+<p>Before the young man could take a step, Paulita had leaped to the ground with sylph-like
+agility and smiled at him with a smile full of conciliation. He smiled in return,
+and it seemed to him that all the clouds, all the black thoughts that before had beset
+him, vanished like smoke, the sky lighted up, the breeze sang, flowers covered the
+grass by the roadside. But unfortunately Doña Victorina was there and she pounced
+upon the young man to ask him for news of Don Tiburcio, since Isagani had undertaken
+to discover his hiding-place by inquiry among the students he knew.
+</p>
+<p>“No one has been able to tell me up to now,” he answered, and he was telling the truth,
+for Don Tiburcio was really hidden in the house of the youth’s own uncle, Padre Florentino.
+</p>
+<p>“Let him know,” declared Doña Victorina furiously, “that I’ll call in the Civil Guard.
+Alive or dead, I want to know where he is—because one has to wait ten years before
+marrying again.”
+</p>
+<p>Isagani gazed at her in fright—Doña Victorina was thinking of remarrying! Who could
+the unfortunate be?
+</p>
+<p>“What do you think of Juanito Pelaez?” she asked him suddenly.
+</p>
+<p>Juanito! Isagani knew not what to reply. He was tempted to tell all the evil he knew
+of Pelaez, but a feeling of delicacy triumphed in his heart and he spoke well of his
+rival, for the very reason that he was such. Doña Victorina, entirely satisfied and
+becoming enthusiastic, then <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3754">[<a href="#xd32e3754">238</a>]</span>broke out into exaggerations of Pelaez’s merits and was already going to make Isagani
+a confidant of her new passion when Paulita’s friend came running to say that the
+former’s fan had fallen among the stones of the beach, near the Malecon. Stratagem
+or accident, the fact is that this mischance gave an excuse for the friend to remain
+with the old woman, while Isagani might talk with Paulita. Moreover, it was a matter
+of rejoicing to Doña Victorina, since to get Juanito for herself she was favoring
+Isagani’s love.
+</p>
+<p>Paulita had her plan ready. On thanking him she assumed the role of the offended party,
+showed resentment, and gave him to understand that she was surprised to meet him there
+when everybody was on the Luneta, even the French actresses.
+</p>
+<p>“You made the appointment for me, how could I be elsewhere?”
+</p>
+<p>“Yet last night you did not even notice that I was in the theater. I was watching
+you all the time and you never took your eyes off those <i>cochers</i>.”
+</p>
+<p>So they exchanged parts: Isagani, who had come to demand explanations, found himself
+compelled to give them and considered himself very happy when Paulita said that she
+forgave him. In regard to her presence at the theater, he even had to thank her for
+that: forced by her aunt, she had decided to go in the hope of seeing him during the
+performance. Little she cared for Juanito Pelaez!
+</p>
+<p>“My aunt’s the one who is in love with him,” she said with a merry laugh.
+</p>
+<p>Then they both laughed, for the marriage of Pelaez with Doña Victorina made them really
+happy, and they saw it already an accomplished fact, until Isagani remembered that
+Don Tiburcio was still living and confided the secret to his sweetheart, after exacting
+her promise that she would tell no one. Paulita promised, with the mental reservation
+of relating it to her friend.
+</p>
+<p>This led the conversation to Isagani’s town, surrounded <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3767">[<a href="#xd32e3767">239</a>]</span>by forests, situated on the shore of the sea which roared at the base of the high
+cliffs. Isagani’s gaze lighted up when he spoke of that obscure spot, a flush of pride
+overspread his cheeks, his voice trembled, his poetic imagination glowed, his words
+poured forth burning, charged with enthusiasm, as if he were talking of love to his
+love, and he could not but exclaim:
+</p>
+<p>“Oh, in the solitude of my mountains I feel free, free as the air, as the light that
+shoots unbridled through space! A thousand cities, a thousand palaces, would I give
+for that spot in the Philippines, where, far from men, I could feel myself to have
+genuine liberty. There, face to face with nature, in the presence of the mysterious
+and the infinite, the forest and the sea, I think, speak, and work like a man who
+knows not tyrants.”
+</p>
+<p>In the presence of such enthusiasm for his native place, an enthusiasm that she did
+not comprehend, for she was accustomed to hear her country spoken ill of, and sometimes
+joined in the chorus herself, Paulita manifested some jealousy, as usual making herself
+the offended party.
+</p>
+<p>But Isagani very quickly pacified her. “Yes,” he said, “I loved it above all things
+before I knew you! It was my delight to wander through the thickets, to sleep in the
+shade of the trees, to seat myself upon a cliff to take in with my gaze the Pacific
+which rolled its blue waves before me, bringing to me echoes of songs learned on the
+shores of free America. Before knowing you, that sea was for me my world, my delight,
+my love, my dream! When it slept in calm with the sun shining overhead, it was my
+delight to gaze into the abyss hundreds of feet below me, seeking monsters in the
+forests of madrepores and coral that were revealed through the limpid blue, enormous
+serpents that the country folk say leave the forests to dwell in the sea, and there
+take on frightful forms. Evening, they say, is the time when the sirens appear, and
+I saw them between the waves—so great was my eagerness that once I thought I could
+discern them amid the foam, busy in their divine <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3774">[<a href="#xd32e3774">240</a>]</span>sports, I distinctly heard their songs, songs of liberty, and I made out the sounds
+of their silvery harps. Formerly I spent hours and hours watching the transformations
+in the clouds, or gazing at a solitary tree in the plain or a high rock, without knowing
+why, without being able to explain the vague feelings they awoke in me. My uncle used
+to preach long sermons to me, and fearing that I would become a hypochondriac, talked
+of placing me under a doctor’s care. But I met you, I loved you, and during the last
+vacation it seemed that something was lacking there, the forest was gloomy, sad the
+river that glides through the shadows, dreary the sea, deserted the sky. Ah, if you
+should go there once, if your feet should press those paths, if you should stir the
+waters of the rivulet with your fingers, if you should gaze upon the sea, sit upon
+the cliff, or make the air ring with your melodious songs, my forest would be transformed
+into an Eden, the ripples of the brook would sing, light would burst from the dark
+leaves, into diamonds would be converted the dewdrops and into pearls the foam of
+the sea.”
+</p>
+<p>But Paulita had heard that to reach Isagani’s home it was necessary to cross mountains
+where little leeches abounded, and at the mere thought of them the little coward shivered
+convulsively. Humored and petted, she declared that she would travel only in a carriage
+or a railway train.
+</p>
+<p>Having now forgotten all his pessimism and seeing only thornless roses about him,
+Isagani answered, “Within a short time all the islands are going to be crossed with
+networks of iron rails.
+</p>
+<div lang="es" class="lgouter">
+<p class="line">“ ‘Por donde rápidas
+</p>
+<p class="line">Y voladoras
+</p>
+<p class="line">Locomotoras
+</p>
+<p class="line">Corriendo irán,’<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e3784src" href="#xd32e3784">4</a></p>
+</div>
+<p class="first">as some one said. Then the most beautiful spots of the islands will be accessible
+to all.”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3788">[<a href="#xd32e3788">241</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“Then, but when? When I’m an old woman?”
+</p>
+<p>“Ah, you don’t know what we can do in a few years,” replied the youth. “You don’t
+realize the energy and enthusiasm that are awakening in the country after the sleep
+of centuries. Spain heeds us; our young men in Madrid are working day and night, dedicating
+to the fatherland all their intelligence, all their time, all their strength. Generous
+voices there are mingled with ours, statesmen who realize that there is no better
+bond than community of thought and interest. Justice will be meted out to us, and
+everything points to a brilliant future for all. It’s true that we’ve just met with
+a slight rebuff, we students, but victory is rolling along the whole line, it is in
+the consciousness of all! The traitorous repulse that we have suffered indicates the
+last gasp, the final convulsions of the dying. Tomorrow we shall be citizens of the
+Philippines, whose destiny will be a glorious one, because it will be in loving hands.
+Ah, yes, the future is ours! I see it rose-tinted, I see the movement that stirs the
+life of these regions so long dead, lethargic. I see towns arise along the railroads,
+and factories everywhere, edifices like that of Mandaloyan! I hear the steam hiss,
+the trains roar, the engines rattle! I see the smoke rise—their heavy breathing; I
+smell the oil—the sweat of monsters busy at incessant toil. This port, so slow and
+laborious of creation, this river where commerce is in its death agony, we shall see
+covered with masts, giving us an idea of the forests of Europe in winter. This pure
+air, and these stones, now so clean, will be crowded with coal, with boxes and barrels,
+the products of human industry, but let it not matter, for we shall move about rapidly
+in comfortable coaches to seek in the interior other air, other scenes on other shores,
+cooler temperatures on the slopes of the mountains. The warships of our navy will
+guard our coasts, the Spaniard and the Filipino will rival each other in zeal to repel
+all foreign invasion, to defend our homes, and let you bask in peace and smiles, loved
+and respected. Free from the system of exploitation, <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3792">[<a href="#xd32e3792">242</a>]</span>without hatred or distrust, the people will labor because then labor will cease to
+be a despicable thing, it will no longer be servile, imposed upon a slave. Then the
+Spaniard will not embitter his character with ridiculous pretensions of despotism,
+but with a frank look and a stout heart we shall extend our hands to one another,
+and commerce, industry, agriculture, the sciences, will develop under the mantle of
+liberty, with wise and just laws, as in prosperous England.”<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e3794src" href="#xd32e3794">5</a>
+</p>
+<p>Paulita smiled dubiously and shook her head. “Dreams, dreams!” she sighed. “I’ve heard
+it said that you have many enemies. Aunt says that this country must always be enslaved.”
+</p>
+<p>“Because your aunt is a fool, because she can’t live without slaves! When she hasn’t
+them she dreams of them in the future, and if they are not obtainable she forces them
+into her imagination. True it is that we have enemies, that there will be a struggle,
+but we shall conquer. The old system may convert the ruins of its castle into formless
+barricades, but we will take them singing hymns of liberty, in the light of the eyes
+of you women, to the applause of your lovely hands. But do not be uneasy—the struggle
+will be a pacific one. Enough that you spur us to zeal, that you awake in us noble
+and elevated thoughts and encourage us <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3801">[<a href="#xd32e3801">243</a>]</span>to constancy, to heroism, with your affection for our reward.”
+</p>
+<p>Paulita preserved her enigmatic smile and seemed thoughtful, as she gazed toward the
+river, patting her cheek lightly with her fan. “But if you accomplish nothing?” she
+asked abstractedly.
+</p>
+<p>The question hurt Isagani. He fixed his eyes on his sweetheart, caught her lightly
+by the hand, and began: “Listen, if we accomplish nothing—”
+</p>
+<p>He paused in doubt, then resumed: “You know how I love you, how I adore you, you know
+that I feel myself a different creature when your gaze enfolds me, when I surprise
+in it the flash of love, but yet if we accomplish nothing, I would dream of another
+look of yours and would die happy, because the light of pride could burn in your eyes
+when you pointed to my corpse and said to the world: ‘My love died fighting for the
+rights of my fatherland!’ ”
+</p>
+<p>“Come home, child, you’re going to catch cold,” screeched Doña Victorina at that instant,
+and the voice brought them back to reality. It was time to return, and they kindly
+invited him to enter the carriage, an invitation which the young man did not give
+them cause to repeat. As it was Paulita’s carriage, naturally Doña Victorina and the
+friend occupied the back seat, while the two lovers sat on the smaller one in front.
+</p>
+<p>To ride in the same carriage, to have her at his side, to breathe her perfume, to
+rub against the silk of her dress, to see her pensive with folded arms, lighted by
+the moon of the Philippines that lends to the meanest things idealism and enchantment,
+were all dreams beyond Isagani’s hopes! What wretches they who were returning alone
+on foot and had to give way to the swift carriage! In the whole course of the drive,
+along the beach and down the length of La Sabana, across the Bridge of Spain, Isagani
+saw nothing but a sweet profile, gracefully set off by beautiful hair, ending in an
+arching neck that lost itself amid the gauzy piña. A diamond winked at him from the
+lobe of the <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3810">[<a href="#xd32e3810">244</a>]</span>little ear, like a star among silvery clouds. He heard faint echoes inquiring for
+Don Tiburcio de Espadaña, the name of Juanito Pelaez, but they sounded to him like
+distant bells, the confused noises heard in a dream. It was necessary to tell him
+that they had reached Plaza Santa Cruz.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3812">[<a href="#xd32e3812">245</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e3710">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e3710src">1</a></span> Referring to the expeditions—<i lang="es">Misión Española Católica</i>—to the Caroline and Pelew Islands from 1886 to 1895, headed by the Capuchin Fathers,
+which brought misery and disaster upon the natives of those islands, unprofitable
+losses and sufferings to the Filipino soldiers engaged in them, discredit to Spain,
+and decorations of merit to a number of Spanish officers.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e3710src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e3724">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e3724src">2</a></span> Over the possession of the Caroline and Pelew Islands. The expeditions referred to
+in the previous note were largely inspired by German activity with regard to those
+islands, which had always been claimed by Spain, who sold her claim to them to Germany
+after the loss of the Philippines.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e3724src" title="Return to note 2 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e3741" lang="en">
+<p class="footnote" lang="en"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e3741src">3</a></span> “Where the wind wrinkles the silent waves, that rapidly break,
+of their own movement, with a gentle murmur on the shore.”—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e3741src" title="Return to note 3 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e3784" lang="en">
+<p class="footnote" lang="en"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e3784src">4</a></span> “Where rapid and winged engines will rush in flight.”—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e3784src" title="Return to note 4 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e3794">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e3794src">5</a></span> There is something almost uncanny about the general accuracy of the prophecy in these
+lines, the economic part of which is now so well on the way to realization, although
+the writer of them would doubtless have been a very much surprised individual had
+he also foreseen how it would come about. But one of his own expressions was “fire
+and steel to the cancer,” and it surely got them.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote cont">On the very day that this passage was translated and this note written, the first
+commercial liner was tied up at the new docks, which have destroyed the Malecon but
+raised Manila to the front rank of Oriental seaports, and the final revision is made
+at Baguio, Mountain Province, amid the “cooler temperatures on the slopes of the mountains.”
+As for the political portion, it is difficult even now to contemplate calmly the blundering
+fatuity of that bigoted medieval brand of “patriotism” which led the decrepit Philippine
+government to play the Ancient Mariner and shoot the Albatross that brought this message.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e3794src" title="Return to note 5 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch25" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e454">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XXV</h2>
+<h2 class="main">Smiles and Tears</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">The sala of the <i>Pansiteria Macanista de Buen Gusto</i><a class="noteRef" id="xd32e3820src" href="#xd32e3820">1</a> that night presented an extraordinary aspect. Fourteen young men of the principal
+islands of the archipelago, from the pure Indian (if there be pure ones) to the Peninsular
+Spaniard, were met to hold the banquet advised by Padre Irene in view of the happy
+solution of the affair about instruction in Castilian. They had engaged all the tables
+for themselves, ordered the lights to be increased, and had posted on the wall beside
+the landscapes and Chinese kakemonos this strange versicle:
+</p>
+<p>“GLORY TO CUSTODIO FOR HIS CLEVERNESS AND PANSIT ON EABTH TO THE YOUTHS OF GOOD WILL.”
+</p>
+<p>In a country where everything grotesque is covered with a mantle of seriousness, where
+many rise by the force of wind and hot air, in a country where the deeply serious
+and sincere may do damage on issuing from the heart and may cause trouble, probably
+this was the best way to celebrate the ingenious inspiration of the illustrious Don
+Custodio. The mocked replied to the mockery with a laugh, to the governmental joke
+with a plate of <i>pansit</i>, and yet—!
+</p>
+<p>They laughed and jested, but it could be seen that the merriment was forced. The laughter
+had a certain nervous ring, eyes flashed, and in more than one of these a tear glistened.
+Nevertheless, these young men were cruel, they were unreasonable! It was not the first
+time that their most <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3832">[<a href="#xd32e3832">246</a>]</span>beautiful ideas had been so treated, that their hopes had been defrauded with big
+words and small actions: before this Don Custodio there had been many, very many others.
+</p>
+<p>In the center of the room under the red lanterns were placed four round tables, systematically
+arranged to form a square. Little wooden stools, equally round, served as seats. In
+the middle of each table, according to the practise of the establishment, were arranged
+four small colored plates with four pies on each one and four cups of tea, with the
+accompanying dishes, all of red porcelain. Before each seat was a bottle and two glittering
+wine-glasses.
+</p>
+<p>Sandoval was curious and gazed about scrutinizing everything, tasting the food, examining
+the pictures, reading the bill of fare. The others conversed on the topics of the
+day: about the French actresses, about the mysterious illness of Simoun, who, according
+to some, had been found wounded in the street, while others averred that he had attempted
+to commit suicide. As was natural, all lost themselves in conjectures. Tadeo gave
+his particular version, which according to him came from a reliable source: Simoun
+had been assaulted by some unknown person in the old Plaza Vivac,<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e3837src" href="#xd32e3837">2</a> the motive being revenge, in proof of which was the fact that Simoun himself refused
+to make the least explanation. From this they proceeded to talk of mysterious revenges,
+and naturally of monkish pranks, each one relating the exploits of the curate of his
+town.
+</p>
+<p>A notice in large black letters crowned the frieze of the room with this warning:
+</p>
+<div lang="es" class="lgouter">
+<p class="line">De esta fonda el cabecilla
+</p>
+<p class="line">Al publico advierte
+</p>
+<p class="line">Que nada dejen absolutamente
+</p>
+<p class="line">Sobre alguna mesa ó silla.<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e3847src" href="#xd32e3847">3</a></p>
+</div>
+<p><span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3849">[<a href="#xd32e3849">247</a>]</span></p>
+<p class="first">“What a notice!” exclaimed Sandoval. “As if he might have confidence in the police,
+eh? And what verses! Don Tiburcio converted into a quatrain—two feet, one longer than
+the other, between two crutches! If Isagani sees them, he’ll present them to his future
+aunt.”
+</p>
+<p>“Here’s Isagani!” called a voice from the stairway. The happy youth appeared radiant
+with joy, followed by two Chinese, without camisas, who carried on enormous waiters
+tureens that gave out an appetizing odor. Merry exclamations greeted them.
+</p>
+<p>Juanito Pelaez was missing, but the hour fixed had already passed, so they sat down
+happily to the tables. Juanito was always unconventional.
+</p>
+<p>“If in his place we had invited Basilio,” said Tadeo, “we should have been better
+entertained. We might have got him drunk and drawn some secrets from him.”
+</p>
+<p>“What, does the prudent Basilio possess secrets?”
+</p>
+<p>“I should say so!” replied Tadeo. “Of the most important kind. There are some enigmas
+to which he alone has the key: the boy who disappeared, the nun—”
+</p>
+<p>“Gentlemen, the <i>pansit lang-lang</i> is the soup <i>par excellence</i>!” cried Makaraig. “As you will observe, Sandoval, it is composed of vermicelli, crabs
+or shrimps, egg paste, scraps of chicken, and I don’t know what else. As first-fruits,
+let us offer the bones to Don Custodio, to see if he will project something with them.”
+</p>
+<p>A burst of merry laughter greeted this sally.
+</p>
+<p>“If he should learn—”
+</p>
+<p>“He’d come a-running!” concluded Sandoval. “This is excellent soup—what is it called?”
+</p>
+<p>“<i>Pansit lang-lang</i>, that is, Chinese <i>pansit</i>, to distinguish it from that which is peculiar to this country.”
+</p>
+<p>“Bah! That’s a hard name to remember. In honor of Don Custodio, I christen it the
+<i>soup project</i>!”
+</p>
+<p>“Gentlemen,” said Makaraig, who had prepared the menu, “there are three courses yet.
+Chinese stew made of pork—”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3879">[<a href="#xd32e3879">248</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“Which should be dedicated to Padre Irene.”
+</p>
+<p>“Get out! Padre Irene doesn’t eat pork, unless he turns his nose away,” whispered
+a young man from Iloilo to his neighbor.
+</p>
+<p>“Let him turn his nose away!”
+</p>
+<p>“Down with Padre Irene’s nose,” cried several at once.
+</p>
+<p>“Respect, gentlemen, more respect!” demanded Pecson with comic gravity.
+</p>
+<p>“The third course is a lobster pie—”
+</p>
+<p>“Which should be dedicated to the friars,” suggested he of the Visayas.
+</p>
+<p>“For the lobsters’ sake,” added Sandoval.
+</p>
+<p>“Right, and call it friar pie!”
+</p>
+<p>The whole crowd took this up, repeating in concert, “Friar pie!”
+</p>
+<p>“I protest in the name of one of them,” said Isagani.
+</p>
+<p>“And I, in the name of the lobsters,” added Tadeo.
+</p>
+<p>“Respect, gentlemen, more respect!” again demanded Pecson with a full mouth.
+</p>
+<p>“The fourth is stewed <i>pansit</i>, which is dedicated—to the government and the country!”
+</p>
+<p>All turned toward Makaraig, who went on: “Until recently, gentlemen, the <i>pansit</i> was believed to be Chinese or Japanese, but the fact is that, being unknown in China
+or Japan, it would seem to be Filipino, yet those who prepare it and get the benefit
+from it are the Chinese—the same, the very, very same that happens to the government
+and to the Philippines: they seem to be Chinese, but whether they are or not, the
+Holy Mother has her doctors—all eat and enjoy it, yet characterize it as disagreeable
+and loathsome, the same as with the country, the same as with the government. All
+live at its cost, all share in its feast, and afterwards there is no worse country
+than the Philippines, there is no government more imperfect. Let us then dedicate
+the <i>pansit</i> to the country and to the government.”
+</p>
+<p>“Agreed!” many exclaimed.
+</p>
+<p>“I protest!” cried Isagani.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3907">[<a href="#xd32e3907">249</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“Respect for the weaker, respect for the victims,” called Pecson in a hollow voice,
+waving a chicken-bone in the air.
+</p>
+<p>“Let’s dedicate the <i>pansit</i> to Quiroga the Chinaman, one of the four powers of the Filipino world,” proposed
+Isagani.
+</p>
+<p>“No, to his Black Eminence.”
+</p>
+<p>“Silence!” cautioned one mysteriously. “There are people in the plaza watching us,
+and walls have ears.”
+</p>
+<p>True it was that curious groups were standing by the windows, while the talk and laughter
+in the adjoining houses had ceased altogether, as if the people there were giving
+their attention to what was occurring at the banquet. There was something extraordinary
+about the silence.
+</p>
+<p>“Tadeo, deliver your speech,” Makaraig whispered to him.
+</p>
+<p>It had been agreed that Sandoval, who possessed the most oratorical ability, should
+deliver the last toast as a summing up.
+</p>
+<p>Tadeo, lazy as ever, had prepared nothing, so he found himself in a quandary. While
+disposing of a long string of vermicelli, he meditated how to get out of the difficulty,
+until he recalled a speech learned in school and decided to plagiarize it, with adulterations.
+</p>
+<p>“Beloved brethren in project!” he began, gesticulating with two Chinese chop-sticks.
+</p>
+<p>“Brute! Keep that chop-stick out of my hair!” cried his neighbor.
+</p>
+<p>“Called by you to fill the void that has been left in—”
+</p>
+<p>“Plagiarism!” Sandoval interrupted him. “That speech was delivered by the president
+of our lyceum.”
+</p>
+<p>“Called by your election,” continued the imperturbable Tadeo, “to fill the void that
+has been left in my mind”—pointing to his stomach—“by a man famous for his Christian
+principles and for his inspirations and projects, worthy of some little remembrance,
+what can one like myself say of him, I who am very hungry, not having breakfasted?”
+</p>
+<p>“Have a neck, my friend!” called a neighbor, offering that portion of a chicken.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3927">[<a href="#xd32e3927">250</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“There is one course, gentlemen, the treasure of a people who are today a tale and
+a mockery in the world, wherein have thrust their hands the greatest gluttons of the
+western regions of the earth—” Here he pointed with his chopsticks to Sandoval, who
+was struggling with a refractory chicken-wing.
+</p>
+<p>“And eastern!” retorted the latter, describing a circle in the air with his spoon,
+in order to include all the banqueters.
+</p>
+<p>“No interruptions!”
+</p>
+<p>“I demand the floor!”
+</p>
+<p>“I demand pickles!” added Isagani.
+</p>
+<p>“Bring on the stew!”
+</p>
+<p>All echoed this request, so Tadeo sat down, contented with having got out of his quandary.
+</p>
+<p>The dish consecrated to Padre Irene did not appear to be extra good, as Sandoval cruelly
+demonstrated thus: “Shining with grease outside and with pork inside! Bring on the
+third course, the friar pie!”
+</p>
+<p>The pie was not yet ready, although the sizzling of the grease in the frying-pan could
+be heard. They took advantage of the delay to drink, begging Pecson to talk.
+</p>
+<p>Pecson crossed himself gravely and arose, restraining his clownish laugh with an effort,
+at the same time mimicking a certain Augustinian preacher, then famous, and beginning
+in a murmur, as though he were reading a text.
+</p>
+<p>“<i lang="la">Si tripa plena laudal Deum, tripa famelica laudabit fratres</i>—if the full stomach praises God, the hungry stomach will praise the friars. Words
+spoken by the Lord Custodio through the mouth of Ben-Zayb, in the journal <i lang="es">El Grito de la Integridad</i>, the second article, absurdity the one hundred and fifty-seventh.
+</p>
+<p>“Beloved brethren in Christ: Evil blows its foul breath over the verdant shores of
+Frailandia, commonly called the Philippine Archipelago. No day passes but the attack
+is renewed, but there is heard some sarcasm against the reverend, venerable, infallible
+corporations, defenseless and unsupported. <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3950">[<a href="#xd32e3950">251</a>]</span>Allow me, brethren, on this occasion to constitute myself a knight-errant to sally
+forth in defense of the unprotected, of the holy corporations that have reared us,
+thus again confirming the saving idea of the adage—a full stomach praises God, which
+is to say, a hungry stomach will praise the friars.”
+</p>
+<p>“Bravo, bravo!”
+</p>
+<p>“Listen,” said Isagani seriously, “I want you to understand that, speaking of friars,
+I respect one.”
+</p>
+<p>Sandoval was getting merry, so he began to sing a shady couplet about the friars.
+</p>
+<p>“Hear me, brethren!” continued Pecson. “Turn your gaze toward the happy days of your
+infancy, endeavor to analyze the present and ask yourselves about the future. What
+do you find? Friars, friars, and friars! A friar baptized you, confirmed you, visited
+you in school with loving zeal; a friar heard your first secret; he was the first
+to bring you into communion with God, to set your feet upon the pathway of life; friars
+were your first and friars will be your last teachers; a friar it is who opens the
+hearts of your sweethearts, disposing them to heed your sighs; a friar marries you,
+makes you travel over different islands to afford you changes of climate and diversion;
+he will attend your death-bed, and even though you mount the scaffold, there will
+the friar be to accompany you with his prayers and tears, and you may rest assured
+that he will not desert you until he sees you thoroughly dead. Nor does his charity
+end there—dead, he will then endeavor to bury you with all pomp, he will fight that
+your corpse pass through the church to receive his supplications, and he will only
+rest satisfied when he can deliver you into the hands of the Creator, purified here
+on earth, thanks to temporal punishments, tortures, and humiliations. Learned in the
+doctrines of Christ, who closes heaven against the rich, they, our redeemers and genuine
+ministers of the Saviour, seek every means to lift away our sins and bear them far,
+far off, there where the accursed Chinese and Protestants <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3957">[<a href="#xd32e3957">252</a>]</span>dwell, to leave us this air, limpid, pure, healthful, in such a way that even should
+we so wish afterwards, we could not find a real to bring about our condemnation.
+</p>
+<p>“If, then, their existence is necessary to our happiness, if wheresoever we turn we
+must encounter their delicate hands, hungering for kisses, that every day smooth the
+marks of abuse from our countenances, why not adore them and fatten them—why demand
+their impolitic expulsion? Consider for a moment the immense void that their absence
+would leave in our social system. Tireless workers, they improve and propagate the
+races! Divided as we are, thanks to our jealousies and our susceptibilities, the friars
+unite us in a common lot, in a firm bond, so firm that many are unable to move their
+elbows. Take away the friar, gentlemen, and you will see how the Philippine edifice
+will totter; lacking robust shoulders and hairy limbs to sustain it, Philippine life
+will again become monotonous, without the merry note of the playful and gracious friar,
+without the booklets and sermons that split our sides with laughter, without the amusing
+contrast between grand pretensions and small brains, without the actual, daily representations
+of the tales of Boccaccio and La Fontaine! Without the girdles and scapularies, what
+would you have our women do in the future—save that money and perhaps become miserly
+and covetous? Without the masses, novenaries, and processions, where will you find
+games of <i>panguingui</i> to entertain them in their hours of leisure? They would then have to devote themselves
+to their household duties and instead of reading diverting stories of miracles, we
+should then have to get them works that are not extant.
+</p>
+<p>“Take away the friar and heroism will disappear, the political virtues will fall under
+the control of the vulgar. Take him away and the Indian will cease to exist, for the
+friar is the Father, the Indian is the Word! The former is the sculptor, the latter
+the statue, because all that we are, think, or do, we owe to the friar—to his patience,
+his toil, his perseverance of three centuries to modify the form <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3965">[<a href="#xd32e3965">253</a>]</span>Nature gave us. The Philippines without the friar and without the Indian—what then
+would become of the unfortunate government in the hands of the Chinamen?”
+</p>
+<p>“It will eat lobster pie,” suggested Isagani, whom Pecson’s speech bored.
+</p>
+<p>“And that’s what we ought to be doing. Enough of speeches!”
+</p>
+<p>As the Chinese who should have served the courses did not put in his appearance, one
+of the students arose and went to the rear, toward the balcony that overlooked the
+river. But he returned at once, making mysterious signs.
+</p>
+<p>“We’re watched! I’ve seen Padre Sibyla’s pet!”
+</p>
+<p>“Yes?” ejaculated Isagani, rising.
+</p>
+<p>“It’s no use now. When he saw me he disappeared.”
+</p>
+<p>Approaching the window he looked toward the plaza, then made signs to his companions
+to come nearer. They saw a young man leave the door of the <i>pansitería</i>, gaze all about him, then with some unknown person enter a carriage that waited at
+the curb. It was Simoun’s carriage.
+</p>
+<p>“Ah!” exclaimed Makaraig. “The slave of the Vice-Rector attended by the Master of
+the General!”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3980">[<a href="#xd32e3980">254</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e3820">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e3820src">1</a></span> These establishments are still a notable feature of native life in Manila. Whether
+the author adopted a title already common or popularized one of his own invention,
+the fact is that they are now invariably known by the name used here. The use of <i>macanista</i> was due to the presence in Manila of a large number of Chinese from Macao.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e3820src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e3837">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e3837src">2</a></span> Originally, Plaza San Gabriel, from the Dominican mission for the Chinese established
+there; later, as it became a commercial center, Plaza Vivac; and now known as Plaza
+Cervantes, being the financial center of Manila.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e3837src" title="Return to note 2 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e3847" lang="en">
+<p class="footnote" lang="en"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e3847src">3</a></span> “The manager of this restaurant warns the public to leave absolutely nothing on any
+table or chair.”—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e3847src" title="Return to note 3 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch26" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e465">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XXVI</h2>
+<h2 class="main">Pasquinades</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">Very early the next morning Basilio arose to go to the hospital. He had his plans
+made: to visit his patients, to go afterwards to the University to see about his licentiateship,
+and then have an interview with Makaraig about the expense this would entail, for
+he had used up the greater part of his savings in ransoming Juli and in securing a
+house where she and her grandfather might live, and he had not dared to apply to Capitan
+Tiago, fearing that such a move would be construed as an advance on the legacy so
+often promised him.
+</p>
+<p>Preoccupied with these thoughts, he paid no attention to the groups of students who
+were at such an early hour returning from the Walled City, as though the classrooms
+had been closed, nor did he even note the abstracted air of some of them, their whispered
+conversations, or the mysterious signals exchanged among them. So it was that when
+he reached San Juan de Dios and his friends asked him about the conspiracy, he gave
+a start, remembering what Simoun had planned, but which had miscarried, owing to the
+unexplained accident to the jeweler. Terrified, he asked in a trembling voice, at
+the same time endeavoring to feign ignorance, “Ah, yes, what conspiracy?”
+</p>
+<p>“It’s been discovered,” replied one, “and it seems that many are implicated in it.”
+</p>
+<p>With an effort Basilio controlled himself. “Many implicated?” he echoed, trying to
+learn something from the looks of the others. “Who?”
+</p>
+<p>“Students, a lot of students.”
+</p>
+<p>Basilio did not think it prudent to ask more, fearing <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e3992">[<a href="#xd32e3992">255</a>]</span>that he would give himself away, so on the pretext of visiting his patients he left
+the group. One of the clinical professors met him and placing his hand mysteriously
+on the youth’s shoulder—the professor was a friend of his—asked him in a low voice,
+“Were you at that supper last night?”
+</p>
+<p>In his excited frame of mind Basilio thought the professor had said <i>night before last</i>, which was the time of his interview with Simoun. He tried to explain. “I assure
+you,” he stammered, “that as Capitan Tiago was worse—and besides I had to finish that
+book—”
+</p>
+<p>“You did well not to attend it,” said the professor. “But you’re a member of the students’
+association?”
+</p>
+<p>“I pay my dues.”
+</p>
+<p>“Well then, a piece of advice: go home at once and destroy any papers you have that
+may compromise you.”
+</p>
+<p>Basilio shrugged his shoulders—he had no papers, nothing more than his clinical notes.
+</p>
+<p>“Has Señor Simoun—”
+</p>
+<p>“Simoun has nothing to do with the affair, thank God!” interrupted the physician.
+“He was opportunely wounded by some unknown hand and is now confined to his bed. No,
+other hands are concerned in this, but hands no less terrible.”
+</p>
+<p>Basilio drew a breath of relief. Simoun was the only one who could compromise him,
+although he thought of Cabesang Tales.
+</p>
+<p>“Are there tulisanes—”
+</p>
+<p>“No, man, nothing more than students.”
+</p>
+<p>Basilio recovered his serenity. “What has happened then?” he made bold to ask.
+</p>
+<p>“Seditious pasquinades have been found; didn’t you know about them?”
+</p>
+<p>“Where?”
+</p>
+<p>“In the University.”
+</p>
+<p>“Nothing more than that?”
+</p>
+<p>“Whew! What more do you want?” asked the professor, <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4016">[<a href="#xd32e4016">256</a>]</span>almost in a rage. “The pasquinades are attributed to the students of the association—but,
+keep quiet!”
+</p>
+<p>The professor of pathology came along, a man who had more the look of a sacristan
+than of a physician. Appointed by the powerful mandate of the Vice-Rector, without
+other merit than unconditional servility to the corporation, he passed for a spy and
+an informer in the eyes of the rest of the faculty.
+</p>
+<p>The first professor returned his greeting coldly, and winked to Basilio, as he said
+to him, “Now I know that Capitan Tiago smells like a corpse—the crows and vultures
+have been gathering around him.” So saying, he went inside.
+</p>
+<p>Somewhat calmed, Basilio now ventured to inquire for more details, but all that he
+could learn was that pasquinades had been found on the doors of the University, and
+that the Vice-Rector had ordered them to be taken down and sent to the Civil Government.
+It was said that they were filled with threats of assassination, invasion, and other
+braggadocio.
+</p>
+<p>The students made their comments on the affair. Their information came from the janitor,
+who had it from a servant in Santo Tomas, who had it from an usher. They prognosticated
+future suspensions and imprisonments, even indicating who were to be the victims—naturally
+the members of the association.
+</p>
+<p>Basilio then recalled Simoun’s words: “The day in which they can get rid of you, you
+will not complete your course.”
+</p>
+<p>“Could he have known anything?” he asked himself. “We’ll see who is the most powerful.”
+</p>
+<p>Recovering his serenity, he went on toward the University, to learn what attitude
+it behooved him to take and at the same time to see about his licentiateship. He passed
+along Calle Legazpi, then down through Beaterio, and upon arriving at the corner of
+this street and Calle Solana saw that something important must indeed have happened.
+Instead of the former lively, chattering groups on the sidewalks <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4026">[<a href="#xd32e4026">257</a>]</span>were to be seen civil-guards making the students move on, and these latter issuing
+from the University silent, some gloomy, some agitated, to stand off at a distance
+or make their way home.
+</p>
+<p>The first acquaintance he met was Sandoval, but Basilio called to him in vain. He
+seemed to have been smitten deaf. “Effect of fear on the gastro-intestinal juices,”
+thought Basilio.
+</p>
+<p>Later he met Tadeo, who wore a Christmas face—at last that eternal holiday seemed
+to be realized.
+</p>
+<p>“What has happened, Tadeo?”
+</p>
+<p>“We’ll have no school, at least for a week, old man! Sublime! Magnificent!” He rubbed
+his hands in glee.
+</p>
+<p>“But what has happened?”
+</p>
+<p>“They’re going to arrest all of us in the association.”
+</p>
+<p>“And are you glad of that?”
+</p>
+<p>“There’ll be no school, there’ll be no school!” He moved away almost bursting with
+joy.
+</p>
+<p>Basilio saw Juanito Pelaez approaching, pale and suspicious. This time his hump had
+reached its maximum, so great was his haste to get away. He had been one of the most
+active promoters of the association while things were running smoothly.
+</p>
+<p>“Eh, Pelaez, what’s happened?”
+</p>
+<p>“Nothing, I know nothing. I didn’t have anything to do with it,” he responded nervously.
+“I was always telling you that these things were quixotisms. It’s the truth, you know
+I’ve said so to you?”
+</p>
+<p>Basilio did not remember whether he had said so or not, but to humor him replied,
+“Yes, man, but what’s happened?”
+</p>
+<p>“It’s the truth, isn’t it? Look, you’re a witness: I’ve always been opposed—you’re
+a witness, don’t forget it!”
+</p>
+<p>“Yes, man, but what’s going on?”
+</p>
+<p>“Listen, you’re a witness! I’ve never had anything to do with the members of the association,
+except to give them <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4046">[<a href="#xd32e4046">258</a>]</span>advice. You’re not going to deny it now. Be careful, won’t you?”
+</p>
+<p>“No, no, I won’t deny it, but for goodness’ sake, what has happened?”
+</p>
+<p>But Juanito was already far away. He had caught a glimpse of a guard approaching and
+feared arrest.
+</p>
+<p>Basilio then went on toward the University to see if perhaps the secretary’s office
+might be open and if he could glean any further news. The office was closed, but there
+was an extraordinary commotion in the building. Hurrying up and down the stairways
+were friars, army officers, private persons, old lawyers and doctors, there doubtless
+to offer their services to the endangered cause.
+</p>
+<p>At a distance he saw his friend Isagani, pale and agitated, but radiant with youthful
+ardor, haranguing some fellow students with his voice raised as though he cared little
+that he be heard by everybody.
+</p>
+<p>“It seems preposterous, gentlemen, it seems unreal, that an incident so insignificant
+should scatter us and send us into flight like sparrows at whom a scarecrow has been
+shaken! But is this the first time that students have gone to prison for the sake
+of liberty? Where are those who have died, those who have been shot? Would you apostatize
+now?”
+</p>
+<p>“But who can the fool be that wrote such pasquinades?” demanded an indignant listener.
+</p>
+<p>“What does that matter to us?” rejoined Isagani. “We don’t have to find out, let them
+find out! Before we know how they are drawn up, we have no need to make any show of
+agreement at a time like this. There where the danger is, there must we hasten, because
+honor is there! If what the pasquinades say is compatible with our dignity and our
+feelings, be he who he may that wrote them, he has done well, and we ought to be grateful
+to him and hasten to add our signatures to his! If they are unworthy of us, our conduct
+and our consciences will in themselves protest and defend us from every accusation!”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4056">[<a href="#xd32e4056">259</a>]</span></p>
+<p>Upon hearing such talk, Basilio, although he liked Isagani very much, turned and left.
+He had to go to Makaraig’s house to see about the loan.
+</p>
+<p>Near the house of the wealthy student he observed whisperings and mysterious signals
+among the neighbors, but not comprehending what they meant, continued serenely on
+his way and entered the doorway. Two guards advanced and asked him what he wanted.
+Basilio realized that he had made a bad move, but he could not now retreat.
+</p>
+<p>“I’ve come to see my friend Makaraig,” he replied calmly.
+</p>
+<p>The guards looked at each other. “Wait here,” one of them said to him. “Wait till
+the corporal comes down.”
+</p>
+<p>Basilio bit his lips and Simoun’s words again recurred to him. Had they come to arrest
+Makaraig?—was his thought, but he dared not give it utterance. He did not have to
+wait long, for in a few moments Makaraig came down, talking pleasantly with the corporal.
+The two were preceded by a warrant officer.
+</p>
+<p>“What, you too, Basilio?” he asked.
+</p>
+<p>“I came to see you—”
+</p>
+<p>“Noble conduct!” exclaimed Makaraig laughing. “In time of calm, you avoid us.”
+</p>
+<p>The corporal asked Basilio his name, then scanned a list. “Medical student, Calle
+Anloague?” he asked.
+</p>
+<p>Basilio bit his lip.
+</p>
+<p>“You’ve saved us a trip,” added the corporal, placing his hand on the youth’s shoulder.
+“You’re under arrest!”
+</p>
+<p>“What, I also?”
+</p>
+<p>Makaraig burst out into laughter.
+</p>
+<p>“Don’t worry, friend. Let’s get into the carriage, while I tell you about the supper
+last night.”
+</p>
+<p>With a graceful gesture, as though he were in his own house, he invited the warrant
+officer and the corporal to enter the carriage that waited at the door.
+</p>
+<p>“To the Civil Government!” he ordered the cochero.
+</p>
+<p>Now that Basilio had again regained his composure, he <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4077">[<a href="#xd32e4077">260</a>]</span>told Makaraig the object of his visit. The rich student did not wait for him to finish,
+but seized his hand. “Count on me, count on me, and to the festivities celebrating
+our graduation we’ll invite these gentlemen,” he said, indicating the corporal and
+the warrant officer.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4079">[<a href="#xd32e4079">261</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch27" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e475">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XXVII</h2>
+<h2 class="main">The Friar and the Filipino</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first"></p>
+<blockquote lang="la">Vox populi, vox Dei</blockquote><p>
+</p>
+<p>We left Isagani haranguing his friends. In the midst of his enthusiasm an usher approached
+him to say that Padre Fernandez, one of the higher professors, wished to talk with
+him.
+</p>
+<p>Isagani’s face fell. Padre Fernandez was a person greatly respected by him, being
+the <i>one</i> always excepted by him whenever the friars were attacked.
+</p>
+<p>“What does Padre Fernandez want?” he inquired.
+</p>
+<p>The usher shrugged his shoulders and Isagani reluctantly followed him.
+</p>
+<p>Padre Fernandez, the friar whom we met in Los Baños, was waiting in his cell, grave
+and sad, with his brows knitted as if he were in deep thought. He arose as Isagani
+entered, shook hands with him, and closed the door. Then he began to pace from one
+end of the room to the other. Isagani stood waiting for him to speak.
+</p>
+<p>“Señor Isagani,” he began at length with some emotion, “from the window I’ve heard
+you speaking, for though I am a consumptive I have good ears, and I want to talk with
+you. I have always liked the young men who express themselves clearly and have their
+own way of thinking and acting, no matter that their ideas may differ from mine. You
+young men, from what I have heard, had a supper last night. Don’t excuse yourself—”
+</p>
+<p>“I don’t intend to excuse myself!” interrupted Isagani.
+</p>
+<p>“So much the better—it shows that you accept the consequences of your actions. Besides,
+you would do ill in <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4100">[<a href="#xd32e4100">262</a>]</span>retracting, and I don’t blame you, I take no notice of what may have been said there
+last night, I don’t accuse you, because after all you’re free to say of the Dominicans
+what seems best to you, you are not a pupil of ours—only this year have we had the
+pleasure of having you, and we shall probably not have you longer. Don’t think that
+I’m going to invoke considerations of gratitude; no, I’m not going to waste my time
+in stupid vulgarisms. I’ve had you summoned here because I believe that you are one
+of the few students who act from conviction, and, as I like men of conviction, I’m
+going to explain myself to Señor Isagani.”
+</p>
+<p>Padre Fernandez paused, then continued his walk with bowed head, his gaze riveted
+on the floor.
+</p>
+<p>“You may sit down, if you wish,” he remarked. “It’s a habit of mine to walk about
+while talking, because my ideas come better then.”
+</p>
+<p>Isagani remained standing, with his head erect, waiting for the professor to get to
+the point of the matter.
+</p>
+<p>“For more than eight years I have been a professor here,” resumed Padre Fernandez,
+still continuing to pace back and forth, “and in that time I’ve known and dealt with
+more than twenty-five hundred students. I’ve taught them, I’ve tried to educate them,
+I’ve tried to inculcate in them principles of justice and of dignity, and yet in these
+days when there is so much murmuring against us I’ve not seen one who has the temerity
+to maintain his accusations when he finds himself in the presence of a friar, not
+even aloud in the presence of any numbers. Young men there are who behind our backs
+calumniate us and before us kiss our hands, with a base smile begging kind looks from
+us! Bah! What do you wish that we should do with such creatures?”
+</p>
+<p>“The fault is not all theirs, Padre,” replied Isagani. “The fault lies partly with
+those who have taught them to be hypocrites, with those who have tyrannized over freedom
+of thought and freedom of speech. Here every independent <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4109">[<a href="#xd32e4109">263</a>]</span>thought, every word that is not an echo of the will of those in power, is characterized
+as filibusterism, and you know well enough what that means. A fool would he be who
+to please himself would say aloud what he thinks, who would lay himself liable to
+suffer persecution!”
+</p>
+<p>“What persecution have you had to suffer?” asked Padre Fernandez, raising his head.
+“Haven’t I let you express yourself freely in my class? Nevertheless, you are an exception
+that, if what you say is true, I must correct, so as to make the rule as general as
+possible and thus avoid setting a bad example.”
+</p>
+<p>Isagani smiled. “I thank you, but I will not discuss with you whether I am an exception.
+I will accept your qualification so that you may accept mine: you also are an exception,
+and as here we are not going to talk about exceptions, nor plead for ourselves, at
+least, I mean, <i>I’m not</i>, I beg of my <i>professor</i> to change the course of the conversation.”
+</p>
+<p>In spite of his liberal principles, Padre Fernandez raised his head and stared in
+surprise at Isagani. That young man was more independent than he had thought—although
+he called him <i>professor</i>, in reality he was dealing with him as an equal, since he allowed himself to offer
+suggestions. Like a wise diplomat, Padre Fernandez not only recognized the fact but
+even took his stand upon it.
+</p>
+<p>“Good enough!” he said. “But don’t look upon me as your professor. I’m a friar and
+you are a Filipino student, nothing more nor less! Now I ask you—what do the Filipino
+students want of us?”
+</p>
+<p>The question came as a surprise; Isagani was not prepared for it. It was a thrust
+made suddenly while they were preparing their defense, as they say in fencing. Thus
+startled, Isagani responded with a violent stand, like a beginner defending himself.
+</p>
+<p>“That you do your duty!” he exclaimed.
+</p>
+<p>Fray Fernandez straightened up—that reply sounded to him like a cannon-shot. “That
+we do our duty!” he <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4128">[<a href="#xd32e4128">264</a>]</span>repeated, holding himself erect. “Don’t we, then, do our duty? What duties do you
+ascribe to us?”
+</p>
+<p>“Those which you voluntarily placed upon yourselves on joining the order, and those
+which afterwards, once in it, you have been willing to assume. But, as a Filipino
+student, I don’t think myself called upon to examine your conduct with reference to
+your statutes, to Catholicism, to the government, to the Filipino people, and to humanity
+in general—those are questions that you have to settle with your founders, with the
+Pope, with the government, with the whole people, and with God. As a Filipino student,
+I will confine myself to your duties toward us. The friars in general, being the local
+supervisors of education in the provinces, and the Dominicans in particular, by monopolizing
+in their hands all the studies of the Filipino youth, have assumed the obligation
+to its eight millions of inhabitants, to Spain, and to humanity, of which we form
+a part, of steadily bettering the young plant, morally and physically, of training
+it toward its happiness, of creating a people honest, prosperous, intelligent, virtuous,
+noble, and loyal. Now I ask you in my turn—have the friars fulfilled that obligation
+of theirs?”
+</p>
+<p>“We’re fulfilling—”
+</p>
+<p>“Ah, Padre Fernandez,” interrupted Isagani, “you with your hand on <i>your</i> heart can say that you are fulfilling it, but with your hand on the heart of your
+order, on the heart of all the orders, you cannot say that without deceiving yourself.
+Ah, Padre Fernandez, when I find myself in the presence of a person whom I esteem
+and respect, I prefer to be the accused rather than the accuser, I prefer to defend
+myself rather than take the offensive. But now that we have entered upon the discussion,
+let us carry it to the end! How do they fulfill their obligation, those who look after
+education in the towns? By hindering it! And those who here monopolize education,
+those who try to mold the mind of youth, to the exclusion of all others whomsoever,
+how do they carry out their mission? By <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4136">[<a href="#xd32e4136">265</a>]</span>curtailing knowledge as much as possible, by extinguishing all ardor and enthusiasm,
+by trampling on all dignity, the soul’s only refuge, by inculcating in us worn-out
+ideas, rancid beliefs, false principles incompatible with a life of progress! Ah,
+yes, when it is a question of feeding convicts, of providing for the maintenance of
+criminals, the government calls for bids in order to find the purveyor who offers
+the best means of subsistence, he who at least will not let them perish from hunger,
+but when it is a question of morally feeding a whole people, of nourishing the intellect
+of youth, the healthiest part, that which is later to be the country and the all,
+the government not only does not ask for any bid, but restricts the power to that
+very body which makes a boast of not desiring education, of wishing no advancement.
+What should we say if the purveyor for the prisons, after securing the contract by
+intrigue, should then leave the prisoners to languish in want, giving them only what
+is stale and rancid, excusing himself afterwards by saying that it is not convenient
+for the prisoners to enjoy good health, because good health brings merry thoughts,
+because merriment improves the man, and the man ought not to be improved, because
+it is to the purveyor’s interest that there be many criminals? What should we say
+if afterwards the government and the purveyor should agree between themselves that
+of the ten or twelve cuartos which one received for each criminal, the other should
+receive five?”
+</p>
+<p>Padre Fernandek bit his lip. “Those are grave charges,” he said, “and you are overstepping
+the limits of our agreement.”
+</p>
+<p>“No, Padre, not if I continue to deal with the student question. The friars—and I
+do not say, you friars, since I do not confuse you with the common herd—the friars
+of all the orders have constituted themselves our mental purveyors, yet they say and
+shamelessly proclaim that it is not expedient for us to become enlightened, because
+some day we shall declare ourselves free! That is just the same <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4141">[<a href="#xd32e4141">266</a>]</span>as not wishing the prisoner to be well-fed so that he may improve and get out of prison.
+Liberty is to man what education is to the intelligence, and the friars’ unwillingness
+that we have it is the origin of our discontent.”
+</p>
+<p>“Instruction is given only to those who deserve it,” rejoined Padre Fernandez dryly.
+“To give it to men without character and without morality is to prostitute it.”
+</p>
+<p>“Why are there men without character and without morality?”
+</p>
+<p>The Dominican shrugged his shoulders. “Defects that they imbibe with their mothers’
+milk, that they breathe in the bosom of the family—how do I know?”
+</p>
+<p>“Ah, no, Padre Fernandez!” exclaimed the young man impetuously. “You have not dared
+to go into the subject deeply, you have not wished to gaze into the depths from fear
+of finding yourself there in the darkness of your brethren. What we are, you have
+made us. A people tyrannized over is forced to be hypocritical; a people denied the
+truth must resort to lies; and he who makes himself a tyrant breeds slaves. There
+is no morality, you say, so let it be—even though statistics can refute you in that
+here are not committed crimes like those among other peoples, blinded by the fumes
+of their moralizers. But, without attempting now to analyze what it is that forms
+the character and how far the education received determines morality, I will agree
+with you that we are defective. Who is to blame for that? You who for three centuries
+and a half have had in your hands our education, or we who submit to everything? If
+after three centuries and a half the artist has been able to produce only a caricature,
+stupid indeed he must be!”
+</p>
+<p>“Or bad enough the material he works upon.”
+</p>
+<p>“Stupider still then, when, knowing it to be bad, he does not give it up, but goes
+on wasting time. Not only is he stupid, but he is a cheat and a robber, because he
+knows that his work is useless, yet continues to draw his salary. Not only is he stupid
+and a thief, he is a villain in that <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4151">[<a href="#xd32e4151">267</a>]</span>he prevents any other workman from trying his skill to see if he might not produce
+something worth while! The deadly jealousy of the incompetent!”
+</p>
+<p>The reply was sharp and Padre Fernandez felt himself caught. To his gaze Isagani appeared
+gigantic, invincible, convincing, and for the first time in his life he felt beaten
+by a Filipino student. He repented of having provoked the argument, but it was too
+late to turn back. In this quandary, finding himself confronted with such a formidable
+adversary, he sought a strong shield and laid hold of the government.
+</p>
+<p>“You impute all the faults to us, because you see only us, who are near,” he said
+in a less haughty tone. “It’s natural and doesn’t surprise me. A person hates the
+soldier or policeman who arrests him and not the judge who sends him to prison. You
+and we are both dancing to the same measure of music—if at the same note you lift
+your foot in unison with us, don’t blame us for it, it’s the music that is directing
+our movements. Do you think that we friars have no consciences and that we do not
+desire what is right? Do you believe that we do not think about you, that we do not
+heed our duty, that we only eat to live, and live to rule? Would that it were so!
+But we, like you, follow the cadence, finding ourselves between Scylla and Charybdis:
+either you reject us or the government rejects us. The government commands, and he
+who commands, commands,—and must be obeyed!”
+</p>
+<p>“From which it may be inferred,” remarked Isagani with a bitter smile, “that the government
+wishes our demoralization.”
+</p>
+<p>“Oh, no, I didn’t mean that! What I meant to say is that there are beliefs, there
+are theories, there are laws, which, dictated with the best intention, produce the
+most deplorable consequences. I’ll explain myself better by citing an example. To
+stamp out a small evil, there are dictated many laws that cause greater evils still:
+‘<i lang="la">corruptissima in republica plurimae leges,</i>’ said Tacitus. To prevent <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4161">[<a href="#xd32e4161">268</a>]</span>one case of fraud, there are provided a million and a half preventive or humiliating
+regulations, which produce the immediate effect of awakening in the public the desire
+to elude and mock such regulations. To make a people criminal, there’s nothing more
+needed than to doubt its virtue. Enact a law, not only here, but even in Spain, and
+you will see how the means of evading it will be sought, and this is for the very
+reason that the legislators have overlooked the fact that the more an object is hidden,
+the more a sight of it is desired. Why are rascality and astuteness regarded as great
+qualities in the Spanish people, when there is no other so noble, so proud, so chivalrous
+as it? Because our legislators, with the best intentions, have doubted its nobility,
+wounded its pride, challenged its chivalry! Do you wish to open in Spain a road among
+the rocks? Then place there an imperative notice forbidding the passage, and the people,
+in order to protest against the order, will leave the highway to clamber over the
+rocks. The day on which some legislator in Spain forbids virtue and commands vice,
+then all will become virtuous!”
+</p>
+<p>The Dominican paused for a brief space, then resumed: “But you may say that we are
+getting away from the subject, so I’ll return to it. What I can say to you, to convince
+you, is that the vices from which you suffer ought to be ascribed by you neither to
+us nor to the government. They are due to the imperfect organization of our social
+system: <i>qui multum probat, nihil probat</i>, one loses himself through excessive caution, lacking what is necessary and having
+too much of what is superfluous.”
+</p>
+<p>“If you admit those defects in your social system,” replied Isagani, “why then do
+you undertake to regulate alien societies, instead of first devoting your attention
+to yourselves?”
+</p>
+<p>“We’re getting away from the subject, young man. The theory in accomplished facts
+must be accepted.”
+</p>
+<p>“So let it be! I accept it because it is an accomplished <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4171">[<a href="#xd32e4171">269</a>]</span>fact, but I will further ask: why, if your social organization is defective, do you
+not change it or at least give heed to the cry of those who are injured by it?”
+</p>
+<p>“We’re still far away. Let’s talk about what the students want from the friars.”
+</p>
+<p>“From the moment when the friars hide themselves behind the government, the students
+have to turn to it.”
+</p>
+<p>This statement was true and there appeared no means of ignoring it.
+</p>
+<p>“I’m not the government and I can’t answer for its acts. What do the students wish
+us to do for them within the limits by which we are confined?”
+</p>
+<p>“Not to oppose the emancipation of education but to favor it.”
+</p>
+<p>The Dominican shook his head. “Without stating my own opinion, that is asking us to
+commit suicide,” he said.
+</p>
+<p>“On the contrary, it is asking you for room to pass in order not to trample upon and
+crush you.”
+</p>
+<p>“Ahem!” coughed Padre Fernandez, stopping and remaining thoughtful. “Begin by asking
+something that does not cost so much, something that any one of us can grant without
+abatement of dignity or privilege, for if we can reach an understanding and dwell
+in peace, why this hatred, why this distrust?”
+</p>
+<p>“Then let’s get down to details.”
+</p>
+<p>“Yes, because if we disturb the foundation, we’ll bring down the whole edifice.”
+</p>
+<p>“Then let’s get down to details, let’s leave the region of abstract principles,” rejoined
+Isagani with a smile, “and <i>also without stating my own opinion,</i>”—the youth accented these words—“the students would desist from their attitude and
+soften certain asperities if the professors would try to treat them better than they
+have up to the present. That is in their hands.”
+</p>
+<p>“What?” demanded the Dominican. “Have the students any complaint to make about my
+conduct?”
+</p>
+<p>“Padre, we agreed from the start not to talk of yourself <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4191">[<a href="#xd32e4191">270</a>]</span>or of myself, we’re speaking generally. The students, besides getting no great benefit
+out of the years spent in the classes, often leave there remnants of their dignity,
+if not the whole of it.”
+</p>
+<p>Padre Fernandez again bit his lip. “No one forces them to study—the fields are uncultivated,”
+he observed dryly.
+</p>
+<p>“Yes, there is something that impels them to study,” replied Isagani in the same tone,
+looking the Dominican full in the face. “Besides the duty of every one to seek his
+own perfection, there is the desire innate in man to cultivate his intellect, a desire
+the more powerful here in that it is repressed. He who gives his gold and his life
+to the State has the right to require of it opporttmity better to get that gold and
+better to care for his life. Yes, Padre, there is something that impels them, and
+that something is the government itself. It is you yourselves who pitilessly ridicule
+the uncultured Indian and deny him his rights, on the ground that he is ignorant.
+You strip him and then scoff at his nakedness.”
+</p>
+<p>Padre Fernandez did not reply, but continued to pace about feverishly, as though very
+much agitated.
+</p>
+<p>“You say that the fields are not cultivated,” resumed Isagani in a changed tone, after
+a brief pause. “Let’s not enter upon an analysis of the reason for this, because we
+should get far away. But you, Padre Fernandez, you, a teacher, you, a learned man,
+do you wish a people of peons and laborers? In your opinion, is the laborer the perfect
+state at which man may arrive in his development? Or is it that you wish knowledge
+for yourself and labor for the rest?”
+</p>
+<p>“No, I want knowledge for him who deserves it, for him who knows how to use it,” was
+the reply. “When the students demonstrate that they love it, when young men of conviction
+appear, young men who know how to maintain their dignity and make it respected, then
+there will be knowledge, then there will be considerate professors! If <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4200">[<a href="#xd32e4200">271</a>]</span>there are now professors who resort to abuse, it is because there are pupils who submit
+to it.”
+</p>
+<p>“When there are professors, there will be students!”
+</p>
+<p>“Begin by reforming yourselves, you who have need of change, and we will follow.”
+</p>
+<p>“Yes,” said Isagani with a bitter laugh, “let us begin it, because the difficulty
+is on our side. Well you know what is expected of a pupil who stands before a professor—you
+yourself, with all your love of justice, with all your kind sentiments, have been
+restraining yourself by a great effort while I have been telling you bitter truths,
+you yourself, Padre Fernandez! What good has been secured by him among us who has
+tried to inculcate other ideas? What evils have not fallen upon you because you have
+tried to be just and perform your duty?”
+</p>
+<p>“Señor Isagani,” said the Dominican, extending his hand, “although it may seem that
+nothing practical has resulted from this conversation, yet something has been gained.
+I’ll talk to my brethren about what you have told me and I hope that something can
+be done. Only I fear that they won’t believe in your existence.”
+</p>
+<p>“I fear the same,” returned Isagani, shaking the Dominican’s hand. “I fear that my
+friends will not believe in your existence, as you have revealed yourself to me today.”<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e4208src" href="#xd32e4208">1</a>
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4221">[<a href="#xd32e4221">272</a>]</span></p>
+<p>Considering the interview at an end, the young man took his leave.
+</p>
+<p>Padre Fernandez opened the door and followed him with his gaze until he disappeared
+around a corner in the corridor. For some time he listened to the retreating footsteps,
+then went back into his cell and waited for the youth to appear in the street.
+</p>
+<p>He saw him and actually heard him say to a friend who asked where he was going: “To
+the Civil Government! I’m going to see the pasquinades and join the others!”
+</p>
+<p>His startled friend stared at him as one would look at a person who is about to commit
+suicide, then moved away from him hurriedly.
+</p>
+<p>“Poor boy!” murmured Padre Fernandez, feeling his eyes moisten. “I grudge you to the
+Jesuits who educated you.”
+</p>
+<p>But Padre Fernandez was completely mistaken; the Jesuits repudiated Isagani<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e4230src" href="#xd32e4230">2</a> when that afternoon they learned that he had been arrested, saying that he would
+compromise them. “That young man has thrown himself away, he’s going to do us harm!
+Let it be understood that he didn’t get those ideas here.”
+</p>
+<p>Nor were the Jesuits wrong. No! Those ideas come only from God through the medium
+of Nature.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4235">[<a href="#xd32e4235">273</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e4208">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e4208src">1</a></span> “We do not believe in the verisimilitude of this dialogue, fabricated by the author
+in order to refute the arguments of the friars, whose pride was so great that it would
+not permit any Isagani to tell them these truths face to face. The <i>invention</i> of Padre Fernandez as a Dominican professor is a stroke of generosity on Rizal’s
+part, in conceding that there could have existed <i>any</i> friar capable of talking frankly with an <i>Indian</i>.”—<i>W.&nbsp;E. Retana, in note to this chapter in the edition published by him at Barcelona
+in 1908</i>. Retana ought to know of what he is writing, for he was in the employ of the friars
+for several years and later in Spain wrote extensively for the journal supported by
+them to defend their position in the Philippines. He has also been charged with having
+strongly urged Rizal’s execution in 1896. Since 1898, however, he has doubled about,
+or, perhaps more aptly, performed a journalistic somersault—having written a diffuse
+biography and other works dealing with Rizal. He is strong in unassorted <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4218">[<a href="#xd32e4218">272</a>]</span>facts, but his comments, when not inane and wearisome, approach a maudlin wail over
+“spilt milk,” so the above is given at its face value only.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e4208src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e4230">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e4230src">2</a></span> Quite suggestive of, and perhaps inspired by, the author’s own experience.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e4230src" title="Return to note 2 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch28" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e485">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XXVIII</h2>
+<h2 class="main">Tatakut</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">With prophetic inspiration Ben-Zayb had been for some days past maintaining in his
+newspaper that education was disastrous, very disastrous for the Philippine Islands,
+and now in view of the events of that Friday of pasquinades, the writer crowed and
+chanted his triumph, leaving belittled and overwhelmed his adversary <i>Horatius</i>, who in the <i>Pirotecnia</i> had dared to ridicule him in the following manner:
+</p>
+<p></p>
+<blockquote>
+<p class="first">From our contemporary, <i>El Grito</i>:
+</p>
+<p>“Education is disastrous, very disastrous, for the Philippine Islands.”
+</p>
+<p>Admitted.
+</p>
+<p>For some time <i>El Grito</i> has pretended to represent the Filipino people—<i>ergo</i>, as Fray Ibañez would say, if he knew Latin.
+</p>
+<p>But Fray Ibañez turns Mussulman when he writes, and we know how the Mussulmans dealt
+with education. <i>In witness whereof</i>, as a royal preacher said, the Alexandrian library!</p>
+</blockquote><p>
+</p>
+<p>Now he was right, he, Ben-Zayb! He was the only one in the islands who thought, the
+only one who foresaw events!
+</p>
+<p>Truly, the news that seditious pasquinades had been found on the doors of the University
+not only took away the appetite from many and disturbed the digestion of others, but
+it even rendered the phlegmatic Chinese uneasy, so that they no longer dared to sit
+in their shops with one leg drawn up as usual, from fear of losing time in extending
+it in order to put themselves into flight. At eight o’clock in the morning, although
+the sun continued on its course and his Excellency, the Captain-General, did not appear
+at the head of his victorious cohorts, still the <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4268">[<a href="#xd32e4268">274</a>]</span>excitement had increased. The friars who were accustomed to frequent Quiroga’s bazaar
+did not put in their appearance, and this symptom presaged terrific cataclysms. If
+the sun had risen a square and the saints appeared only in pantaloons, Quiroga would
+not have been so greatly alarmed, for he would have taken the sun for a gaming-table
+and the sacred images for gamblers who had lost their camisas, but for the friars
+not to come, precisely when some novelties had just arrived for them!
+</p>
+<p>By means of a provincial friend of his, Quiroga forbade entrance into his gaming-houses
+to every Indian who was not an old acquaintance, as the future Chinese consul feared
+that they might get possession of the sums that the wretches lost there. After arranging
+his bazaar in such a way that he could close it quickly in case of need, he had a
+policeman accompany him for the short distance that separated his house from Simoun’s.
+Quiroga thought this occasion the most propitious for making use of the rifles and
+cartridges that he had in his warehouse, in the way the jeweler had pointed out; so
+that on the following days there would be searches made, and then—how many prisoners,
+how many terrified people would give up their savings! It was the game of the old
+carbineers, in slipping contraband cigars and tobacco-leaves under a house, in order
+to pretend a search and force the unfortunate owner to bribery or fines, only now
+the art had been perfected and, the tobacco monopoly abolished, resort was had to
+the prohibited arms.
+</p>
+<p>But Simoun refused to see any one and sent word to the Chinese that he should leave
+things as they were, whereupon he went to see Don Custodio to inquire whether he should
+fortify his bazaar, but neither would Don Custodio receive him, being at the time
+engaged in the study of a project for defense in case of a siege. He thought of Ben-Zayb
+as a source of information, but finding the writer armed to the teeth and using two
+loaded revolvers for paper-weights, took his leave in the shortest possible <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4273">[<a href="#xd32e4273">275</a>]</span>time, to shut himself up in his house and take to his bed under pretense of illness.
+</p>
+<p>At four in the afternoon the talk was no longer of simple pasquinades. There were
+whispered rumors of an understanding between the students and the outlaws of San Mateo,
+it was certain that in the <i>pansitería</i> they had conspired to surprise the city, there was talk of German ships outside the
+bay to support the movement, of a band of young men who under the pretext of protesting
+and demonstrating their Hispanism had gone to the Palace to place themselves at the
+General’s orders but had been arrested because it was discovered that they were armed.
+Providence had saved his Excellency, preventing him from receiving those precocious
+criminals, as he was at the time in conference with the Provincials, the Vice-Rector,
+and with Padre Irene, Padre Salvi’s representative. There was considerable truth in
+these rumors, if we have to believe Padre Irene, who in the afternoon went to visit
+Capitan Tiago. According to him, certain persons had advised his Excellency to improve
+the opportunity in order to inspire terror and administer a lasting lesson to the
+filibusters.
+</p>
+<p>“A number shot,” one had advised, “some two dozen reformers deported at once, in the
+silence of the night, would extinguish forever the flames of discontent.”
+</p>
+<p>“No,” rejoined another, who had a kind heart, “sufficient that the soldiers parade
+through the streets, a troop of cavalry, for example, with drawn sabers—sufficient
+to drag along some cannon, that’s enough! The people are timid and will all retire
+into their houses.”
+</p>
+<p>“No, no,” insinuated another. “This is the opportunity to get rid of the enemy. It’s
+not sufficient that they retire into their houses, they should be made to come out,
+like evil humors by means of plasters. If they are inclined to start riots, they should
+be stirred up by secret agitators. I am of the opinion that the troops should be resting
+on their arms and appearing careless and indifferent, so the people may be emboldened,
+and then in case of any disturbance—out on them, action!”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4284">[<a href="#xd32e4284">276</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“The end justifies the means,” remarked another. “Our end is our holy religion and
+the integrity of the fatherland. Proclaim a state of siege, and in case of the least
+disturbance, arrest all the rich and educated, and—clean up the country!”
+</p>
+<p>“If I hadn’t got there in time to counsel moderation,” added Padre Irene, speaking
+to Capitan Tiago, “it’s certain that blood would now be flowing through the streets.
+I thought of you, Capitan—The partizans of force couldn’t do much with the General,
+and they missed Simoun. Ah, if Simoun had not been taken ill—”
+</p>
+<p>With the arrest of Basilio and the search made later among his books and papers, Capitan
+Tiago had become much worse. Now Padre Irene had come to augment his terror with hair-raising
+tales. Ineffable fear seized upon the wretch, manifesting itself first by a light
+shiver, which was rapidly accentuated, until he was unable to speak. With his eyes
+bulging and his brow covered with sweat, he caught Padre Irene’s arm and tried to
+rise, but could not, and then, uttering two groans, fell heavily back upon the pillow.
+His eyes were wide open and he was slavering—but he was dead. The terrified Padre
+Irene fled, and, as the dying man had caught hold of him, in his flight he dragged
+the corpse from the bed, leaving it sprawling in the middle of the room.
+</p>
+<p>By night the terror had reached a climax. Several incidents had occurred to make the
+timorous believe in the presence of secret agitators.
+</p>
+<p>During a baptism some cuartos were thrown to the boys and naturally there was a scramble
+at the door of the church. It happened that at the time there was passing a bold soldier,
+who, somewhat preoccupied, mistook the uproar for a gathering of filibusters and hurled
+himself, sword in hand, upon the boys. He went into the church, and had he not become
+entangled in the curtains suspended from the choir he would not have left a single
+head on shoulders. It was but the matter of a moment for the <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4291">[<a href="#xd32e4291">277</a>]</span>timorous to witness this and take to flight, spreading the news that the revolution
+had begun. The few shops that had been kept open were now hastily closed, there being
+Chinese who even left bolts of cloth outside, and not a few women lost their slippers
+in their flight through the streets. Fortunately, there was only one person wounded
+and a few bruised, among them the soldier himself, who suffered a fall fighting with
+the curtain, which smelt to him of filibusterism. Such prowess gained him great renown,
+and a renown so pure that it is to be wished all fame could be acquired in like manner—mothers
+would then weep less and earth would be more populous!
+</p>
+<p>In a suburb the inhabitants caught two unknown individuals burying arms under a house,
+whereupon a tumult arose and the people pursued the strangers in order to kill them
+and turn their bodies over to the authorities, but some one pacified the excited crowd
+by telling them that it would be sufficient to hand over the <i lang="la">corpora delictorum</i>, which proved to be some old shotguns that would surely have killed the first person
+who tried to fire them.
+</p>
+<p>“All right,” exclaimed one braggart, “if they want us to rebel, let’s go ahead!” But
+he was cuffed and kicked into silence, the women pinching him as though he had been
+the owner of the shotguns.
+</p>
+<p>In Ermita the affair was more serious, even though there was less excitement, and
+that when there were shots fired. A certain cautious government employee, armed to
+the teeth, saw at nightfall an object near his house, and taking it for nothing less
+than a student, fired at it twice with a revolver. The object proved to be a policeman,
+and they buried him—<i lang="la">pax Christi! Mutis!</i>
+</p>
+<p>In Dulumbayan various shots also resounded, from which there resulted the death of
+a poor old deaf man, who had not heard the sentinel’s <i lang="es">quién vive</i>, and of a hog that had heard it and had not answered <i lang="es">España</i>! The old man was buried with difficulty, since there was no money to pay for the
+obsequies, but the hog was eaten.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4312">[<a href="#xd32e4312">278</a>]</span></p>
+<p>In Manila,<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e4315src" href="#xd32e4315">1</a> in a confectionery near the University much frequented by the students, the arrests
+were thus commented upon.
+</p>
+<p>“And have they arrested Tadeo?”<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e4321src" href="#xd32e4321">2</a> asked the proprietess.
+</p>
+<p>“<i>Abá</i>!” answered a student who lived in Parian, “he’s already shot!”
+</p>
+<p>“Shot! <i>Nakú</i>! He hasn’t paid what he owes me.”
+</p>
+<p>“Ay, don’t mention that or you’ll be taken for an accomplice. I’ve already burnt the
+book<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e4334src" href="#xd32e4334">3</a> you lent me. There might be a search and it would be found. Be careful!”
+</p>
+<p>“Did you say that Isagani is a prisoner?”
+</p>
+<p>“Crazy fool, too, that Isagani,” replied the indignant student. “They didn’t try to
+catch him, but he went and surrendered. Let him bust himself—he’ll surely be shot.”
+</p>
+<p>The señora shrugged her shoulders. “He doesn’t owe me anything. And what about Paulita?”
+</p>
+<p>“She won’t lack a husband. Sure, she’ll cry a little, and then marry a Spaniard.”
+</p>
+<p>The night was one of the gloomiest. In the houses the rosary was recited and pious
+women dedicated paternosters and requiems to each of the souls of their relatives
+and friends. By eight o’clock hardly a pedestrian could be seen—only from time to
+time was heard the galloping of a horse against whose sides a saber clanked noisily,
+then the whistles of the watchmen, and carriages that whirled along at full speed,
+as though pursued by mobs of filibusters.
+</p>
+<p>Yet terror did not reign everywhere. In the house of the silversmith, where Placido
+Penitente boarded, the events were commented upon and discussed with some freedom.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4346">[<a href="#xd32e4346">279</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“I don’t believe in the pasquinades,” declared a workman, lank and withered from operating
+the blowpipe. “To me it looks like Padre Salvi’s doings.”
+</p>
+<p>“Ahem, ahem!” coughed the silversmith, a very prudent man, who did not dare to stop
+the conversation from fear that he would be considered a coward. The good man had
+to content himself with coughing, winking to his helper, and gazing toward the street,
+as if to say, “They may be watching us!”
+</p>
+<p>“On account of the operetta,” added another workman.
+</p>
+<p>“Aha!” exclaimed one who had a foolish face, “I told you so!”
+</p>
+<p>“Ahem!” rejoined a clerk, in a tone of compassion, “the affair of the pasquinades
+is true, Chichoy, and I can give you the explanation.”
+</p>
+<p>Then he added mysteriously, “It’s a trick of the Chinaman Quiroga’s!”
+</p>
+<p>“Ahem, ahem!” again coughed the silversmith, shifting his quid of buyo from one cheek
+to the other.
+</p>
+<p>“Believe me, Chichoy, of Quiroga the Chinaman! I heard it in the office.”
+</p>
+<p>“<i>Nakú</i>, it’s certain then,” exclaimed the simpleton, believing it at once.
+</p>
+<p>“Quiroga,” explained the clerk, “has a hundred thousand pesos in Mexican silver out
+in the bay. How is he to get it in? Very easily. Fix up the pasquinades, availing
+himself of the question of the students, and, while every-body is excited, grease
+the officials’ palms, and in the cases come!”
+</p>
+<p>“Just it! Just it!” cried the credulous fool, striking the table with his fist. “Just
+it! That’s why Quiroga did it! That’s why—” But he had to relapse into silence as
+he really did not know what to say about Quiroga.
+</p>
+<p>“And we must pay the damages?” asked the indignant Chichoy.
+</p>
+<p>“Ahem, ahem, a-h-hem!” coughed the silversmith, hearing steps in the street.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4366">[<a href="#xd32e4366">280</a>]</span></p>
+<p>The footsteps approached and all in the shop fell silent.
+</p>
+<p>“St. Pascual Bailon is a great saint,” declared the silversmith hypocritically, in
+a loud voice, at the same time winking to the others. “St. Pascual Bailon—”
+</p>
+<p>At that moment there appeared the face of Placido Penitente, who was accompanied by
+the pyrotechnician that we saw receiving orders from Simoun. The newcomers were surrounded
+and importuned for news.
+</p>
+<p>“I haven’t been able to talk with the prisoners,” explained Placido. “There are some
+thirty of them.”
+</p>
+<p>“Be on your guard,” cautioned the pyrotechnician, exchanging a knowing look with Placido.
+“They say that to-night there’s going to be a massacre.”
+</p>
+<p>“Aha! Thunder!” exclaimed Chichoy, looking about for a weapon. Seeing none, he caught
+up his blowpipe.
+</p>
+<p>The silversmith sat down, trembling in every limb. The credulous simpleton already
+saw himself beheaded and wept in anticipation over the fate of his family.
+</p>
+<p>“No,” contradicted the clerk, “there’s not going to be any massacre. The adviser of”—he
+made a mysterious gesture—“is fortunately sick.”
+</p>
+<p>“Simoun!”
+</p>
+<p>“Ahem, ahem, a-h-hem!”
+</p>
+<p>Placido and the pyrotechnician exchanged another look.
+</p>
+<p>“If he hadn’t got sick—”
+</p>
+<p>“It would look like a revolution,” added the pyrotechnician negligently, as he lighted
+a cigarette in the lamp chimney. “And what should we do then?”
+</p>
+<p>“Then we’d start a real one, now that they’re going to massacre us anyhow—”
+</p>
+<p>The violent fit of coughing that seized the silversmith prevented the rest of this
+speech from being heard, but Chichoy must have been saying terrible things, to judge
+from his murderous gestures with the blowpipe and the face of a Japanese tragedian
+that he put on.
+</p>
+<p>“Rather say that he’s playing off sick because he’s afraid to go out. As may be seen—”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4385">[<a href="#xd32e4385">281</a>]</span></p>
+<p>The silversmith was attacked by another fit of coughing so severe that he finally
+asked all to retire.
+</p>
+<p>“Nevertheless, get ready,” warned the pyrotechnician. “If they want to force us to
+kill or be killed—”
+</p>
+<p>Another fit of coughing on the part of the poor silversmith prevented further conversation,
+so the workmen and apprentices retired to their homes, carrying with them hammers
+and saws, and other implements, more or less cutting, more or less bruising, disposed
+to sell their lives dearly. Placido and the pyrotechnician went out again.
+</p>
+<p>“Prudence, prudence!” cautioned the silversmith in a tearful voice.
+</p>
+<p>“You’ll take care of my widow and orphans!” begged the credulous simpleton in a still
+more tearful voice, for he already saw himself riddled with bullets and buried.
+</p>
+<p>That night the guards at the city gates were replaced with Peninsular artillerymen,
+and on the following morning as the sun rose, Ben-Zayb, who had ventured to take a
+morning stroll to examine the condition of the fortifications, found on the glacis
+near the Luneta the corpse of a native girl, half-naked and abandoned. Ben-Zayb was
+horrified, but after touching it with his cane and gazing toward the gates proceeded
+on his way, musing over a sentimental tale he might base upon the incident.
+</p>
+<p>However, no allusion to it appeared in the newspapers on the following days, engrossed
+as they were with the falls and slippings caused by banana-peels. In the dearth of
+news Ben-Zayb had to comment at length on a cyclone that had destroyed in America
+whole towns, causing the death of more than two thousand persons. Among other beautiful
+things he said:
+</p>
+<blockquote>
+<p class="first">“<i>The sentiment of charity</i>, MORE PREVALENT IN CATHOLIC COUNTRIES THAN IN OTHERS, and the thought of Him who,
+influenced by that same feeling, sacrificed himself for <i>humanity, moves (sic)</i> us to compassion over the misfortunes of our kind and to render thanks that <i>in this country</i>, so scourged by cyclones, there are not enacted scenes so desolating as that which
+the inhabitants of the United States mus have witnessed!”</p>
+</blockquote><p>
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4405">[<a href="#xd32e4405">282</a>]</span></p>
+<p><i>Horatius</i> did not miss the opportunity, and, also without mentioning the dead, or the murdered
+native girl, or the assaults, answered him in his <i>Pirotecnia</i>:
+</p>
+<blockquote>
+<p class="first">“After such great charity and such great humanity, Fray Ibañez—I mean, Ben-Zayb—brings
+himself to pray for the Philippines.
+</p>
+<p>But he is understood.
+</p>
+<p>Because he is not Catholic, and the sentiment of charity is most prevalent,” etc.<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e4416src" href="#xd32e4416">4</a></p>
+</blockquote><p>
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4419">[<a href="#xd32e4419">283</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e4315">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e4315src">1</a></span> The Walled City, the original Manila, is still known to the Spaniards and older natives
+exclusively as such, the other districts being referred to by their distinctive names.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e4315src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e4321">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e4321src">2</a></span> Nearly all the dialogue in this chapter is in the mongrel Spanish-Tagalog “market
+language,” which cannot be reproduced in English.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e4321src" title="Return to note 2 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e4334">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e4334src">3</a></span> Doubtless a reference to the author’s first work, <i>Noli Me Tangere</i>, which was tabooed by the authorities.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e4334src" title="Return to note 3 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e4416">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e4416src">4</a></span> Such inanities as these are still a feature of Manila journalism.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e4416src" title="Return to note 4 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch29" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e495">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XXIX</h2>
+<h2 class="main">Exit Capitan Tiago</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first"></p>
+<blockquote lang="la">Talis vita, finis ita</blockquote><p>
+</p>
+<p>Capitan Tiago had a good end—that is, a quite exceptional funeral. True it is that
+the curate of the parish had ventured the observation to Padre Irene that Capitan
+Tiago had died without confession, but the good priest, smiling sardonically, had
+rubbed the tip of his nose and answered:
+</p>
+<p>“Why say that to me? If we had to deny the obsequies to all who die without confession,
+we should forget the <i>De profundis</i>! These restrictions, as you well know, are enforced when the impenitent is also insolvent.
+But Capitan Tiago—out on you! You’ve buried infidel Chinamen, and with a requiem mass!”
+</p>
+<p>Capitan Tiago had named Padre Irene as his executor and willed his property in part
+to St. Clara, part to the Pope, to the Archbishop, the religious corporations, leaving
+twenty pesos for the matriculation of poor students. This last clause had been dictated
+at the suggestion of Padre Irene, in his capacity as protector of studious youths.
+Capitan Tiago had annulled a legacy of twenty-five pesos that he had left to Basilio,
+in view of the ungrateful conduct of the boy during the last few days, but Padre Irene
+had restored it and announced that he would take it upon his own purse and conscience.
+</p>
+<p>In the dead man’s house, where were assembled on the following day many old friends
+and acquaintances, considerable comment was indulged in over a miracle. It was reported
+that, at the very moment when he was dying, the <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4436">[<a href="#xd32e4436">284</a>]</span>soul of Capitan Tiago had appeared to the nuns surrounded by a brilliant light. God
+had saved him, thanks to the pious legacies, and to the numerous masses he had paid
+for. The story was commented upon, it was recounted vividly, it took on particulars,
+and was doubted by no one. The appearance of Capitan Tiago was minutely described—of
+course the frock coat, the cheek bulged out by the quid of buyo, without omitting
+the game-cock and the opium-pipe. The senior sacristan, who was present, gravely affirmed
+these facts with his head and reflected that, after death, he would appear with his
+cup of white <i>tajú</i>, for without that refreshing breakfast he could not comprehend happiness either on
+earth or in heaven.
+</p>
+<p>On this subject, because of their inability to discuss the events of the preceding
+day and because there were gamblers present, many strange speculations were developed.
+They made conjectures as to whether Capitan Tiago would invite St. Peter to a <i>soltada</i>, whether they would place bets, whether the game-cocks were immortal, whether invulnerable,
+and in this case who would be the referee, who would win, and so on: discussions quite
+to the taste of those who found sciences, theories, and systems, based on a text which
+they esteem infallible, revealed or dogmatic. Moreover, there were cited passages
+from novenas, books of miracles, sayings of the curates, descriptions of heaven, and
+other embroidery. Don Primitivo, the philosopher, was in his glory quoting opinions
+of the theologians.
+</p>
+<p>“Because no one can lose,” he stated with great authority. “To lose would cause hard
+feelings and in heaven there can’t be any hard feelings.”
+</p>
+<p>“But some one has to win,” rejoined the gambler Aristorenas. “The fun lies in winning!”
+</p>
+<p>“Well, both win, that’s easy!”
+</p>
+<p>This idea of both winning could not be admitted by Aristorenas, for he had passed
+his life in the cockpit and had always seen one cock lose and the other win—at best,
+there was a tie. Vainly Don Primitivo argued in Latin. <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4450">[<a href="#xd32e4450">285</a>]</span>Aristorenas shook his head, and that too when Don Primitivo’s Latin was easy to understand,
+for he talked of <i>an gallus talisainus, acuto tari armatus, an gallus beati Petri bulikus sasabung̃us
+sit</i>,<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e4454src" href="#xd32e4454">1</a> and so on, until at length he decided to resort to the argument which many use to
+convince and silence their opponents.
+</p>
+<p>“You’re going to be damned, friend Martin, you’re falling into heresy! <i lang="la">Cave ne cadas!</i> I’m not going to play monte with you any more, and we’ll not set up a bank together.
+You deny the omnipotence of God, <i lang="la">peccatum mortale!</i> You deny the existence of the Holy Trinity— three are one and one is three! Take
+care! You indirectly deny that two natures, two understandings, and two wills can
+have only one memory! Be careful! <i lang="la">Quicumque non crederit anathema sit!</i>”
+</p>
+<p>Martin Aristorenas shrank away pale and trembling, while Quiroga, who had listened
+with great attention to the argument, with marked deference offered the philosopher
+a magnificent cigar, at the same time asking in his caressing voice: “Surely, one
+can make a contract for a cockpit with Kilisto,<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e4485src" href="#xd32e4485">2</a> ha? When I die, I’ll be the contractor, ha?”
+</p>
+<p>Among the others, they talked more of the deceased; at least they discussed what kind
+of clothing to put on him. Capitan Tinong proposed a Franciscan habit—and fortunately,
+he had one, old, threadbare, and patched, a precious object which, according to the
+friar who gave it to him as alms in exchange for thirty-six pesos, would preserve
+the corpse from the flames of hell and which reckoned in its <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4492">[<a href="#xd32e4492">286</a>]</span>support various pious anecdotes taken from the books distributed by the curates. Although
+he held this relic in great esteem, Capitan Tinong was disposed to part with it for
+the sake of his intimate friend, whom he had not been able to visit during his illness.
+But a tailor objected, with good reason, that since the nuns had seen Capitan Tiago
+ascending to heaven in a frock coat, in a frock coat he should be dressed here on
+earth, nor was there any necessity for preservatives and fire-proof garments. The
+deceased had attended balls and fiestas in a frock coat, and nothing else would be
+expected of him in the skies—and, wonderful to relate, the tailor accidentally happened
+to have one ready, which he would part with for thirty-two pesos, four cheaper than
+the Franciscan habit, because he didn’t want to make any profit on Capitan Tiago,
+who had been his customer in life and would now be his patron in heaven. But Padre
+Irene, trustee and executor, rejected both proposals and ordered that the Capitan
+be dressed in one of his old suits of clothes, remarking with holy unction that God
+paid no attention to clothing.
+</p>
+<p>The obsequies were, therefore, of the very first class. There were responsories in
+the house, and in the street three friars officiated, as though one were not sufficient
+for such a great soul. All the rites and ceremonies possible were performed, and it
+is reported that there were even <i>extras</i>, as in the benefits for actors. It was indeed a delight: loads of incense were burned,
+there were plenty of Latin chants, large quantities of holy water were expended, and
+Padre Irene, out of regard for his old friend, sang the <i>Dies Irae</i> in a falsetto voice from the choir, while the neighbors suffered real headaches from
+so much knell-ringing.
+</p>
+<p>Doña Patrocinio, the ancient rival of Capitan Tiago in religiosity, actually wanted
+to die on the next day, so that she might order even more sumptuous obsequies. The
+pious old lady could not bear the thought that he, whom she had long considered vanquished
+forever, should in dying come <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4502">[<a href="#xd32e4502">287</a>]</span>forward again with so much pomp. Yes, she desired to die, and it seemed that she could
+hear the exclamations of the people at the funeral: “This indeed is what you call
+a funeral! This indeed is to know how to die, Doña Patrocinio!”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4504">[<a href="#xd32e4504">288</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e4454">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e4454src">1</a></span> “Whether there would be a <i>talisain</i> cock, armed with a sharp gaff, whether the blessed Peter’s fighting-cock would be
+a <i>bulik</i>—”
+</p>
+<p class="footnote cont"><i>Talisain</i> and <i>bulik</i> are distinguishing terms in the vernacular for fighting-cocks, <i>tari</i> and <i>sasabung̃in</i> the Tagalog terms for “gaff” and “game-cock,” respectively.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote cont">The Tagalog terminology of the cockpit and monkish Latin certainly make a fearful
+and wonderful mixture—nor did the author have to resort to his imagination to get
+samples of it.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e4454src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e4485">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e4485src">2</a></span> This is Quiroga’s pronunciation of <i>Christo</i>.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e4485src" title="Return to note 2 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch30" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e505">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XXX</h2>
+<h2 class="main">Juli</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">The death of Capitan Tiago and Basilio’s imprisonment were soon reported in the province,
+and to the honor of the simple inhabitants of San Diego, let it be recorded that the
+latter was the incident more regretted and almost the only one discussed. As was to
+be expected, the report took on different forms, sad and startling details were given,
+what could not be understood was explained, the gaps being filled by conjectures,
+which soon passed for accomplished facts, and the phantoms thus created terrified
+their own creators.
+</p>
+<p>In the town of Tiani it was reported that at least, at the very least, the young man
+was going to be deported and would very probably be murdered on the journey. The timorous
+and pessimistic were not satisfied with this but even talked about executions and
+courts-martial—January was a fatal month; in January the Cavite affair had occurred,
+and <i>they</i><a class="noteRef" id="xd32e4513src" href="#xd32e4513">1</a> even though curates, had been garroted, so a poor Basilio without protectors or friends—
+</p>
+<p>“I told him so!” sighed the Justice of the Peace, as if he had at some time given
+advice to Basilio. “I told him so.”
+</p>
+<p>“It was to be expected,” commented Sister Penchang. “He would go into the church and
+when he saw that the holy water was somewhat dirty he wouldn’t cross himself with
+it. He talked about germs and disease, <i>abá</i>, it’s the chastisement of God! He deserved it, and he got it! As <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4521">[<a href="#xd32e4521">289</a>]</span>though the holy water could transmit diseases! Quite the contrary, <i>abá!</i>”
+</p>
+<p>She then related how she had cured herself of indigestion by moistening her stomach
+with holy water, at the same time reciting the <i>Sanctus Deus</i>, and she recommended the remedy to those present when they should suffer from dysentery,
+or an epidemic occurred, only that then they must pray in Spanish:
+</p>
+<div lang="es" class="lgouter">
+<p class="line">Santo Diós,
+</p>
+<p class="line">Santo fuerte,
+</p>
+<p class="line">Santo inmortal,
+</p>
+<p class="line">¡Libranos, Señor, de la peste
+</p>
+<p class="line">Y de todo mal!<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e4536src" href="#xd32e4536">2</a></p>
+</div>
+<p class="first">“It’s an infallible remedy, but you must apply the holy water to the part affected,”
+she concluded.
+</p>
+<p>But there were many persons who did not believe in these things, nor did they attribute
+Basilio’s imprisonment to the chastisement of God. Nor did they take any stock in
+insurrections and pasquinades, knowing the prudent and ultra-pacific character of
+the boy, but preferred to ascribe it to revenge on the part of the friars, because
+of his having rescued from servitude Juli, the daughter of a tulisan who was the mortal
+enemy of a certain powerful corporation. As they had quite a poor idea of the morality
+of that same corporation and could recall cases of petty revenge, their conjecture
+was believed to have more probability and justification.
+</p>
+<p>“What a good thing I did when I drove her from my house!” said Sister Penchang. “I
+don’t want to have any trouble with the friars, so I urged her to find the money.”
+</p>
+<p>The truth was, however, that she regretted Juli’s liberty, for Juli prayed and fasted
+for her, and if she had stayed a longer time, would also have done penance. Why, if
+the curates pray for us and Christ died for our sins, couldn’t Juli do the same for
+Sister Penchang?
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4546">[<a href="#xd32e4546">290</a>]</span></p>
+<p>When the news reached the hut where the poor Juli and her grandfather lived, the girl
+had to have it repeated to her. She stared at Sister Bali, who was telling it, as
+though without comprehension, without ability to collect her thoughts. Her ears buzzed,
+she felt a sinking at the heart and had a vague presentiment that this event would
+have a disastrous influence on her own future. Yet she tried to seize upon a ray of
+hope, she smiled, thinking that Sister Bali was joking with her, a rather strong joke,
+to be sure, but she forgave her beforehand if she would acknowledge that it was such.
+But Sister Bali made a cross with one of her thumbs and a forefinger, and kissed it,
+to prove that she was telling the truth. Then the smile faded forever from the girl’s
+lips, she turned pale, frightfully pale, she felt her strength leave her and for the
+first time in her life she lost consciousness, falling into a swoon.
+</p>
+<p>When by dint of blows, pinches, dashes of water, crosses, and the application of sacred
+palms, the girl recovered and remembered the situation, silent tears sprang from her
+eyes, drop by drop, without sobs, without laments, without complaints! She thought
+about Basilio, who had had no other protector than Capitan Tiago, and who now, with
+the Capitan dead, was left completely unprotected and in prison. In the Philippines
+it is a well-known fact that patrons are needed for everything, from the time one
+is christened until one dies, in order to get justice, to secure a passport, or to
+develop an industry. As it was said that his imprisonment was due to revenge on account
+of herself and her father, the girl’s sorrow turned to desperation. Now it was her
+duty to liberate him, as he had done in rescuing her from servitude, and the inner
+voice which suggested the idea offered to her imagination a horrible means.
+</p>
+<p>“Padre Camorra, the curate,” whispered the voice. Juli gnawed at her lips and became
+lost in gloomy meditation.
+</p>
+<p>As a result of her father’s crime, her grandfather had been arrested in the hope that
+by such means the son could be made to appear. The only one who could get him <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4552">[<a href="#xd32e4552">291</a>]</span>his liberty was Padre Camorra, and Padre Camorra had shown himself to be poorly satisfied
+with her words of gratitude, having with his usual frankness asked for some sacrifices—since
+which time Juli had tried to avoid meeting him. But the curate made her kiss his hand,
+he twitched her nose and patted her cheeks, he joked with her, winking and laughing,
+and laughing he pinched her. Juli was also the cause of the beating the good curate
+had administered to some young men who were going about the village serenading the
+girls. Malicious ones, seeing her pass sad and dejected, would remark so that she
+might hear: “If she only wished it, Cabesang Tales would be pardoned.”
+</p>
+<p>Juli reached her home, gloomy and with wandering looks. She had changed greatly, having
+lost her merriment, and no one ever saw her smile again. She scarcely spoke and seemed
+to be afraid to look at her own face. One day she was seen in the town with a big
+spot of soot on her forehead, she who used to go so trim and neat. Once she asked
+Sister Bali if the people who committed suicide went to hell.
+</p>
+<p>“Surely!” replied that woman, and proceeded to describe the place as though she had
+been there.
+</p>
+<p>Upon Basilio’s imprisonment, the simple and grateful relatives had planned to make
+all kinds of sacrifices to save the young man, but as they could collect among themselves
+no more than thirty pesos, Sister Bali, as usual, thought of a better plan.
+</p>
+<p>“What we must do is to get some advice from the town clerk,” she said. To these poor
+people, the town clerk was what the Delphic oracle was to the ancient Greeks.
+</p>
+<p>“By giving him a real and a cigar,” she continued, “he’ll tell you all the laws so
+that your head bursts listening to him. If you have a peso, he’ll save you, even though
+you may be at the foot of the scaffold. When my friend Simon was put in jail and flogged
+for not being able to give evidence about a robbery perpetrated near his house, <i>abá</i>, for two reales and a half and a string of garlics, the town clerk got him out. And
+I saw Simon myself when <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4562">[<a href="#xd32e4562">292</a>]</span>he could scarcely walk and he had to stay in bed at least a month. Ay, his flesh rotted
+as a result and he died!”
+</p>
+<p>Sister Bali’s advice was accepted and she herself volunteered to interview the town
+clerk. Juli gave her four reales and added some strips of jerked venison her grand-father
+had got, for Tandang Selo had again devoted himself to hunting.
+</p>
+<p>But the town clerk could do nothing—the prisoner was in Manila, and his power did
+not extend that far. “If at least he were at the capital, then—” he ventured, to make
+a show of his authority, which he knew very well did not extend beyond the boundaries
+of Tiani, but he had to maintain his prestige and keep the jerked venison. “But I
+can give you a good piece of advice, and it is that you go with Juli to see the Justice
+of the Peace. But it’s very necessary that Juli go.”
+</p>
+<p>The Justice of the Peace was a very rough fellow, but if he should see Juli he might
+conduct himself less rudely—this is wherein lay the wisdom of the advice.
+</p>
+<p>With great gravity the honorable Justice listened to Sister Bali, who did the talking,
+but not without staring from time to time at the girl, who hung her head with shame.
+People would say that she was greatly interested in Basilio, people who did not remember
+her debt of gratitude, nor that his imprisonment, according to report, was on her
+account.
+</p>
+<p>After belching three or four times, for his Honor had that ugly habit, he said that
+the only person who could save Basilio was Padre Camorra, <i>in case he should care to do so</i>. Here he stared meaningly at the girl and advised her to deal with the curate in
+person.
+</p>
+<p>“You know what influence he has,—he got your grand-father out of jail. A report from
+him is enough to deport a new-born babe or save from death a man with the noose about
+his neck.”
+</p>
+<p>Juli said nothing, but Sister Bali took this advice as though she had read it in a
+novena, and was ready to accompany the girl to the convento. It so happened that <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4576">[<a href="#xd32e4576">293</a>]</span>she was just going there to get as alms a scapulary in exchange for four full reales.
+</p>
+<p>But Juli shook her head and was unwilling to go to the convento. Sister Bali thought
+she could guess the reason—Padre Camorra was reputed to be very fond of the women
+and was very frolicsome—so she tried to reassure her. “You’ve nothing to fear if I
+go with you. Haven’t you read in the booklet <i>Tandang Basio</i>, given you by the curate, that the girls should go to the convento, even without
+the knowledge of their elders, to relate what is going on at home? <i>Abá</i>, that book is printed with the permission of the Archbishop!”
+</p>
+<p>Juli became impatient and wished to cut short such talk, so she begged the pious woman
+to go if she wished, but his Honor observed with a belch that the supplications of
+a youthful face were more moving than those of an old one, the sky poured its dew
+over the fresh flowers in greater abundance than over the withered ones. The metaphor
+was fiendishly beautiful.
+</p>
+<p>Juli did not reply and the two left the house. In the street the girl firmly refused
+to go to the convento and they returned to their village. Sister Bali, who felt offended
+at this lack of confidence in herself, on the way home relieved her feelings by administering
+a long preachment to the girl.
+</p>
+<p>The truth was that the girl could not take that step without damning herself in her
+own eyes, besides being cursed of men and cursed of God! It had been intimated to
+her several times, whether with reason or not, that if she would make that sacrifice
+her father would be pardoned, and yet she had refused, in spite of the cries of her
+conscience reminding her of her filial duty. Now must she make it for Basilio, her
+sweetheart? That would be to fall to the sound of mockery and laughter from all creation.
+Basilio himself would despise her! No, never! She would first hang herself or leap
+from some precipice. At any rate, she was already damned for being a wicked daughter.
+</p>
+<p>The poor girl had besides to endure all the reproaches <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4589">[<a href="#xd32e4589">294</a>]</span>of her relatives, who, knowing nothing of what had passed between her and Padre Camovra,
+laughed at her fears. Would Padre Camorra fix his attention upon a country girl when
+there were so many others in the town? Hero the good women cited names of unmarried
+girls, rich and beautiful, who had been more or less unfortunate. Meanwhile, if they
+should shoot Basilio?
+</p>
+<p>Juli covered her ears and stared wildly about, as if seeking a voice that might plead
+for her, but she saw only her grandfather, who was dumb and had his gaze fixed on
+his hunting-spear.
+</p>
+<p>That night she scarcely slept at all. Dreams and nightmares, some funereal, some bloody,
+danced before her sight and woke her often, bathed in cold perspiration. She fancied
+that she heard shots, she imagined that she saw her father, that father who had done
+so much for her, fighting in the forests, hunted like a wild beast because she had
+refused to save him. The figure of her father was transformed and she recognized Basilio,
+dying, with looks of reproach at her. The wretched girl arose, prayed, wept, called
+upon her mother, upon death, and there was even a moment when, overcome with terror,
+if it had not been night-time, she would have run straight to the convento, let happen
+what would.
+</p>
+<p>With the coming of day the sad presentiments and the terrors of darkness were partly
+dissipated. The light inspired hopes in her. But the news of the afternoon was terrible,
+for there was talk of persons shot, so the next night was for the girl frightful.
+In her desperation she decided to give herself up as soon as day dawned and then kill
+herself afterwards—anything, rather than enditre such tortures! But the dawn brought
+new hope and she would not go to church or even leave the house. She was afraid she
+would yield.
+</p>
+<p>So passed several days in praying and cursing, in calling upon God and wishing for
+death. The day gave her a slight respite and she trusted in some miracle. The reports
+that <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4597">[<a href="#xd32e4597">295</a>]</span>came from Manila, although they reached there magnified, said that of the prisoners
+some had secured their liberty, thanks to patrons and influence. Some one had to be
+sacrificed—who would it be? Juli shuddered and returned home biting her finger-nails.
+Then came the night with its terrors, which took on double proportions and seemed
+to be converted into realities. Juli feared to fall asleep, for her slumbers were
+a continuous nightmare. Looks of reproach would flash across her eyelids just as soon
+as they were closed, complaints and laments pierced her ears. She saw her father wandering
+about hungry, without rest or repose; she saw Basilio dying in the road, pierced by
+two bullets, just as she had seen the corpse of that neighbor who had been killed
+while in the charge of the Civil Guard. She saw the bonds that cut into the flesh,
+she saw the blood pouring from the mouth, she heard Basilio calling to her, “Save
+me! Save me! You alone can save me!” Then a burst of laughter would resound and she
+would turn her eyes to see her father gazing at her with eyes full of reproach. Juli
+would wake up, sit up on her <i>petate</i>, and draw her hands across her forehead to arrange her hair—cold sweat, like the
+sweat of death, moistened it!
+</p>
+<p>“Mother, mother!” she sobbed.
+</p>
+<p>Meanwhile, they who were so carelessly disposing of people’s fates, he who commanded
+the legal murders, he who violated justice and made use of the law to maintain himself
+by force, slept in peace.
+</p>
+<p>At last a traveler arrived from Manila and reported that all the prisoners had been
+set free, all except Basilio, who had no protector. It was reported in Manila, added
+the traveler, that the young man would be deported to the Carolines, having been forced
+to sign a petition beforehand, in which he declared that he asked it voluntarily.<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e4605src" href="#xd32e4605">3</a> The <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4608">[<a href="#xd32e4608">296</a>]</span>traveler had seen the very steamer that was going to take him away.
+</p>
+<p>This report put an end to all the girl’s hesitation. Besides, her mind was already
+quite weak from so many nights of watching and horrible dreams. Pale and with unsteady
+eyes, she sought out Sister Bali and, in a voice that was cause for alarm, told her
+that she was ready, asking her to accompany her. Sister Bali thereupon rejoiced and
+tried to soothe her, but Juli paid no attention to her, apparently intent only upon
+hurrying to the convento. She had decked herself out in her finest clothes, and even
+pretended to be quite gay, talking a great deal, although in a rather incoherent way.
+</p>
+<p>So they set out. Juli went ahead, becoming impatient that her companion lagged behind.
+But as they neared the town, her nervous energy began gradually to abate, she fell
+silent and wavered in her resolution, lessened her pace and soon dropped behind, so
+that Sister Bali had to encourage her.
+</p>
+<p>“We’ll get there late,” she remonstrated.
+</p>
+<p>Juli now followed, pale, with downcast eyes, which she was afraid to raise. She felt
+that the whole world was staring at her and pointing its finger at her. A vile name
+whistled in her ears, but still she disregarded it and continued on her way. Nevertheless,
+when they came in sight of the convento, she stopped and began to tremble.
+</p>
+<p>“Let’s go home, let’s go home,” she begged, holding her companion back.
+</p>
+<p>Sister Bali had to take her by the arm and half drag her along, reassuring her and
+telling her about the books of the friars. She would not desert her, so there was
+nothing to fear. Padre Camorra had other things in mind—Juli was only a poor country
+girl.
+</p>
+<p>But upon arriving at the door of the convento, Juli firmly refused to go in, catching
+hold of the wall.
+</p>
+<p>“No, no,” she pleaded in terror. “No, no, no! Have pity!”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4620">[<a href="#xd32e4620">297</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“But what a fool—”
+</p>
+<p>Sister Bali pushed her gently along, Juli, pallid and with wild features, offering
+resistance. The expression of her face said that she saw death before her.
+</p>
+<p>“All right, let’s go back, if you don’t want to!” at length the good woman exclaimed
+in irritation, as she did not believe there was any real danger. Padre Camorra, in
+spite of all his reputation, would dare do nothing before her.
+</p>
+<p>“Let them carry poor Basilio into exile, let them shoot him on the way, saying that
+he tried to escape,” she added. “When he’s dead, then remorse will come. But as for
+myself, I owe him no favors, so he can’t reproach me!”
+</p>
+<p>That was the decisive stroke. In the face of that reproach, with wrath and desperation
+mingled, like one who rushes to suicide, Juli closed her eyes in order not to see
+the abyss into which she was hurling herself and resolutely entered the convento.
+A sigh that sounded like the rattle of death escaped from her lips. Sister Bali followed,
+telling her how to act.
+</p>
+<p>That night comments were mysteriously whispered about certain events which had occurred
+that afternoon. A girl had leaped from a window of the convento, falling upon some
+stones and killing herself. Almost at the same time another woman had rushed out of
+the convento to run through the streets shouting and screaming like a lunatic. The
+prudent townsfolk dared not utter any names and many mothers pinched their daughters
+for letting slip expressions that might compromise them.
+</p>
+<p>Later, very much later, at twilight, an old man came from a village and stood calling
+at the door of the convento, which was closed and guarded by sacristans. The old man
+beat the door with his fists and with his head, while he littered cries stifled and
+inarticulate, like those of a dumb person, until he was at length driven away by blows
+and shoves. Then he made his way to the gobernadorcillo’s house, but was told that
+the gobernadorcillo was not there, <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4629">[<a href="#xd32e4629">298</a>]</span>he was at the convento; he went to the Justice of the Peace, but neither was the Justice
+of the Peace at home—he had been summoned to the convento; he went to the teniente-mayor,
+but he too was at the convento; he directed his steps to the barracks, but the lieutenant
+of the Civil Guard was at the convento. The old man then returned to his village,
+weeping like a child. His wails were heard in the middle of the night, causing men
+to bite their lips and women to clasp their hands, while the dogs slunk fearfully
+back into the houses with their tails between their legs.
+</p>
+<p>“Ah, God, God!” said a poor woman, lean from fasting, “in Thy presence there is no
+rich, no poor, no white, no black—Thou wilt grant us justice!”
+</p>
+<p>“Yes,” rejoined her husband, “just so that God they preach is not a pure invention,
+a fraud! They themselves are the first not to believe in Him.”
+</p>
+<p>At eight o’clock in the evening it was rumored that more than seven friars, proceeding
+from neighboring towns, were assembled in the convento to hold a conference. On the
+following day, Tandang Selo disappeared forever from the village, carrying with him
+his hunting-spear.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4636">[<a href="#xd32e4636">299</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e4513">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e4513src">1</a></span> The native priests Burgos, Gomez, and Zamora, charged with complicity in the uprising
+of 1872, and executed.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e4513src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e4536" lang="en">
+<p class="footnote" lang="en"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e4536src">2</a></span> This versicle, found in the booklets of prayer, is common on the scapularies, which,
+during the late insurrection, were easily converted into the <i>anting-anting</i>, or amulets, worn by the fanatics.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e4536src" title="Return to note 2 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e4605">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e4605src">3</a></span> This practise—secretly compelling suspects to sign a request to be transferred to
+some other island—was by no means a figment of the author’s imagination, but was extensively
+practised to anticipate any legal difficulties that might arise.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e4605src" title="Return to note 3 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch31" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e515">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XXXI</h2>
+<h2 class="main">The High Official</h2>
+<blockquote lang="fr">
+<p class="first">L’Espagne et sa, vertu, l’Espagne et sa grandeur
+<br>Tout s’en va!—Victor Hugo</p>
+</blockquote>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p>The newspapers of Manila were so engrossed in accounts of a notorious murder committed
+in Europe, in panegyrics and puffs for various preachers in the city, in the constantly
+increasing success of the French operetta, that they could scarcely devote space to
+the crimes perpetrated in the provinces by a band of tulisanes headed by a fierce
+and terrible leader who was called <i>Matanglawin.</i><a class="noteRef" id="xd32e4649src" href="#xd32e4649">1</a> Only when the object of the attack was a convento or a Spaniard there then appeared
+long articles giving frightful details and asking for martial law, energetic measures,
+and so on. So it was that they could take no notice of what had occurred in the town
+of Tiani, nor was there the slightest hint or allusion to it. In private circles something
+was whispered, but so confused, so vague, and so little consistent, that not even
+the name of the victim was known, while those who showed the greatest interest forgot
+it quickly, trusting that the affair had been settled in some way with the wronged
+family. The only one who knew anything certain was Padre Camorra, who had to leave
+the town, to be transferred to another or to remain for some time in the convento
+in Manila.
+</p>
+<p>“Poor Padre Camorra!” exclaimed Ben-Zayb in a fit of generosity. “He was so jolly
+and had such a good heart!”
+</p>
+<p>It was true that the students had recovered their liberty, <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4655">[<a href="#xd32e4655">300</a>]</span>thanks to the exertions of their relatives, who did not hesitate at expense, gifts,
+or any sacrifice whatsoever. The first to see himself free, as was to be expected,
+was Makaraig, and the last Isagani, because Padre Florentine did not reach Manila
+until a week after the events. So many acts of clemency secured for the General the
+title of clement and merciful, which Ben-Zayb hastened to add to his long list of
+adjectives.
+</p>
+<p>The only one who did not obtain his liberty was Basilio, since he was also accused
+of having in his possession prohibited books. We don’t know whether this referred
+to his text-book on legal medicine or to the pamphlets that were found, dealing with
+the Philippines, or both together—the fact is that it was said that prohibited literature
+was being secretly sold, and upon the unfortunate boy fell all the weight of the rod
+of justice.
+</p>
+<p>It was reported that his Excellency had been thus advised: “It’s necessary that there
+be some one, so that the prestige of authority may be sustained and that it may not
+be said that we made a great fuss over nothing. Authority before everything. It’s
+necessary that some one be made an example of. Let there be just one, one who, according
+to Padre Irene, was the servant of Capitan Tiago—there’ll be no one to enter a complaint—”
+</p>
+<p>“Servant and student?” asked his Excellency. “That fellow, then! Let it be he!”
+</p>
+<p>“Your Excellency will pardon me,” observed the high official, who happened to be present,
+“but I’ve been told that this boy is a medical student and his teachers speak well
+of him. If he remains a prisoner he’ll lose a year, and as this year he finishes—”
+</p>
+<p>The high official’s interference in behalf of Basilio, instead of helping, harmed
+him. For some time there had been between this official and his Excellency strained
+relations and bad feelings, augmented by frequent clashes.
+</p>
+<p>“Yes? So much the greater reason that he should be kept prisoner; a year longer in
+his studies, instead of injuring <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4665">[<a href="#xd32e4665">301</a>]</span>him, will do good, not only to himself but to all who afterwards fall into his hands.
+One doesn’t become a bad physician by extensive practise. So much the more reason
+that he should remain! Soon the filibustering reformers will say that we are not looking
+out for the country!” concluded his Excellency with a sarcastic laugh.
+</p>
+<p>The high official realized that he had made a false move and took Basilio’s case to
+heart. “But it seems to me that this young man is the most innocent of all,” he rejoined
+rather timidly.
+</p>
+<p>“Books have been seized in his possession,” observed the secretary.
+</p>
+<p>“Yes, works on medicine and pamphlets written by Peninsulars, with the leaves uncut,
+and besides, what does that signify? Moreover, this young man was not present at the
+banquet in the <i>pansitería</i>, he hasn’t mixed up in anything. As I’ve said, he’s the most innocent—”
+</p>
+<p>“So much the better!” exclaimed his Excellency jocosely. “In that way the punishment
+will prove more salutary and exemplary, since it inspires greater terror. To govern
+is to act in this way, my dear sir, as it is often expedient to sacrifice the welfare
+of one to the welfare of many. But I’m doing more—from the welfare of one will result
+the welfare of all, the principle of endangered authority is preserved, prestige is
+respected and maintained. By this act of mine I’m correcting my own and other people’s
+faults.”
+</p>
+<p>The high official restrained himself with an effort and, disregarding the allusion,
+decided to take another tack. “But doesn’t your Excellency fear the—responsibility?”
+</p>
+<p>“What have I to fear?” rejoined the General impatiently. “Haven’t I discretionary
+powers? Can’t I do what I please for the better government of these islands? What
+have I to fear? Can some menial perhaps arraign me before the tribunals and exact
+from me responsibility? Even though he had the means, he would have to consult the
+Ministry first, and the Minister—”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4677">[<a href="#xd32e4677">302</a>]</span></p>
+<p>He waved his hand and burst out into laughter.
+</p>
+<p>“The Minister who appointed me, the devil knows where he is, and he will feel honored
+in being able to welcome me when I return. The present one, I don’t even think of
+him, and the devil take him too! The one that relieves him will find himself in so
+many difficulties with his new duties that he won’t be able to fool with trifles.
+I, my dear sir, have nothing over me but my conscience, I act according to my conscience,
+and my conscience is satisfied, so I don’t care a straw for the opinions of this one
+and that. My conscience, my dear sir, my conscience!”
+</p>
+<p>“Yes, General, but the country—”
+</p>
+<p>“Tut, tut, tut, tut! The country—what have I to do Avith the country? Have I perhaps
+contracted any obligations to it? Do I owe my office to it? Was it the country that
+elected me?”
+</p>
+<p>A brief pause ensued, during which the high official stood with bowed head. Then,
+as if reaching a decision, he raised it to stare fixedly at the General. Pale and
+trembling, he said with repressed energy: “That doesn’t matter, General, that doesn’t
+matter at all! Your Excellency has not been chosen by the Filipino people, but by
+Spain, all the more reason why you should treat the Filipinos well so that they may
+not be able to reproach Spain. The greater reason, General, the greater reason! Your
+Excellency, by coming here, has contracted the obligation to govern justly, to seek
+the welfare—”
+</p>
+<p>“Am I not doing it?” interrupted his Excellency in exasperation, taking a step forward.
+“Haven’t I told you that I am getting from the good of one the good of all? Are you
+now going to give me lessons? If you don’t understand my actions, how am I to blame?
+Do I compel you to share my responsibility?”
+</p>
+<p>“Certainly not,” replied the high official, drawing himself up proudly. “Your Excellency
+does not compel me, your Excellency cannot compel me, <i>me,</i> to share <i>your</i> responsibility. I understand mine in quite another way, <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4691">[<a href="#xd32e4691">303</a>]</span>and because I have it, I’m going to speak—I’ve held my peace a long time. Oh, your
+Excellency needn’t make those gestures, because the fact that I’ve come here in this
+or that capacity doesn’t mean that I have given up my rights, that I have been reduced
+to the part of a slave, without voice or dignity.
+</p>
+<p>“I don’t want Spain to lose this beautiful empire, these eight millions of patient
+and submissive subjects, who live on hopes and delusions, but neither do I wish to
+soil my hands in their barbarous exploitation. I don’t wish it ever to be said that,
+the slave-trade abolished, Spain has continued to cloak it with her banner and perfect
+it under a wealth of specious institutions. No, to be great Spain does not have to
+be a tyrant, Spain is sufficient unto herself, Spain was greater when she had only
+her own territory, wrested from the clutches of the Moor. I too am a Spaniard, but
+before being a Spaniard I am a man, and before Spain and above Spain is her honor,
+the lofty principles of morality, the eternal principles of immutable justice! Ah,
+you are surprised that I think thus, because you have no idea of the grandeur of the
+Spanish name, no, you haven’t any idea of it, you identify it with persons and interests.
+To you the Spaniard may be a pirate, he may be a murderer, a hypocrite, a cheat, anything,
+just so he keep what he has—but to me the Spaniard should lose everything, empire,
+power, wealth, everything, before his honor! Ah, my dear sir, we protest when we read
+that might is placed before right, yet we applaud when in practise we see might play
+the hypocrite in not only perverting right but even in using it as a tool in order
+to gain control. For the very reason that I love Spain, I’m speaking now, and I defy
+your frown!
+</p>
+<p>“I don’t wish that the coming ages accuse Spain of being the stepmother of the nations,
+the vampire of races, the tyrant of small islands, since it would be a horrible mockery
+of the noble principles of our ancient kings. How are we carrying out their sacred
+legacy? They promised to these <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4696">[<a href="#xd32e4696">304</a>]</span>islands protection and justice, and we are playing with the lives and liberties of
+the inhabitants; they promised civilization, and we are curtailing it, fearful that
+they may aspire to a nobler existence; they promised them light, and we cover their
+eyes that they may not witness our orgies; they promised to teach them virtue and
+we are encouraging their vice. Instead of peace, wealth, and justice, confusion reigns,
+commerce languishes, and skepticism is fostered among the masses.
+</p>
+<p>“Let us put ourselves in the place of the Filipinos and ask ourselves what we would
+do in their place. Ah, in your silence I read their right to rebel, and if matters
+do not mend they will rebel some day, and justice will be on their side, with them
+will go the sympathy of all honest men, of every patriot in the world! When a people
+is denied light, home, liberty, and justice—things that are essential to life, and
+therefore man’s patrimony—that people has the right to treat him who so despoils it
+as we would the robber who intercepts us on the highway. There are no distinctions,
+there are no exceptions, nothing but a fact, a right, an aggression, and every honest
+man who does not place himself on the side of the wronged makes himself an accomplice
+and stains his conscience.
+</p>
+<p>“True, I am not a soldier, and the years are cooling the little fire in my blood,
+but just as I would risk being torn to pieces to defend the integrity of Spain against
+any foreign invader or against an unjustified disloyalty in her provinces, so I also
+assure you that I would place myself beside the oppressed Filipinos, because I would
+prefer to fall in the cause of the outraged rights of humanity to triumphing with
+the selfish interests of a nation, even when that nation be called as it is called—Spain!”
+</p>
+<p>“Do you know when the mail-boat leaves?” inquired his Excellency coldly, when the
+high official had finished speaking.
+</p>
+<p>The latter stared at him fixedly, then dropped his head and silently left the palace.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4703">[<a href="#xd32e4703">305</a>]</span></p>
+<p>Outside he found his carriage awaiting him. “Some day when you declare yourselves
+independent,” he said somewhat abstractedly to the native lackey who opened the carriage-door
+for him, “remember that there were not lacking in Spain hearts that beat for you and
+struggled for your rights!”
+</p>
+<p>“Where, sir?” asked the lackey, who had understood nothing of this and was inquiring
+whither they should go.
+</p>
+<p>Two hours later the high official handed in his resignation and announced his intention
+of returning to Spain by the next mail-steamer.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4709">[<a href="#xd32e4709">306</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e4649">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e4649src">1</a></span> “Hawk-Eye.”—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e4649src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch32" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e525">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XXXII</h2>
+<h2 class="main">Effect of the Pasquinades</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">As a result of the events narrated, many mothers ordered their sons immediately to
+leave off their studies and devote themselves to idleness or to agriculture. When
+the examinations came, suspensions were plentiful, and he was a rare exception who
+finished the course, if he had belonged to the famous association, to which no one
+paid any more attention. Pecson, Tadeo, and Juanito Pelaez were all alike suspended—the
+first receiving his dismissal with his foolish grin and declaring his intention of
+becoming an officer in some court, while Tadeo, with his eternal holiday realized
+at last, paid for an illumination and made a bonfire of his books. Nor did the others
+get off much better, and at length they too had to abandon their studies, to the great
+satisfaction of their mothers, who always fancy their sons hanged if they should come
+to understand what the books teach. Juanito Pelaez alone took the blow ill, since
+it forced him to leave school for his father’s store, with whom he was thenceforward
+to be associated in the business: the rascal found the store much less entertaining,
+but after some time his friends again noticed his hump appear, a symptom that his
+good humor was returning. The rich Makaraig, in view of the catastrophe, took good
+care not to expose himself, and having secured a passport by means of money set out
+in haste for Europe. It was said that his Excellency, the Captain-General, in his
+desire to do good by good means, and careful of the interests of the Filipinos, hindered
+the departure of every one who could not first prove substantially that he had the
+money to spend and could live in idleness in European cities. Among our <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4716">[<a href="#xd32e4716">307</a>]</span>acquaintances those who got off best were Isagani and Sandoval: the former passed
+in the subject he studied under Padre Fernandez and was suspended in the others, while
+the latter was able to confuse the examining-board with his oratory.
+</p>
+<p>Basilio was the only one who did not pass in any subject, who was not suspended, and
+who did not go to Europe, for he remained in Bilibid prison, subjected every three
+days to examinations, almost always the same in principle, without other variation
+than a change of inquisitors, since it seemed that in the presence of such great guilt
+all gave up or fell away in horror. And while the documents moldered or were shifted
+about, while the stamped papers increased like the plasters of an ignorant physician
+on the body of a hypochondriac, Basilio became informed of all the details of what
+had happened in Tiani, of the death of Juli and the disappearance of Tandang Selo.
+Sinong, the abused cochero, who had driven him to San Diego, happened to be in Manila
+at that time and called to give him all the news.
+</p>
+<p>Meanwhile, Simoun had recovered his health, or so at least the newspapers said. Ben-Zayb
+rendered thanks to “the Omnipotent who watches over such a precious life,” and manifested
+the hope that the Highest would some day reveal the malefactor, whose crime remained
+unpunished, thanks to the charity of the victim, who was too closely following the
+words of the Great Martyr: <i>Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.</i> These and other things Ben-Zayb said in print, while by mouth he was inquiring whether
+there was any truth in the rumor that the opulent jeweler was going to give a grand
+fiesta, a banquet such as had never before been seen, in part to celebrate his recovery
+and in part as a farewell to the country in which he had increased his fortune. It
+was whispered as certain that Simoun, who would have to leave with the Captain-General,
+whose command expired in May, was making every effort to secure from Madrid an extension,
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4723">[<a href="#xd32e4723">308</a>]</span>and that he was advising his Excellency to start a campaign in order to have an excuse
+for remaining, but it was further reported that for the first time his Excellency
+had disregarded the advice of his favorite, making it a point of honor not to retain
+for a single additional day the power that had been conferred upon him, a rumor which
+encouraged belief that the fiesta announced would take place; very soon. For the rest,
+Simoun remained unfathomable, since he had become very uncommunicative, showed himself
+seldom, and smiled mysteriously when the rumored fiesta was mentioned.
+</p>
+<p>“Come, Señor Sindbad,” Ben-Zayb had once rallied him, “dazzle us with something Yankee!
+You owe something to this country.”
+</p>
+<p>“Doubtless!” was Simoun’s response, with a dry smile.
+</p>
+<p>“You’ll throw the house wide open, eh?”
+</p>
+<p>“Maybe, but as I have no house—”
+</p>
+<p>“You ought to have secured Capitan Tiago’s, which Señor Pelaez got for nothing.”
+</p>
+<p>Simoun became silent, and from that time on he was often seen in the store of Don
+Timoteo Pelaez, with whom it was said he had entered into partnership. Some weeks
+afterward, in the month of April, it was rumored that Juanito Pelaez, Don Timoteo’s
+son, was going to marry Paulita Gomez, the girl coveted by Spaniards and foreigners.
+</p>
+<p>“Some men are lucky!” exclaimed other envious merchants. “To buy a house for nothing,
+sell his consignment of galvanized iron well, get into partnership with a Simoun,
+and marry his son to a rich heiress—just say if those aren’t strokes of luck that
+all honorable men don’t have!”
+</p>
+<p>“If you only knew whence came that luck of Señor Pelaez’s!” another responded, in
+a tone which indicated that the speaker did know. “It’s also assured that there’ll
+be a fiesta and on a grand scale,” was added with mystery.
+</p>
+<p>It was really true that Paulita was going to marry <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4736">[<a href="#xd32e4736">309</a>]</span>Juanito Pelaez. Her love for Isagani had gradually waned, like all first loves based
+on poetry and sentiment. The events of the pasquinades and the imprisonment of the
+youth had shorn him of all his charms. To whom would it have occurred to seek danger,
+to desire to share the fate of his comrades, to surrender himself, when every one
+was hiding and denying any complicity in the affair? It was quixotic, it was madness
+that no sensible person in Manila could pardon, and Juanito was quite right in ridiculing
+him, representing what a sorry figure he cut when he went to the Civil Government.
+Naturally, the brilliant Paulita could no longer love a young man who so erroneously
+understood social matters and whom all condemned. Then she began to reflect. Juanito
+was clever, capable, gay, shrewd, the son of a rich merchant of Manila, and a Spanish
+mestizo besides—if Don Timoteo was to be believed, a full-blooded Spaniard. On the
+other hand, Isagani was a provincial native who dreamed of forests infested with leeches,
+he was of doubtful family, with a priest for an uncle, who would perhaps be an enemy
+to luxury and balls, of which she was very fond. One beautiful morning therefore it
+occurred to her that she had been a downright fool to prefer him to his rival, and
+from that time on Pelaez’s hump steadily increased. Unconsciously, yet rigorously,
+Paulita was obeying the law discovered by Darwin, that the female surrenders herself
+to the fittest male, to him who knows how to adapt himself to the medium in which
+he lives, and to live in Manila there was no other like Pelaez, who from his infancy
+had had chicanery at his finger-tips. Lent passed with its Holy Week, its array of
+processions and pompous displays, without other novelty than a mysterious mutiny among
+the artillerymen, the cause of which was never disclosed. The houses of light materials
+were torn down in the presence of a troop of cavalry, ready to fall upon the owners
+in case they should offer resistance. There was a great deal of weeping and many lamentations,
+but the affair did not get beyond that. The curious, among <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4738">[<a href="#xd32e4738">310</a>]</span>them Simoun, went to see those who were left homeless, walking about indifferently
+and assuring each other that thenceforward they could sleep in peace.
+</p>
+<p>Towards the end of April, all the fears being now forgotten, Manila was engrossed
+with one topic: the fiesta that Don Timoteo Pelaez was going to celebrate at the wedding
+of his son, for which the General had graciously and condescendingly agreed to be
+the patron. Simoun was reported to have arranged the matter. The ceremony would be
+solemnized two days before the departure of the General, who would honor the house
+and make a present to the bridegroom. It was whispered that the jeweler would pour
+out cascades of diamonds and throw away handfuls of pearls in honor of his partner’s
+son, thus, since he could hold no fiesta of his own, as he was a bachelor and had
+no house, improving the opportunity to dazzle the Filipino people with a memorable
+farewell. All Manila prepared to be invited, and never did uneasiness take stronger
+hold of the mind than in view of the thought of not being among those bidden. Friendship
+with Simoun became a matter of dispute, and many husbands were forced by their wives
+to purchase bars of steel and sheets of galvanized iron in order to make friends with
+Don Timoteo Pelaez.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4742">[<a href="#xd32e4742">311</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch33" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e536">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XXXIII</h2>
+<h2 class="main">La Ultima Razón<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e4748src" href="#xd32e4748">1</a></h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">At last the great day arrived. During the morning Simoun had not left his house, busied
+as he was in packing his arms and his jewels. His fabulous wealth was already locked
+up in the big steel chest with its canvas cover, there remaining only a few cases
+containing bracelets and pins, doubtless gifts that he meant to make. He was going
+to leave with the Captain-General, who cared in no way to lengthen his stay, fearful
+of what people would say. Malicious ones insinuated that Simoun did not dare remain
+alone, since without the General’s support he did not care to expose himself to the
+vengeance of the many wretches he had exploited, all the more reason for which was
+the fact that the General who was coming was reported to be a model of rectitude and
+might make him disgorge his gains. The superstitious Indians, on the other hand, believed
+that Simoun was the devil who did not wish to separate himself from his prey. The
+pessimists winked maliciously and said, “The field laid waste, the locust leaves for
+other parts!” Only a few, a very few, smiled and said nothing.
+</p>
+<p>In the afternoon Simoun had given orders to his servant that if there appeared a young
+man calling himself Basilio he should be admitted at once. Then he shut himself up
+in his room and seemed to become lost in deep thought. Since his illness the jeweler’s
+countenance had become harder and gloomier, while the wrinkles between his eyebrows
+had <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4753">[<a href="#xd32e4753">312</a>]</span>deepened greatly. He did not hold himself so erect as formerly, and his head was bowed.
+</p>
+<p>So absorbed was he in his meditations that he did not hear a knock at the door, and
+it had to be repeated. He shuddered and called out, “Come in!”
+</p>
+<p>It was Basilio, but how altered! If the change that had taken place in Simoun during
+those two months was great, in the young student it was frightful. His cheeks were
+hollow, his hair unkempt, his clothing disordered. The tender melancholy had disappeared
+from his eyes, and in its place glittered a dark light, so that it might be said that
+he had died and his corpse had revived, horrified with what it had seen in eternity.
+If not crime, then the shadow of crime, had fixed itself upon his whole appearance.
+Simoun himself was startled and felt pity for the wretch.
+</p>
+<p>Without any greeting Basilio slowly advanced into the room, and in a voice that made
+the jeweler shudder said to him, “Señor Simoun, I’ve been a wicked son and a bad brother—I’ve
+overlooked the murder of one and the tortures of the other, and God has chastised
+me! Now there remains to me only one desire, and it is to return evil for evil, crime
+for crime, violence for violence!”
+</p>
+<p>Simoun listened in silence, while Basilio continued; “Four months ago you talked to
+me about your plans. I refused to take part in them, but I did wrong, you have been
+right. Three months and a half ago the revolution was on the point of breaking out,
+but I did not then care to participate in it, and the movement failed. In payment
+for my conduct I’ve been arrested and owe my liberty to your efforts only. You are
+right and now I’ve come to say to you: put a weapon in my hand and let the revolution
+come! I am ready to serve you, along with all the rest of the unfortunates.”
+</p>
+<p>The cloud that had darkened Simoun’s brow suddenly disappeared, a ray of triumph darted
+from his eyes, and like one who has found what he sought he exclaimed: “I’m right,
+yes, I’m right! Right and Justice are on my side, because <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4761">[<a href="#xd32e4761">313</a>]</span>my cause is that of the persecuted. Thanks, young man, thanks! You’ve come to clear
+away my doubts, to end my hesitation.”
+</p>
+<p>He had risen and his face was beaming. The zeal that had animated him when four months
+before he had explained his plans to Basilio in the wood of his ancestors reappeared
+in his countenance like a red sunset after a cloudy day.
+</p>
+<p>“Yes,” he resumed, “the movement failed and many have deserted me because they saw
+me disheartened and wavering at the supreme moment. I still cherished something in
+my heart, I was not the master of all my feelings, I still loved! Now everything is
+dead in me, no longer is there even a corpse sacred enough for me to respect its sleep.
+No longer will there be any vacillation, for you yourself, an idealistic youth, a
+gentle dove, understand the necessity and come to spur me to action. Somewhat late
+you have opened your eyes, for between you and me together we might have executed
+marvelous plans, I above in the higher circles spreading death amid perfume and gold,
+brutalizing the vicious and corrupting or paralyzing the few good, and you below among
+the people, among the young men, stirring them to life amid blood and tears. Our task,
+instead of being bloody and barbarous, would have been holy, perfect, artistic, and
+surely success would have crowned our efforts. But no intelligence would support me,
+I encountered fear or effeminacy among the enlightened classes, selfishness among
+the rich, simplicity among the youth, and only in the mountains, in the waste places,
+among the outcasts, have I found my men. But no matter now! If we can’t get a finished
+statue, rounded out in all its details, of the rough block we work upon let those
+to come take charge!”
+</p>
+<p>Seizing the arm of Basilio, who was listening without comprehending all he said, he
+led him to the laboratory where he kept his chemical mixtures. Upon the table was
+placed a large case made of dark shagreen, similar to those <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4768">[<a href="#xd32e4768">314</a>]</span>that hold the silver plate exchanged as gifts among the rich and powerful. Opening
+this, Simoun revealed to sight, upon a bottom of red satin, a lamp of very peculiar
+shape, Its body was in the form of a pomegranate as large as a man’s head, with fissures
+in it exposing to view the seeds inside, which were fashioned of enormous carnelians.
+The covering was of oxidized gold in exact imitation of the wrinkles on the fruit.
+</p>
+<p>Simoun took it out with great care and, removing the burner, exposed to view the interior
+of the tank, which was lined with steel two centimeters in thickness and which had
+a capacity of over a liter. Basilio questioned him with his eyes, for as yet he comprehended
+nothing. Without entering upon explanations, Simoun carefully took from a cabinet
+a flask and showed the young man the formula written upon it.
+</p>
+<p>“Nitro-glycerin!” murmured Basilio, stepping backward and instinctively thrusting
+his hands behind him. “Nitro-glycerin! Dynamite!” Beginning now to understand, he
+felt his hair stand on end.
+</p>
+<p>“Yes, nitro-glycerin!” repeated Simoun slowly, with his cold smile and a look of delight
+at the glass flask. “It’s also something more than nitro-glycerin—it’s concentrated
+tears, repressed hatred, wrongs, injustice, outrage. It’s the last resort of the weak,
+force against force, violence against violence. A moment ago I was hesitating, but
+you have come and decided me. This night the most dangerous tyrants will be blown
+to pieces, the irresponsible rulers that hide themselves behind God and the State,
+whose abuses remain unpunished because no one can bring them to justice. This night
+the Philippines will hear the explosion that will convert into rubbish the formless
+monument whose decay I have fostered.”
+</p>
+<p>Basilio was so terrified that his lips worked without producing any sound, his tongue
+was paralyzed, his throat parched. For the first time he was looking at the powerful
+liquid which he had heard talked of as a thing distilled <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4775">[<a href="#xd32e4775">315</a>]</span>in gloom by gloomy men, in open war against society. Now he had it before him, transparent
+and slightly yellowish, poured with great caution into the artistic pomegranate. Simoun
+looked to him like the jinnee of the <i>Arabian Nights</i> that sprang from the sea, he took on gigantic proportions, his head touched the sky,
+he made the house tremble and shook the whole city with a shrug of his shoulders.
+The pomegranate assumed the form of a colossal sphere, the fissures became hellish
+grins whence escaped names and glowing cinders. For the first time in his life Basilio
+was overcome with fright and completely lost his composure.
+</p>
+<p>Simoun, meanwhile, screwed on solidly a curious and complicated mechanism, put in
+place a glass chimney, then the bomb, and crowned the whole with an elegant shade.
+Then he moved away some distance to contemplate the effect, inclining his head now
+to one side, now to the other, thus better to appreciate its magnificent appearance.
+</p>
+<p>Noticing that Basilio was watching him with questioning and suspicious eyes, he said,
+“Tonight there will be a fiesta and this lamp will be placed in a little dining-kiosk
+that I’ve had constructed for the purpose. The lamp will give a brilliant light, bright
+enough to suffice for the illumination of the whole place by itself, but at the end
+of twenty minutes the light will fade, and then when some one tries to turn up the
+wick a cap of fulminate of mercury will explode, the pomegranate will blow up and
+with it the dining-room, in the roof and floor of which I have concealed sacks of
+powder, so that no one shall escape.”
+</p>
+<p>There wras a moment’s silence, while Simoun stared at his mechanism and Basilio scarcely
+breathed.
+</p>
+<p>“So my assistance is not needed,” observed the young man.
+</p>
+<p>“No, you have another mission to fulfill,” replied Simoun thoughtfully. “At nine the
+mechanism will have exploded and the report will have been heard in the country round,
+in the mountains, in the caves. The uprising that I had arranged with the artillerymen
+was a failure from lack <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4785">[<a href="#xd32e4785">316</a>]</span>of plan and timeliness, but this time it won’t be so. Upon hearing the explosion,
+the wretched and the oppressed, those who wander about pursued by force, will sally
+forth armed to join Cabesang Tales in Santa Mesa, whence they will fall upon the city,<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e4787src" href="#xd32e4787">2</a> while the soldiers, whom I have made to believe that the General is shamming an insurrection
+in order to remain, will issue from their barracks ready to fire upon whomsoever I
+may designate. Meanwhile, the cowed populace, thinking that the hour of massacre has
+come, will rush out prepared to kill or be killed, and as they have neither arms nor
+organization, you with some others will put yourself at their head and direct them
+to the warehouses of Quiroga, where I keep my rifles. Cabesang Tales and I will join
+one another in the city and take possession of it, while you in the suburbs will seize
+the bridges and throw up barricades, and then be ready to come to our aid to butcher
+not only those opposing the revolution but also every man who refuses to take up arms
+and join us.”
+</p>
+<p>“All?” stammered Basilio in a choking voice.
+</p>
+<p>“All!” repeated Simoun in a sinister tone. “All—Indians, mestizos, Chinese, Spaniards,
+all who are found to be without courage, without energy. The race must be renewed!
+Cowardly fathers will only breed slavish sons, and it wouldn’t be worth while to destroy
+and then try to rebuild with rotten materials. What, do you shudder? Do you tremble,
+do you fear to scatter death? What is death? What does a hecatomb of twenty thousand
+wretches signify? Twenty thousand miseries less, and millions of wretches saved from
+birth! The most timid ruler does not <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4798">[<a href="#xd32e4798">317</a>]</span>hesitate to dictate a law that produces misery and lingering death for thousands and
+thousands of prosperous and industrious subjects, happy perchance, merely to satisfy
+a caprice, a whim, his pride, and yet you shudder because in one night are to be ended
+forever the mental tortures of many helots, because a vitiated and paralytic people
+has to die to give place to another, young, active, full of energy!
+</p>
+<p>“What is death? Nothingness, or a dream? Can its specters be compared to the reality
+of the agonies of a whole miserable generation? The needful thing is to destroy the
+evil, to kill the dragon and bathe the new people in the blood, in order to make it
+strong and invulnerable. What else is the inexorable law of Nature, the law of strife
+in which the weak has to succumb so that the vitiated species be not perpetuated and
+creation thus travel backwards? Away then with effeminate scruples! Fulfill the eternal
+laws, foster them, and then the earth will be so much the more fecund the more it
+is fertilized with blood, and the thrones the more solid the more they rest upon crimes
+and corpses. Let there be no hesitation, no doubtings! What is the pain of death?
+A momentary sensation, perhaps confused, perhaps agreeable, like the transition from
+waking to sleep. What is it that is being destroyed? Evil, suffering—feeble weeds,
+in order to set in their place luxuriant plants. Do you call that destruction? I should
+call it creating, producing, nourishing, vivifying!”
+</p>
+<p>Such bloody sophisms, uttered with conviction and coolness, overwhelmed the youth,
+weakened as he was by more than three months in prison and blinded by his passion
+for revenge, so he was not in a mood to analyze the moral basis of the matter. Instead
+of replying that the worst and cowardliest of men is always something more than a
+plant, because he has a soul and an intelligence, which, however vitiated and brutalized
+they may be, can be redeemed; instead of replying that man has no right to dispose
+of one life for the benefit of another, that the right to life is inherent in every
+individual like the right to liberty and to <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4803">[<a href="#xd32e4803">318</a>]</span>light; instead of replying that if it is an abuse on the part of governments to punish
+in a culprit the faults and crimes to which they have driven him by their own negligence
+or stupidity, how much more so would it be in a man, however great and however unfortunate
+he might be, to punish in a wretched people the faults of its governments and its
+ancestors; instead of declaring that God alone can use such methods, that God can
+destroy because He can create, God who holds in His hands recompense, eternity, and
+the future, to justify His acts, and man never; instead of these reflections, Basilio
+merely interposed a cant reflection.
+</p>
+<p>“What will the world say at the sight of such butchery?”
+</p>
+<p>“The world will applaud, as usual, conceding the right of the strongest, the most
+violent!” replied Simoun with his cruel smile. “Europe applauded when the western
+nations sacrificed millions of Indians in America, and not by any means to found nations
+much more moral or more pacific: there is the North with its egotistic liberty, its
+lynch-law, its political frauds—the South with its turbulent republics, its barbarous
+revolutions, civil wars, pronunciamientos, as in its mother Spain! Europe applauded
+when the powerful Portugal despoiled the Moluccas, it applauds while England is destroying
+the primitive races in the Pacific to make room for its emigrants. Europe will applaud
+as the end of a drama, the close of a tragedy, is applauded, for the vulgar do not
+fix their attention on principles, they look only at results. Commit the crime well,
+and you will be admired and have more partizans than if you had carried out virtuous
+actions with modesty and timidity.”
+</p>
+<p>“Exactly,” rejoined the youth, “what does it matter to me, after all, whether they
+praise or censure, when this world takes no care of the oppressed, of the poor, and
+of weak womankind? What obligations have I to recognize toward society when it has
+recognized none toward me?”
+</p>
+<p>“That’s what I like to hear,” declared the tempter triumphantly. <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4810">[<a href="#xd32e4810">319</a>]</span>He took a revolver from a case and gave it to Basilio, saying, “At ten o’clock wait
+for me in front of the church of St. Sebastian to receive my final instructions. Ah,
+at nine you must be far, very far from Calle Anloague.”
+</p>
+<p>Basilio examined the weapon, loaded it, and placed it in the inside pocket of his
+coat, then took his leave with a curt, “I’ll see you later.”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4814">[<a href="#xd32e4814">320</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e4748">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e4748src">1</a></span> Ultima Razón de Reyes: the last argument of kings—force. (Expression attributed to
+Calderon de la Barca, the great Spanish dramatist.)—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e4748src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e4787">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e4787src">2</a></span> Curiously enough, and by what must have been more than a mere coincidence, this route
+through Santa Mesa from San Juan del Monte was the one taken by an armed party in
+their attempt to enter the city at the outbreak of the Katipunan rebellion on the
+morning of August 30, 1896. (Foreman’s <i>The Philippine Islands</i>, Chap. XXVI.)
+</p>
+<p class="footnote cont">It was also on the bridge connecting these two places that the first shot in the insurrection
+against American sovereignty was fired on the night of February 4, 1899.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e4787src" title="Return to note 2 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch34" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e546">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XXXIV</h2>
+<h2 class="main">The Wedding</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">Once in the street, Basilio began to consider how he might spend the time until the
+fatal hour arrived, for it was then not later than seven o’clock. It was the vacation
+period and all the students were back in their towns, Isagani being the only one who
+had not cared to leave, but he had disappeared that morning and no one knew his whereabouts—so
+Basilio had been informed when after leaving the prison he had gone to visit his friend
+and ask him for lodging. The young man did not know where to go, for he had no money,
+nothing but the revolver. The memory of the lamp filled his imagination, the great
+catastrophe that would occur within two hours. Pondering over this, he seemed to see
+the men who passed before his eyes walking without heads, and he felt a thrill of
+ferocious joy in telling himself that, hungry and destitute, he that night was going
+to be dreaded, that from a poor student and servant, perhaps the sun would see him
+transformed into some one terrible and sinister, standing upon pyramids of corpses,
+dictating laws to all those who were passing before his gaze now in magnificent carriages.
+He laughed like one condemned to death and patted the butt of the revolver. The boxes
+of cartridges were also in his pockets.
+</p>
+<p>A question suddenly occurred to him—where would the drama begin? In his bewilderment
+he had not thought of asking Simoun, but the latter had warned him to keep away from
+Calle Anloague. Then came a suspicion: that afternoon, upon leaving the prison, he
+had proceeded to the former house of Capitan Tiago to get his few personal effects
+and had found it transformed, prepared for a fiesta<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4823">[<a href="#xd32e4823">321</a>]</span>—the wedding of Juanito Pelaez! Simoun had spoken of a fiesta.
+</p>
+<p>At this moment he noticed passing in front of him a long line of carriages filled
+with ladies and gentlemen, conversing in a lively manner, and he even thought he could
+make out big bouquets of flowers, but he gave the detail no thought. The carriages
+were going toward Calle Rosario and in meeting those that came down off the Bridge
+of Spain had to move along slowly and stop frequently. In one he saw Juanito Pelaez
+at the side of a woman dressed in white with a transparent veil, in whom he recognized
+Paulita Gomez.
+</p>
+<p>“Paulita!” he ejaculated in surprise, realizing that it was indeed she, in a bridal
+gown, along with Juanito Pelaez, as though they were just coming from the church.
+“Poor Isagani!” he murmured, “what can have become of him?”
+</p>
+<p>He thought for a while about his friend, a great and generous soul, and mentally asked
+himself if it would not be well to tell him about the plan, then answered himself
+that Isagani would never take part in such a butchery. They had not treated Isagani
+as they had him.
+</p>
+<p>Then he thought that had there been no imprisonment, he would have been betrothed,
+or a husband, at this time, a licentiate in medicine, living and working in some corner
+of his province. The ghost of Juli, crushed in her fall, crossed his mind, and dark
+flames of hatred lighted his eyes; again he caressed the butt of the revolver, regretting
+that the terrible hour had not yet come. Just then he saw Simoun come out of the door
+of his house, carrying in his hands the case containing the lamp, carefully wrapped
+up, and enter a carriage, which then followed those bearing the bridal party. In order
+not to lose track of Simoun, Basilio took a good look at the cochero and with astonishment
+recognized in him the wretch who had driven him to San Diego, Sinong, the fellow maltreated
+by the Civil Guard, the same who had come to the prison to tell him about the occurrences
+in Tiani.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4830">[<a href="#xd32e4830">322</a>]</span></p>
+<p>Conjecturing that Calle Anloague was to be the scene of action, thither the youth
+directed his steps, hurrying forward and getting ahead of the carriages, which were,
+in fact, all moving toward the former house of Capitan Tiago—there they were assembling
+in search of a ball, but actually to dance in the air! Basilio smiled when he noticed
+the pairs of civil-guards who formed the escort, and from their number he could guess
+the importance of the fiesta and the guests. The house overflowed with people and
+poured floods of light from its windows, the entrance was carpeted and strewn with
+flowers. Upstairs there, perhaps in his former solitary room, an orchestra was playing
+lively airs, which did not completely drown the confused tumult of talk and laughter.
+</p>
+<p>Don Timoteo Pelaez was reaching the pinnacle of fortune, and the reality surpassed
+his dreams. He was, at last, marrying his son to the rich Gomez heiress, and, thanks
+to the money Simoun had lent him, he had royally furnished that big house, purchased
+for half its value, and was giving in it a splendid fiesta, with the foremost divinities
+of the Manila Olympus for his guests, to gild him with the light of their prestige.
+Since that morning there had been recurring to him, with the persistence of a popular
+song, some vague phrases that he had read in the communion service. “Now has the fortunate
+hour come! Now draws nigh the happy moment! Soon there will be fulfilled in you the
+admirable words of Simoun—‘I live, and yet not I alone, but the Captain-General liveth
+in me.’ ” The Captain-General the patron of his son! True, he had not attended the
+ceremony, where Don Custodio had represented him, but he would come to dine, he would
+bring a wedding-gift, a lamp which not even Aladdin’s—between you and me, Simoun was
+presenting the lamp. Timoteo, what more could you desire?
+</p>
+<p>The transformation that Capitan Tiago’s house had undergone was considerable—it had
+been richly repapered, while the smoke and the smell of opium had been completely
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4835">[<a href="#xd32e4835">323</a>]</span>eradicated. The immense sala, widened still more by the colossal mirrors that infinitely
+multiplied the lights of the chandeliers, was carpeted throughout, for the salons
+of Europe had carpets, and even though the floor was of wide boards brilliantly polished,
+a carpet it must have too, since nothing should be lacking. The rich furniture of
+Capitan Tiago had disappeared and in its place was to be seen another kind, in the
+style of Louis&nbsp;XV. Heavy curtains of red velvet, trimmed with gold, with the initials
+of the bridal couple worked on them, and upheld by garlands of artificial orange-blossoms,
+hung as portières and swept the floor with their wide fringes, likewise of gold. In
+the corners appeared enormous Japanese vases, alternating with those of Sèvres of
+a clear dark-blue, placed upon square pedestals of carved wood.
+</p>
+<p>The only decorations not in good taste were the screaming chromos which Don Timoteo
+had substituted for the old drawings and pictures of saints of Capitan Tiago. Simoun
+had been unable to dissuade him, for the merchant did not want oil-paintings—some
+one might ascribe them to Filipino artists! He, a patron of Filipino artists, never!
+On that point depended his peace of mind and perhaps his life, and he knew how to
+get along in the Philippines! It is true that he had heard foreign painters mentioned—Raphael,
+Murillo, Velasquez—but he did not know their addresses, and then they might prove
+to be somewhat seditious. With the chromos he ran no risk, as the Filipinos did not
+make them, they came cheaper, the effect was the same, if not better, the colors brighter
+and the execution very fine. Don’t say that Don Timoteo did not know how to comport
+himself in the Philippines!
+</p>
+<p>The large hallway was decorated with flowers, having been converted into a dining-room,
+with a long table for thirty persons in the center, and around the sides, pushed against
+the walls, other smaller ones for two or three persons each. Bouquets of flowers,
+pyramids of fruits among ribbons and lights, covered their centers. The groom’s place
+was designated <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4841">[<a href="#xd32e4841">324</a>]</span>by a bunch of roses and the bride’s by another of orange-blossoms and tuberoses. In
+the presence of so much finery and flowers one could imagine that nymphs in gauzy
+garments and Cupids with iridescent wings were going to serve nectar and ambrosia
+to aerial guests, to the sound of lyres and Aeolian harps.
+</p>
+<p>But the table for the greater gods was not there, being placed yonder in the middle
+of the wide azotea within a magnificent kiosk constructed especially for the occasion.
+A lattice of gilded wood over which clambered fragrant vines screened the interior
+from the eyes of the vulgar without impeding the free circulation of air to preserve
+the coolness necessary at that season. A raised platform lifted the table above the
+level of the others at which the ordinary mortals were going to dine and an arch decorated
+by the best artists would protect the august heads from the jealous gaze of the stars.
+</p>
+<p>On this table were laid only seven plates. The dishes were of solid silver, the cloth
+and napkins of the finest linen, the wines the most costly and exquisite. Don Timoteo
+had sought the most rare and expensive in everything, nor would he have hesitated
+at crime had he been assured that the Captain-General liked to eat human flesh.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4846">[<a href="#xd32e4846">325</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch35" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e556">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XXXV</h2>
+<h2 class="main">The Fiesta</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first"></p>
+<blockquote lang="es">“Danzar sobre un volcán.”</blockquote><p>
+</p>
+<p>By seven in the evening the guests had begun to arrive: first, the lesser divinities,
+petty government officials, clerks, and merchants, with the most ceremonious greetings
+and the gravest airs at the start, as if they were parvenus, for so much light, so
+many decorations, and so much glassware had some effect. Afterwards, they began to
+be more at ease, shaking their fists playfully, with pats on the shoulders, and even
+familiar slaps on the back. Some, it is true, adopted a rather disdainful air, to
+let it be seen that they were accustomed to better things—of course they were! There
+was one goddess who yawned, for she found everything vulgar and even remarked that
+she was ravenously hungry, while another quarreled with her god, threatening to box
+his ears.
+</p>
+<p>Don Timoteo bowed here and bowed there, scattered his best smiles, tightened his belt,
+stepped backward, turned halfway round, then completely around, and so on again and
+again, until one goddess could not refrain from remarking to her neighbor, under cover
+of her fan: “My dear, how important the old man is! Doesn’t he look like a jumping-jack?”
+</p>
+<p>Later came the bridal couple, escorted by Doña Victorina and the rest of the party.
+Congratulations, hand-shakings, patronizing pats for the groom: for the bride, insistent
+stares and anatomical observations on the part of the men, with analyses of her gown,
+her toilette, speculations as to her health and strength on the part of the women.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4859">[<a href="#xd32e4859">326</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“Cupid and Psyche appearing on Olympus,” thought Ben-Zayb, making a mental note of
+the comparison to spring it at some better opportunity. The groom had in fact the
+mischievous features of the god of love, and with a little good-will his hump, which
+the severity of his frock coat did not altogether conceal, could be taken for a quiver.
+</p>
+<p>Don Timoteo began to feel his belt squeezing him, the corns on his feet began to ache,
+his neck became tired, but still the General had not come. The greater gods, among
+them Padre Irene and Padre Salvi, had already arrived, it was true, but the chief
+thunderer was still lacking. The poor man became uneasy, nervous; his heart beat violently,
+but still he had to bow and smile; he sat down, he arose, failed to hear what was
+said to him, did not say what he meant. In the meantime, an amateur god made remarks
+to him about his chromos, criticizing them with the statement that they spoiled the
+walls.
+</p>
+<p>“Spoil the walls!” repeated Don Timoteo, with a smile and a desire to choke him. “But
+they were made in Europe and are the most costly I could get in Manila! Spoil the
+walls!” Don Timoteo swore to himself that on the very next day he would present for
+payment all the chits that the critic had signed in his store.
+</p>
+<p>Whistles resounded, the galloping of horses was heard—at last! “The General! The Captain-General!”
+</p>
+<p>Pale with emotion, Don Timoteo, dissembling the pain of his corns and accompanied
+by his son and some of the greater gods, descended to receive the Mighty Jove. The
+pain at his belt vanished before the doubts that now assailed him: should he frame
+a smile or affect gravity; should he extend his hand or wait for the General to offer
+his? <i>Carambas!</i> Why had nothing of this occurred to him before, so that he might have consulted his
+good friend Simoun?
+</p>
+<p>To conceal his agitation, he whispered to his son in a low, shaky voice, “Have you
+a speech prepared?”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4871">[<a href="#xd32e4871">327</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“Speeches are no longer in vogue, papa, especially on such an occasion as this.”
+</p>
+<p>Jupiter arrived in the company of Juno, who was converted into a tower of artificial
+lights—with diamonds in her hair, diamonds around her neck, on her arms, on her shoulders,
+she was literally covered with diamonds. She was arrayed in a magnificent silk gown
+having a long train decorated with embossed flowers.
+</p>
+<p>His Excellency literally took possession of the house, as Don Timoteo stammeringly
+begged him to do.<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e4876src" href="#xd32e4876">1</a> The orchestra played the royal march while the divine couple majestically ascended
+the carpeted stairway.
+</p>
+<p>Nor was his Excellency’s gravity altogether affected. Perhaps for the first time since
+his arrival in the islands he felt sad, a strain of melancholy tinged his thoughts.
+This was the last triumph of his three years of government, and within two days he
+would descend forever from such an exalted height. What was he leaving behind? His
+Excellency did not care to turn his head backwards, but preferred to look ahead, to
+gaze into the future. Although he was carrying away a fortune, large sums to his credit
+were awaiting him in European banks, and he had residences, yet he had injured many,
+he had made enemies at the Court, the high official was waiting for him there. Other
+Generals had enriched themselves as rapidly as he, and now they were ruined. Why not
+stay longer, as Simoun had advised him to do? No, good taste before everything else.
+The bows, moreover, were not now so profound as before, he noticed insistent stares
+and even looks of dislike, but still he replied affably and even attempted to smile.
+</p>
+<p>“It’s plain that the sun is setting,” observed Padre Irene in Ben-Zayb’s ear. “Many
+now stare him in the face.”
+</p>
+<p>The devil with the curate—that was just what he was going to remark!
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4883">[<a href="#xd32e4883">328</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“My dear,” murmured into the ear of a neighbor the lady who had referred to Don Timoteo
+as a jumping-jack, “did you ever see such a skirt?”
+</p>
+<p>“Ugh, the curtains from the Palace!”
+</p>
+<p>“You don’t say! But it’s true! They’re carrying everything away. You’ll see how they
+make wraps out of the carpets.”
+</p>
+<p>“That only goes to show that she has talent and taste,” observed her husband, reproving
+her with a look. “Women should be economical.” This poor god was still suffering from
+the dressmaker’s bill.
+</p>
+<p>“My dear, give me curtains at twelve pesos a yard, and you’ll see if I put on these
+rags!” retorted the goddess in pique. “Heavens! You can talk when you have done something
+fine like that to give you the right!”
+</p>
+<p>Meanwhile, Basilio stood before the house, lost in the throng of curious spectators,
+counting those who alighted from their carriages. When he looked upon so many persons,
+happy and confident, when he saw the bride and groom followed by their train of fresh
+and innocent little girls, and reflected that they were going to meet there a horrible
+death, he was sorry and felt his hatred waning within him. He wanted to save so many
+innocents, he thought of notifying the police, but a carriage drove up to set down
+Padre Salvi and Padre Irene, both beaming with content, and like a passing cloud his
+good intentions vanished. “What does it matter to me?” he asked himself. “Let the
+righteous suffer with the sinners.”
+</p>
+<p>Then he added, to silence his scruples: “I’m not an informer, I mustn’t abuse the
+confidence he has placed in me. I owe him, <i>him</i> more than I do <i>them</i>: he dug my mother’s grave, they killed her! What have I to do with them? I did everything
+possible to be good and useful, I tried to forgive and forget, I suffered every imposition,
+and only asked that they leave me in peace. I got in no one’s way. What have they
+done to me? Let their mangled limbs fly through the air! We’ve suffered enough.”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4897">[<a href="#xd32e4897">329</a>]</span></p>
+<p>Then he saw Simoun alight with the terrible lamp in his hands, saw him cross the entrance
+with bowed head, as though deep in thought. Basilio felt his heart beat fainter, his
+feet and hands turn cold, while the black silhouette of the jeweler assumed fantastic
+shapes enveloped in flames. There at the foot of the stairway Simoun checked his steps,
+as if in doubt, and Basilio held his breath. But the hesitation was transient—Simoun
+raised his head, resolutely ascended the stairway, and disappeared.
+</p>
+<p>It then seemed to the student that the house was going to blow up at any moment, and
+that walls, lamps, guests, roof, windows, orchestra, would be hurtling through the
+air like a handful of coals in the midst of an infernal explosion. He gazed about
+him and fancied that he saw corpses in place of idle spectators, he saw them torn
+to shreds, it seemed to him that the air was filled with flames, but his calmer self
+triumphed over this transient hallucination, which was due somewhat to his hunger.
+</p>
+<p>“Until he comes out, there’s no danger,” he said to himself. “The Captain-General
+hasn’t arrived yet.”
+</p>
+<p>He tried to appear calm and control the convulsive trembling in his limbs, endeavoring
+to divert his thoughts to other things. Something within was ridiculing him, saying,
+“If you tremble now, before the supreme moment, how will you conduct yourself when
+you see blood flowing, houses burning, and bullets whistling?”
+</p>
+<p>His Excellency arrived, but the young man paid no attention to him. He was watching
+the face of Simoun, who was among those that descended to receive him, and he read
+in that implacable countenance the sentence of death for all those men, so that fresh
+terror seized upon him. He felt cold, he leaned against the wall, and, with his eyes
+fixed on the windows and his ears cocked, tried to guess what might be happening.
+In the sala he saw the crowd surround Simoun to look at the lamp, he heard congratulations
+and exclamations of admiration—the words “dining-room,” “novelty,” were repeated many
+times—he saw <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4904">[<a href="#xd32e4904">330</a>]</span>the General smile and conjectured that the novelty was to be exhibited that very night,
+by the jeweler’s arrangement, on the table whereat his Excellency was to dine. Simoun
+disappeared, followed by a crowd of admirers.
+</p>
+<p>At that supreme moment his good angel triumphed, he forgot his hatreds, he forgot
+Juli, he wanted to save the innocent. Come what might, he would cross the street and
+try to enter. But Basilio had forgotten that he was miserably dressed. The porter
+stopped him and accosted him roughly, and finally, upon his insisting, threatened
+to call the police.
+</p>
+<p>Just then Simoun came down, slightly pale, and the porter turned from Basilio to salute
+the jeweler as though he had been a saint passing. Basilio realized from the expression
+of Simoun’s face that he was leaving the fated house forever, that the lamp was lighted.
+<i>Alea jacta est!</i> Seized by the instinct of self-preservation, he thought then of saving himself. It
+might occur to any of the guests through curiosity to tamper with the wick and then
+would come the explosion to overwhelm them all. Still he heard Simoun say to the cochero,
+“The Escolta, hurry!”
+</p>
+<p>Terrified, dreading that he might at any moment hear the awful explosion, Basilio
+hurried as fast as his legs would carry him to get away from the accursed spot, but
+his legs seemed to lack the necessary agility, his feet slipped on the sidewalk as
+though they were moving but not advancing. The people he met blocked the way, and
+before he had gone twenty steps he thought that at least five minutes had elapsed.
+</p>
+<p>Some distance away he stumbled against a young man who was standing with his head
+thrown back, gazing fixedly at the house, and in him he recognized Isagani. “What
+are you doing here?” he demanded. “Come away!”
+</p>
+<p>Isagani stared at him vaguely, smiled sadly, and again turned his gaze toward the
+open balconies, across which was revealed the ethereal silhouette of the bride clinging
+to the groom’s arm as they moved slowly out of sight.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4916">[<a href="#xd32e4916">331</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“Come, Isagani, let’s get away from that house. Come!” Basilio urged in a hoarse voice,
+catching his friend by the arm.
+</p>
+<p>Isagani gently shook himself free and continued to stare with the same sad smile upon
+his lips.
+</p>
+<p>“For God’s sake, let’s get away from here!”
+</p>
+<p>“Why should I go away? Tomorrow it will not be she.”
+</p>
+<p>There was so much sorrow in those words that Basilio for a moment forgot his own terror.
+“Do you want to die?” he demanded.
+</p>
+<p>Isagani shrugged his shoulders and continued to gaze toward the house.
+</p>
+<p>Basilio again tried to drag him away. “Isagani, Isagani, listen to me! Let’s not waste
+any time! That house is mined, it’s going to blow up at any moment, by the least imprudent
+act, the least curiosity! Isagani, all will perish in its ruins.”
+</p>
+<p>“In its ruins?” echoed Isagani, as if trying to understand, but without removing his
+gaze from the window.
+</p>
+<p>“Yes, in its ruins, yes, Isagani! For God’s sake, come! I’ll explain afterwards. Come!
+One who has been more unfortunate than either you or I has doomed them all. Do you
+see that white, clear light, like an electric lamp, shining from the azotea? It’s
+the light of death! A lamp charged with dynamite, in a mined dining-room, will burst
+and not a rat will escape alive. Come!”
+</p>
+<p>“No,” answered Isagani, shaking his head sadly. “I want to stay here, I want to see
+her for the last time. Tomorrow, you see, she will be something different.”
+</p>
+<p>“Let fate have its way!” Basilio then exclaimed, hurrying away.
+</p>
+<p>Isagani watched his friend rush away with a precipitation that indicated real terror,
+but continued to stare toward the charmed window, like the cavalier of Toggenburg
+waiting for his sweetheart to appear, as Schiller tells. Now the sala was deserted,
+all having repaired to the dining-rooms, <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4931">[<a href="#xd32e4931">332</a>]</span>and it occurred to Isagani that Basilio’s fears may have been well-founded. He recalled
+the terrified countenance of him who was always so calm and composed, and it set him
+to thinking.
+</p>
+<p>Suddenly an idea appeared clear in his imagination—the house was going to blow up
+and Paulita was there, Paulita was going to die a frightful death. In the presence
+of this idea everything was forgotten: jealousy, suffering, mental torture, and the
+generous youth thought only of his love. Without reflecting, without hesitation, he
+ran toward the house, and thanks to his stylish clothes and determined mien, easily
+secured admittance.
+</p>
+<p>While these short scenes were occurring in the street, in the dining-kiosk of the
+greater gods there was passed from hand to hand a piece of parchment on which were
+written in red ink these fateful words:
+</p>
+<div class="lgouter">
+<p class="line"><i>Mene, Tekel, Phares</i><a class="noteRef" id="xd32e4938src" href="#xd32e4938">2</a>
+</p>
+<p class="line"><i>Juan Crisostomo Ibarra</i></p>
+</div>
+<p class="first">“Juan Crisostomo Ibarra? Who is he?” asked his Excellency, handing the paper to his
+neighbor.
+</p>
+<p>“A joke in very bad taste!” exclaimed Don Custodio. “To sign the name of a filibuster
+dead more than ten years!”
+</p>
+<p>“A filibuster!”
+</p>
+<p>“It’s a seditious joke!”
+</p>
+<p>“There being ladies present—”
+</p>
+<p>Padre Irene looked around for the joker and saw Padre Salvi, who was seated at the
+right of the Countess, turn as white as his napkin, while he stared at the mysterious
+words with bulging eyes. The scene of the sphinx recurred to him.
+</p>
+<p>“What’s the matter, Padre Salvi?” he asked. “Do you recognize your friend’s signature?”
+</p>
+<p>Padre Salvi did not reply. He made an effort to speak <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4953">[<a href="#xd32e4953">333</a>]</span>and without being conscious of what he was doing wiped his forehead with his napkin.
+</p>
+<p>“What has happened to your Reverence?”
+</p>
+<p>“It is his very handwriting!” was the whispered reply in a scarcely perceptible voice.
+“It’s the very handwriting of Ibarra.” Leaning against the back of his chair, he let
+his arms fall as though all strength had deserted him.
+</p>
+<p>Uneasiness became converted into fright, they all stared at one another without uttering
+a single word. His Excellency started to rise, but apprehending that such a move would
+be ascribed to fear, controlled himself and looked about him. There were no soldiers
+present, even the waiters were unknown to him.
+</p>
+<p>“Let’s go on eating, gentlemen,” he exclaimed, “and pay no attention to the joke.”
+But his voice, instead of reassuring, increased the general uneasiness, for it trembled.
+</p>
+<p>“I don’t suppose that that <i>Mene, Tekel, Phares</i>, means that we’re to be assassinated tonight?” speculated Don Custodio.
+</p>
+<p>All remained motionless, but when he added, “Yet they might poison us,” they leaped
+up from their chairs.
+</p>
+<p>The light, meanwhile, had begun slowly to fade. “The lamp is going out,” observed
+the General uneasily. “Will you turn up the wick, Padre Irene?”
+</p>
+<p>But at that instant, with the swiftness of a flash of lightning, a figure rushed in,
+overturning a chair and knocking a servant down, and in the midst of the general surprise
+seized the lamp, rushed to the azotea, and threw it into the river. The whole thing
+happened in a second and the dining-kiosk was left in darkness.
+</p>
+<p>The lamp had already struck the water before the servants could cry out, “Thief, thief!”
+and rush toward the azotea. “A revolver!” cried one of them. “A revolver, quick! After
+the thief!”
+</p>
+<p>But the figure, more agile than they, had already mounted the balustrade and before
+a light could be brought, precipitated itself into the river, striking the water with
+a loud splash.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4970">[<a href="#xd32e4970">334</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e4876">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e4876src">1</a></span> Spanish etiquette requires a host to welcome his guest with the conventional phrase:
+“The house belongs to you.”—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e4876src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e4938">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e4938src">2</a></span> The handwriting on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast, foretelling the destruction of
+Babylon. Daniel, v, 25–28.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e4938src" title="Return to note 2 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch36" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e566">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XXXVI</h2>
+<h2 class="main">Ben-Zayb’s Afflictions</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">Immediately upon hearing of the incident, after lights had been brought and the scarcely
+dignified attitudes of the startled gods revealed, Ben-Zayb, filled with holy indignation,
+and with the approval of the press-censor secured beforehand, hastened home—an entresol
+where he lived in a mess with others—to write an article that would be the sublimest
+ever penned under the skies of the Philippines. The Captain-General would leave disconsolate
+if he did not first enjoy his dithyrambs, and this Ben-Zayb, in his kindness of heart,
+could not allow. Hence he sacrificed the dinner and ball, nor did he sleep that night.
+</p>
+<p>Sonorous exclamations of horror, of indignation, to fancy that the world was smashing
+to pieces and the stars, the eternal stars, were clashing together! Then a mysterious
+introduction, filled with allusions, veiled hints, then an account of the affair,
+and the final peroration. He multiplied the flourishes and exhausted all his euphemisms
+in describing the drooping shoulders and the tardy baptism of salad his Excellency
+had received on his Olympian brow, he eulogized the agility with which the General
+had recovered a vertical position, placing his head where his legs had been, and vice
+versa, then intoned a hymn to Providence for having so solicitously guarded those
+sacred bones. The paragraph turned out to be so perfect that his Excellency appeared
+as a hero, and fell higher, as Victor Hugo said.
+</p>
+<p>He wrote, erased, added, and polished, so that, without wanting in veracity—this was
+his special merit as a <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4979">[<a href="#xd32e4979">335</a>]</span>journalist—the whole would be an epic, grand for the seven gods, cowardly and base
+for the unknown thief, “who had executed himself, terror-stricken, and in the very
+act convinced of the enormity of his crime.”
+</p>
+<p>He explained Padre Irene’s act of plunging under the table as “an impulse of innate
+valor, which the habit of a God of peace and gentleness, worn throughout a whole life,
+had been unable to extinguish,” for Padre Irene had tried to hurl himself upon the
+thief and had taken a straight course along the submensal route. In passing, he spoke
+of submarine passages, mentioned a project of Don Custodio’s, called attention to
+the liberal education and wide travels of the priest. Padre Salvi’s swoon was the
+excessive sorrow that took possession of the virtuous Franciscan to see the little
+fruit borne among the Indians by his pious sermons, while the immobility and fright
+of the other guests, among them the Countess, who “sustained” Padre Salvi (she grabbed
+him), were the serenity and sang-froid of heroes, inured to danger in the performance
+of their duties, beside whom the Roman senators surprised by the Gallic invaders were
+nervous schoolgirls frightened at painted cockroaches.
+</p>
+<p>Afterwards, to form a contrast, the picture of the thief: fear, madness, confusion,
+the fierce look, the distorted features, and—force of moral superiority in the race—his
+religious awe to see assembled there such august personages! Here came in opportunely
+a long imprecation, a harangue, a diatribe against the perversion of good customs,
+hence the necessity of a permanent military tribunal, “a declaration of martial law
+within the limits already so declared, special legislation, energetic and repressive,
+because it is in every way needful, it is of imperative importance to impress upon
+the malefactors and criminals that if the heart is generous and paternal for those
+who are submissive and obedient to the law, the hand is strong, firm, inexorable,
+hard, and severe for those who against all reason fail to respect it and who insult
+the sacred institutions of the <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4984">[<a href="#xd32e4984">336</a>]</span>fatherland. Yes, gentlemen, this is demanded not only for the welfare of these islands,
+not only for the welfare of all mankind, but also in the name of Spain, the honor
+of the Spanish name, the prestige of the Iberian people, because before all things
+else Spaniards we are, and the flag of Spain,” etc.
+</p>
+<p>He terminated the article with this farewell: “Go in peace, gallant warrior, you who
+with expert hand have guided the destinies of this country in such calamitous times!
+Go in peace to breathe the balmy breezes of Manzanares!<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e4988src" href="#xd32e4988">1</a> We shall remain here like faithful sentinels to venerate your memory, to admire your
+wise dispositions, to avenge the infamous attempt upon your splendid gift, which we
+will recover even if we have to dry up the seas! Such a precious relic will be for
+this country an eternal monument to your splendor, your presence of mind, your gallantry!”
+</p>
+<p>In this rather confused way he concluded the article and before dawn sent it to the
+printing-office, of course with the censor’s permit. Then he went to sleep like Napoleon,
+after he had arranged the plan for the battle of Jena.
+</p>
+<p>But at dawn he was awakened to have the sheets of copy returned with a note from the
+editor saying that his Excellency had positively and severely forbidden any mention
+of the affair, and had further ordered the denial of any versions and comments that
+might get abroad, discrediting them as exaggerated rumors.
+</p>
+<p>To Ben-Zayb this blow was the murder of a beautiful and sturdy child, born and nurtured
+with such great pain and fatigue. Where now hurl the Catilinarian pride, the splendid
+exhibition of warlike crime-avenging materials? And to think that within a month or
+two he was going to leave the Philippines, and the article could not be published
+in Spain, since how could he say those things about the criminals of Madrid, where
+other ideas prevailed, where <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e4995">[<a href="#xd32e4995">337</a>]</span>extenuating circumstances were sought, where facts were weighed, where there were
+juries, and so on? Articles such as his were like certain poisonous rums that are
+manufactured in Europe, good enough to be sold among the negroes, <i>good for negroes</i>,<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e4999src" href="#xd32e4999">2</a> with the difference that if the negroes did not drink them they would not be destroyed,
+while Ben-Zayb’s articles, whether the Filipinos read them or not, had their effect.
+</p>
+<p>“If only some other crime might be committed today or tomorrow,” he mused.
+</p>
+<p>With the thought of that child dead before seeing the light, those frozen buds, and
+feeling his eyes fill with tears, he dressed himself to call upon the editor. But
+the editor shrugged his shoulders; his Excellency had forbidden it because if it should
+be divulged that seven of the greater gods had let themselves be surprised and robbed
+by a nobody, while they brandished knives and forks, that would endanger the integrity
+of the fatherland! So he had ordered that no search be made for the lamp or the thief,
+and had recommended to his successors that they should not run the risk of dining
+in any private house, without being surrounded by halberdiers and guards. As those
+who knew anything about the events that night in Don Timoteo’s house were for the
+most part military officials and government employees, it was not difficult to suppress
+the affair in public, for it concerned the integrity of the fatherland. Before this
+name Ben-Zayb bowed his head heroically, thinking about Abraham, Guzman El Bueno,<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e5006src" href="#xd32e5006">3</a> or at least, Brutus and other heroes of antiquity.
+</p>
+<p>Such a sacrifice could not remain unrewarded, the gods of journalism being pleased
+with Abraham Ben-Zayb. Almost upon the hour came the reporting angel bearing the sacrificial
+lamb in the shape of an assault committed at a country-house on the Pasig, where certain
+friars were <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5011">[<a href="#xd32e5011">338</a>]</span>spending the heated season. Here was his opportunity and Ben-Zayb praised his gods.
+</p>
+<p>“The robbers got over two thousand pesos, leaving badly wounded one friar and two
+servants. The curate defended himself as well as he could behind a chair, which was
+smashed in his hands.”
+</p>
+<p>“Wait, wait!” said Ben-Zayb, taking notes. “Forty or fifty outlaws traitorously—revolvers,
+bolos, shotguns, pistols—lion at bay—chair—splinters flying—barbarously wounded—ten
+thousand pesos!”
+</p>
+<p>So great was his enthusiasm that he was not content with mere reports, but proceeded
+in person to the scene of the crime, composing on the road a Homeric description of
+the fight. A harangue in the mouth of the leader? A scornful defiance on the part
+of the priest? All the metaphors and similes applied to his Excellency, Padre Irene,
+and Padre Salvi would exactly fit the wounded friar and the description of the thief
+would serve for each of the outlaws. The imprecation could be expanded, since he could
+talk of religion, of the faith, of charity, of the ringing of bells, of what the Indians
+owed to the friars, he could get sentimental and melt into Castelarian<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e5017src" href="#xd32e5017">4</a> epigrams and lyric periods. The señoritas of the city would read the article and
+murmur, “Ben-Zayb, bold as a lion and tender as a lamb!”
+</p>
+<p>But when he reached the scene, to his great astonishment he learned that the wounded
+friar was no other than Padre Camorra, sentenced by his Provincial to expiate in the
+pleasant country-house on the banks of the Pasig his pranks in Tiani. He had a slight
+scratch on his hand and a bruise on his head received from flattening himself out
+on the floor. The robbers numbered three or four, armed only with bolos, the sum stolen
+fifty pesos!
+</p>
+<p>“It won’t do!” exclaimed Ben-Zayb. “Shut up! You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
+</p>
+<p>“How don’t I know, <i>puñales?</i>”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5026">[<a href="#xd32e5026">339</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“Don’t be a fool—the robbers must have numbered more.”
+</p>
+<p>“You ink-slinger—”
+</p>
+<p>So they had quite an altercation. What chiefly concerned Ben-Zayb was not to throw
+away the article, to give importance to the affair, so that he could use the peroration.
+</p>
+<p>But a fearful rumor cut short their dispute. The robbers caught had made some important
+revelations. One of the outlaws under <i>Matanglawin</i> (Cabesang Tales) had made an appointment with them to join his band in Santa Mesa,
+thence to sack the conventos and houses of the wealthy. They would be guided by a
+Spaniard, tall and sunburnt, with white hair, who said that he was acting under the
+orders of the General, whose great friend he was, and they had been further assured
+that the artillery and various regiments would join them, wherefore they were to entertain
+no fear at all. The tulisanes would be pardoned and have a third part of the booty
+assigned to them. The signal was to have been a cannon-shot, but having waited for
+it in vain the tulisanes, thinking themselves deceived, separated, some going back
+to their homes, some returning to the mountains vowing vengeance on the Spaniard,
+who had thus failed twice to keep his word. Then they, the robbers caught, had decided
+to do something on their own account, attacking the country-house that they found
+closest at hand, resolving religiously to give two-thirds of the booty to the Spaniard
+with white hair, if perchance he should call upon them for it.
+</p>
+<p>The description being recognized as that of Simoun, the declaration was received as
+an absurdity and the robber subjected to all kinds of tortures, including the electric
+machine, for his impious blasphemy. But news of the disappearance of the jeweler having
+attracted the attention of the whole Escolta, and the sacks of powder and great quantities
+of cartridges having been discovered in his house, the story began to wear an appearance
+of truth. Mystery began to enwrap the affair, enveloping it in clouds; there <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5037">[<a href="#xd32e5037">340</a>]</span>were whispered conversations, coughs, suspicious looks, suggestive comments, and trite
+second-hand remarks. Those who were on the inside were unable to get over their astonishment,
+they put on long faces, turned pale, and but little was wanting for many persons to
+lose their minds in realizing certain things that had before passed unnoticed.
+</p>
+<p>“We’ve had a narrow escape! Who would have said—”
+</p>
+<p>In the afternoon Ben-Zayb, his pockets filled with revolvers and cartridges, went
+to see Don Custodio, whom he found hard at work over a project against American jewelers.
+In a hushed voice he whispered between the palms of his hands into the journalist’s
+ear mysterious words.
+</p>
+<p>“Really?” questioned Ben-Zayb, slapping his hand on his pocket and paling visibly.
+</p>
+<p>“Wherever he may be found—” The sentence was completed with an expressive pantomime.
+Don Custodio raised both arms to the height of his face, with the right more bent
+than the left, turned the palms of his hands toward the floor, closed one eye, and
+made two movements in advance. “Ssh! Ssh!” he hissed.
+</p>
+<p>“And the diamonds?” inquired Ben-Zayb.
+</p>
+<p>“If they find him—” He went through another pantomime with the fingers of his right
+hand, spreading them out and clenching them together like the closing of a fan, clutching
+out with them somewhat in the manner of the wings of a wind-mill sweeping imaginary
+objects toward itself with practised skill. Ben-Zayb responded with another pantomime,
+opening his eyes wide, arching his eyebrows and sucking in his breath eagerly as though
+nutritious air had just been discovered.
+</p>
+<p>“Sssh!”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5047">[<a href="#xd32e5047">341</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e4988">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e4988src">1</a></span> A town in Ciudad Real province, Spain.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e4988src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e4999">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e4999src">2</a></span> The italicized words are in English in the original.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e4999src" title="Return to note 2 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e5006">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e5006src">3</a></span> A Spanish hero, whose chief exploit was the capture of Gibraltar from the Moors in
+1308.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e5006src" title="Return to note 3 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e5017">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e5017src">4</a></span> Emilio Castelar (1832–1899), generally regarded as the greatest of Spanish orators.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e5017src" title="Return to note 4 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch37" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e576">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XXXVII</h2>
+<h2 class="main">The Mystery</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first"></p>
+<blockquote lang="es">Todo se sabe</blockquote><p>
+</p>
+<p>Notwithstanding so many precautions, rumors reached the public, even though quite
+changed and mutilated. On the following night they were the theme of comment in the
+house of Orenda, a rich jewel merchant in the industrious district of Santa Cruz,
+and the numerous friends of the family gave attention to nothing else. They were not
+indulging in cards, or playing the piano, while little Tinay, the youngest of the
+girls, became bored playing <i>chongka</i> by herself, without being able to understand the interest awakened by assaults, conspiracies,
+and sacks of powder, when there were in the seven holes so many beautiful cowries
+that seemed to be winking at her in unison and smiled with their tiny mouths half-opened,
+begging to be carried up to the <i>home</i>. Even Isagani, who, when he came, always used to play with her and allow himself
+to be beautifully cheated, did not come at her call, for Isagani was gloomily and
+silently listening to something Chichoy the silversmith was relating. Momoy, the betrothed
+of Sensia, the eldest of the daughters—a pretty and vivacious girl, rather given to
+joking—had left the window where he was accustomed to spend his evenings in amorous
+discourse, and this action seemed to be very annoying to the lory whose cage hung
+from the eaves there, the lory endeared to the house from its ability to greet everybody
+in the morning with marvelous phrases of love. Capitana Loleng, the energetic and
+intelligent Capitana Loleng, had her account-book open before her, but she <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5062">[<a href="#xd32e5062">342</a>]</span>neither read nor wrote in it, nor was her attention fixed on the trays of loose pearls,
+nor on the diamonds—she had completely forgotten herself and was all ears. Her husband
+himself, the great Capitan Toringoy,—a transformation of the name Domingo,—the happiest
+man in the district, without other occupation than to dress well, eat, loaf, and gossip,
+while his whole family worked and toiled, had not gone to join his coterie, but was
+listening between fear and emotion to the hair-raising news of the lank Chichoy.
+</p>
+<p>Nor was reason for all this lacking. Chichoy had gone to deliver some work for Don
+Timoteo Pelaez, a pair of earrings for the bride, at the very time when they were
+tearing down the kiosk that on the previous night had served as a dining-room for
+the foremost officials. Here Chichoy turned pale and his hair stood on end.
+</p>
+<p>“<i>Nakú</i>!” he exclaimed, “sacks and sacks of powder, sacks of powder under the floor, in the
+roof, under the table, under the chairs, everywhere! It’s lucky none of the workmen
+were smoking.”
+</p>
+<p>“Who put those sacks of powder there?” asked Capitana Loleng, who was brave and did
+not turn pale, as did the enamored Momoy. But Momoy had attended the wedding, so his
+posthumous emotion can be appreciated: he had been near the kiosk.
+</p>
+<p>“That’s what no one can explain,” replied Chichoy. “Who would have any interest in
+breaking up the fiesta? There couldn’t have been more than one, as the celebrated
+lawyer Señor Pasta who was there on a visit declared—either an enemy of Don Timoteo’s
+or a rival of Juanito’s.”
+</p>
+<p>The Orenda girls turned instinctively toward Isagani, who smiled silently.
+</p>
+<p>“Hide yourself,” Capitana Loleng advised him. “They may accuse you. Hide!”
+</p>
+<p>Again Isagani smiled but said nothing.
+</p>
+<p>“Don Timoteo,” continued Chichoy, “did not know to <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5077">[<a href="#xd32e5077">343</a>]</span>whom to attribute the deed. He himself superintended the work, he and his friend Simoun,
+and nobody else. The house was thrown into an uproar, the lieutenant of the guard
+came, and after enjoining secrecy upon everybody, they sent me away. But—”
+</p>
+<p>“But—but—” stammered the trembling Momoy.
+</p>
+<p>“<i>Nakú!</i>” ejaculated Sensia, gazing at her fiancé and trembling sympathetically to remember
+that he had been at the fiesta. “This young man—If the house had blown up—” She stared
+at her sweetheart passionately and admired his courage.
+</p>
+<p>“If it had blown up—”
+</p>
+<p>“No one in the whole of Calle Anloague would have been left alive,” concluded Capitan
+Toringoy, feigning valor and indifference in the presence of his family.
+</p>
+<p>“I left in consternation,” resumed Chichoy, “thinking about how, if a mere spark,
+a cigarette had fallen, if a lamp had been overturned, at the present moment we should
+have neither a General, nor an Archbishop, nor any one, not even a government clerk!
+All who were at the fiesta last night—annihilated!”
+</p>
+<p>“<i lang="es">Vírgen Santísima!</i> This young man—”
+</p>
+<p>“<i>’Susmariosep!</i>” exclaimed Capitana Loleng. “All our debtors were there, <i>’Susmariosep!</i> And we have a house near there! Who could it have been?”
+</p>
+<p>“Now you may know about it,” added Chichoy in a whisper, “but you must keep it a secret.
+This afternoon I met a friend, a clerk in an office, and in talking about the affair,
+he gave me the clue to the mystery—he had it from some government employees. Who do
+you suppose put the sacks of powder there?”
+</p>
+<p>Many shrugged their shoulders, while Capitan Toringoy merely looked askance at Isagani.
+</p>
+<p>“The friars?”
+</p>
+<p>“Quiroga the Chinaman?”
+</p>
+<p>“Some student?”
+</p>
+<p>“Makaraig?”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5106">[<a href="#xd32e5106">344</a>]</span></p>
+<p>Capitan Toringoy coughed and glanced at Isagani, while Chichoy shook his head and
+smiled.
+</p>
+<p>“The jeweler Simoun.”
+</p>
+<p>“Simoun!!”
+</p>
+<p>The profound silence of amazement followed these words. Simoun, the evil genius of
+the Captain-General, the rich trader to whose house they had gone to buy unset gems,
+Simoun, who had received the Orenda girls with great courtesy and had paid them fine
+compliments! For the very reason that the story seemed absurd it was believed. “<i lang="la">Credo quia absurdum,</i>” said St. Augustine.
+</p>
+<p>“But wasn’t Simoun at the fiesta last night?” asked Sensia.
+</p>
+<p>“Yes,” said Momoy. “But now I remember! He left the house just as we were sitting
+down to the dinner. He went to get his wedding-gift.”
+</p>
+<p>“But wasn’t he a friend of the General’s? Wasn’t he a partner of Don Timoteo’s?”
+</p>
+<p>“Yes, he made himself a partner in order to strike the blow and kill all the Spaniards.”
+</p>
+<p>“Aha!” cried Sensia. “Now I understand!”
+</p>
+<p>“What?”
+</p>
+<p>“You didn’t want to believe Aunt Tentay. Simoun is the devil and he has bought up
+the souls of all the Spaniards. Aunt Tentay said so!”
+</p>
+<p>Capitana Loleng crossed herself and looked uneasily toward the jewels, fearing to
+see them turn into live coals, while Capitan Toringoy took off the ring which had
+come from Simoun.
+</p>
+<p>“Simoun has disappeared without leaving any traces,” added Chichoy. “The Civil Guard
+is searching for him.”
+</p>
+<p>“Yes,” observed Sensia, crossing herself, “searching for the devil.”
+</p>
+<p>Now many things were explained: Simoun’s fabulous wealth and the peculiar smell in
+his house, the smell of sulphur. Binday, another of the daughters, a frank and lovely
+girl, remembered having seen blue flames in the <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5128">[<a href="#xd32e5128">345</a>]</span>jeweler’s house one afternoon when she and her mother had gone there to buy jewels.
+Isagani listened attentively, but said nothing.
+</p>
+<p>“So, last night—” ventured Momoy.
+</p>
+<p>“Last night?” echoed Sensia, between curiosity and fear.
+</p>
+<p>Momoy hesitated, but the face Sensia put on banished his fear. “Last night, while
+we were eating, there was a disturbance, the light in the General’s dining-room went
+out. They say that some unknown person stole the lamp that was presented by Simoun.”
+</p>
+<p>“A thief? One of the Black Hand?”
+</p>
+<p>Isagani arose to walk back and forth.
+</p>
+<p>“Didn’t they catch him?”
+</p>
+<p>“He jumped into the river before anybody recognized him. Some say he was a Spaniard,
+some a Chinaman, and others an Indian.”
+</p>
+<p>“It’s believed that with the lamp,” added Chichoy, “he was going to set fire to the
+house, then the powder—”
+</p>
+<p>Momoy again shuddered but noticing that Sensia was watching him tried to control himself.
+“What a pity!” he exclaimed with an effort. “How wickedly the thief acted. Everybody
+would have been killed.”
+</p>
+<p>Sensia stared at him in fright, the women crossed themselves, while Capitan Toringoy,
+who was afraid of politics, made a move to go away.
+</p>
+<p>Momoy turned to Isagani, who observed with an enigmatic smile: “It’s always wicked
+to take what doesn’t belong to you. If that thief had known what it was all about
+and had been able to reflect, surely he wouldn’t have done as he did.”
+</p>
+<p>Then, after a pause, he added, “For nothing in the world would I want to be in his
+place!”
+</p>
+<p>So they continued their comments and conjectures until an hour later, when Isagani
+bade the family farewell, to return forever to his uncle’s side.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5145">[<a href="#xd32e5145">346</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch38" class="div1 chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e586">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XXXVIII</h2>
+<h2 class="main">Fatality</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first"><i>Matanglawin</i> was the terror of Luzon. His band had as lief appear in one province where it was
+least expected as make a descent upon another that was preparing to resist it. It
+burned a sugar-mill in Batangas and destroyed the crops, on the following day it murdered
+the Justice of the Peace of Tiani, and on the next took possession of the town of
+Cavite, carrying off the arms from the town hall. The central provinces, from Tayabas
+to Pangasinan, suffered from his depredations, and his bloody name extended from Albay
+in the south to Kagayan in the north. The towns, disarmed through mistrust on the
+part of a weak government, fell easy prey into his hands—at his approach the fields
+were abandoned by the farmers, the herds were scattered, while a trail of blood and
+fire marked his passage. <i>Matanglawin</i> laughed at the severe measures ordered by the government against the tulisanes, since
+from them only the people in the outlying villages suffered, being captured and maltreated
+if they resisted the band, and if they made peace with it being flogged and deported
+by the government, provided they completed the journey and did not meet with a fatal
+accident on the way. Thanks to these terrible alternatives many of the country folk
+decided to enlist under his command.
+</p>
+<p>As a result of this reign of terror, trade among the towns, already languishing, died
+out completely. The rich dared not travel, and the poor feared to be arrested by the
+Civil Guard, which, being under obligation to pursue the tulisanes, often seized the
+first person encountered and subjected him to unspeakable tortures. In its impotence,
+the <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5157">[<a href="#xd32e5157">347</a>]</span>government put on a show of energy toward the persons whom it suspected, in order
+that by force of cruelty the people should not realize its weakness—the fear that
+prompted such measures.
+</p>
+<p>A string of these hapless suspects, some six or seven, with their arms tied behind
+them, bound together like a bunch of human meat, was one afternoon marching through
+the excessive heat along a road that skirted a mountain, escorted by ten or twelve
+guards armed with rifles. Their bayonets gleamed in the sun, the barrels of their
+rifles became hot, and even the sage-leaves in their helmets scarcely served to temper
+the effect of the deadly May sun.
+</p>
+<p>Deprived of the use of their arms and pressed close against one another to save rope,
+the prisoners moved along almost uncovered and unshod, he being the best off who had
+a handkerchief twisted around his head. Panting, suffering, covered with dust which
+perspiration converted into mud, they felt their brains melting, they saw lights dancing
+before them, red spots floating in the air. Exhaustion and dejection were pictured
+in their faces, desperation, wrath, something indescribable, the look of one who dies
+cursing, of a man who is weary of life, who hates himself, who blasphemes against
+God. The strongest lowered their heads to rub their faces against the dusky backs
+of those in front of them and thus wipe away the sweat that was blinding them. Many
+were limping, but if any one of them happened to fall and thus delay the march he
+would hear a curse as a soldier ran up brandishing a branch torn from a tree and forced
+him to rise by striking about in all directions. The string then started to run, dragging,
+rolling in the dust, the fallen one, who howled and begged to be killed; but perchance
+he succeeded in getting on his feet and then went along crying like a child and cursing
+the hour he was born.
+</p>
+<p>The human cluster halted at times while the guards drank, and then the prisoners continued
+on their way with <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5163">[<a href="#xd32e5163">348</a>]</span>parched mouths, darkened brains, and hearts full of curses. Thirst was for these wretches
+the least of their troubles.
+</p>
+<p>“Move on, you sons of ——!” cried a soldier, again refreshed, hurling the insult common
+among the lower classes of Filipinos.
+</p>
+<p>The branch whistled and fell on any shoulder whatsoever, the nearest one, or at times
+upon a face to leave a welt at first white, then red, and later dirty with the dust
+of the road.
+</p>
+<p>“Move on, you cowards!” at times a voice yelled in Spanish, deepening its tone.
+</p>
+<p>“Cowards!” repeated the mountain echoes.
+</p>
+<p>Then the cowards quickened their pace under a sky of red-hot iron, over a burning
+road, lashed by the knotty branch which was worn into shreds on their livid skins.
+A Siberian winter would perhaps be tenderer than the May sun of the Philippines.
+</p>
+<p>Yet, among the soldiers there was one who looked with disapproving eyes upon so much
+wanton cruelty, as he marched along silently with his brows knit in disgust. At length,
+seeing that the guard, not satisfied with the branch, was kicking the prisoners that
+fell, he could no longer restrain himself but cried out impatiently, “Here, Mautang,
+let them alone!”
+</p>
+<p>Mautang turned toward him in surprise. “What’s it to you, Carolino?” he asked.
+</p>
+<p>“To me, nothing, but it hurts me,” replied Carolino. “They’re men like ourselves.”
+</p>
+<p>“It’s plain that you’re new to the business!” retorted Mautang with a compassionate
+smile. “How did you treat the prisoners in the war?”
+</p>
+<p>“With more consideration, surely!” answered Carolino.
+</p>
+<p>Mautang remained silent for a moment and then, apparently having discovered the reason,
+calmly rejoined, “Ah, it’s because they are enemies and fight us, while these—these
+are our own countrymen.”
+</p>
+<p>Then drawing nearer to Carolino he whispered, “How <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5179">[<a href="#xd32e5179">349</a>]</span>stupid you are! They’re treated so in order that they may attempt to resist or to
+escape, and then—bang!”
+</p>
+<p>Carolino made no reply.
+</p>
+<p>One of the prisoners then begged that they let him stop for a moment.
+</p>
+<p>“This is a dangerous place,” answered the corporal, gazing uneasily toward the mountain.
+“Move on!”
+</p>
+<p>“Move on!” echoed Mautang and his lash whistled.
+</p>
+<p>The prisoner twisted himself around to stare at him with reproachful eyes. “You are
+more cruel than the Spaniard himself,” he said.
+</p>
+<p>Mautang replied with more blows, when suddenly a bullet whistled, followed by a loud
+report. Mautang dropped his rifle, uttered an oath, and clutching at his breast with
+both hands fell spinning into a heap. The prisoner saw him writhing in the dust with
+blood spurting from his mouth.
+</p>
+<p>“Halt!” called the corporal, suddenly turning pale.
+</p>
+<p>The soldiers stopped and stared about them. A wisp of smoke rose from a thicket on
+the height above. Another bullet sang to its accompanying report and the corporal,
+wounded in the thigh, doubled over vomiting curses. The column was attacked by men
+hidden among the rocks above.
+</p>
+<p>Sullen with rage the corporal motioned toward the string of prisoners and laconically
+ordered, “Fire!”
+</p>
+<p>The wretches fell upon their knees, filled with consternation. As they could not lift
+their hands, they begged for mercy by kissing the dust or bowing their heads—one talked
+of his children, another of his mother who would be left unprotected, one promised
+money, another called upon God—but the muzzles were quickly lowered and a hideous
+volley silenced them all.
+</p>
+<p>Then began the sharpshooting against those who were behind the rocks above, over which
+a light cloud of smoke began to hover. To judge from the scarcity of their shots,
+the invisible enemies could not have more than three rifles. As they advanced firing,
+the guards sought cover behind <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5194">[<a href="#xd32e5194">350</a>]</span>tree-trunks or crouched down as they attempted to scale the height. Splintered rocks
+leaped up, broken twigs fell from trees, patches of earth were torn up, and the first
+guard who attempted the ascent rolled back with a bullet through his shoulder.
+</p>
+<p>The hidden enemy had the advantage of position, but the valiant guards, who did not
+know how to flee, were on the point of retiring, for they had paused, unwilling to
+advance; that fight against the invisible unnerved them. Smoke and rocks alone could
+be seen—not a voice was heard, not a shadow appeared; they seemed to be fighting with
+the mountain.
+</p>
+<p>“Shoot, Carolino! What are you aiming at?” called the corporal.
+</p>
+<p>At that instant a man appeared upon a rock, making signs with his rifle.
+</p>
+<p>“Shoot him!” ordered the corporal with a foul oath.
+</p>
+<p>Three guards obeyed the order, but the man continued standing there, calling out at
+the top of his voice something unintelligible.
+</p>
+<p>Carolino paused, thinking that he recognized something familiar about that figure,
+which stood out plainly in the sunlight. But the corporal threatened to tie him up
+if he did not fire, so Carolino took aim and the report of his rifle was heard. The
+man on the rock spun around and disappeared with a cry that left Carolino horror-stricken.
+</p>
+<p>Then followed a rustling in the bushes, indicating that those within were scattering
+in all directions, so the soldiers boldly advanced, now that there was no more resistance.
+Another man appeared upon the rock, waving a spear, and they fired at him. He sank
+down slowly, catching at the branch of a tree, but with another volley fell face downwards
+on the rock.
+</p>
+<p>The guards climbed on nimbly, with bayonets fixed ready for a hand-to-hand fight.
+Carolino alone moved forward reluctantly, with a wandering, gloomy look, the cry of
+the man struck by his bullet still ringing in his ears. The <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5206">[<a href="#xd32e5206">351</a>]</span>first to reach the spot found an old man dying, stretched out on the rock. He plunged
+his bayonet into the body, but the old man did not even wink, his eyes being fixed
+on Carolino with an indescribable gaze, while with his bony hand he pointed to something
+behind the rock.
+</p>
+<p>The soldiers turned to see Caroline frightfully pale, his mouth hanging open, with
+a look in which glimmered the last spark of reason, for Carolino, who was no other
+than Tano, Cabesang Tales’ son, and who had just returned from the Carolines, recognized
+in the dying man his grandfather, Tandang Selo. No longer able to speak, the old man’s
+dying eyes uttered a whole poem of grief—and then a corpse, he still continued to
+point to something behind the rock.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5210">[<a href="#xd32e5210">352</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div id="ch39" class="div1 last-child chapter"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#xd32e596">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="label">Chapter XXXIX</h2>
+<h2 class="main">Conclusion</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first">In his solitary retreat on the shore of the sea, whose mobile surface was visible
+through the open, windows, extending outward until it mingled with the horizon, Padre
+Florentino was relieving the monotony by playing on his harmonium sad and melancholy
+tunes, to which the sonorous roar of the surf and the sighing of the treetops of the
+neighboring wood served as accompaniments. Notes long, full, mournful as a prayer,
+yet still vigorous, escaped from the old instrument. Padre Florentino, who was an
+accomplished musician, was improvising, and, as he was alone, gave free rein to the
+sadness in his heart.
+</p>
+<p>For the truth was that the old man was very sad. His good friend, Don Tiburcio de
+Espadaña, had just left him, fleeing from the persecution of his wife. That morning
+he had received a note from the lieutenant of the Civil Guard, which ran thus:
+</p>
+<blockquote>
+<p class="first">MY DEAR CHAPLAIN,—I have just received from the commandant a telegram that says, “Spaniard
+hidden house Padre Florentino capture forward alive dead.” As the telegram is quite
+explicit, warn your friend not to be there when I come to arrest him at eight tonight.
+</p>
+<p>Affectionately,
+</p>
+<p class="signed">PEREZ
+</p>
+<p>Burn this note.</p>
+</blockquote><p>
+</p>
+<p>“T-that V-victorina!” Don Tiburcio had stammered. “S-she’s c-capable of having me
+s-shot!”
+</p>
+<p>Padre Florentino was unable to reassure him. Vainly he pointed out to him that the
+word <i>cojera</i> should have read <i>cogerá</i>,<a class="noteRef" id="xd32e5232src" href="#xd32e5232">1</a> and that the hidden Spaniard could not be Don <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5258">[<a href="#xd32e5258">353</a>]</span> Tiburcio, but the jeweler Simoun, who two days before had arrived, wounded and a
+fugitive, begging for shelter. But Don Tiburcio would not be convinced—<i>cojera</i> was his own lameness, his personal description, and it was an intrigue of Victorina’s
+to get him back alive or dead, as Isagani had written from Manila. So the poor Ulysses
+had left the priest’s house to conceal himself in the hut of a woodcutter.
+</p>
+<p>No doubt was entertained by Padre Florentino that the Spaniard wanted was the jeweler
+Simoun, who had arrived mysteriously, himself carrying the jewel-chest, bleeding,
+morose, and exhausted. With the free and cordial Filipino hospitality, the priest
+had taken him in, without asking indiscreet questions, and as news of the events in
+Manila had not yet reached his ears he was unable to understand the situation clearly.
+The only conjecture that occurred to him was that the General, the jeweler’s friend
+and protector, being gone, probably his enemies, the victims of wrong and abuse, were
+now rising and calling for vengeance, and that the acting Governor was pursuing him
+to make him disgorge the wealth he had accumulated—hence his flight. But whence came
+his wounds? Had he tried to commit suicide? Were they the result of personal revenge?
+Or were they merely caused by an accident, as Simoun claimed? Had they been received
+in escaping from the force that was pursuing him?
+</p>
+<p>This last conjecture was the one that seemed to have the greatest appearance of probability,
+being further strengthened by the telegram received and Simoun’s decided unwillingness
+from the start to be treated by the doctor from the capital. The jeweler submitted
+only to the ministrations of Don Tiburcio, and even to them with marked distrust.
+In this situation Padre Florentino was asking himself what <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5265">[<a href="#xd32e5265">354</a>]</span>line of conduct he should pursue when the Civil Guard came to arrest Simoun. His condition
+would not permit his removal, much less a long journey—but the telegram said alive
+or dead.
+</p>
+<p>Padre Florentine ceased playing and approached the window to gaze out at the sea,
+whose desolate surface was without a ship, without a sail—it gave him no suggestion.
+A solitary islet outlined in the distance spoke only of solitude and made the space
+more lonely. Infinity is at times despairingly mute.
+</p>
+<p>The old man was trying to analyze the sad and ironical smile with which Simoun had
+received the news that he was to be arrested. What did that smile mean? And that other
+smile, still sadder and more ironical, with which he received the news that they would
+not come before eight at night? What did all this mystery signify? Why did Simoun
+refuse to hide? There came into his mind the celebrated saying of St. John Chrysostom
+when he was defending the eunuch Eutropius: “Never was a better time than this to
+say—Vanity of vanities and all is vanity!”
+</p>
+<p>Yes, that Simoun, so rich, so powerful, so feared a week ago, and now more unfortunate
+than Eutropius, was seeking refuge, not at the altars of a church, but in the miserable
+house of a poor native priest, hidden in the forest, on the solitary seashore! Vanity
+of vanities and all is vanity! That man would within a few hours be a prisoner, dragged
+from the bed where he lay, without respect for his condition, without consideration
+for his wounds—dead or alive his enemies demanded him! How could he save him? Where
+could he find the moving accents of the bishop of Constantinople? What weight would
+his weak words have, the words of a native priest, whose own humiliation this same
+Simoun had in his better days seemed to applaud and encourage?
+</p>
+<p>But Padre Florentine no longer recalled the indifferent reception that two months
+before the jeweler had accorded to him when he had tried to interest him in favor
+of Isagani, <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5273">[<a href="#xd32e5273">355</a>]</span>then a prisoner on account of his imprudent chivalry; he forgot the activity Simoun
+had displayed in urging Paulita’s marriage, which had plunged Isagani into the fearful
+misanthropy that was worrying his uncle. He forgot all these things and thought only
+of the sick man’s plight and his own obligations as a host, until his senses reeled.
+Where must he hide him to avoid his falling into the clutches of the authorities?
+But the person chiefly concerned was not worrying, he was smiling.
+</p>
+<p>While he was pondering over these things, the old man was approached by a servant
+who said that the sick man wished to speak with him, so he went into the next room,
+a clean and well-ventilated apartment with a floor of wide boards smoothed and polished,
+and simply furnished with big, heavy armchairs of ancient design, without varnish
+or paint. At one end there was a large kamagon bed with its four posts to support
+the canopy, and beside it a table covered with bottles, lint, and bandages. A praying-desk
+at the feet of a Christ and a scanty library led to the suspicion that it was the
+priest’s own bedroom, given up to his guest according to the Filipino custom of offering
+to the stranger the best table, the best room, and the best bed in the house. Upon
+seeing the windows opened wide to admit freely the healthful sea-breeze and the echoes
+of its eternal lament, no one in the Philippines would have said that a sick person
+was to be found there, since it is the custom to close all the windows and stop up
+all the cracks just as soon as any one catches a cold or gets an insignificant headache.
+</p>
+<p>Padre Florentine looked toward the bed and was astonished to see that the sick man’s
+face had lost its tranquil and ironical expression. Hidden grief seemed to knit his
+brows, anxiety was depicted in his looks, his lips were curled in a smile of pain.
+</p>
+<p>“Are you suffering, Señor Simoun?” asked the priest solicitously, going to his side.
+</p>
+<p>“Some! But in a little while I shall cease to suffer,” he replied with a shake of
+his head.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5280">[<a href="#xd32e5280">356</a>]</span></p>
+<p>Padre Florentine clasped his hands in fright, suspecting that he understood the terrible
+truth. “My God, what have you done? What have you taken?” He reached toward the bottles.
+</p>
+<p>“It’s useless now! There’s no remedy at all!” answered Simoun with a pained smile.
+“What did you expect me to do? Before the clock strikes eight—alive or dead—dead,
+yes, but alive, no!”
+</p>
+<p>“My God, what have you done?”
+</p>
+<p>“Be calm!” urged the sick man with a wave of his hand. “What’s done is done. I must
+not fall into anybody’s hands—my secret would be torn from me. Don’t get excited,
+don’t lose your head, it’s useless! Listen—the night is coming on and there’s no time
+to be lost. I must tell you my secret, and intrust to you my last request, I must
+lay my life open before you. At the supreme moment I want to lighten myself of a load,
+I want to clear up a doubt of mine. You who believe so firmly in God—I want you to
+tell me if there is a God!”
+</p>
+<p>“But an antidote, Señor Simoun! I have ether, chloroform—”
+</p>
+<p>The priest began to search for a flask, until Simoun cried impatiently, “Useless,
+it’s useless! Don’t waste time! I’ll go away with my secret!”
+</p>
+<p>The bewildered priest fell down at his desk and prayed at the feet of the Christ,
+hiding his face in his hands. Then he arose serious and grave, as if he had received
+from his God all the force, all the dignity, all the authority of the Judge of consciences.
+Moving a chair to the head of the bed he prepared to listen.
+</p>
+<p>At the first words Simoun murmured, when he told his real name, the old priest started
+back and gazed at him in terror, whereat the sick man smiled bitterly. Taken by surprise,
+the priest was not master of himself, but he soon recovered, and covering his face
+with a handkerchief again bent over to listen.
+</p>
+<p>Simoun related his sorrowful story: how, thirteen years <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5292">[<a href="#xd32e5292">357</a>]</span>before, he had returned from Europe filled with hopes and smiling illusions, having
+come back to marry a girl whom he loved, disposed to do good and forgive all who had
+wronged him, just so they would let him live in peace. But it was not so. A mysterious
+hand involved him in the confusion of an uprising planned by his enemies. Name, fortune,
+love, future, liberty, all were lost, and he escaped only through the heroism of a
+friend. Then he swore vengeance. With the wealth of his family, which had been buried
+in a wood, he had fled, had gone to foreign lands and engaged in trade. He took part
+in the war in Cuba, aiding first one side and then another, but always profiting.
+There he made the acquaintance of the General, then a major, whose good-will he won
+first by loans of money, and afterwards he made a friend of him by the knowledge of
+criminal secrets. With his money he had been able to secure the General’s appointment
+and, once in the Philippines, he had used him as a blind tool and incited him to all
+kinds of injustice, availing himself of his insatiable lust for gold.
+</p>
+<p>The confession was long and tedious, but during the whole of it the confessor made
+no further sign of surprise and rarely interrupted the sick man. It was night when
+Padre Florentino, wiping the perspiration from his face, arose and began to meditate.
+Mysterious darkness flooded the room, so that the moonbeams entering through the window
+filled it with vague lights and vaporous reflections.
+</p>
+<p>Into the midst of the silence the priest’s voice broke sad and deliberate, but consoling:
+“God will forgive you, Señor—Simoun,” he said. “He knows that we are fallible, He
+has seen that you have suffered, and in ordaining that the chastisement for your faults
+should come as death from the very ones you have instigated to crime, we can see His
+infinite mercy. He has frustrated your plans one by one, the best conceived, first
+by the death of Maria Clara, then by a lack of preparation, then in some mysterious
+way. Let us bow to His will and render Him thanks!”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5297">[<a href="#xd32e5297">358</a>]</span></p>
+<p>“According to you, then,” feebly responded the sick man, “His will is that these islands—”
+</p>
+<p>“Should continue in the condition in which they suffer?” finished the priest, seeing
+that the other hesitated. “I don’t know, sir, I can’t read the thought of the Inscrutable.
+I know that He has not abandoned those peoples who in their supreme moments have trusted
+in Him and made Him the Judge of their cause, I know that His arm has never failed
+when, justice long trampled upon and every recourse gone, the oppressed have taken
+up the sword to fight for home and wife and children, for their inalienable rights,
+which, as the German poet says, shine ever there above, unextinguished and inextinguishable,
+like the eternal stars themselves. No, God is justice, He cannot abandon His cause,
+the cause of liberty, without which no justice is possible.”
+</p>
+<p>“Why then has He denied me His aid?” asked the sick man in a voice charged with bitter
+complaint.
+</p>
+<p>“Because you chose means that He could not sanction,” was the severe reply. “The glory
+of saving a country is not for him who has contributed to its ruin. You have believed
+that what crime and iniquity have defiled and deformed, another crime and another
+iniquity can purify and redeem. Wrong! Hate never produces anything but monsters and
+crime criminals! Love alone realizes wonderful works, virtue alone can save! No, if
+our country has ever to be free, it will not be through vice and crime, it will not
+be so by corrupting its sons, deceiving some and bribing others, no! Redemption presupposes
+virtue, virtue sacrifice, and sacrifice love!”
+</p>
+<p>“Well, I accept your explanation,” rejoined the sick man, after a pause. “I have been
+mistaken, but, because I have been mistaken, will that God deny liberty to a people
+and yet save many who are much worse criminals than I am? What is my mistake compared
+to the crimes of our rulers? Why has that God to give more heed to my iniquity than
+to the cries of so many innocents? Why has He not stricken me down and then made the
+people triumph? Why <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5304">[<a href="#xd32e5304">359</a>]</span>does He let so many worthy and just ones suffer and look complacently upon their tortures?”
+</p>
+<p>“The just and the worthy must suffer in order that their ideas may be known and extended!
+You must shake or shatter the vase to spread its perfume, you must smite the rock
+to get the spark! There is something providential in the persecutions of tyrants,
+Señor Simoun!”
+</p>
+<p>“I knew it,” murmured the sick man, “and therefore I encouraged the tyranny.”
+</p>
+<p>“Yes, my friend, but more corrupt influences than anything else were spread. You fostered
+the social rottenness without sowing an idea. From this fermentation of vices loathing
+alone could spring, and if anything were born overnight it would be at best a mushroom,
+for mushrooms only can spring spontaneously from filth. True it is that the vices
+of the government are fatal to it, they cause its death, but they kill also the society
+in whose bosom they are developed. An immoral government presupposes a demoralized
+people, a conscienceless administration, greedy and servile citizens in the settled
+parts, outlaws and brigands in the mountains. Like master, like slave! Like government,
+like country!”
+</p>
+<p>A brief pause ensued, broken at length by the sick man’s voice. “Then, what can be
+done?”
+</p>
+<p>“Suffer and work!”
+</p>
+<p>“Suffer—work!” echoed the sick man bitterly. “Ah, it’s easy to say that, when you
+are not suffering, when the work is rewarded. If your God demands such great sacrifices
+from man, man who can scarcely count upon the present and doubts the future, if you
+had seen what I have, the miserable, the wretched, suffering unspeakable tortures
+for crimes they have not committed, murdered to cover up the faults and incapacity
+of others, poor fathers of families torn from their homes to work to no purpose upon
+highways that are destroyed each day and seem only to serve for sinking families into
+want. Ah, to suffer, to work, is the will of God! Convince them that their murder
+is their <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5314">[<a href="#xd32e5314">360</a>]</span>salvation, that their work is the prosperity of the home! To suffer, to work! What
+God is that?”
+</p>
+<p>“A very just God, Señor Simoun,” replied the priest. “A God who chastises our lack
+of faith, our vices, the little esteem in which we hold dignity and the civic virtues.
+We tolerate vice, we make ourselves its accomplices, at times we applaud it, and it
+is just, very just that we suffer the consequences, that our children suffer them.
+It is the God of liberty, Señor Simoun, who obliges us to love it, by making the yoke
+heavy for us—a God of mercy, of equity, who while He chastises us, betters us and
+only grants prosperity to him who has merited it through his efforts. The school of
+suffering tempers, the arena of combat strengthens the soul.
+</p>
+<p>“I do not mean to say that our liberty will be secured at the sword’s point, for the
+sword plays but little part in modern affairs, but that we must secure it by making
+ourselves worthy of it, by exalting the intelligence and the dignity of the individual,
+by loving justice, right, and greatness, even to the extent of dying for them,—and
+when a people reaches that height God will provide a weapon, the idols will be shattered,
+the tyranny will crumble like a house of cards and liberty will shine out like the
+first dawn.
+</p>
+<p>“Our ills we owe to ourselves alone, so let us blame no one. If Spain should see that
+we were less complaisant with tyranny and more disposed to struggle and suffer for
+our rights, Spain would be the first to grant us liberty, because when the fruit of
+the womb reaches maturity woe unto the mother who would stifle it! So, while the Filipino
+people has not sufficient energy to proclaim, with head erect and bosom bared, its
+rights to social life, and to guarantee it with its sacrifices, with its own blood;
+while we see our countrymen in private life ashamed within themselves, hear the voice
+of conscience roar in rebellion and protest, yet in public life keep silence or even
+echo the words of him who abuses them in order to mock the abused; while we see them
+wrap themselves up in their egotism and with a <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5320">[<a href="#xd32e5320">361</a>]</span>forced smile praise the most iniquitous actions, begging with their eyes a portion
+of the booty—why grant them liberty? With Spain or without Spain they would always
+be the same, and perhaps worse! Why independence, if the slaves of today will be the
+tyrants of tomorrow? And that they will be such is not to be doubted, for he who submits
+to tyranny loves it.
+</p>
+<p>“Señor Simoun, when our people is unprepared, when it enters the fight through fraud
+and force, without a clear understanding of what it is doing, the wisest attempts
+will fail, and better that they do fail, since why commit the wife to the husband
+if he does not sufficiently love her, if he is not ready to die for her?”
+</p>
+<p>Padre Florentino felt the sick man catch and press his hand, so he became silent,
+hoping that the other might speak, but he merely felt a stronger pressure of the hand,
+heard a sigh, and then profound silence reigned in the room. Only the sea, whose waves
+were rippled by the night breeze, as though awaking from the heat of the day, sent
+its hoarse roar, its eternal chant, as it rolled against the jagged rocks. The moon,
+now free from the sun’s rivalry, peacefully commanded the sky, and the trees of the
+forest bent down toward one another, telling their ancient legends in mysterious murmurs
+borne on the wings of the wind.
+</p>
+<p>The sick man said nothing, so Padre Florentino, deeply thoughtful, murmured: “Where
+are the youth who will consecrate their golden hours, their illusions, and their enthusiasm
+to the welfare of their native land? Where are the youth who will generously pour
+out their blood to wash away so much shame, so much crime, so much abomination? Pure
+and spotless must the victim be that the sacrifice may be acceptable! Where are you,
+youth, who will embody in yourselves the vigor of life that has left our veins, the
+purity of ideas that has been contaminated in our brains, the fire of enthusiasm that
+has been quenched in our hearts? We await you, O youth! Come, for we await you!”
+</p>
+<p>Feeling his eyes moisten he withdrew his hand from that <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5328">[<a href="#xd32e5328">362</a>]</span>of the sick man, arose, and went to the window to gaze out upon the wide surface of
+the sea. He was drawn from his meditation by gentle raps at the door. It was the servant
+asking if he should bring a light.
+</p>
+<p>When the priest returned to the sick man and looked at him in the light of the lamp,
+motionless, his eyes closed, the hand that had pressed his lying open and extended
+along the edge of the bed, he thought for a moment that he was sleeping, but noticing
+that he was not breathing touched him gently, and then realized that he was dead.
+His body had already commenced to turn cold. The priest fell upon his knees and prayed.
+</p>
+<p>When he arose and contemplated the corpse, in whose features were depicted the deepest
+grief, the tragedy of a whole wasted life which he was carrying over there beyond
+death, the old man shuddered and murmured, “God have mercy on those who turned him
+from the straight path!”
+</p>
+<p>While the servants summoned by him fell upon their knees and prayed for the dead man,
+curious and bewildered as they gazed toward the bed, reciting requiem after requiem,
+Padre Florentino took from a cabinet the celebrated steel chest that contained Simoun’s
+fabulous wealth. He hesitated for a moment, then resolutely descended the stairs and
+made his way to the cliff where Isagani was accustomed to sit and gaze into the depths
+of the sea.
+</p>
+<p>Padre Florentino looked down at his feet. There below he saw the dark billows of the
+Pacific beating into the hollows of the cliff, producing sonorous thunder, at the
+same time that, smitten by the moonbeams, the waves and foam glittered like sparks
+of fire, like handfuls of diamonds hurled into the air by some jinnee of the abyss.
+He gazed about him. He was alone. The solitary coast was lost in the distance amid
+the dim cloud that the moonbeams played through, until it mingled with the horizon.
+The forest murmured unintelligible sounds.
+</p>
+<p>Then the old man, with an effort of his herculean arms, hurled the chest into space,
+throwing it toward the sea. It <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5336">[<a href="#xd32e5336">363</a>]</span>whirled over and over several times and descended rapidly in a slight curve, reflecting
+the moonlight on its polished surface. The old man saw the drops of water fly and
+heard a loud splash as the abyss closed over and swallowed up the treasure. He waited
+for a few moments to see if the depths would restore anything, but the wave rolled
+on as mysteriously as before, without adding a fold to its rippling surface, as though
+into the immensity of the sea a pebble only had been dropped.
+</p>
+<p>“May Nature guard you in her deep abysses among the pearls and corals of her eternal
+seas,” then said the priest, solemnly extending his hands. “When for some holy and
+sublime purpose man may need you, God will in his wisdom draw you from the bosom of
+the waves. Meanwhile, there you will not work woe, you will not distort justice, you
+will not foment avarice!”
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5340">[<a href="#xd32e5340">365</a>]</span></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes">
+<hr class="fnsep">
+<div class="footnote-body">
+<div class="fndiv" id="xd32e5232">
+<p class="footnote"><span class="fnlabel"><a class="noteRef" href="#xd32e5232src">1</a></span> In the original the message reads: <span lang="es">“Español escondido casa Padre Florentino cojera remitirá vivo muerto.”</span> Don Tiburcio understands <span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5237">[<a href="#xd32e5237">353</a>]</span><i lang="es">cojera</i> as referring to himself; there is a play upon the Spanish words <i lang="es">cojera</i>, lameness, and <i lang="es">cogerá</i>, a form of the verb <i lang="es">coger</i>, to seize or capture—<i>j</i> and <i>g</i> in these two words having the same sound, that of the English <i>h</i>.—Tr.&nbsp;<a class="fnarrow" href="#xd32e5232src" title="Return to note 1 in text.">↑</a></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div class="back">
+<div class="div1 glossary"><span class="pageNum">[<a href="#toc">Contents</a>]</span><div class="divHead">
+<h2 class="main">Glossary</h2>
+</div>
+<div class="divBody">
+<p class="first"><b>abá:</b> A Tagalog exclamation of wonder, surprise, etc., often used to introduce or emphasize
+a contradictory statement.
+</p>
+<p><b>alcalde:</b> Governor of a province or district, with both executive and judicial authority.
+</p>
+<p><b>Ayuntamiento:</b> A city corporation or council, and by extension the building in which it has its
+offices; specifically, in Manila, the capitol.
+</p>
+<p><b>balete:</b> The Philippine banyan, a tree sacred in Malay folk-lore.
+</p>
+<p><b>banka:</b> A dugout canoe with bamboo supports or outriggers.
+</p>
+<p><b>batalan:</b> The platform of split bamboo attached to a <b>nipa</b> house.
+</p>
+<p><b>batikúlin:</b> A variety of easily-turned wood, used in carving.
+</p>
+<p><b>bibinka:</b> A sweetmeat made of sugar or molasses and rice-flour, commonly sold in the small
+shops.
+</p>
+<p><b>buyera:</b> A woman who prepares and sells the <b>buyo</b>.
+</p>
+<p><b>buyo:</b> The masticatory prepared by wrapping a piece of areca-nut with a little shell-lime
+in a betel-leaf—the <b>pan</b> of British India.
+</p>
+<p><b>cabesang:</b> Title of a <b>cabeza de barangay;</b> given by courtesy to his wife also.
+</p>
+<p><b>cabeza de barangay:</b> Headman and tax-collector for a group of about fifty families, for whose “tribute”
+he was personally responsible.
+</p>
+<p><b>calesa:</b> A two-wheeled chaise with folding top.
+</p>
+<p><b>calle:</b> Street (Spanish).
+</p>
+<p><b>camisa:</b> 1. A loose, collarless shirt of transparent material worn by men outside the trousers.
+2. A thin, transparent waist with flowing sleeves, worn by women.
+</p>
+<p><b>capitan:</b> “Captain,” a title used in addressing or referring to a gobernadorcillo, or a former
+occupant of that office.
+</p>
+<p><b>carambas:</b> A Spanish exclamation denoting surprise or displeasure.
+</p>
+<p><b>carbineer:</b> Internal-revenue guard.
+</p>
+<p><b>carromata:</b> A small two-wheeled vehicle with a fixed top.
+</p>
+<p><b>casco:</b> A flat-bottomed freight barge.
+</p>
+<p><b>cayman:</b> The Philippine crocodile.
+</p>
+<p><b>cedula:</b> Certificate of registration and receipt for poll-tax.
+</p>
+<p><b>chongka:</b> A child’s game played with pebbles or cowry-shells.
+</p>
+<p><b>cigarrera:</b> A woman working in a cigar or cigarette factory.
+</p>
+<p><b>Civil Guard:</b> Internal quasi-military police force of Spanish officers and native soldiers.
+</p>
+<p><b>cochero:</b> Carriage driver, coachman.
+</p>
+<p><b>cuarto:</b> A copper coin, one hundred and sixty of which were equal in value to a silver peso.
+</p>
+<p><b>filibuster:</b> A native of the Philippines who was accused of advocating their separation from Spain.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5470">[<a href="#xd32e5470">366</a>]</span></p>
+<p><b>filibusterism:</b> See <b>filibuster</b>.
+</p>
+<p><b>gobernadorcillo:</b> “Petty governor,” the principal municipal official—also, in Manila, the head of a
+commercial guild.
+</p>
+<p><b>gumamela:</b> The hibiscus, common as a garden shrub in the Philippines.
+</p>
+<p id="glindian"><b>Indian:</b> The Spanish designation for the Christianized Malay of the Philippines was <b>indio</b> (Indian), a term used rather contemptuously, the name <b>Filipino</b> being generally applied in a restricted sense to the children of Spaniards born in
+the Islands.
+</p>
+<p><b>kalan:</b> The small, portable, open, clay fireplace commonly used in cooking.
+</p>
+<p><b>kalikut:</b> A short section of bamboo for preparing the <b>buyo</b>; a primitive betel-box.
+</p>
+<p><b>kamagon:</b> A tree of the ebony family, from which fine cabinet-wood is obtained. Its fruit is
+the <b>mabolo</b>, or date-plum.
+</p>
+<p><b>lanete:</b> A variety of timber used in carving.
+</p>
+<p><b>linintikan:</b> A Tagalog exclamation of disgust or contempt—“thunder!”
+</p>
+<p><b>Malacañang:</b> The palace of the Captain-General: from the vernacular name of the place where it
+stands, “fishermen’s resort.”
+</p>
+<p><b>Malecon:</b> A drive along the bay shore of Manila, opposite the Walled City.
+</p>
+<p><b>Mestizo:</b> A person of mixed Filipino and Spanish blood; sometimes applied also to a person
+of mixed Filipino and Chinese blood.
+</p>
+<p><b>nakú:</b> A Tagalog exclamation of surprise, wonder, etc.
+</p>
+<p><b>narra:</b> The Philippine mahogany.
+</p>
+<p><b>nipa:</b> Swamp palm, with the imbricated leaves of which the roofs and sides of the common
+native houses are constructed.
+</p>
+<p><b lang="es">novena:</b> A devotion consisting of prayers recited for nine consecutive days, asking for some
+special favor; also, a booklet of these prayers.
+</p>
+<p><b lang="es">panguingui:</b> A complicated card-game, generally for small stakes, played with a monte deck.
+</p>
+<p><b lang="es">panguinguera:</b> A woman addicted to <b>panguingui</b>, this being chiefly a feminine diversion in the Philippines.
+</p>
+<p><b>pansit:</b> A soup made of Chinese vermicelli.
+</p>
+<p><b lang="es">pansitería:</b> A shop where <b>pansit</b> is prepared and sold.
+</p>
+<p><b lang="es">pañuelo:</b> A starched neckerchief folded stiffly over the shoulders, fastened in front and falling
+in a point behind: the most distinctive portion of the customary dress of Filipino
+women.
+</p>
+<p><b>peso:</b> A silver coin, either the Spanish peso or the Mexican dollar, about the size of an
+American dollar and of approximately half its value.
+</p>
+<p><b>petate:</b> Sleeping-mat woven from palm leaves.
+</p>
+<p><b lang="es">piña:</b> Fine cloth made from pineapple-leaf fibers.
+</p>
+<p><b>Provincial:</b> The head of a religious order in the Philippines.
+</p>
+<p><b>puñales:</b> “Daggers!”
+</p>
+<p><b>querida:</b> A paramour, mistress: from the Spanish “beloved.”
+</p>
+<p><b>real:</b> One-eighth of a peso, twenty cuartos.
+</p>
+<p><b>sala:</b> The principal room in the more pretentious Philippine houses.
+</p>
+<p><b>salakot:</b> Wide hat of palm or bamboo, distinctively Filipino.
+</p>
+<p><b>sampaguita:</b> The Arabian jasmine: a small, white, very fragrant flower, extensively cultivated,
+and worn in chaplets and rosaries by women and girls—the typical Philippine flower.
+<span class="pageNum" id="xd32e5619">[<a href="#xd32e5619">367</a>]</span></p>
+<p><b>sipa</b>: A game played with a hollow ball of plaited bamboo or rattan, by boys standing in
+a circle, who by kicking it with their heels endeavor to keep it from striking the
+ground.
+</p>
+<p><b>soltada</b>: A bout between fighting-cocks.
+</p>
+<p><b>’Susmariosep</b>: A common exclamation: contraction of the Spanish, <b lang="es">Jesús, María, y José</b>, the Holy Family.
+</p>
+<p><b>tabi</b>: The cry used by carriage drivers to warn pedestrians.
+</p>
+<p><b>tabú</b>: A utensil fashioned from half of a coconut shell.
+</p>
+<p><b>tajú</b>: A thick beverage prepared from bean-meal and syrup.
+</p>
+<p><b>tampipi</b>: A telescopic basket of woven palm, bamboo, or rattan.
+</p>
+<p><b>Tandang</b>: A title of respect for an old man: from the Tagalog term for “old.”
+</p>
+<p><b>tapis</b>: A piece of dark cloth or lace, often richly worked or embroidered, worn at the waist
+somewhat in the fashion of an apron; a distinctive portion of the native women’s attire,
+especially among the Tagalogs.
+</p>
+<p><b>tatakut</b>: The Tagalog term for “fear.”
+</p>
+<p><b lang="es">teniente-mayor</b>: “Senior lieutenant,” the senior member of the town council and substitute for the
+gobernadorcillo.
+</p>
+<p><b>tertiary sister</b>: A member of a lay society affiliated with a regular monastic order.
+</p>
+<p><b lang="es">tienda</b>: A shop or stall for the sale of merchandise.
+</p>
+<p><b>tikbalang</b>: An evil spirit, capable of assuming various forms, but said to appear usually as
+a tall black man with disproportionately long legs: the “bogey man” of Tagalog children.
+</p>
+<p><b lang="es">tulisan</b>: Outlaw, bandit. Under the old régime in the Philippines the <b lang="es">tulisanes</b> were those who, on account of real or fancied grievances against the authorities,
+or from fear of punishment for crime, or from an instinctive desire to return to primitive
+simplicity, foreswore life in the towns “under the bell,” and made their homes in
+the mountains or other remote places. Gathered in small bands with such arms as they
+could secure, they sustained themselves by highway robbery and the levying of black-mail
+from the country folk.
+</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div class="transcriberNote">
+<h2 class="main">Colophon</h2>
+<h3 class="main">Availability</h3>
+<p class="first">This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project
+Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at <a class="seclink xd32e34" title="External link" href="https://www.gutenberg.org/">www.gutenberg.org</a>.
+</p>
+<h3 class="main">Metadata</h3>
+<table class="colophonMetadata">
+<tr>
+<td><b>Title:</b></td>
+<td>The Reign of Greed</td>
+<td></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><b>Author:</b></td>
+<td>José Rizal (1861–1896)</td>
+<td>Info <span class="externalUrl">https://viaf.org/viaf/41845763/</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><b>Translator:</b></td>
+<td>Charles Derbyshire</td>
+<td>Info <span class="externalUrl">https://viaf.org/viaf/6883172/</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><b>Publication date:</b></td>
+<td>2004-01-01</td>
+<td></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><b>File generation date:</b></td>
+<td>2024-02-27 22:25:51 UTC</td>
+<td></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><b>Language:</b></td>
+<td>English</td>
+<td></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><b>Original publication date:</b></td>
+<td>1912</td>
+<td></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><b>Keywords:</b></td>
+<td>Historical fiction</td>
+<td></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><b></b></td>
+<td>Philippines - History - 1812-1898 - Fiction</td>
+<td></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><b>Project Gutenberg:</b></td>
+<td><a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10676" class="seclink">10676</a></td>
+<td></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><b>GitHub:</b></td>
+<td>10676-Rizal-The-Reign-of-Greed <span class="externalUrl">https://github.com/GutenbergSource/10676-Rizal-The-Reign-of-Greed</span></td>
+<td></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><b>QR-code:</b></td>
+<td colspan="2"><img src="images/qr10676.png" alt="QR-code of Project Gutenberg URL" width="148" height="148"></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<h3 class="main">Revision History</h3>
+<ul>
+<li>2002-11-21: Added TEI tags.
+</li>
+<li>2010-04-27: Some changes to facilitate ePub generation.</li>
+</ul>
+<h3 class="main">Corrections</h3>
+<p>The following 3 corrections have been applied to the text:</p>
+<table class="correctionTable">
+<tr>
+<th>Page</th>
+<th>Source</th>
+<th>Correction</th>
+<th>Edit distance</th>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="width20"><a class="pageref" href="#xd32e740">10</a></td>
+<td class="width40 bottom" lang="en">he</td>
+<td class="width40 bottom" lang="en">he’s</td>
+<td class="bottom">2</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="width20"><a class="pageref" href="#xd32e752">11</a></td>
+<td class="width40 bottom" lang="en">slaping</td>
+<td class="width40 bottom" lang="en">slapping</td>
+<td class="bottom">1</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="width20"><a class="pageref" href="#xd32e1151">42</a></td>
+<td class="width40 bottom" lang="en">Bathazar</td>
+<td class="width40 bottom" lang="en">Balthazar</td>
+<td class="bottom">1</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10676 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Reign of Greed, by Jose Rizal
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Reign of Greed
+       Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo'
+
+Author: Jose Rizal
+
+Translator: Charles Derbyshire
+
+Release Date: October 10, 2005 [EBook #10676]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REIGN OF GREED ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jeroen Hellingman and the distributed proofreaders team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                           The Reign of Greed
+
+
+
+ A Complete English Version of _El Filibusterismo_ from the Spanish of
+                               Jos� Rizal
+
+                                   By
+
+                           Charles Derbyshire
+
+
+
+                                 Manila
+                      Philippine Education Company
+                                  1912
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Copyright, 1912, by Philippine Education Company.
+Entered at Stationers' Hall.
+Registrado en las Islas Filipinas.
+_All rights reserved_.
+
+
+
+
+
+TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION
+
+
+El Filibusterismo, the second of Jos� Rizal's novels of Philippine
+life, is a story of the last days of the Spanish r�gime in the
+Philippines. Under the name of _The Reign of Greed_ it is for the
+first time translated into English. Written some four or five years
+after _Noli Me Tangere_, the book represents Rizal's more mature
+judgment on political and social conditions in the islands, and in
+its graver and less hopeful tone reflects the disappointments and
+discouragements which he had encountered in his efforts to lead the
+way to reform. Rizal's dedication to the first edition is of special
+interest, as the writing of it was one of the grounds of accusation
+against him when he was condemned to death in 1896. It reads:
+
+
+    "To the memory of the priests, Don Mariano Gomez (85 years
+    old), Don Jos� Burgos (30 years old), and Don Jacinto Zamora
+    (35 years old). Executed in Bagumbayan Field on the 28th of
+    February, 1872.
+
+    "The Church, by refusing to degrade you, has placed in doubt
+    the crime that has been imputed to you; the Government, by
+    surrounding your trials with mystery and shadows, causes the
+    belief that there was some error, committed in fatal moments;
+    and all the Philippines, by worshiping your memory and calling
+    you martyrs, in no sense recognizes your culpability. In so
+    far, therefore, as your complicity in the Cavite mutiny is not
+    clearly proved, as you may or may not have been patriots, and
+    as you may or may not have cherished sentiments for justice
+    and for liberty, I have the right to dedicate my work to
+    you as victims of the evil which I undertake to combat. And
+    while we await expectantly upon Spain some day to restore
+    your good name and cease to be answerable for your death,
+    let these pages serve as a tardy wreath of dried leaves over
+    your unknown tombs, and let it be understood that every one
+    who without clear proofs attacks your memory stains his hands
+    in your blood!
+
+        J. Rizal."
+
+
+A brief recapitulation of the story in _Noli Me Tangere_ (The Social
+Cancer) is essential to an understanding of such plot as there is
+in the present work, which the author called a "continuation" of the
+first story.
+
+Juan Crisostomo Ibarra is a young Filipino, who, after studying
+for seven years in Europe, returns to his native land to find that
+his father, a wealthy landowner, has died in prison as the result
+of a quarrel with the parish curate, a Franciscan friar named Padre
+Damaso. Ibarra is engaged to a beautiful and accomplished girl, Maria
+Clara, the supposed daughter and only child of the rich Don Santiago
+de los Santos, commonly known as "Capitan Tiago," a typical Filipino
+cacique, the predominant character fostered by the friar r�gime.
+
+Ibarra resolves to forego all quarrels and to work for the betterment
+of his people. To show his good intentions, he seeks to establish,
+at his own expense, a public school in his native town. He meets with
+ostensible support from all, especially Padre Damaso's successor,
+a young and gloomy Franciscan named Padre Salvi, for whom Maria Clara
+confesses to an instinctive dread.
+
+At the laying of the corner-stone for the new schoolhouse a
+suspicious accident, apparently aimed at Ibarra's life, occurs, but
+the festivities proceed until the dinner, where Ibarra is grossly and
+wantonly insulted over the memory of his father by Fray Damaso. The
+young man loses control of himself and is about to kill the friar,
+who is saved by the intervention of Maria Clara.
+
+Ibarra is excommunicated, and Capitan Tiago, through his fear of the
+friars, is forced to break the engagement and agree to the marriage of
+Maria Clara with a young and inoffensive Spaniard provided by Padre
+Damaso. Obedient to her reputed father's command and influenced
+by her mysterious dread of Padre Salvi, Maria Clara consents to
+this arrangement, but becomes seriously ill, only to be saved by
+medicines sent secretly by Ibarra and clandestinely administered by
+a girl friend.
+
+Ibarra succeeds in having the excommunication removed, but before he
+can explain matters an uprising against the Civil Guard is secretly
+brought about through agents of Padre Salvi, and the leadership is
+ascribed to Ibarra to ruin him. He is warned by a mysterious friend,
+an outlaw called Elias, whose life he had accidentally saved; but
+desiring first to see Maria Clara, he refuses to make his escape,
+and when the outbreak occurs he is arrested as the instigator of it
+and thrown into prison in Manila.
+
+On the evening when Capitan Tiago gives a ball in his Manila house to
+celebrate his supposed daughter's engagement, Ibarra makes his escape
+from prison and succeeds in seeing Maria Clara alone. He begins to
+reproach her because it is a letter written to her before he went to
+Europe which forms the basis of the charge against him, but she clears
+herself of treachery to him. The letter had been secured from her by
+false representations and in exchange for two others written by her
+mother just before her birth, which prove that Padre Damaso is her
+real father. These letters had been accidentally discovered in the
+convento by Padre Salvi, who made use of them to intimidate the girl
+and get possession of Ibarra's letter, from which he forged others
+to incriminate the young man. She tells him that she will marry the
+young Spaniard, sacrificing herself thus to save her mother's name
+and Capitan Tiago's honor and to prevent a public scandal, but that
+she will always remain true to him.
+
+Ibarra's escape had been effected by Elias, who conveys him in a
+banka up the Pasig to the Lake, where they are so closely beset by
+the Civil Guard that Elias leaps into the water and draws the pursuers
+away from the boat, in which Ibarra lies concealed.
+
+On Christmas Eve, at the tomb of the Ibarras in a gloomy wood,
+Elias appears, wounded and dying, to find there a boy named Basilio
+beside the corpse of his mother, a poor woman who had been driven
+to insanity by her husband's neglect and abuses on the part of the
+Civil Guard, her younger son having disappeared some time before in
+the convento, where he was a sacristan. Basilio, who is ignorant of
+Elias's identity, helps him to build a funeral pyre, on which his
+corpse and the madwoman's are to be burned.
+
+Upon learning of the reported death of Ibarra in the chase on the Lake,
+Maria Clara becomes disconsolate and begs her supposed godfather,
+Fray Damaso, to put her in a nunnery. Unconscious of her knowledge of
+their true relationship, the friar breaks down and confesses that all
+the trouble he has stirred up with the Ibarras has been to prevent her
+from marrying a native, which would condemn her and her children to
+the oppressed and enslaved class. He finally yields to her entreaties
+and she enters the nunnery of St. Clara, to which Padre Salvi is soon
+assigned in a ministerial capacity.
+
+
+        O masters, lords, and rulers in all lands,
+        Is this the handiwork you give to God,
+        This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?
+        How will you ever straighten up this shape-;
+        Touch it again with immortality;
+        Give back the upward looking and the light;
+        Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
+        Make right the immemorial infamies,
+        Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?
+
+        O masters, lords, and rulers in all lands,
+        How will the future reckon with this man?
+        How answer his brute question in that hour
+        When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
+        How will it be with kingdoms and with kings--
+        With those who shaped him to the thing he is--
+        When this dumb terror shall reply to God,
+        After the silence of the centuries?
+
+
+
+Edwin Markham
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+
+    I.          On the Upper Deck
+    II.         On the Lower Deck
+    III.        Legends
+    IV.         Cabesang Tales
+    V.          A Cochero's Christmas Eve
+    VI.         Basilio
+    VII.        Simoun
+    VIII.       Merry Christmas
+    IX.         Pilates
+    X.          Wealth and Want
+    XI.         Los Ba�os
+    XII.        Placido Penitente
+    XIII.       The Class in Physics
+    XIV.        In the House of the Students
+    XV.         Se�or Pasta
+    XVI.        The Tribulations of a Chinese
+    XVII.       The Quiapo Pair
+    XVIII.      Legerdemain
+    XIX.        The Fuse
+    XX.         The Arbiter
+    XXI.        Manila Types
+    XXII.       The Performance
+    XXIII.      A Corpse
+    XXIV.       Dreams
+    XXV.        Smiles and Tears
+    XXVI.       Pasquinades
+    XXVII.      The Friar and the Filipino
+    XXVIII.     Tatakut
+    XXIX.       Exit Capitan Tiago
+    XXX.        Juli
+    XXXI.       The High Official
+    XXXII.      Effect of the Pasquinades
+    XXXIII.     La Ultima Raz�n
+    XXXIV.      The Wedding
+    XXXV.       The Fiesta
+    XXXVI.      Ben-Zayb's Afflictions
+    XXXVII.     The Mystery
+    XXXVIII.    Fatality
+    XXXIX.      Conclusion
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+ON THE UPPER DECK
+
+
+    Sic itur ad astra.
+
+
+One morning in December the steamer _Tabo_ was laboriously ascending
+the tortuous course of the Pasig, carrying a large crowd of passengers
+toward the province of La Laguna. She was a heavily built steamer,
+almost round, like the _tab�_ from which she derived her name,
+quite dirty in spite of her pretensions to whiteness, majestic and
+grave from her leisurely motion. Altogether, she was held in great
+affection in that region, perhaps from her Tagalog name, or from the
+fact that she bore the characteristic impress of things in the country,
+representing something like a triumph over progress, a steamer that was
+not a steamer at all, an organism, stolid, imperfect yet unimpeachable,
+which, when it wished to pose as being rankly progressive, proudly
+contented itself with putting on a fresh coat of paint. Indeed, the
+happy steamer was genuinely Filipino! If a person were only reasonably
+considerate, she might even have been taken for the Ship of State,
+constructed, as she had been, under the inspection of _Reverendos_
+and _Ilustr�simos_....
+
+Bathed in the sunlight of a morning that made the waters of the river
+sparkle and the breezes rustle in the bending bamboo on its banks,
+there she goes with her white silhouette throwing out great clouds
+of smoke--the Ship of State, so the joke runs, also has the vice of
+smoking! The whistle shrieks at every moment, hoarse and commanding
+like a tyrant who would rule by shouting, so that no one on board
+can hear his own thoughts. She menaces everything she meets: now she
+looks as though she would grind to bits the _salambaw_, insecure
+fishing apparatus which in their movements resemble skeletons of
+giants saluting an antediluvian tortoise; now she speeds straight
+toward the clumps of bamboo or against the amphibian structures,
+_karihan_, or wayside lunch-stands, which, amid _gumamelas_ and other
+flowers, look like indecisive bathers who with their feet already in
+the water cannot bring themselves to make the final plunge; at times,
+following a sort of channel marked out in the river by tree-trunks,
+she moves along with a satisfied air, except when a sudden shock
+disturbs the passengers and throws them off their balance, all the
+result of a collision with a sand-bar which no one dreamed was there.
+
+Moreover, if the comparison with the Ship of State is not yet complete,
+note the arrangement of the passengers. On the lower deck appear brown
+faces and black heads, types of Indians, [1] Chinese, and mestizos,
+wedged in between bales of merchandise and boxes, while there on the
+upper deck, beneath an awning that protects them from the sun, are
+seated in comfortable chairs a few passengers dressed in the fashion of
+Europeans, friars, and government clerks, each with his _puro_ cigar,
+and gazing at the landscape apparently without heeding the efforts
+of the captain and the sailors to overcome the obstacles in the river.
+
+The captain was a man of kindly aspect, well along in years, an old
+sailor who in his youth had plunged into far vaster seas, but who now
+in his age had to exercise much greater attention, care, and vigilance
+to avoid dangers of a trivial character. And they were the same for
+each day: the same sand-bars, the same hulk of unwieldy steamer wedged
+into the same curves, like a corpulent dame in a jammed throng. So,
+at each moment, the good man had to stop, to back up, to go forward at
+half speed, sending--now to port, now to starboard--the five sailors
+equipped with long bamboo poles to give force to the turn the rudder
+had suggested. He was like a veteran who, after leading men through
+hazardous campaigns, had in his age become the tutor of a capricious,
+disobedient, and lazy boy.
+
+Do�a Victorina, the only lady seated in the European group, could say
+whether the _Tabo_ was not lazy, disobedient, and capricious--Do�a
+Victorina, who, nervous as ever, was hurling invectives against the
+cascos, bankas, rafts of coconuts, the Indians paddling about, and
+even the washerwomen and bathers, who fretted her with their mirth and
+chatter. Yes, the _Tabo_ would move along very well if there were no
+Indians in the river, no Indians in the country, yes, if there were
+not a single Indian in the world--regardless of the fact that the
+helmsmen were Indians, the sailors Indians, Indians the engineers,
+Indians ninety-nine per cent, of the passengers, and she herself also
+an Indian if the rouge were scratched off and her pretentious gown
+removed. That morning Do�a Victorina was more irritated than usual
+because the members of the group took very little notice of her,
+reason for which was not lacking; for just consider--there could be
+found three friars, convinced that the world would move backwards the
+very day they should take a single step to the right; an indefatigable
+Don Custodio who was sleeping peacefully, satisfied with his projects;
+a prolific writer like Ben-Zayb (anagram of Iba�ez), who believed that
+the people of Manila thought because he, Ben-Zayb, was a thinker;
+a canon like Padre Irene, who added luster to the clergy with his
+rubicund face, carefully shaven, from which towered a beautiful Jewish
+nose, and his silken cassock of neat cut and small buttons; and a
+wealthy jeweler like Simoun, who was reputed to be the adviser and
+inspirer of all the acts of his Excellency, the Captain-General--just
+consider the presence there of these pillars _sine quibus non_ of the
+country, seated there in agreeable discourse, showing little sympathy
+for a renegade Filipina who dyed her hair red! Now wasn't this enough
+to exhaust the patience of a female Job--a sobriquet Do�a Victorina
+always applied to herself when put out with any one!
+
+The ill-humor of the se�ora increased every time the captain shouted
+"Port," "Starboard" to the sailors, who then hastily seized their
+poles and thrust them against the banks, thus with the strength of
+their legs and shoulders preventing the steamer from shoving its hull
+ashore at that particular point. Seen under these circumstances the
+Ship of State might be said to have been converted from a tortoise
+into a crab every time any danger threatened.
+
+"But, captain, why don't your stupid steersmen go in that
+direction?" asked the lady with great indignation.
+
+"Because it's very shallow in the other, se�ora," answered the captain,
+deliberately, slowly winking one eye, a little habit which he had
+cultivated as if to say to his words on their way out, "Slowly,
+slowly!"
+
+"Half speed! Botheration, half speed!" protested Do�a Victorina
+disdainfully. "Why not full?"
+
+"Because we should then be traveling over those ricefields, se�ora,"
+replied the imperturbable captain, pursing his lips to indicate the
+cultivated fields and indulging in two circumspect winks.
+
+This Do�a Victorina was well known in the country for her caprices and
+extravagances. She was often seen in society, where she was tolerated
+whenever she appeared in the company of her niece, Paulita Gomez,
+a very beautiful and wealthy orphan, to whom she was a kind of
+guardian. At a rather advanced age she had married a poor wretch
+named Don Tiburcio de Espada�a, and at the time we now see her,
+carried upon herself fifteen years of wedded life, false frizzes, and a
+half-European costume--for her whole ambition had been to Europeanize
+herself, with the result that from the ill-omened day of her wedding
+she had gradually, thanks to her criminal attempts, succeeded in
+so transforming herself that at the present time Quatrefages and
+Virchow together could not have told where to classify her among the
+known races.
+
+Her husband, who had borne all her impositions with the resignation of
+a fakir through so many years of married life, at last on one luckless
+day had had his bad half-hour and administered to her a superb whack
+with his crutch. The surprise of Madam Job at such an inconsistency
+of character made her insensible to the immediate effects, and only
+after she had recovered from her astonishment and her husband had
+fled did she take notice of the pain, then remaining in bed for
+several days, to the great delight of Paulita, who was very fond
+of joking and laughing at her aunt. As for her husband, horrified
+at the impiety of what appeared to him to be a terrific parricide,
+he took to flight, pursued by the matrimonial furies (two curs and a
+parrot), with all the speed his lameness permitted, climbed into the
+first carriage he encountered, jumped into the first banka he saw on
+the river, and, a Philippine Ulysses, began to wander from town to
+town, from province to province, from island to island, pursued and
+persecuted by his bespectacled Calypso, who bored every one that had
+the misfortune to travel in her company. She had received a report of
+his being in the province of La Laguna, concealed in one of the towns,
+so thither she was bound to seduce him back with her dyed frizzes.
+
+Her fellow travelers had taken measures of defense by keeping up
+among themselves a lively conversation on any topic whatsoever. At
+that moment the windings and turnings of the river led them to talk
+about straightening the channel and, as a matter of course, about the
+port works. Ben-Zayb, the journalist with the countenance of a friar,
+was disputing with a young friar who in turn had the countenance of an
+artilleryman. Both were shouting, gesticulating, waving their arms,
+spreading out their hands, stamping their feet, talking of levels,
+fish-corrals, the San Mateo River, [2] of cascos, of Indians, and so
+on, to the great satisfaction of their listeners and the undisguised
+disgust of an elderly Franciscan, remarkably thin and withered,
+and a handsome Dominican about whose lips flitted constantly a
+scornful smile.
+
+The thin Franciscan, understanding the Dominican's smile, decided
+to intervene and stop the argument. He was undoubtedly respected,
+for with a wave of his hand he cut short the speech of both at the
+moment when the friar-artilleryman was talking about experience and
+the journalist-friar about scientists.
+
+"Scientists, Ben-Zayb--do you know what they are?" asked the Franciscan
+in a hollow voice, scarcely stirring in his seat and making only a
+faint gesture with his skinny hand. "Here you have in the province
+a bridge, constructed by a brother of ours, which was not completed
+because the scientists, relying on their theories, condemned it as
+weak and scarcely safe--yet look, it is the bridge that has withstood
+all the floods and earthquakes!" [3]
+
+"That's it, _pu�ales,_ that very thing, that was exactly what I was
+going to say!" exclaimed the friar-artilleryman, thumping his fists
+down on the arms of his bamboo chair. "That's it, that bridge and
+the scientists! That was just what I was going to mention, Padre
+Salvi--_pu�ales!_"
+
+Ben-Zayb remained silent, half smiling, either out of respect or
+because he really did not know what to reply, and yet his was the only
+thinking head in the Philippines! Padre Irene nodded his approval as
+he rubbed his long nose.
+
+Padre Salvi, the thin and withered cleric, appeared to be satisfied
+with such submissiveness and went on in the midst of the silence:
+"But this does not mean that you may not be as near right as Padre
+Camorra" (the friar-artilleryman). "The trouble is in the lake--"
+
+"The fact is there isn't a single decent lake in this country,"
+interrupted Do�a Victorina, highly indignant, and getting ready for
+a return to the assault upon the citadel.
+
+The besieged gazed at one another in terror, but with the promptitude
+of a general, the jeweler Simoun rushed in to the rescue. "The remedy
+is very simple," he said in a strange accent, a mixture of English
+and South American. "And I really don't understand why it hasn't
+occurred to somebody."
+
+All turned to give him careful attention, even the Dominican. The
+jeweler was a tall, meager, nervous man, very dark, dressed in the
+English fashion and wearing a pith helmet. Remarkable about him was
+his long white hair contrasted with a sparse black beard, indicating a
+mestizo origin. To avoid the glare of the sun he wore constantly a pair
+of enormous blue goggles, which completely hid his eyes and a portion
+of his cheeks, thus giving him the aspect of a blind or weak-sighted
+person. He was standing with his legs apart as if to maintain his
+balance, with his hands thrust into the pockets of his coat.
+
+"The remedy is very simple," he repeated, "and wouldn't cost a cuarto."
+
+The attention now redoubled, for it was whispered in Manila that this
+man controlled the Captain-General, and all saw the remedy in process
+of execution. Even Don Custodio himself turned to listen.
+
+"Dig a canal straight from the source to the mouth of the river,
+passing through Manila; that is, make a new river-channel and fill
+up the old Pasig. That would save land, shorten communication, and
+prevent the formation of sandbars."
+
+The project left all his hearers astounded, accustomed as they were
+to palliative measures.
+
+"It's a Yankee plan!" observed Ben-Zayb, to ingratiate himself with
+Simoun, who had spent a long time in North America.
+
+All considered the plan wonderful and so indicated by the movements
+of their heads. Only Don Custodio, the liberal Don Custodio, owing to
+his independent position and his high offices, thought it his duty
+to attack a project that did not emanate from himself--that was a
+usurpation! He coughed, stroked the ends of his mustache, and with
+a voice as important as though he were at a formal session of the
+Ayuntamiento, said, "Excuse me, Se�or Simoun, my respected friend,
+if I should say that I am not of your opinion. It would cost a great
+deal of money and might perhaps destroy some towns."
+
+"Then destroy them!" rejoined Simoun coldly.
+
+"And the money to pay the laborers?"
+
+"Don't pay them! Use the prisoners and convicts!"
+
+"But there aren't enough, Se�or Simoun!"
+
+"Then, if there aren't enough, let all the villagers, the old men,
+the youths, the boys, work. Instead of the fifteen days of obligatory
+service, let them work three, four, five months for the State, with the
+additional obligation that each one provide his own food and tools."
+
+The startled Don Custodio turned his head to see if there was any
+Indian within ear-shot, but fortunately those nearby were rustics,
+and the two helmsmen seemed to be very much occupied with the windings
+of the river.
+
+"But, Se�or Simoun--"
+
+"Don't fool yourself, Don Custodio," continued Simoun dryly, "only in
+this way are great enterprises carried out with small means. Thus
+were constructed the Pyramids, Lake Moeris, and the Colosseum
+in Rome. Entire provinces came in from the desert, bringing their
+tubers to feed on. Old men, youths, and boys labored in transporting
+stones, hewing them, and carrying them on their shoulders under
+the direction of the official lash, and afterwards, the survivors
+returned to their homes or perished in the sands of the desert. Then
+came other provinces, then others, succeeding one another in the work
+during years. Thus the task was finished, and now we admire them,
+we travel, we go to Egypt and to Home, we extol the Pharaohs and the
+Antonines. Don't fool yourself--the dead remain dead, and might only
+is considered right by posterity."
+
+"But, Se�or Simoun, such measures might provoke uprisings," objected
+Don Custodio, rather uneasy over the turn the affair had taken.
+
+"Uprisings, ha, ha! Did the Egyptian people ever rebel, I wonder? Did
+the Jewish prisoners rebel against the pious Titus? Man, I thought
+you were better informed in history!"
+
+Clearly Simoun was either very presumptuous or disregarded
+conventionalities! To say to Don Custodio's face that he did not know
+history! It was enough to make any one lose his temper! So it seemed,
+for Don Custodio forgot himself and retorted, "But the fact is that
+you're not among Egyptians or Jews!"
+
+"And these people have rebelled more than once," added the Dominican,
+somewhat timidly. "In the times when they were forced to transport
+heavy timbers for the construction of ships, if it hadn't been for
+the clerics--"
+
+"Those times are far away," answered Simoun, with a laugh even drier
+than usual. "These islands will never again rebel, no matter how much
+work and taxes they have. Haven't you lauded to me, Padre Salvi,"
+he added, turning to the Franciscan, "the house and hospital at Los
+Ba�os, where his Excellency is at present?"
+
+Padre Salvi gave a nod and looked up, evading the question.
+
+"Well, didn't you tell me that both buildings were constructed
+by forcing the people to work on them under the whip of a
+lay-brother? Perhaps that wonderful bridge was built in the same
+way. Now tell me, did these people rebel?"
+
+"The fact is--they have rebelled before," replied the Dominican,
+"and _ab actu ad posse valet illatio!_"
+
+"No, no, nothing of the kind," continued Simoun, starting down a
+hatchway to the cabin. "What's said, is said! And you, Padre Sibyla,
+don't talk either Latin or nonsense. What are you friars good for if
+the people can rebel?"
+
+Taking no notice of the replies and protests, Simoun descended the
+small companionway that led below, repeating disdainfully, "Bosh,
+bosh!"
+
+Padre Sibyla turned pale; this was the first time that he, Vice-Rector
+of the University, had ever been credited with nonsense. Don Custodio
+turned green; at no meeting in which he had ever found himself had
+he encountered such an adversary.
+
+"An American mulatto!" he fumed.
+
+"A British Indian," observed Ben-Zayb in a low tone.
+
+"An American, I tell you, and shouldn't I know?" retorted Don Custodio
+in ill-humor. "His Excellency has told me so. He's a jeweler whom
+the latter knew in Havana, and, as I suspect, the one who got him
+advancement by lending him money. So to repay him he has had him come
+here to let him have a chance and increase his fortune by selling
+diamonds--imitations, who knows? And he so ungrateful, that, after
+getting money from the Indians, he wishes--huh!" The sentence was
+concluded by a significant wave of the hand.
+
+No one dared to join in this diatribe. Don Custodio could discredit
+himself with his Excellency, if he wished, but neither Ben-Zayb,
+nor Padre Irene, nor Padre Salvi, nor the offended Padre Sibyla had
+any confidence in the discretion of the others.
+
+"The fact is that this man, being an American, thinks no doubt
+that we are dealing with the redskins. To talk of these matters on
+a steamer! Compel, force the people! And he's the very person who
+advised the expedition to the Carolines and the campaign in Mindanao,
+which is going to bring us to disgraceful ruin. He's the one who
+has offered to superintend the building of the cruiser, and I say,
+what does a jeweler, no matter how rich and learned he may be, know
+about naval construction?"
+
+All this was spoken by Don Custodio in a guttural tone to his neighbor
+Ben-Zayb, while he gesticulated, shrugged his shoulders, and from time
+to time with his looks consulted the others, who were nodding their
+heads ambiguously. The Canon Irene indulged in a rather equivocal
+smile, which he half hid with his hand as he rubbed his nose.
+
+"I tell you, Ben-Zayb," continued Don Custodio, slapping the journalist
+on the arm, "all the trouble comes from not consulting the old-timers
+here. A project in fine words, and especially with a big appropriation,
+with an appropriation in round numbers, dazzles, meets with acceptance
+at once, for this!" Here, in further explanation, he rubbed the tip
+of his thumb against his middle and forefinger. [4]
+
+"There's something in that, there's something in that," Ben-Zayb
+thought it his duty to remark, since in his capacity of journalist
+he had to be informed about everything.
+
+"Now look here, before the port works I presented a project, original,
+simple, useful, economical, and practicable, for clearing away the bar
+in the lake, and it hasn't been accepted because there wasn't any of
+that in it." He repeated the movement of his fingers, shrugged his
+shoulders, and gazed at the others as though to say, "Have you ever
+heard of such a misfortune?"
+
+"May we know what it was?" asked several, drawing nearer and giving
+him their attention. The projects of Don Custodio were as renowned
+as quacks' specifics.
+
+Don Custodio was on the point of refusing to explain it from
+resentment at not having found any supporters in his diatribe against
+Simoun. "When there's no danger, you want me to talk, eh? And when
+there is, you keep quiet!" he was going to say, but that would cause
+the loss of a good opportunity, and his project, now that it could
+not be carried out, might at least be known and admired.
+
+After blowing out two or three puffs of smoke, coughing, and spitting
+through a scupper, he slapped Ben-Zayb on the thigh and asked,
+"You've seen ducks?"
+
+"I rather think so--we've hunted them on the lake," answered the
+surprised journalist.
+
+"No, I'm not talking about wild ducks, I'm talking of the domestic
+ones, of those that are raised in Pateros and Pasig. Do you know what
+they feed on?"
+
+Ben-Zayb, the only thinking head, did not know--he was not engaged
+in that business.
+
+"On snails, man, on snails!" exclaimed Padre Camorra. "One doesn't
+have to be an Indian to know that; it's sufficient to have eyes!"
+
+"Exactly so, on snails!" repeated Don Custodio, flourishing his
+forefinger. "And do you know where they get them?"
+
+Again the thinking head did not know.
+
+"Well, if you had been in the country as many years as I have, you
+would know that they fish them out of the bar itself, where they
+abound, mixed with the sand."
+
+"Then your project?"
+
+"Well, I'm coming to that. My idea was to compel all the towns round
+about, near the bar, to raise ducks, and you'll see how they, all
+by themselves, will deepen the channel by fishing for the snails--no
+more and no less, no more and no less!"
+
+Here Don Custodio extended his arms and gazed triumphantly at the
+stupefaction of his hearers--to none of them had occurred such an
+original idea.
+
+"Will you allow me to write an article about that?" asked Ben-Zayb. "In
+this country there is so little thinking done--"
+
+"But, Don Custodio," exclaimed Do�a Victorina with smirks and grimaces,
+"if everybody takes to raising ducks the _balot_ [5] eggs will become
+abundant. Ugh, how nasty! Rather, let the bar close up entirely!"
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+ON THE LOWER DECK
+
+
+There, below, other scenes were being enacted. Seated on benches
+or small wooden stools among valises, boxes, and baskets, a few
+feet from the engines, in the heat of the boilers, amid the human
+smells and the pestilential odor of oil, were to be seen the great
+majority of the passengers. Some were silently gazing at the changing
+scenes along the banks, others were playing cards or conversing in the
+midst of the scraping of shovels, the roar of the engine, the hiss of
+escaping steam, the swash of disturbed waters, and the shrieks of the
+whistle. In one corner, heaped up like corpses, slept, or tried to
+sleep, a number of Chinese pedlers, seasick, pale, frothing through
+half-opened lips, and bathed in their copious perspiration. Only
+a few youths, students for the most part, easily recognizable from
+their white garments and their confident bearing, made bold to move
+about from stern to bow, leaping over baskets and boxes, happy in
+the prospect of the approaching vacation. Now they commented on the
+movements of the engines, endeavoring to recall forgotten notions of
+physics, now they surrounded the young schoolgirl or the red-lipped
+_buyera_ with her collar of _sampaguitas,_ whispering into their ears
+words that made them smile and cover their faces with their fans.
+
+Nevertheless, two of them, instead of engaging in these fleeting
+gallantries, stood in the bow talking with a man, advanced in years,
+but still vigorous and erect. Both these youths seemed to be well
+known and respected, to judge from the deference shown them by their
+fellow passengers. The elder, who was dressed in complete black, was
+the medical student, Basilio, famous for his successful cures and
+extraordinary treatments, while the other, taller and more robust,
+although much younger, was Isagani, one of the poets, or at least
+rimesters, who that year came from the Ateneo, [6] a curious character,
+ordinarily quite taciturn and uncommunicative. The man talking with
+them was the rich Capitan Basilio, who was returning from a business
+trip to Manila.
+
+"Capitan Tiago is getting along about the same as usual, yes, sir,"
+said the student Basilio, shaking his head. "He won't submit to any
+treatment. At the advice of _a certain person_ he is sending me to San
+Diego under the pretext of looking after his property, but in reality
+so that he may be left to smoke his opium with complete liberty."
+
+When the student said _a certain person_, he really meant Padre Irene,
+a great friend and adviser of Capitan Tiago in his last days.
+
+"Opium is one of the plagues of modern times," replied the capitan
+with the disdain and indignation of a Roman senator. "The ancients knew
+about it but never abused it. While the addiction to classical studies
+lasted--mark this well, young men--opium was used solely as a medicine;
+and besides, tell me who smoke it the most?--Chinamen, Chinamen who
+don't understand a word of Latin! Ah, if Capitan Tiago had only devoted
+himself to Cicero--" Here the most classical disgust painted itself
+on his carefully-shaven Epicurean face. Isagani regarded him with
+attention: that gentleman was suffering from nostalgia for antiquity.
+
+"But to get back to this academy of Castilian," Capitan Basilio
+continued, "I assure you, gentlemen, that you won't materialize it."
+
+"Yes, sir, from day to day we're expecting the permit," replied
+Isagani. "Padre Irene, whom you may have noticed above, and to whom
+we've presented a team of bays, has promised it to us. He's on his
+way now to confer with the General."
+
+"That doesn't matter. Padre Sibyla is opposed to it."
+
+"Let him oppose it! That's why he's here on the steamer, in order
+to--at Los Ba�os before the General."
+
+And the student Basilio filled out his meaning by going through the
+pantomime of striking his fists together.
+
+"That's understood," observed Capitan Basilio, smiling. "But even
+though you get the permit, where'll you get the funds?"
+
+"We have them, sir. Each student has contributed a real."
+
+"But what about the professors?"
+
+"We have them: half Filipinos and half Peninsulars." [7]
+
+"And the house?"
+
+"Makaraig, the wealthy Makaraig, has offered one of his."
+
+Capitan Basilio had to give in; these young men had everything
+arranged.
+
+"For the rest," he said with a shrug of his shoulders, "it's not
+altogether bad, it's not a bad idea, and now that you can't know
+Latin at least you may know Castilian. Here you have another instance,
+namesake, of how we are going backwards. In our times we learned Latin
+because our books were in Latin; now you study Latin a little but
+have no Latin books. On the other hand, your books are in Castilian
+and that language is not taught--_aetas parentum pejor avis tulit
+nos nequiores!_ as Horace said." With this quotation he moved away
+majestically, like a Roman emperor.
+
+The youths smiled at each other. "These men of the past," remarked
+Isagani, "find obstacles for everything. Propose a thing to them and
+instead of seeing its advantages they only fix their attention on
+the difficulties. They want everything to come smooth and round as
+a billiard ball."
+
+"He's right at home with your uncle," observed Basilio.
+
+"They talk of past times. But listen--speaking of uncles, what does
+yours say about Paulita?"
+
+Isagani blushed. "He preached me a sermon about the choosing of
+a wife. I answered him that there wasn't in Manila another like
+her--beautiful, well-bred, an orphan--"
+
+"Very wealthy, elegant, charming, with no defect other than a
+ridiculous aunt," added Basilio, at which both smiled.
+
+"In regard to the aunt, do you know that she has charged me to look
+for her husband?"
+
+"Do�a Victorina? And you've promised, in order to keep your
+sweetheart."
+
+"Naturally! But the fact is that her husband is actually hidden--in
+my uncle's house!"
+
+Both burst into a laugh at this, while Isagani continued: "That's
+why my uncle, being a conscientious man, won't go on the upper deck,
+fearful that Do�a Victorina will ask him about Don Tiburcio. Just
+imagine, when Do�a Victorina learned that I was a steerage passenger
+she gazed at me with a disdain that--"
+
+At that moment Simoun came down and, catching sight of the two young
+men, greeted Basilio in a patronizing tone: "Hello, Don Basilio,
+you're off for the vacation? Is the gentleman a townsman of yours?"
+
+Basilio introduced Isagani with the remark that he was not a townsman,
+but that their homes were not very far apart. Isagani lived on the
+seashore of the opposite coast. Simoun examined him with such marked
+attention that he was annoyed, turned squarely around, and faced the
+jeweler with a provoking stare.
+
+"Well, what is the province like?" the latter asked, turning again
+to Basilio.
+
+"Why, aren't you familiar with it?"
+
+"How the devil am I to know it when I've never set foot in it? I've
+been told that it's very poor and doesn't buy jewels."
+
+"We don't buy jewels, because we don't need them," rejoined Isagani
+dryly, piqued in his provincial pride.
+
+A smile played over Simoun's pallid lips. "Don't be offended, young
+man," he replied. "I had no bad intentions, but as I've been assured
+that nearly all the money is in the hands of the native priests, I
+said to myself: the friars are dying for curacies and the Franciscans
+are satisfied with the poorest, so when they give them up to the
+native priests the truth must be that the king's profile is unknown
+there. But enough of that! Come and have a beer with me and we'll
+drink to the prosperity of your province."
+
+The youths thanked him, but declined the offer.
+
+"You do wrong," Simoun said to them, visibly taken aback. "Beer is a
+good thing, and I heard Padre Camorra say this morning that the lack
+of energy noticeable in this country is due to the great amount of
+water the inhabitants drink."
+
+Isagani was almost as tall as the jeweler, and at this he drew
+himself up.
+
+"Then tell Padre Camorra," Basilio hastened to say, while he nudged
+Isagani slyly, "tell him that if he would drink water instead of wine
+or beer, perhaps we might all be the gainers and he would not give
+rise to so much talk."
+
+"And tell him, also," added Isagani, paying no attention to his
+friend's nudges, "that water is very mild and can be drunk, but that
+it drowns out the wine and beer and puts out the fire, that heated
+it becomes steam, and that ruffled it is the ocean, that it once
+destroyed mankind and made the earth tremble to its foundations!" [8]
+
+Simoun raised his head. Although his looks could not be read
+through the blue goggles, on the rest of his face surprise might
+be seen. "Rather a good answer," he said. "But I fear that he might
+get facetious and ask me when the water will be converted into steam
+and when into an ocean. Padre Camorra is rather incredulous and is
+a great wag."
+
+"When the fire heats it, when the rivulets that are now scattered
+through the steep valleys, forced by fatality, rush together in the
+abyss that men are digging," replied Isagani.
+
+"No, Se�or Simoun," interposed Basilio, changing to a jesting tone,
+"rather keep in mind the verses of my friend Isagani himself:
+
+
+    'Fire you, you say, and water we,
+    Then as you wish, so let it be;
+    But let us live in peace and right,
+    Nor shall the fire e'er see us fight;
+    So joined by wisdom's glowing flame,
+    That without anger, hate, or blame,
+    We form the steam, the fifth element,
+    Progress and light, life and movement.'"
+
+
+"Utopia, Utopia!" responded Simoun dryly. "The engine is about to
+meet--in the meantime, I'll drink my beer." So, without any word of
+excuse, he left the two friends.
+
+"But what's the matter with you today that you're so
+quarrelsome?" asked Basilio.
+
+"Nothing. I don't know why, but that man fills me with horror,
+fear almost."
+
+"I was nudging you with my elbow. Don't you know that he's called
+the Brown Cardinal?"
+
+"The Brown Cardinal?"
+
+"Or Black Eminence, as you wish."
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+"Richelieu had a Capuchin adviser who was called the Gray Eminence;
+well, that's what this man is to the General."
+
+"Really?"
+
+"That's what I've heard from _a certain person,_--who always speaks
+ill of him behind his back and flatters him to his face."
+
+"Does he also visit Capitan Tiago?"
+
+"From the first day after his arrival, and I'm sure that _a certain
+person_ looks upon him as a rival--in the inheritance. I believe
+that he's going to see the General about the question of instruction
+in Castilian."
+
+At that moment Isagani was called away by a servant to his uncle.
+
+On one of the benches at the stern, huddled in among the other
+passengers, sat a native priest gazing at the landscapes that were
+successively unfolded to his view. His neighbors made room for him, the
+men on passing taking off their hats, and the gamblers not daring to
+set their table near where he was. He said little, but neither smoked
+nor assumed arrogant airs, nor did he disdain to mingle with the other
+men, returning the salutes with courtesy and affability as if he felt
+much honored and very grateful. Although advanced in years, with hair
+almost completely gray, he appeared to be in vigorous health, and even
+when seated held his body straight and his head erect, but without
+pride or arrogance. He differed from the ordinary native priests,
+few enough indeed, who at that period served merely as coadjutors or
+administered some curacies temporarily, in a certain self-possession
+and gravity, like one who was conscious of his personal dignity
+and the sacredness of his office. A superficial examination of his
+appearance, if not his white hair, revealed at once that he belonged
+to another epoch, another generation, when the better young men were
+not afraid to risk their dignity by becoming priests, when the native
+clergy looked any friar at all in the face, and when their class,
+not yet degraded and vilified, called for free men and not slaves,
+superior intelligences and not servile wills. In his sad and serious
+features was to be read the serenity of a soul fortified by study and
+meditation, perhaps tried out by deep moral suffering. This priest
+was Padre Florentino, Isagani's uncle, and his story is easily told.
+
+Scion of a wealthy and influential family of Manila, of agreeable
+appearance and cheerful disposition, suited to shine in the world, he
+had never felt any call to the sacerdotal profession, but by reason
+of some promises or vows, his mother, after not a few struggles and
+violent disputes, compelled him to enter the seminary. She was a great
+friend of the Archbishop, had a will of iron, and was as inexorable
+as is every devout woman who believes that she is interpreting the
+will of God. Vainly the young Florentine offered resistance, vainly he
+begged, vainly he pleaded his love affairs, even provoking scandals:
+priest he had to become at twenty-five years of age, and priest he
+became. The Archbishop ordained him, his first mass was celebrated
+with great pomp, three days were given over to feasting, and his
+mother died happy and content, leaving him all her fortune.
+
+But in that struggle Florentine received a wound from which he
+never recovered. Weeks before his first mass the woman he loved,
+in desperation, married a nobody--a blow the rudest he had ever
+experienced. He lost his moral energy, life became dull and
+insupportable. If not his virtue and the respect for his office,
+that unfortunate love affair saved him from the depths into which the
+regular orders and secular clergymen both fall in the Philippines. He
+devoted himself to his parishioners as a duty, and by inclination to
+the natural sciences.
+
+When the events of seventy-two occurred, [9] he feared that the
+large income his curacy yielded him would attract attention to
+him, so, desiring peace above everything, he sought and secured his
+release, living thereafter as a private individual on his patrimonial
+estate situated on the Pacific coast. He there adopted his nephew,
+Isagani, who was reported by the malicious to be his own son by his
+old sweetheart when she became a widow, and by the more serious and
+better informed, the natural child of a cousin, a lady in Manila.
+
+The captain of the steamer caught sight of the old priest and insisted
+that he go to the upper deck, saying, "If you don't do so, the friars
+will think that you don't want to associate with them."
+
+Padre Florentino had no recourse but to accept, so he summoned his
+nephew in order to let him know where he was going, and to charge him
+not to come near the upper deck while he was there. "If the captain
+notices you, he'll invite you also, and we should then be abusing
+his kindness."
+
+"My uncle's way!" thought Isagani. "All so that I won't have any
+reason for talking with Do�a Victorina."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+LEGENDS
+
+
+    Ich weiss nicht was soil es bedeuten
+    Dass ich so traurig bin!
+
+
+When Padre Florentino joined the group above, the bad humor provoked by
+the previous discussion had entirely disappeared. Perhaps their spirits
+had been raised by the attractive houses of the town of Pasig, or the
+glasses of sherry they had drunk in preparation for the coming meal, or
+the prospect of a good breakfast. Whatever the cause, the fact was that
+they were all laughing and joking, even including the lean Franciscan,
+although he made little noise and his smiles looked like death-grins.
+
+"Evil times, evil times!" said Padre Sibyla with a laugh.
+
+"Get out, don't say that, Vice-Rector!" responded the Canon Irene,
+giving the other's chair a shove. "In Hongkong you're doing a fine
+business, putting up every building that--ha, ha!"
+
+"Tut, tut!" was the reply; "you don't see our expenses, and the
+tenants on our estates are beginning to complain--"
+
+"Here, enough of complaints, _pu�ales,_ else I'll fall to
+weeping!" cried Padre Camorra gleefully. "We're not complaining,
+and we haven't either estates or banking-houses. You know that my
+Indians are beginning to haggle over the fees and to flash schedules on
+me! Just look how they cite schedules to me now, and none other than
+those of the Archbishop Basilio Sancho, [10] as if from his time up
+to now prices had not risen. Ha, ha, ha! Why should a baptism cost
+less than a chicken? But I play the deaf man, collect what I can,
+and never complain. We're not avaricious, are we, Padre Salvi?"
+
+At that moment Simoun's head appeared above the hatchway.
+
+"Well, where've you been keeping yourself?" Don Custodio called to
+him, having forgotten all about their dispute. "You're missing the
+prettiest part of the trip!"
+
+"Pshaw!" retorted Simoun, as he ascended, "I've seen so many rivers
+and landscapes that I'm only interested in those that call up legends."
+
+"As for legends, the Pasig has a few," observed the captain, who did
+not relish any depreciation of the river where he navigated and earned
+his livelihood. "Here you have that of _Malapad-na-bato,_ a rock sacred
+before the coming of the Spaniards as the abode of spirits. Afterwards,
+when the superstition had been dissipated and the rock profaned, it was
+converted into a nest of tulisanes, since from its crest they easily
+captured the luckless bankas, which had to contend against both the
+currents and men. Later, in our time, in spite of human interference,
+there are still told stories about wrecked bankas, and if on rounding
+it I didn't steer with my six senses, I'd be smashed against its
+sides. Then you have another legend, that of Do�a Jeronima's cave,
+which Padre Florentino can relate to you."
+
+"Everybody knows that," remarked Padre Sibyla disdainfully.
+
+But neither Simoun, nor Ben-Zayb, nor Padre Irene, nor Padre Camorra
+knew it, so they begged for the story, some in jest and others from
+genuine curiosity. The priest, adopting the tone of burlesque with
+which some had made their request, began like an old tutor relating
+a story to children.
+
+"Once upon a time there was a student who had made a promise of
+marriage to a young woman in his country, but it seems that he failed
+to remember her. She waited for him faithfully year after year, her
+youth passed, she grew into middle age, and then one day she heard a
+report that her old sweetheart was the Archbishop of Manila. Disguising
+herself as a man, she came round the Cape and presented herself before
+his grace, demanding the fulfilment of his promise. What she asked
+was of course impossible, so the Archbishop ordered the preparation
+of the cave that you may have noticed with its entrance covered and
+decorated with a curtain of vines. There she lived and died and there
+she is buried. The legend states that Do�a Jeronima was so fat that
+she had to turn sidewise to get into it. Her fame as an enchantress
+sprung from her custom of throwing into the river the silver dishes
+which she used in the sumptuous banquets that were attended by crowds
+of gentlemen. A net was spread under the water to hold the dishes
+and thus they were cleaned. It hasn't been twenty years since the
+river washed the very entrance of the cave, but it has gradually been
+receding, just as the memory of her is dying out among the people."
+
+"A beautiful legend!" exclaimed Ben-Zayb. "I'm going to write an
+article about it. It's sentimental!"
+
+Do�a Victorina thought of dwelling in such a cave and was about to
+say so, when Simoun took the floor instead.
+
+"But what's your opinion about that, Padre Salvi?" he asked the
+Franciscan, who seemed to be absorbed in thought. "Doesn't it seem to
+you as though his Grace, instead of giving her a cave, ought to have
+placed her in a nunnery--in St. Clara's, for example? What do you say?"
+
+There was a start of surprise on Padre Sibyla's part to notice that
+Padre Salvi shuddered and looked askance at Simoun.
+
+"Because it's not a very gallant act," continued Simoun quite
+naturally, "to give a rocky cliff as a home to one with whose
+hopes we have trifled. It's hardly religious to expose her thus to
+temptation, in a cave on the banks of a river--it smacks of nymphs and
+dryads. It would have been more gallant, more pious, more romantic,
+more in keeping with the customs of this country, to shut her up in
+St. Clara's, like a new Eloise, in order to visit and console her
+from time to time."
+
+"I neither can nor should pass judgment upon the conduct of
+archbishops," replied the Franciscan sourly.
+
+"But you, who are the ecclesiastical governor, acting in the place
+of our Archbishop, what would you do if such a case should arise?"
+
+Padre Salvi shrugged his shoulders and calmly responded, "It's not
+worth while thinking about what can't happen. But speaking of legends,
+don't overlook the most beautiful, since it is the truest: that of
+the miracle of St. Nicholas, the ruins of whose church you may have
+noticed. I'm going to relate it to Se�or Simoun, as he probably hasn't
+heard it. It seems that formerly the river, as well as the lake,
+was infested with caymans, so huge and voracious that they attacked
+bankas and upset them with a slap of the tail. Our chronicles relate
+that one day an infidel Chinaman, who up to that time had refused to be
+converted, was passing in front of the church, when suddenly the devil
+presented himself to him in the form of a cayman and upset the banka,
+in order to devour him and carry him off to hell. Inspired by God,
+the Chinaman at that moment called upon St. Nicholas and instantly
+the cayman was changed into a stone. The old people say that in
+their time the monster could easily be recognized in the pieces of
+stone that were left, and, for my part, I can assure you that I have
+clearly made out the head, to judge from which the monster must have
+been enormously large."
+
+"Marvelous, a marvelous legend!" exclaimed Ben-Zayb. "It's good for an
+article--the description of the monster, the terror of the Chinaman,
+the waters of the river, the bamboo brakes. Also, it'll do for a study
+of comparative religions; because, look you, an infidel Chinaman in
+great distress invoked exactly the saint that he must know only by
+hearsay and in whom he did not believe. Here there's no room for the
+proverb that 'a known evil is preferable to an unknown good.' If I
+should find myself in China and get caught in such a difficulty, I
+would invoke the obscurest saint in the calendar before Confucius or
+Buddha. Whether this is due to the manifest superiority of Catholicism
+or to the inconsequential and illogical inconsistency in the brains
+of the yellow race, a profound study of anthropology alone will be
+able to elucidate."
+
+Ben-Zayb had adopted the tone of a lecturer and was describing
+circles in the air with his forefinger, priding himself on his
+imagination, which from the most insignificant facts could deduce
+so many applications and inferences. But noticing that Simoun was
+preoccupied and thinking that he was pondering over what he, Ben-Zayb,
+had just said, he inquired what the jeweler was meditating about.
+
+"About two very important questions," answered Simoun; "two questions
+that you might add to your article. First, what may have become of
+the devil on seeing himself suddenly confined within a stone? Did he
+escape? Did he stay there? Was he crushed? Second, if the petrified
+animals that I have seen in various European museums may not have
+been the victims of some antediluvian saint?"
+
+The tone in which the jeweler spoke was so serious, while he rested
+his forehead on the tip of his forefinger in an attitude of deep
+meditation, that Padre Camorra responded very gravely, "Who knows,
+who knows?"
+
+"Since we're busy with legends and are now entering the lake,"
+remarked Padre Sibyla, "the captain must know many--"
+
+At that moment the steamer crossed the bar and the panorama spread out
+before their eyes was so truly magnificent that all were impressed. In
+front extended the beautiful lake bordered by green shores and blue
+mountains, like a huge mirror, framed in emeralds and sapphires,
+reflecting the sky in its glass. On the right were spread out the
+low shores, forming bays with graceful curves, and dim there in the
+distance the crags of Sungay, while in the background rose Makiling,
+imposing and majestic, crowned with fleecy clouds. On the left lay
+Talim Island with its curious sweep of hills. A fresh breeze rippled
+over the wide plain of water.
+
+"By the way, captain," said Ben-Zayb, turning around, "do you know
+in what part of the lake a certain Guevara, Navarra, or Ibarra,
+was killed?"
+
+The group looked toward the captain, with the exception of Simoun, who
+had turned away his head as though to look for something on the shore.
+
+"Ah, yes!" exclaimed Do�a Victorina. "Where, captain? Did he leave
+any tracks in the water?"
+
+The good captain winked several times, an indication that he was
+annoyed, but reading the request in the eyes of all, took a few steps
+toward the bow and scanned the shore.
+
+"Look over there," he said in a scarcely audible voice, after making
+sure that no strangers were near. "According to the officer who
+conducted the pursuit, Ibarra, upon finding himself surrounded, jumped
+out of his banka there near the Kinabutasan [11] and, swimming under
+water, covered all that distance of more than two miles, saluted by
+bullets every time that he raised his head to breathe. Over yonder is
+where they lost track of him, and a little farther on near the shore
+they discovered something like the color of blood. And now I think
+of it, it's just thirteen years, day for day, since this happened."
+
+"So that his corpse--" began Ben-Zayb.
+
+"Went to join his father's," replied Padre Sibyla. "Wasn't he also
+another filibuster, Padre Salvi?"
+
+"That's what might be called cheap funerals, Padre Camorra,
+eh?" remarked Ben-Zayb.
+
+"I've always said that those who won't pay for expensive funerals
+are filibusters," rejoined the person addressed, with a merry laugh.
+
+"But what's the matter with you, Se�or Simoun?" inquired Ben-Zayb,
+seeing that the jeweler was motionless and thoughtful. "Are you
+seasick--an old traveler like you? On such a drop of water as this!"
+
+"I want to tell you," broke in the captain, who had come to hold all
+those places in great affection, "that you can't call this a drop
+of water. It's larger than any lake in Switzerland and all those in
+Spain put together. I've seen old sailors who got seasick here."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+CABESANG TALES
+
+
+Those who have read the first part of this story will perhaps remember
+an old wood-cutter who lived in the depths of the forest. [12] Tandang
+Selo is still alive, and though his hair has turned completely white,
+he yet preserves his good health. He no longer hunts or cuts firewood,
+for his fortunes have improved and he works only at making brooms.
+
+His son Tales (abbreviation of Telesforo) had worked at first on shares
+on the lands of a capitalist, but later, having become the owner of
+two carabaos and several hundred pesos, determined to work on his own
+account, aided by his father, his wife, and his three children. So
+they cut down and cleared away some thick woods which were situated
+on the borders of the town and which they believed belonged to no
+one. During the labors of cleaning and cultivating the new land,
+the whole family fell ill with malaria and the mother died, along
+with the eldest daughter, Lucia, in the flower of her age. This,
+which was the natural consequence of breaking up new soil infested
+with various kinds of bacteria, they attributed to the anger of the
+woodland spirit, so they were resigned and went on with their labor,
+believing him pacified.
+
+But when they began to harvest their first crop a religious
+corporation, which owned land in the neighboring town, laid claim to
+the fields, alleging that they fell within their boundaries, and to
+prove it they at once started to set up their marks. However, the
+administrator of the religious order left to them, for humanity's
+sake, the usufruct of the land on condition that they pay a small
+sum annually--a mere bagatelle, twenty or thirty pesos. Tales, as
+peaceful a man as could be found, was as much opposed to lawsuits
+as any one and more submissive to the friars than most people; so,
+in order not to smash a _palyok_ against a _kawali_ (as he said,
+for to him the friars were iron pots and he a clay jar), he had the
+weakness to yield to their claim, remembering that he did not know
+Spanish and had no money to pay lawyers.
+
+Besides, Tandang Selo said to him, "Patience! You would spend more
+in one year of litigation than in ten years of paying what the white
+padres demand. And perhaps they'll pay you back in masses! Pretend
+that those thirty pesos had been lost in gambling or had fallen into
+the water and been swallowed by a cayman."
+
+The harvest was abundant and sold well, so Tales planned to build a
+wooden house in the barrio of Sagpang, of the town of Tiani, which
+adjoined San Diego.
+
+Another year passed, bringing another good crop, and for this reason
+the friars raised the rent to fifty pesos, which Tales paid in order
+not to quarrel and because he expected to sell his sugar at a good
+price.
+
+"Patience! Pretend that the cayman has grown some," old Selo consoled
+him.
+
+That year he at last saw his dream realized: to live in the barrio of
+Sagpang in a wooden house. The father and grandfather then thought of
+providing some education for the two children, especially the daughter
+Juliana, or Juli, as they called her, for she gave promise of being
+accomplished and beautiful. A boy who was a friend of the family,
+Basilio, was studying in Manila, and he was of as lowly origin as they.
+
+But this dream seemed destined not to be realized. The first care the
+community took when they saw the family prospering was to appoint as
+cabeza de barangay its most industrious member, which left only Tano,
+the son, who was only fourteen years old. The father was therefore
+called _Cabesang_ Tales and had to order a sack coat, buy a felt hat,
+and prepare to spend his money. In order to avoid any quarrel with
+the curate or the government, he settled from his own pocket the
+shortages in the tax-lists, paying for those who had died or moved
+away, and he lost considerable time in making the collections and on
+his trips to the capital.
+
+"Patience! Pretend that the cayman's relatives have joined him,"
+advised Tandang Selo, smiling placidly.
+
+"Next year you'll put on a long skirt and go to Manila to study like
+the young ladies of the town," Cabesang Tales told his daughter every
+time he heard her talking of Basilio's progress.
+
+But that next year did not come, and in its stead there was another
+increase in the rent. Cabesang Tales became serious and scratched
+his head. The clay jar was giving up all its rice to the iron pot.
+
+When the rent had risen to two hundred pesos, Tales was not content
+with scratching his head and sighing; he murmured and protested. The
+friar-administrator then told him that if he could not pay, some one
+else would be assigned to cultivate that land--many who desired it
+had offered themselves.
+
+He thought at first that the friar was joking, but the friar was
+talking seriously, and indicated a servant of his to take possession
+of the land. Poor Tales turned pale, he felt a buzzing in his ears, he
+saw in the red mist that rose before his eyes his wife and daughter,
+pallid, emaciated, dying, victims of the intermittent fevers--then
+he saw the thick forest converted into productive fields, he saw the
+stream of sweat watering its furrows, he saw himself plowing under
+the hot sun, bruising his feet against the stones and roots, while
+this friar had been driving about in his carriage with the wretch who
+was to get the land following like a slave behind his master. No, a
+thousand times, no! First let the fields sink into the depths of the
+earth and bury them all! Who was this intruder that he should have
+any right to his land? Had he brought from his own country a single
+handful of that soil? Had he crooked a single one of his fingers to
+pull up the roots that ran through it?
+
+Exasperated by the threats of the friar, who tried to uphold his
+authority at any cost in the presence of the other tenants, Cabesang
+Tales rebelled and refused to pay a single cuarto, having ever before
+himself that red mist, saying that he would give up his fields to the
+first man who could irrigate it with blood drawn from his own veins.
+
+Old Selo, on looking at his son's face, did not dare to mention the
+cayman, but tried to calm him by talking of clay jars, reminding him
+that the winner in a lawsuit was left without a shirt to his back.
+
+"We shall all be turned to clay, father, and without shirts we were
+born," was the reply.
+
+So he resolutely refused to pay or to give up a single span of his
+land unless the friars should first prove the legality of their claim
+by exhibiting a title-deed of some kind. As they had none, a lawsuit
+followed, and Cabesang Tales entered into it, confiding that some at
+least, if not all, were lovers of justice and respecters of the law.
+
+"I serve and have been serving the King with my money and my services,"
+he said to those who remonstrated with him. "I'm asking for justice
+and he is obliged to give it to me."
+
+Drawn on by fatality, and as if he had put into play in the lawsuit
+the whole future of himself and his children, he went on spending his
+savings to pay lawyers, notaries, and solicitors, not to mention the
+officials and clerks who exploited his ignorance and his needs. He
+moved to and fro between the village and the capital, passed his
+days without eating and his nights without sleeping, while his talk
+was always about briefs, exhibits, and appeals. There was then seen
+a struggle such as was never before carried on under the skies of the
+Philippines: that of a poor Indian, ignorant and friendless, confiding
+in the justness and righteousness of his cause, fighting against a
+powerful corporation before which Justice bowed her head, while the
+judges let fall the scales and surrendered the sword. He fought as
+tenaciously as the ant which bites when it knows that it is going
+to be crushed, as does the fly which looks into space only through
+a pane of glass. Yet the clay jar defying the iron pot and smashing
+itself into a thousand pieces bad in it something impressive--it had
+the sublimeness of desperation!
+
+On the days when his journeys left him free he patrolled his fields
+armed with a shotgun, saying that the tulisanes were hovering around
+and he had need of defending himself in order not to fall into their
+hands and thus lose his lawsuit. As if to improve his marksmanship,
+he shot at birds and fruits, even the butterflies, with such accurate
+aim that the friar-administrator did not dare to go to Sagpang without
+an escort of civil-guards, while the friar's hireling, who gazed from
+afar at the threatening figure of Tales wandering over the fields
+like a sentinel upon the walls, was terror stricken and refused to
+take the property away from him.
+
+But the local judges and those at the capital, warned by the experience
+of one of their number who had been summarily dismissed, dared not
+give him the decision, fearing their own dismissal. Yet they were not
+really bad men, those judges, they were upright and conscientious,
+good citizens, excellent fathers, dutiful sons--and they were
+able to appreciate poor Tales' situation better than Tales himself
+could. Many of them were versed in the scientific and historical
+basis of property, they knew that the friars by their own statutes
+could not own property, but they also knew that to come from far
+across the sea with an appointment secured with great difficulty,
+to undertake the duties of the position with the best intentions,
+and now to lose it because an Indian fancied that justice had to
+be done on earth as in heaven--that surely was an idea! They had
+their families and greater needs surely than that Indian: one had
+a mother to provide for, and what duty is more sacred than that of
+caring for a mother? Another had sisters, all of marriageable age;
+that other there had many little children who expected their daily
+bread and who, like fledglings in a nest, would surely die of hunger
+the day he was out of a job; even the very least of them had there,
+far away, a wife who would be in distress if the monthly remittance
+failed. All these moral and conscientious judges tried everything in
+their power in the way of counsel, advising Cabesang Tales to pay
+the rent demanded. But Tales, like all simple souls, once he had
+seen what was just, went straight toward it. He demanded proofs,
+documents, papers, title-deeds, but the friars had none of these,
+resting their case on his concessions in the past.
+
+Cabesang Tales' constant reply was: "If every day I give alms to a
+beggar to escape annoyance, who will oblige me to continue my gifts
+if he abuses my generosity?"
+
+From this stand no one could draw him, nor were there any threats that
+could intimidate him. In vain Governor M---- made a trip expressly
+to talk to him and frighten him. His reply to it all was: "You may
+do what you like, Mr. Governor, I'm ignorant and powerless. But I've
+cultivated those fields, my wife and daughter died while helping me
+clear them, and I won't give them up to any one but him who can do
+more with them than I've done. Let him first irrigate them with his
+blood and bury in them his wife and daughter!"
+
+The upshot of this obstinacy was that the honorable judges gave the
+decision to the friars, and everybody laughed at him, saying that
+lawsuits are not won by justice. But Cabesang Tales appealed, loaded
+his shotgun, and patrolled his fields with deliberation.
+
+During this period his life seemed to be a wild dream. His son,
+Tano, a youth as tall as his father and as good as his sister, was
+conscripted, but he let the boy go rather than purchase a substitute.
+
+"I have to pay the lawyers," he told his weeping daughter. "If I win
+the case I'll find a way to get him back, and if I lose it I won't
+have any need for sons."
+
+So the son went away and nothing more was heard of him except that his
+hair had been cropped and that he slept under a cart. Six months later
+it was rumored that he had been seen embarking for the Carolines;
+another report was that he had been seen in the uniform of the
+Civil Guard.
+
+"Tano in the Civil Guard! _'Susmariosep_!" exclaimed several, clasping
+their hands. "Tano, who was so good and so honest! _Requimternam!_"
+
+The grandfather went many days without speaking to the father, Juli
+fell sick, but Cabesang Tales did not shed a single tear, although for
+two days he never left the house, as if he feared the looks of reproach
+from the whole village or that he would be called the executioner of
+his son. But on the third day he again sallied forth with his shotgun.
+
+Murderous intentions were attributed to him, and there were
+well-meaning persons who whispered about that he had been heard to
+threaten that he would bury the friar-administrator in the furrows of
+his fields, whereat the friar was frightened at him in earnest. As a
+result of this, there came a decree from the Captain-General forbidding
+the use of firearms and ordering that they be taken up. Cabesang Tales
+had to hand over his shotgun but he continued his rounds armed with
+a long bolo.
+
+"What are you going to do with that bolo when the tulisanes have
+firearms?" old Selo asked him.
+
+"I must watch my crops," was the answer. "Every stalk of cane growing
+there is one of my wife's bones."
+
+The bolo was taken up on the pretext that it was too long. He then
+took his father's old ax and with it on his shoulder continued his
+sullen rounds.
+
+Every time he left the house Tandang Selo and Juli trembled for his
+life. The latter would get up from her loom, go to the window, pray,
+make vows to the saints, and recite novenas. The grandfather was at
+times unable to finish the handle of a broom and talked of returning
+to the forest--life in that house was unbearable.
+
+At last their fears were realized. As the fields were some distance
+from the village, Cabesang Tales, in spite of his ax, fell into the
+hands of tulisanes who had revolvers and rifles. They told him that
+since he had money to pay judges and lawyers he must have some also
+for the outcasts and the hunted. They therefore demanded a ransom of
+five hundred pesos through the medium of a rustic, with the warning
+that if anything happened to their messenger, the captive would pay
+for it with his life. Two days of grace were allowed.
+
+This news threw the poor family into the wildest terror, which was
+augmented when they learned that the Civil Guard was going out in
+pursuit of the bandits. In case of an encounter, the first victim
+would be the captive--this they all knew. The old man was paralyzed,
+while the pale and frightened daughter tried often to talk but could
+not. Still, another thought more terrible, an idea more cruel, roused
+them from their stupor. The rustic sent by the tulisanes said that
+the band would probably have to move on, and if they were slow in
+sending the ransom the two days would elapse and Cabesang Tales would
+have his throat cut.
+
+This drove those two beings to madness, weak and powerless as they
+were. Tandang Selo got up, sat down, went outside, came back again,
+knowing not where to go, where to seek aid. Juli appealed to her
+images, counted and recounted her money, but her two hundred pesos
+did not increase or multiply. Soon she dressed herself, gathered
+together all her jewels, and asked the advice of her grandfather,
+if she should go to see the gobernadorcillo, the judge, the notary,
+the lieutenant of the Civil Guard. The old man said yes to everything,
+or when she said no, he too said no. At length came the neighbors,
+their relatives and friends, some poorer than others, in their
+simplicity magnifying the fears. The most active of all was Sister
+Bali, a great _panguinguera,_ who had been to Manila to practise
+religious exercises in the nunnery of the Sodality.
+
+Juli was willing to sell all her jewels, except a locket set with
+diamonds and emeralds which Basilio had given her, for this locket
+had a history: a nun, the daughter of Capitan Tiago, had given it to a
+leper, who, in return for professional treatment, had made a present of
+it to Basilio. So she could not sell it without first consulting him.
+
+Quickly the shell-combs and earrings were sold, as well as Juli's
+rosary, to their richest neighbor, and thus fifty pesos were added,
+but two hundred and fifty were still lacking. The locket might be
+pawned, but Juli shook her head. A neighbor suggested that the house
+be sold and Tandang Selo approved the idea, satisfied to return to
+the forest and cut firewood as of old, but Sister Bali observed that
+this could not be done because the owner was not present.
+
+"The judge's wife once sold me her _tapis_ for a peso, but her
+husband said that the sale did not hold because it hadn't received
+his approval. _Ab�!_ He took back the _tapis_ and she hasn't returned
+the peso yet, but I don't pay her when she wins at _panguingui, ab�!_
+In that way I've collected twelve cuartos, and for that alone I'm
+going to play with her. I can't bear to have people fail to pay what
+they owe me, _ab�!_"
+
+Another neighbor was going to ask Sister Bali why then did not
+she settle a little account with her, but the quick _panguinguera_
+suspected this and added at once: "Do you know, Juli, what you can
+do? Borrow two hundred and fifty pesos on the house, payable when
+the lawsuit is won."
+
+This seemed to be the best proposition, so they decided to act upon
+it that same day. Sister Bali offered to accompany her, and together
+they visited the houses of all the rich folks in Tiani, but no one
+would accept the proposal. The case, they said, was already lost,
+and to show favors to an enemy of the friars was to expose themselves
+to their vengeance. At last a pious woman took pity on the girl and
+lent the money on condition that Juli should remain with her as a
+servant until the debt was paid. Juli would not have so very much
+to do: sew, pray, accompany her to mass, and fast for her now and
+then. The girl accepted with tears in her eyes, received the money,
+and promised to enter her service on the following day, Christmas.
+
+When the grandfather heard of that sale he fell to weeping like a
+child. What, that granddaughter whom he had not allowed to walk in the
+sun lest her skin should be burned, Juli, she of the delicate fingers
+and rosy feet! What, that girl, the prettiest in the village and
+perhaps in the whole town, before whose window many gallants had vainly
+passed the night playing and singing! What, his only granddaughter,
+the sole joy of his fading eyes, she whom he had dreamed of seeing
+dressed in a long skirt, talking Spanish, and holding herself erect
+waving a painted fan like the daughters of the wealthy--she to become
+a servant, to be scolded and reprimanded, to ruin her fingers, to
+sleep anywhere, to rise in any manner whatsoever!
+
+So the old grandfather wept and talked of hanging or starving himself
+to death. "If you go," he declared, "I'm going back to the forest
+and will never set foot in the town."
+
+Juli soothed him by saying that it was necessary for her father to
+return, that the suit would be won, and they could then ransom her
+from her servitude.
+
+The night was a sad one. Neither of the two could taste a bite and
+the old man refused to lie down, passing the whole night seated in
+a corner, silent and motionless. Juli on her part tried to sleep,
+but for a long time could not close her eyes. Somewhat relieved about
+her father's fate, she now thought of herself and fell to weeping,
+but stifled her sobs so that the old man might not hear them. The
+next day she would be a servant, and it was the very day Basilio was
+accustomed to come from Manila with presents for her. Henceforward
+she would have to give up that love; Basilio, who was going to be a
+doctor, couldn't marry a pauper. In fancy she saw him going to the
+church in company with the prettiest and richest girl in the town,
+both well-dressed, happy and smiling, while she, Juli, followed her
+mistress, carrying novenas, buyos, and the cuspidor. Here the girl
+felt a lump rise in her throat, a sinking at her heart, and begged
+the Virgin to let her die first.
+
+But--said her conscience--he will at least know that I preferred to
+pawn myself rather than the locket he gave me.
+
+This thought consoled her a little and brought on empty dreams. Who
+knows but that a miracle might happen? She might find the two hundred
+and fifty pesos under the image of the Virgin--she had read of
+many similar miracles. The sun might not rise nor morning come, and
+meanwhile the suit would be won. Her father might return, or Basilio
+put in his appearance, she might find a bag of gold in the garden,
+the tulisanes would send the bag of gold, the curate, Padre Camorra,
+who was always teasing her, would come with the tulisanes. So her
+ideas became more and more confused, until at length, worn out by
+fatigue and sorrow, she went to sleep with dreams of her childhood
+in the depths of the forest: she was bathing in the torrent along
+with her two brothers, there were little fishes of all colors that
+let themselves be caught like fools, and she became impatient because
+she found no pleasure in catchnig such foolish little fishes! Basilio
+was under the water, but Basilio for some reason had the face of her
+brother Tano. Her new mistress was watching them from the bank.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+A COCHERO'S CHRISTMAS EVE
+
+
+Basilio reached San Diego just as the Christmas Eve procession was
+passing through the streets. He had been delayed on the road for
+several hours because the cochero, having forgotten his cedula, was
+held up by the Civil Guard, had his memory jogged by a few blows from
+a rifle-butt, and afterwards was taken before the commandant. Now the
+carromata was again detained to let the procession pass, while the
+abused cochero took off his hat reverently and recited a paternoster
+to the first image that came along, which seemed to be that of a
+great saint. It was the figure of an old man with an exceptionally
+long beard, seated at the edge of a grave under a tree filled with
+all kinds of stuffed birds. A _kalan_ with a clay jar, a mortar,
+and a _kalikut_ for mashing buyo were his only utensils, as if to
+indicate that he lived on the border of the tomb and was doing his
+cooking there. This was the Methuselah of the religious iconography
+of the Philippines; his colleague and perhaps contemporary is called
+in Europe Santa Claus, and is still more smiling and agreeable.
+
+"In the time of the saints," thought the cochero, "surely there were no
+civil-guards, because one can't live long on blows from rifle-butts."
+
+Behind the great old man came the three Magian Kings on ponies that
+were capering about, especially that of the negro Melchior, which
+seemed to be about to trample its companions.
+
+"No, there couldn't have been any civil-guards," decided the
+cochero, secretly envying those fortunate times, "because if there
+had been, that negro who is cutting up such capers beside those two
+Spaniards"--Gaspar and Bathazar--"would have gone to jail."
+
+Then, observing that the negro wore a crown and was a king, like the
+other two, the Spaniards, his thoughts naturally turned to the king
+of the Indians, and he sighed. "Do you know, sir," he asked Basilio
+respectfully, "if his right foot is loose yet?"
+
+Basilio had him repeat the question. "Whose right foot?"
+
+"The King's!" whispered the cochero mysteriously.
+
+"What King's?"
+
+"Our King's, the King of the Indians."
+
+Basilio smiled and shrugged his shoulders, while the cochero again
+sighed. The Indians in the country places preserve the legend that
+their king, imprisoned and chained in the cave of San Mateo, will
+come some day to free them. Every hundredth year he breaks one of his
+chains, so that he now has his hands and his left foot loose--only
+the right foot remains bound. This king causes the earthquakes when he
+struggles or stirs himself, and he is so strong that in shaking hands
+with him it is necessary to extend to him a bone, which he crushes
+in his grasp. For some unexplainable reason the Indians call him King
+Bernardo, perhaps by confusing him with Bernardo del Carpio. [13]
+
+"When he gets his right foot loose," muttered the cochero, stifling
+another sigh, "I'll give him my horses, and offer him my services even
+to death, for he'll free us from the Civil Guard." With a melancholy
+gaze he watched the Three Kings move on.
+
+The boys came behind in two files, sad and serious as though they were
+there under compulsion. They lighted their way, some with torches,
+others with tapers, and others with paper lanterns on bamboo poles,
+while they recited the rosary at the top of their voices, as though
+quarreling with somebody. Afterwards came St. Joseph on a modest float,
+with a look of sadness and resignation on his face, carrying his stalk
+of lilies, as he moved along between two civil-guards as though he were
+a prisoner. This enabled the cochero to understand the expression on
+the saint's face, but whether the sight of the guards troubled him or
+he had no great respect for a saint who would travel in such company,
+he did not recite a single requiem.
+
+Behind St. Joseph came the girls bearing lights, their heads covered
+with handkerchiefs knotted under their chins, also reciting the rosary,
+but with less wrath than the boys. In their midst were to be seen
+several lads dragging along little rabbits made of Japanese paper,
+lighted by red candles, with their short paper tails erect. The lads
+brought those toys into the procession to enliven the birth of the
+Messiah. The little animals, fat and round as eggs, seemed to be so
+pleased that at times they would take a leap, lose their balance, fall,
+and catch fire. The owner would then hasten to extinguish such burning
+enthusiasm, puffing and blowing until he finally beat out the fire,
+and then, seeing his toy destroyed, would fall to weeping. The cochero
+observed with sadness that the race of little paper animals disappeared
+each year, as if they had been attacked by the pest like the living
+animals. He, the abused Sinong, remembered his two magnificent horses,
+which, at the advice of the curate, he had caused to be blessed to
+save them from plague, spending therefor ten pesos--for neither
+the government nor the curates have found any better remedy for
+the epizootic--and they had died after all. Yet he consoled himself
+by remembering also that after the shower of holy water, the Latin
+phrases of the padre, and the ceremonies, the horses had become so
+vain and self-important that they would not even allow him, Sinong,
+a good Christian, to put them in harness, and he had not dared to whip
+them, because a tertiary sister had said that they were _sanctified_.
+
+The procession was closed by the Virgin dressed as the Divine Shepherd,
+with a pilgrim's hat of wide brim and long plumes to indicate the
+journey to Jerusalem. That the birth might be made more explicable, the
+curate had ordered her figure to be stuffed with rags and cotton under
+her skirt, so that no one could be in any doubt as to her condition. It
+was a very beautiful image, with the same sad expression of all the
+images that the Filipinos make, and a mien somewhat ashamed, doubtless
+at the way in which the curate had arranged her. In front came several
+singers and behind, some musicians with the usual civil-guards. The
+curate, as was to be expected after what he had done, was not in his
+place, for that year he was greatly displeased at having to use all
+his diplomacy and shrewdness to convince the townspeople that they
+should pay thirty pesos for each Christmas mass instead of the usual
+twenty. "You're turning filibusters!" he had said to them.
+
+The cochero must have been greatly preoccupied with the sights of the
+procession, for when it had passed and Basilio ordered him to go on, he
+did not notice that the lamp on his carromata had gone out. Neither did
+Basilio notice it, his attention being devoted to gazing at the houses,
+which were illuminated inside and out with little paper lanterns
+of fantastic shapes and colors, stars surrounded by hoops with long
+streamers which produced a pleasant murmur when shaken by the wind,
+and fishes of movable heads and tails, having a glass of oil inside,
+suspended from the eaves of the windows in the delightful fashion of
+a happy and homelike fiesta. But he also noticed that the lights were
+flickering, that the stars were being eclipsed, that this year had
+fewer ornaments and hangings than the former, which in turn had had
+even fewer than the year preceding it. There was scarcely any music
+in the streets, while the agreeable noises of the kitchen were not to
+be heard in all the houses, which the youth ascribed to the fact that
+for some time things had been going badly, the sugar did not bring a
+good price, the rice crops had failed, over half the live stock had
+died, but the taxes rose and increased for some inexplicable reason,
+while the abuses of the Civil Guard became more frequent to kill off
+the happiness of the people in the towns.
+
+He was just pondering over this when an energetic
+"Halt!" resounded. They were passing in front of the barracks and one
+of the guards had noticed the extinguished lamp of the carromata,
+which could not go on without it. A hail of insults fell about the
+poor cochero, who vainly excused himself with the length of the
+procession. He would be arrested for violating the ordinances and
+afterwards advertised in the newspapers, so the peaceful and prudent
+Basilio left the carromata and went his way on foot, carrying his
+valise. This was San Diego, his native town, where he had not a
+single relative.
+
+The only, house wherein there seemed to be any mirth was Capitan
+Basilio's. Hens and chickens cackled their death chant to the
+accompaniment of dry and repeated strokes, as of meat pounded on a
+chopping-block, and the sizzling of grease in the frying-pans. A feast
+was going on in the house, and even into the street there passed a
+certain draught of air, saturated with the succulent odors of stews
+and confections. In the entresol Basilio saw Sinang, as small as
+when our readers knew her before, [14] although a little rounder and
+plumper since her marriage. Then to his great surprise he made out,
+further in at the back of the room, chatting with Capitan Basilio,
+the curate, and the alferez of the Civil Guard, no less than the
+jeweler Simoun, as ever with his blue goggles and his nonchalant air.
+
+"It's understood, Se�or Simoun," Capitan Basilio was saying, "that
+we'll go to Tiani to see your jewels."
+
+"I would also go," remarked the alferez, "because I need a watch-chain,
+but I'm so busy--if Capitan Basilio would undertake--"
+
+Capitan Basilio would do so with the greatest pleasure, and as
+he wished to propitiate the soldier in order that he might not be
+molested in the persons of his laborers, he refused to accept the
+money which the alferez was trying to get out of his pocket.
+
+"It's my Christmas gift!"
+
+"I can't allow you, Capitan, I can't permit it!"
+
+"All right! We'll settle up afterwards," replied Capitan Basilio with
+a lordly gesture.
+
+Also, the curate wanted a pair of lady's earrings and requested the
+capitan to buy them for him. "I want them first class. Later we'll
+fix up the account."
+
+"Don't worry about that, Padre," said the good man, who wished to be
+at peace with the Church also. An unfavorable report on the curate's
+part could do him great damage and cause him double the expense,
+for those earrings were a forced present. Simoun in the meantime was
+praising his jewels.
+
+"That fellow is fierce!" mused the student. "He does business
+everywhere. And if I can believe _a certain person,_ he buys from some
+gentlemen for a half of their value the same jewels that he himself
+has sold for presents. Everybody in this country prospers but us!"
+
+He made his way to his house, or rather Capitan Tiago's, now occupied
+by a trustworthy man who had held him in great esteem since the
+day when he had seen him perform a surgical operation with the same
+coolness that he would cut up a chicken. This man was now waiting to
+give him the news. Two of the laborers were prisoners, one was to be
+deported, and a number of carabaos had died.
+
+"The same old story," exclaimed Basilio, in a bad humor. "You always
+receive me with the same complaints." The youth was not overbearing,
+but as he was at times scolded by Capitan Tiago, he liked in his turn
+to chide those under his orders.
+
+The old man cast about for something new. "One of our tenants has died,
+the old fellow who took care of the woods, and the curate refused to
+bury him as a pauper, saying that his master is a rich man."
+
+"What did he die of?"
+
+"Of old age."
+
+"Get out! To die of old age! It must at least have been some
+disease." Basilio in his zeal for making autopsies wanted diseases.
+
+"Haven't you anything new to tell me? You take away my appetite
+relating the same old things. Do you know anything of Sagpang?"
+
+The old man then told him about the kidnapping of Cabesang
+Tales. Basilio became thoughtful and said nothing more--his appetite
+had completely left him.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+BASILIO
+
+
+When the bells began their chimes for the midnight mass and those who
+preferred a good sleep to fiestas and ceremonies arose grumbling at
+the noise and movement, Basilio cautiously left the house, took two
+or three turns through the streets to see that he was not watched
+or followed, and then made his way by unfrequented paths to the road
+that led to the ancient wood of the Ibarras, which had been acquired
+by Capitan Tiago when their property was confiscated and sold. As
+Christmas fell under the waning moon that year, the place was wrapped
+in darkness. The chimes had ceased, and only the tolling sounded
+through the darkness of the night amid the murmur of the breeze-stirred
+branches and the measured roar of the waves on the neighboring lake,
+like the deep respiration of nature sunk in profound sleep.
+
+Awed by the time and place, the youth moved along with his head down,
+as if endeavoring to see through the darkness. But from time to time
+he raised it to gaze at the stars through the open spaces between the
+treetops and went forward parting the bushes or tearing away the lianas
+that obstructed his path. At times he retraced his steps, his foot
+would get caught among the plants, he stumbled over a projecting root
+or a fallen log. At the end of a half-hour he reached a small brook on
+the opposite side of which arose a hillock, a black and shapeless mass
+that in the darkness took on the proportions of a mountain. Basilio
+crossed the brook on the stones that showed black against the shining
+surface of the water, ascended the hill, and made his way to a small
+space enclosed by old and crumbling walls. He approached the balete
+tree that rose in the center, huge, mysterious, venerable, formed of
+roots that extended up and down among the confusedly-interlaced trunks.
+
+Pausing before a heap of stones he took off his hat and seemed to be
+praying. There his mother was buried, and every time he came to the
+town his first visit was to that neglected and unknown grave. Since he
+must visit Cabesang Tales' family the next day, he had taken advantage
+of the night to perform this duty. Seated on a stone, he seemed to fall
+into deep thought. His past rose before him like a long black film,
+rosy at first, then shadowy with spots of blood, then black, black,
+gray, and then light, ever lighter. The end could not be seen, hidden
+as it was by a cloud through which shone lights and the hues of dawn.
+
+Thirteen years before to the day, almost to the hour, his mother
+had died there in the deepest distress, on a glorious night when the
+moon shone brightly and the Christians of the world were engaged in
+rejoicing. Wounded and limping, he had reached there in pursuit of
+her--she mad and terrified, fleeing from her son as from a ghost. There
+she had died, and there had come a stranger who had commanded him to
+build a funeral pyre. He had obeyed mechanically and when he returned
+he found a second stranger by the side of the other's corpse. What
+a night and what a morning those were! The stranger helped him raise
+the pyre, whereon they burned the corpse of the first, dug the grave
+in which they buried his mother, and then after giving him some pieces
+of money told him to leave the place. It was the first time that he had
+seen that man--tall, with blood-shot eyes, pale lips, and a sharp nose.
+
+Entirely alone in the world, without parents or brothers and sisters,
+he left the town whose authorities inspired in him such great fear and
+went to Manila to work in some rich house and study at the same time,
+as many do. His journey was an Odyssey of sleeplessness and startling
+surprises, in which hunger counted for little, for he ate the fruits
+in the woods, whither he retreated whenever he made out from afar the
+uniform of the Civil Guard, a sight that recalled the origin of all
+his misfortunes. Once in Manila, ragged and sick, he went from door
+to door offering his services. A boy from the provinces who knew not
+a single word of Spanish, and sickly besides! Discouraged, hungry, and
+miserable, he wandered about the streets, attracting attention by the
+wretchedness of his clothing. How often was he tempted to throw himself
+under the feet of the horses that flashed by, drawing carriages shining
+with silver and varnish, thus to end his misery at once! Fortunately,
+he saw Capitan Tiago, accompanied by Aunt Isabel. He had known them
+since the days in San Diego, and in his joy believed that in them he
+saw almost fellow-townsfolk. He followed the carriage until he lost
+sight of it, and then made inquiries for the house. As it was the
+very day that Maria Clara entered the nunnery and Capitan Tiago was
+accordingly depressed, he was admitted as a servant, without pay,
+but instead with leave to study, if he so wished, in San Juan de
+Letran. [15]
+
+Dirty, poorly dressed, with only a pair of clogs for footwear, at
+the end of several months' stay in Manila, he entered the first year
+of Latin. On seeing his clothes, his classmates drew away from him,
+and the professor, a handsome Dominican, never asked him a question,
+but frowned every time he looked at him. In the eight months that
+the class continued, the only words that passed between them were
+his name read from the roll and the daily _adsum_ with which the
+student responded. With what bitterness he left the class each
+day, and, guessing the reason for the treatment accorded him, what
+tears sprang into his eyes and what complaints were stifled in his
+heart! How he had wept and sobbed over the grave of his mother,
+relating to her his hidden sorrows, humiliations, and affronts,
+when at the approach of Christmas Capitan Tiago had taken him back
+to San Diego! Yet he memorized the lessons without omitting a comma,
+although he understood scarcely any part of them. But at length he
+became resigned, noticing that among the three or four hundred in his
+class only about forty merited the honor of being questioned, because
+they attracted the professor's attention by their appearance, some
+prank, comicality, or other cause. The greater part of the students
+congratulated themselves that they thus escaped the work of thinking
+and understanding the subject. "One goes to college, not to learn
+and study, but to gain credit for the course, so if the book can be
+memorized, what more can be asked--the year is thus gained." [16]
+
+Basilio passed the examinations by answering the solitary question
+asked him, like a machine, without stopping or breathing, and in the
+amusement of the examiners won the passing certificate. His nine
+companions--they were examined in batches of ten in order to save
+time--did not have such good luck, but were condemned to repeat the
+year of brutalization.
+
+In the second year the game-cock that he tended won a large sum and he
+received from Capitan Tiago a big tip, which he immediately invested
+in the purchase of shoes and a felt hat. With these and the clothes
+given him by his employer, which he made over to fit his person,
+his appearance became more decent, but did not get beyond that. In
+such a large class a great deal was needed to attract the professor's
+attention, and the student who in the first year did not make himself
+known by some special quality, or did not capture the good-will of the
+professors, could with difficulty make himself known in the rest of his
+school-days. But Basilio kept on, for perseverance was his chief trait.
+
+His fortune seemed to change somewhat when he entered the third
+year. His professor happened to be a very jolly fellow, fond of
+jokes and of making the students laugh, complacent enough in that
+he almost always had his favorites recite the lessons--in fact,
+he was satisfied with anything. At this time Basilio now wore shoes
+and a clean and well-ironed camisa. As his professor noticed that
+he laughed very little at the jokes and that his large eyes seemed
+to be asking something like an eternal question, he took him for
+a fool, and one day decided to make him conspicuous by calling
+on him for the lesson. Basilio recited it from beginning to end,
+without hesitating over a single letter, so the professor called him
+a parrot and told a story to make the class laugh. Then to increase
+the hilarity and justify the epithet he asked several questions,
+at the same time winking to his favorites, as if to say to them,
+"You'll see how we're going to amuse ourselves."
+
+Basilio now understood Spanish and answered the questions with the
+plain intention of making no one laugh. This disgusted everybody,
+the expected absurdity did not materialize, no one could laugh, and
+the good friar never pardoned him for having defrauded the hopes of
+the class and disappointed his own prophecies. But who would expect
+anything worth while to come from a head so badly combed and placed on
+an Indian poorly shod, classified until recently among the arboreal
+animals? As in other centers of learning, where the teachers are
+honestly desirous that the students should learn, such discoveries
+usually delight the instructors, so in a college managed by men
+convinced that for the most part knowledge is an evil, at least for
+the students, the episode of Basilio produced a bad impression and
+he was not questioned again during the year. Why should he be, when
+he made no one laugh?
+
+Quite discouraged and thinking of abandoning his studies, he passed
+to the fourth year of Latin. Why study at all, why not sleep like
+the others and trust to luck?
+
+One of the two professors was very popular, beloved by all, passing
+for a sage, a great poet, and a man of advanced ideas. One day when
+he accompanied the collegians on their walk, he had a dispute with
+some cadets, which resulted in a skirmish and a challenge. No doubt
+recalling his brilliant youth, the professor preached a crusade and
+promised good marks to all who during the promenade on the following
+Sunday would take part in the fray. The week was a lively one--there
+were occasional encounters in which canes and sabers were crossed,
+and in one of these Basilio distinguished himself. Borne in triumph
+by the students and presented to the professor, he thus became known
+to him and came to be his favorite. Partly for this reason and partly
+from his diligence, that year he received the highest marks, medals
+included, in view of which Capitan Tiago, who, since his daughter
+had become a nun, exhibited some aversion to the friars, in a fit of
+good humor induced him to transfer to the Ateneo Municipal, the fame
+of which was then in its apogee.
+
+Here a new world opened before his eyes--a system of instruction
+that he had never dreamed of. Except for a few superfluities and some
+childish things, he was filled with admiration for the methods there
+used and with gratitude for the zeal of the instructors. His eyes at
+times filled with tears when he thought of the four previous years
+during which, from lack of means, he had been unable to study at that
+center. He had to make extraordinary efforts to get himself to the
+level of those who had had a good preparatory course, and it might be
+said that in that one year he learned the whole five of the secondary
+curricula. He received his bachelor's degree, to the great satisfaction
+of his instructors, who in the examinations showed themselves to be
+proud of him before the Dominican examiners sent there to inspect the
+school. One of these, as if to dampen such great enthusiasm a little,
+asked him where he had studied the first years of Latin.
+
+"In San Juan de Letran, Padre," answered Basilio.
+
+"Aha! Of course! He's not bad,--in Latin," the Dominican then remarked
+with a slight smile.
+
+From choice and temperament he selected the course in medicine. Capitan
+Tiago preferred the law, in order that he might have a lawyer free,
+but knowledge of the laws is not sufficient to secure clientage
+in the Philippines--it is necessary to win the cases, and for this
+friendships are required, influence in certain spheres, a good deal of
+astuteness. Capitan Tiago finally gave in, remembering that medical
+students get on intimate terms with corpses, and for some time he
+had been seeking a poison to put on the gaffs of his game-cocks,
+the best he had been able to secure thus far being the blood of a
+Chinaman who had died of syphilis.
+
+With equal diligence, or more if possible, the young man continued
+this course, and after the third year began to render medical services
+with such great success that he was not only preparing a brilliant
+future for himself but also earning enough to dress well and save
+some money. This was the last year of the course and in two months he
+would be a physician; he would come back to the town, he would marry
+Juliana, and they would be happy. The granting of his licentiateship
+was not only assured, but he expected it to be the crowning act of
+his school-days, for he had been designated to deliver the valedictory
+at the graduation, and already he saw himself in the rostrum, before
+the whole faculty, the object of public attention. All those heads,
+leaders of Manila science, half-hidden in their colored capes; all
+the women who came there out of curiosity and who years before had
+gazed at him, if not with disdain, at least with indifference; all
+those men whose carriages had once been about to crush him down in the
+mud like a dog: they would listen attentively, and he was going to
+say something to them that would not be trivial, something that had
+never before resounded in that place, he was going to forget himself
+in order to aid the poor students of the future--and he would make
+his entrance on his work in the world with that speech.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+SIMOUN
+
+
+Over these matters Basilio was pondering as he visited his mother's
+grave. He was about to start back to the town when he thought he saw
+a light flickering among the trees and heard the snapping of twigs,
+the sound of feet, and rustling of leaves. The light disappeared
+but the noises became more distinct, coming directly toward where he
+was. Basilio was not naturally superstitious, especially after having
+carved up so many corpses and watched beside so many death-beds,
+but the old legends about that ghostly spot, the hour, the darkness,
+the melancholy sighing of the wind, and certain tales heard in his
+childhood, asserted their influence over his mind and made his heart
+beat violently.
+
+The figure stopped on the other side of the balete, but the youth
+could see it through an open space between two roots that had grown
+in the course of time to the proportions of tree-trunks. It produced
+from under its coat a lantern with a powerful reflecting lens, which
+it placed on the ground, thereby lighting up a pair of riding-boots,
+the rest of the figure remaining concealed in the darkness. The figure
+seemed to search its pockets and then bent over to fix a shovel-blade
+on the end of a stout cane. To his great surprise Basilio thought he
+could make out some of the features of the jeweler Simoun, who indeed
+it was.
+
+The jeweler dug in the ground and from time to time the lantern
+illuminated his face, on which were not now the blue goggles that so
+completely disguised him. Basilio shuddered: that was the same stranger
+who thirteen years before had dug his mother's grave there, only now
+he had aged somewhat, his hair had turned white, he wore a beard and
+a mustache, but yet his look was the same, the bitter expression,
+the same cloud on his brow, the same muscular arms, though somewhat
+thinner now, the same violent energy. Old impressions were stirred
+in the boy: he seemed to feel the heat of the fire, the hunger, the
+weariness of that time, the smell of freshly turned earth. Yet his
+discovery terrified him--that jeweler Simoun, who passed for a British
+Indian, a Portuguese, an American, a mulatto, the Brown Cardinal, his
+Black Eminence, the evil genius of the Captain-General as many called
+him, was no other than the mysterious stranger whose appearance and
+disappearance coincided with the death of the heir to that land! But
+of the two strangers who had appeared, which was Ibarra, the living
+or the dead?
+
+This question, which he had often asked himself whenever Ibarra's death
+was mentioned, again came into his mind in the presence of the human
+enigma he now saw before him. The dead man had had two wounds, which
+must have been made by firearms, as he knew from what he had since
+studied, and which would be the result of the chase on the lake. Then
+the dead man must have been Ibarra, who had come to die at the tomb
+of his forefathers, his desire to be cremated being explained by his
+residence in Europe, where cremation is practised. Then who was the
+other, the living, this jeweler Simoun, at that time with such an
+appearance of poverty and wretchedness, but who had now returned
+loaded with gold and a friend of the authorities? There was the
+mystery, and the student, with his characteristic cold-bloodedness,
+determined to clear it up at the first opportunity.
+
+Simoun dug away for some time, but Basilio noticed that his old vigor
+had declined--he panted and had to rest every few moments. Fearing
+that he might be discovered, the boy made a sudden resolution. Rising
+from his seat and issuing from his hiding-place, he asked in the most
+matter-of-fact tone, "Can I help you, sir?"
+
+Simoun straightened up with the spring of a tiger attacked at his
+prey, thrust his hand in his coat pocket, and stared at the student
+with a pale and lowering gaze.
+
+"Thirteen years ago you rendered me a great service, sir," went on
+Basilio unmoved, "in this very place, by burying my mother, and I
+should consider myself happy if I could serve you now."
+
+Without taking his eyes off the youth Simoun drew a revolver from
+his pocket and the click of a hammer being cocked was heard. "For
+whom do you take me?" he asked, retreating a few paces.
+
+"For a person who is sacred to me," replied Basilio with some emotion,
+for he thought his last moment had come. "For a person whom all, except
+me, believe to be dead, and whose misfortunes I have always lamented."
+
+An impressive silence followed these words, a silence that to the
+youth seemed to suggest eternity. But Simoun, after some hesitation,
+approached him and placing a hand on his shoulder said in a moving
+tone: "Basilio, you possess a secret that can ruin me and now you have
+just surprised me in another, which puts me completely in your hands,
+the divulging of which would upset all my plans. For my own security
+and for the good of the cause in which I labor, I ought to seal your
+lips forever, for what is the life of one man compared to the end I
+seek? The occasion is fitting; no one knows that I have come here;
+I am armed; you are defenceless; your death would be attributed to
+the outlaws, if not to more supernatural causes--yet I'll let you
+live and trust that I shall not regret it. You have toiled, you have
+struggled with energetic perseverance, and like myself, you have your
+scores to settle with society. Your brother was murdered, your mother
+driven to insanity, and society has prosecuted neither the assassin
+nor the executioner. You and I are the dregs of justice and instead
+of destroying we ought to aid each other."
+
+Simoun paused with a repressed sigh, and then slowly resumed, while
+his gaze wandered about: "Yes, I am he who came here thirteen years
+ago, sick and wretched, to pay the last tribute to a great and noble
+soul that was willing to die for me. The victim of a vicious system, I
+have wandered over the world, working night and day to amass a fortune
+and carry out my plan. Now I have returned to destroy that system,
+to precipitate its downfall, to hurl it into the abyss toward which
+it is senselessly rushing, even though I may have to shed oceans
+of tears and blood. It has condemned itself, it stands condemned,
+and I don't want to die before I have seen it in fragments at the
+foot of the precipice!"
+
+Simoun extended both his arms toward the earth, as if with that gesture
+he would like to hold there the broken remains. His voice took on a
+sinister, even lugubrious tone, which made the student shudder.
+
+"Called by the vices of the rulers, I have returned to these islands,
+and under the cloak of a merchant have visited the towns. My gold
+has opened a way for me and wheresoever I have beheld greed in the
+most execrable forms, sometimes hypocritical, sometimes shameless,
+sometimes cruel, fatten on the dead organism, like a vulture on a
+corpse, I have asked myself--why was there not, festering in its
+vitals, the corruption, the ptomaine, the poison of the tombs, to
+kill the foul bird? The corpse was letting itself be consumed, the
+vulture was gorging itself with meat, and because it was not possible
+for me to give it life so that it might turn against its destroyer,
+and because the corruption developed slowly, I have stimulated greed,
+I have abetted it. The cases of injustice and the abuses multiplied
+themselves; I have instigated crime and acts of cruelty, so that the
+people might become accustomed to the idea of death. I have stirred up
+trouble so that to escape from it some remedy might be found; I have
+placed obstacles in the way of trade so that the country, impoverished
+and reduced to misery, might no longer be afraid of anything; I have
+excited desires to plunder the treasury, and as this has not been
+enough to bring about a popular uprising, I have wounded the people
+in their most sensitive fiber; I have made the vulture itself insult
+the very corpse that it feeds upon and hasten the corruption.
+
+"Now, when I was about to get the supreme rottenness, the supreme
+filth, the mixture of such foul products brewing poison, when the
+greed was beginning to irritate, in its folly hastening to seize
+whatever came to hand, like an old woman caught in a conflagration,
+here you come with your cries of Hispanism, with chants of confidence
+in the government, in what cannot come to pass, here you have a body
+palpitating with heat and life, young, pure, vigorous, throbbing with
+blood, with enthusiasm, suddenly come forth to offer itself again as
+fresh food!
+
+"Ah, youth is ever inexperienced and dreamy, always running after
+the butterflies and flowers! You have united, so that by your efforts
+you may bind your fatherland to Spain with garlands of roses when in
+reality you are forging upon it chains harder than the diamond! You
+ask for equal rights, the Hispanization of your customs, and you don't
+see that what you are begging for is suicide, the destruction of your
+nationality, the annihilation of your fatherland, the consecration of
+tyranny! What will you be in the future? A people without character,
+a nation without liberty--everything you have will be borrowed, even
+your very defects! You beg for Hispanization, and do not pale with
+shame when they deny it you! And even if they should grant it to you,
+what then--what have you gained? At best, a country of pronunciamentos,
+a land of civil wars, a republic of the greedy and the malcontents,
+like some of the republics of South America! To what are you tending
+now, with your instruction in Castilian, a pretension that would be
+ridiculous were it not for its deplorable consequences! You wish to
+add one more language to the forty odd that are spoken in the islands,
+so that you may understand one another less and less."
+
+"On the contrary," replied Basilio, "if the knowledge of Castilian
+may bind us to the government, in exchange it may also unite the
+islands among themselves."
+
+"A gross error!" rejoined Simoun. "You are letting yourselves be
+deceived by big words and never go to the bottom of things to examine
+the results in their final analysis. Spanish will never be the general
+language of the country, the people will never talk it, because the
+conceptions of their brains and the feelings of their hearts cannot
+be expressed in that language--each people has its own tongue, as it
+has its own way of thinking! What are you going to do with Castilian,
+the few of you who will speak it? Kill off your own originality,
+subordinate your thoughts to other brains, and instead of freeing
+yourselves, make yourselves slaves indeed! Nine-tenths of those of
+you who pretend to be enlightened are renegades to your country! He
+among you who talks that language neglects his own in such a way that
+he neither writes nor understands it, and how many have I not seen
+who pretended not to know a single word of it! But fortunately, you
+have an imbecile government! While Russia enslaves Poland by forcing
+the Russian language upon it, while Germany prohibits French in the
+conquered provinces, your government strives to preserve yours, and
+you in return, a remarkable people under an incredible government, you
+are trying to despoil yourselves of your own nationality! One and all
+you forget that while a people preserves its language, it preserves
+the marks of its liberty, as a man preserves his independence while
+he holds to his own way of thinking. Language is the thought of the
+peoples. Luckily, your independence is assured; human passions are
+looking out for that!"
+
+Simoun paused and rubbed his hand over his forehead. The waning moon
+was rising and sent its faint light down through the branches of the
+trees, and with his white locks and severe features, illuminated from
+below by the lantern, the jeweler appeared to be the fateful spirit
+of the wood planning some evil.
+
+Basilio was silent before such bitter reproaches and listened with
+bowed head, while Simoun resumed: "I saw this movement started and have
+passed whole nights of anguish, because I understood that among those
+youths there were exceptional minds and hearts, sacrificing themselves
+for what they thought to be a good cause, when in reality they were
+working against their own country. How many times have I wished
+to speak to you young men, to reveal myself and undeceive you! But
+in view of the reputation I enjoy, my words would have been wrongly
+interpreted and would perhaps have had a counter effect. How many times
+have I not longed to approach your Makaraig, your Isagani! Sometimes
+I thought of their death, I wished to destroy them--"
+
+Simoun checked himself.
+
+"Here's why I let you live, Basilio, and by such imprudence I expose
+myself to the risk of being some day betrayed by you. But you know
+who I am, you know how much I must have suffered--then believe in
+me! You are not of the common crowd, which sees in the jeweler Simoun
+the trader who incites the authorities to commit abuses in order that
+the abused may buy jewels. I am the Judge who wishes to castigate
+this system by making use of its own defects, to make war on it by
+flattering it. I need your help, your influence among the youth, to
+combat these senseless desires for Hispanization, for assimilation,
+for equal rights. By that road you will become only a poor copy,
+and the people should look higher. It is madness to attempt to
+influence the thoughts of the rulers--they have their plan outlined,
+the bandage covers their eyes, and besides losing time uselessly, you
+are deceiving the people with vain hopes and are helping to bend their
+necks before the tyrant. What you should do is to take advantage of
+their prejudices to serve your needs. Are they unwilling that you
+be assimilated with the Spanish people? Good enough! Distinguish
+yourselves then by revealing yourselves in your own character, try
+to lay the foundations of the Philippine fatherland! Do they deny you
+hope? Good! Don't depend on them, depend upon yourselves and work! Do
+they deny you representation in their Cortes? So much the better! Even
+should you succeed in sending representatives of your own choice,
+what are you going to accomplish there except to be overwhelmed among
+so many voices, and sanction with your presence the abuses and wrongs
+that are afterwards perpetrated? The fewer rights they allow you,
+the more reason you will have later to throw off the yoke, and return
+evil for evil. If they are unwilling to teach you their language,
+cultivate your own, extend it, preserve to the people their own way
+of thinking, and instead of aspiring to be a province, aspire to be
+a nation! Instead of subordinate thoughts, think independently, to
+the end that neither by right, nor custom, nor language, the Spaniard
+can be considered the master here, nor even be looked upon as a part
+of the country, but ever as an invader, a foreigner, and sooner or
+later you will have your liberty! Here's why I let you live!"
+
+Basilio breathed freely, as though a great weight had been lifted from
+him, and after a brief pause, replied: "Sir, the honor you do me in
+confiding your plans to me is too great for me not to be frank with
+you, and tell you that what you ask of me is beyond my power. I am
+no politician, and if I have signed the petition for instruction in
+Castilian it has been because I saw in it an advantage to our studies
+and nothing more. My destiny is different; my aspiration reduces
+itself to alleviating the physical sufferings of my fellow men."
+
+The jeweler smiled. "What are physical sufferings compared to moral
+tortures? What is the death of a man in the presence of the death of a
+society? Some day you will perhaps be a great physician, if they let
+you go your way in peace, but greater yet will be he who can inject
+a new idea into this anemic people! You, what are you doing for the
+land that gave you existence, that supports your life, that affords
+you knowledge? Don't you realize that that is a useless life which is
+not consecrated to a great idea? It is a stone wasted in the fields
+without becoming a part of any edifice."
+
+"No, no, sir!" replied Basilio modestly, "I'm not folding my arms,
+I'm working like all the rest to raise up from the ruins of the past
+a people whose units will be bound together--that each one may feel
+in himself the conscience and the life of the whole. But however
+enthusiastic our generation may be, we understand that in this great
+social fabric there must be a division of labor. I have chosen my
+task and will devote myself to science."
+
+"Science is not the end of man," declared Simoun.
+
+"The most civilized nations are tending toward it."
+
+"Yes, but only as a means of seeking their welfare."
+
+"Science is more eternal, it's more human, it's more
+universal!" exclaimed the youth in a transport of enthusiasm. "Within a
+few centuries, when humanity has become redeemed and enlightened, when
+there are no races, when all peoples are free, when there are neither
+tyrants nor slaves, colonies nor mother countries, when justice rules
+and man is a citizen of the world, the pursuit of science alone will
+remain, the word patriotism will be equivalent to fanaticism, and he
+who prides himself on patriotic ideas will doubtless be isolated as
+a dangerous disease, as a menace to the social order."
+
+Simoun smiled sadly. "Yes, yes," he said with a shake of his head,
+"yet to reach that condition it is necessary that there be no
+tyrannical and no enslaved peoples, it is necessary that man go about
+freely, that he know how to respect the rights of others in their own
+individuality, and for this there is yet much blood to be shed, the
+struggle forces itself forward. To overcome the ancient fanaticism
+that bound consciences it was necessary that many should perish in
+the holocausts, so that the social conscience in horror declared
+the individual conscience free. It is also necessary that all answer
+the question which with each day the fatherland asks them, with its
+fettered hands extended! Patriotism can only be a crime in a tyrannical
+people, because then it is rapine under a beautiful name, but however
+perfect humanity may become, patriotism will always be a virtue among
+oppressed peoples, because it will at all times mean love of justice,
+of liberty, of personal dignity--nothing of chimerical dreams, of
+effeminate idyls! The greatness of a man is not in living before his
+time, a thing almost impossible, but in understanding its desires,
+in responding to its needs, and in guiding it on its forward way. The
+geniuses that are commonly believed to have existed before their time,
+only appear so because those who judge them see from a great distance,
+or take as representative of the age the line of stragglers!"
+
+Simoun fell silent. Seeing that he could awake no enthusiasm in
+that unresponsive mind, he turned to another subject and asked with
+a change of tone: "And what are you doing for the memory of your
+mother and your brother? Is it enough that you come here every year,
+to weep like a woman over a grave?" And he smiled sarcastically.
+
+The shot hit the mark. Basilio changed color and advanced a step.
+
+"What do you want me to do?" he asked angrily.
+
+"Without means, without social position, how may I bring their
+murderers to justice? I would merely be another victim, shattered like
+a piece of glass hurled against a rock. Ah, you do ill to recall this
+to me, since it is wantonly reopening a wound!"
+
+"But what if I should offer you my aid?"
+
+Basilio shook his head and remained pensive. "All the tardy
+vindications of justice, all the revenge in the world, will not restore
+a single hair of my mother's head, or recall a smile to my brother's
+lips. Let them rest in peace--what should I gain now by avenging them?"
+
+"Prevent others from suffering what you have suffered, that in
+the future there be no brothers murdered or mothers driven to
+madness. Resignation is not always a virtue; it is a crime when it
+encourages tyrants: there are no despots where there are no slaves! Man
+is in his own nature so wicked that he always abuses complaisance. I
+thought as you do, and you know what my fate was. Those who caused
+your misfortunes are watching you day and night, they suspect that
+you are only biding your time, they take your eagerness to learn,
+your love of study, your very complaisance, for burning desires for
+revenge. The day they can get rid of you they will do with you as
+they did with me, and they will not let you grow to manhood, because
+they fear and hate you!"
+
+"Hate me? Still hate me after the wrong they have done me?" asked
+the youth in surprise.
+
+Simoun burst into a laugh. "'It is natural for man to hate those
+whom he has wronged,' said Tacitus, confirming the _quos laeserunt et
+oderunt_ of Seneca. When you wish to gauge the evil or the good that
+one people has done to another, you have only to observe whether
+it hates or loves. Thus is explained the reason why many who have
+enriched themselves here in the high offices they have filled, on
+their return to the Peninsula relieve themselves by slanders and
+insults against those who have been their victims. _Proprium humani
+ingenii est odisse quern laeseris!"_
+
+"But if the world is large, if one leaves them to the peaceful
+enjoyment of power, if I ask only to be allowed to work, to live--"
+
+"And to rear meek-natured sons to send them afterwards to submit to
+the yoke," continued Simoun, cruelly mimicking Basilio's tone. "A fine
+future you prepare for them, and they have to thank you for a life
+of humiliation and suffering! Good enough, young man! When a body
+is inert, it is useless to galvanize it. Twenty years of continuous
+slavery, of systematic humiliation, of constant prostration, finally
+create in the mind a twist that cannot be straightened by the labor
+of a day. Good and evil instincts are inherited and transmitted from
+father to son. Then let your idylic ideas live, your dreams of a
+slave who asks only for a bandage to wrap the chain so that it may
+rattle less and not ulcerate his skin! You hope for a little home
+and some ease, a wife and a handful of rice--here is your ideal man
+of the Philippines! Well, if they give it to you, consider yourself
+fortunate."
+
+Basilio, accustomed to obey and bear with the caprices and humors
+of Capitan Tiago. was now dominated by Simoun, who appeared to him
+terrible and sinister on a background bathed in tears and blood. He
+tried to explain himself by saying that he did not consider himself
+fit to mix in politics, that he had no political opinions because
+he had never studied the question, but that he was always ready to
+lend his services the day they might be needed, that for the moment
+he saw only one need, the enlightenment of the people.
+
+Simoun stopped him with a gesture, and, as the dawn was coming,
+said to him: "Young man, I am not warning you to keep my secret,
+because I know that discretion is one of your good qualities, and
+even though you might wish to sell me, the jeweler Simoun, the friend
+of the authorities and of the religious corporations, will always
+be given more credit than the student Basilio, already suspected
+of filibusterism, and, being a native, so much the more marked and
+watched, and because in the profession you are entering upon you
+will encounter powerful rivals. After all, even though you have not
+corresponded to my hopes, the day on which you change your mind,
+look me up at my house in the Escolta, and I'll be glad to help you."
+
+Basilio thanked him briefly and went away.
+
+"Have I really made a mistake?" mused Simoun, when he found himself
+alone. "Is it that he doubts me and meditates his plan of revenge
+so secretly that he fears to tell it even in the solitude of the
+night? Or can it be that the years of servitude have extinguished
+in his heart every human sentiment and there remain only the animal
+desires to live and reproduce? In that case the type is deformed
+and will have to be cast over again. Then the hecatomb is preparing:
+let the unfit perish and only the strongest survive!"
+
+Then he added sadly, as if apostrophizing some one: "Have patience, you
+who left me a name and a home, have patience! I have lost all--country,
+future, prosperity, your very tomb, but have patience! And thou,
+noble spirit, great soul, generous heart, who didst live with only one
+thought and didst sacrifice thy life without asking the gratitude or
+applause of any one, have patience, have patience! The methods that I
+use may perhaps not be thine, but they are the most direct. The day
+is coming, and when it brightens I myself will come to announce it
+to you who are now indifferent. Have patience!"
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+MERRY CHRISTMAS!
+
+
+When Juli opened her sorrowing eyes, she saw that the house was still
+dark, but the cocks were crowing. Her first thought was that perhaps
+the Virgin had performed the miracle and the sun was not going to rise,
+in spite of the invocations of the cocks. She rose, crossed herself,
+recited her morning prayers with great devotion, and with as little
+noise as possible went out on the _batalan._
+
+There was no miracle--the sun was rising and promised a magnificent
+morning, the breeze was delightfully cool, the stars were paling
+in the east, and the cocks were crowing as if to see who could crow
+best and loudest. That had been too much to ask--it were much easier
+to request the Virgin to send the two hundred and fifty pesos. What
+would it cost the Mother of the Lord to give them? But underneath the
+image she found only the letter of her father asking for the ransom of
+five hundred pesos. There was nothing to do but go, so, seeing that
+her grandfather was not stirring, she thought him asleep and began
+to prepare breakfast. Strange, she was calm, she even had a desire
+to laugh! What had she had last night to afflict her so? She was not
+going very far, she could come every second day to visit the house,
+her grandfather could see her, and as for Basilio, he had known for
+some time the bad turn her father's affairs had taken, since he had
+often said to her, "When I'm a physician and we are married, your
+father won't need his fields."
+
+"What a fool I was to cry so much," she said to herself as she packed
+her _tampipi._ Her fingers struck against the locket and she pressed
+it to her lips, but immediately wiped them from fear of contagion, for
+that locket set with diamonds and emeralds had come from a leper. Ah,
+then, if she should catch that disease she could not get married.
+
+As it became lighter, she could see her grandfather seated in a
+corner, following all her movements with his eyes, so she caught up her
+_tampipi_ of clothes and approached him smilingly to kiss his hand. The
+old man blessed her silently, while she tried to appear merry. "When
+father comes back, tell him that I have at last gone to college--my
+mistress talks Spanish. It's the cheapest college I could find."
+
+Seeing the old man's eyes fill with tears, she placed the _tampipi_
+on her head and hastily went downstairs, her slippers slapping merrily
+on the wooden steps. But when she turned her head to look again at
+the house, the house wherein had faded her childhood dreams and her
+maiden illusions, when she saw it sad, lonely, deserted, with the
+windows half closed, vacant and dark like a dead man's eyes, when
+she heard the low rustling of the bamboos, and saw them nodding in
+the fresh morning breeze as though bidding her farewell, then her
+vivacity disappeared; she stopped, her eyes filled with tears, and
+letting herself fall in a sitting posture on a log by the wayside
+she broke out into disconsolate tears.
+
+Juli had been gone several hours and the sun was quite high overhead
+when Tandang Selo gazed from the window at the people in their festival
+garments going to the town to attend the high mass. Nearly all led
+by the hand or carried in their arms a little boy or girl decked out
+as if for a fiesta.
+
+Christmas day in the Philippines is, according to the elders, a fiesta
+for the children, who are perhaps not of the same opinion and who,
+it may be supposed, have for it an instinctive dread. They are roused
+early, washed, dressed, and decked out with everything new, dear,
+and precious that they possess--high silk shoes, big hats, woolen or
+velvet suits, without overlooking four or five scapularies, which
+contain texts from St. John, and thus burdened they are carried to
+the high mass, where for almost an hour they are subjected to the heat
+and the human smells from so many crowding, perspiring people, and if
+they are not made to recite the rosary they must remain quiet, bored,
+or asleep. At each movement or antic that may soil their clothing
+they are pinched and scolded, so the fact is that they do not laugh
+or feel happy, while in their round eyes can be read a protest against
+so much embroidery and a longing for the old shirt of week-days.
+
+Afterwards, they are dragged from house to house to kiss their
+relatives' hands. There they have to dance, sing, and recite all
+the amusing things they know, whether in the humor or not, whether
+comfortable or not in their fine clothes, with the eternal pinchings
+and scoldings if they play any of their tricks. Their relatives give
+them cuartos which their parents seize upon and of which they hear
+nothing more. The only positive results they are accustomed to get from
+the fiesta are the marks of the aforesaid pinchings, the vexations,
+and at best an attack of indigestion from gorging themselves with
+candy and cake in the houses of kind relatives. But such is the
+custom, and Filipino children enter the world through these ordeals,
+which afterwards prove the least sad, the least hard, of their lives.
+
+Adult persons who live independently also share in this fiesta,
+by visiting their parents and their parents' relatives, crooking
+their knees, and wishing them a merry Christmas. Their Christmas
+gift consists of a sweetmeat, some fruit, a glass of water, or some
+insignificant present.
+
+Tandang Selo saw all his friends pass and thought sadly that this
+year he had no Christmas gift for anybody, while his granddaughter
+had gone without hers, without wishing him a merry Christinas. Was
+it delicacy on Juli's part or pure forgetfulness?
+
+When he tried to greet the relatives who called on him, bringing their
+children, he found to his great surprise that he could not articulate
+a word. Vainly he tried, but no sound could he utter. He placed his
+hands on his throat, shook his head, but without effect. When he tried
+to laugh, his lips trembled convulsively and the only noise produced
+was a hoarse wheeze like the blowing of bellows.
+
+The women gazed at him in consternation. "He's dumb, he's dumb!" they
+cried in astonishment, raising at once a literal pandemonium.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+PILATES
+
+
+When the news of this misfortune became known in the town, some
+lamented it and others shrugged their shoulders. No one was to blame,
+and no one need lay it on his conscience.
+
+The lieutenant of the Civil Guard gave no sign: he had received an
+order to take up all the arms and he had performed his duty. He had
+chased the tulisanes whenever he could, and when they captured Cabesang
+Tales he had organized an expedition and brought into the town,
+with their arms bound behind them, five or six rustics who looked
+suspicious, so if Cabesang Tales did not show up it was because he
+was not in the pockets or under the skins of the prisoners, who were
+thoroughly shaken out.
+
+The friar-administrator shrugged his shoulders: he had nothing to
+do with it, it was a matter of tulisanes and he had merely done his
+duty. True it was that if he had not entered the complaint, perhaps the
+arms would not have been taken up, and poor Tales would not have been
+captured; but he, Fray Clemente, had to look after his own safety,
+and that Tales had a way of staring at him as if picking out a good
+target in some part of his body. Self-defense is natural. If there
+are tulisanes, the fault is not his, it is not his duty to run them
+down--that belongs to the Civil Guard. If Cabesang Tales, instead
+of wandering about his fields, had stayed at home, he would not have
+been captured. In short, that was a punishment from heaven upon those
+who resisted the demands of his corporation.
+
+When Sister Penchang, the pious old woman in whose service Juli
+had entered, learned of it, she ejaculated several _'Susmarioseps_,
+crossed herself, and remarked, "Often God sends these trials because
+we are sinners or have sinning relatives, to whom we should have
+taught piety and we haven't done so."
+
+Those _sinning relatives_ referred to Juliana, for to this pious
+woman Juli was a great sinner. "Think of a girl of marriageable age
+who doesn't yet know how to pray! _Jes�s_, how scandalous! If the
+wretch doesn't say the _Di�s te salve Mar�a_ without stopping at _es
+contigo_, and the _Santa Mar�a_ without a pause after _pecadores_, as
+every good Christian who fears God ought to do! She doesn't know the
+_oremus gratiam_, and says _ment�bus_ for _m�ntibus_. Anybody hearing
+her would think she was talking about something else. _'Susmariosep!_"
+
+Greatly scandalized, she made the sign of the cross and thanked God,
+who had permitted the capture of the father in order that the daughter
+might be snatched from sin and learn the virtues which, according
+to the curates, should adorn every Christian woman. She therefore
+kept the girl constantly at work, not allowing her to return to the
+village to look after her grandfather. Juli had to learn how to pray,
+to read the books distributed by the friars, and to work until the
+two hundred and fifty pesos should be paid.
+
+When she learned that Basilio had gone to Manila to get his savings
+and ransom Juli from her servitude, the good woman believed that the
+girl was forever lost and that the devil had presented himself in
+the guise of the student. Dreadful as it all was, how true was that
+little book the curate had given her! Youths who go to Manila to
+study are ruined and then ruin the others. Thinking to rescue Juli,
+she made her read and re-read the book called _Tandang Basio Macunat_,
+[17] charging her always to go and see the curate in the convento,
+[18] as did the heroine, who is so praised by the author, a friar.
+
+Meanwhile, the friars had gained their point. They had certainly
+won the suit, so they took advantage of Cabesang Tales' captivity
+to turn the fields over to the one who had asked for them, without
+the least thought of honor or the faintest twinge of shame. When
+the former owner returned and learned what had happened, when he saw
+his fields in another's possession,--those fields that had cost the
+lives of his wife and daughter,--when he saw his father dumb and his
+daughter working as a servant, and when he himself received an order
+from the town council, transmitted through the headman of the village,
+to move out of the house within three days, he said nothing; he sat
+down at his father's side and spoke scarcely once during the whole day.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+WEALTH AND WANT
+
+
+On the following day, to the great surprise of the village, the jeweler
+Simoun, followed by two servants, each carrying a canvas-covered chest,
+requested the hospitality of Cabesang Tales, who even in the midst
+of his wretchedness did not forget the good Filipino customs--rather,
+he was troubled to think that he had no way of properly entertaining
+the stranger. But Simoun brought everything with him, servants and
+provisions, and merely wished to spend the day and night in the house
+because it was the largest in the village and was situated between
+San Diego and Tiani, towns where he hoped to find many customers.
+
+Simoun secured information about the condition of the roads and asked
+Cabesang Tales if his revolver was a sufficient protection against
+the tulisanes.
+
+"They have rifles that shoot a long way," was the rather absent-minded
+reply.
+
+"This revolver does no less," remarked Simoun, firing at an areca-palm
+some two hundred paces away.
+
+Cabesang Tales noticed that some nuts fell, but remained silent
+and thoughtful.
+
+Gradually the families, drawn by the fame of the jeweler's wares,
+began to collect. They wished one another merry Christmas, they
+talked of masses, saints, poor crops, but still were there to spend
+their savings for jewels and trinkets brought from Europe. It was
+known that the jeweler was the friend of the Captain-General, so it
+wasn't lost labor to get on good terms with him, and thus be prepared
+for contingencies.
+
+Capitan Basilio came with his wife, daughter, and son-in-law, prepared
+to spend at least three thousand pesos. Sister Penchang was there to
+buy a diamond ring she had promised to the Virgin of Antipolo. She
+had left Juli at home memorizing a booklet the curate had sold her for
+four cuartos, with forty days of indulgence granted by the Archbishop
+to every one who read it or listened to it read.
+
+"_Jes�s!_" said the pious woman to Capitana Tika, "that poor girl has
+grown up like a mushroom planted by the _tikbalang._ I've made her read
+the book at the top of her voice at least fifty times and she doesn't
+remember a single word of it. She has a head like a sieve--full when
+it's in the water. All of us hearing her, even the dogs and cats,
+have won at least twenty years of indulgence."
+
+Simoun arranged his two chests on the table, one being somewhat larger
+than the other. "You don't want plated jewelry or imitation gems. This
+lady," turning to Sinang, "wants real diamonds."
+
+"That's it, yes, sir, diamonds, old diamonds, antique stones, you
+know," she responded. "Papa will pay for them, because he likes antique
+things, antique stones." Sinang was accustomed to joke about the great
+deal of Latin her father understood and the little her husband knew.
+
+"It just happens that I have some antique jewels," replied Simoun,
+taking the canvas cover from the smaller chest, a polished steel
+case with bronze trimmings and stout locks. "I have necklaces of
+Cleopatra's, real and genuine, discovered in the Pyramids; rings of
+Roman senators and knights, found in the ruins of Carthage."
+
+"Probably those that Hannibal sent back after the battle of
+Cannae!" exclaimed Capitan Basilio seriously, while he trembled with
+pleasure. The good man, thought he had read much about the ancients,
+had never, by reason of the lack of museums in Filipinas, seen any
+of the objects of those times.
+
+"I have brought besides costly earrings of Roman ladies, discovered
+in the villa of Annius Mucius Papilinus in Pompeii."
+
+Capitan Easilio nodded to show that he understood and was eager to
+see such precious relics. The women remarked that they also wanted
+things from Rome, such as rosaries blessed by the Pope, holy relics
+that would take away sins without the need of confessions, and so on.
+
+When the chest was opened and the cotton packing removed, there was
+exposed a tray filled with rings, reliquaries, lockets, crucifixes,
+brooches, and such like. The diamonds set in among variously colored
+stones flashed out brightly and shimmered among golden flowers of
+varied hues, with petals of enamel, all of peculiar designs and rare
+Arabesque workmanship.
+
+Simoun lifted the tray and exhibited another filled with quaint jewels
+that would have satisfied the imaginations of seven d�butantes on the
+eves of the balls in their honor. Designs, one more fantastic than
+the other, combinations of precious stones and pearls worked into
+the figures of insects with azure backs and transparent forewings,
+sapphires, emeralds, rubies, turquoises, diamonds, joined to form
+dragon-flies, wasps, bees, butterflies, beetles, serpents, lizards,
+fishes, sprays of flowers. There were diadems, necklaces of pearls
+and diamonds, so that some of the girls could not withhold a _nak�_
+of admiration, and Sinang gave a cluck with her tongue, whereupon
+her mother pinched her to prevent her from encouraging the jeweler
+to raise his prices, for Capitana Tika still pinched her daughter
+even after the latter was married.
+
+"Here you have some old diamonds," explained the jeweler. "This ring
+belonged to the Princess Lamballe and those earrings to one of Marie
+Antoinette's ladies." They consisted of some beautiful solitaire
+diamonds, as large as grains of corn, with somewhat bluish lights,
+and pervaded with a severe elegance, as though they still reflected
+in their sparkles the shuddering of the Reign of Terror.
+
+"Those two earrings!" exclaimed Sinang, looking at her father and
+instinctively covering the arm next to her mother.
+
+"Something more ancient yet, something Roman," said Capitan Basilio
+with a wink.
+
+The pious Sister Penchang thought that with such a gift the Virgin of
+Antipolo would be softened and grant her her most vehement desire:
+for some time she had begged for a wonderful miracle to which her
+name would be attached, so that her name might be immortalized on
+earth and she then ascend into heaven, like the Capitana Ines of the
+curates. She inquired the price and Simoun asked three thousand pesos,
+which made the good woman cross herself--_'Susmariosep!_
+
+Simoun now exposed the third tray, which was filled with watches,
+cigar- and match-cases decorated with the rarest enamels, reliquaries
+set with diamonds and containing the most elegant miniatures.
+
+The fourth tray, containing loose gems, stirred a murmur of
+admiration. Sinang again clucked with her tongue, her mother again
+pinched her, although at the same time herself emitting a _'Susmar�a_
+of wonder.
+
+No one there had ever before seen so much wealth. In that chest lined
+with dark-blue velvet, arranged in trays, were the wonders of the
+_Arabian Nights,_ the dreams of Oriental fantasies. Diamonds as large
+as peas glittered there, throwing out attractive rays as if they were
+about to melt or burn with all the hues of the spectrum; emeralds from
+Peru, of varied forms and shapes; rubies from India, red as drops of
+blood; sapphires from Ceylon, blue and white; turquoises from Persia;
+Oriental pearls, some rosy, some lead-colored, others black. Those
+who have at night seen a great rocket burst in the azure darkness of
+the sky into thousands of colored lights, so bright that they make
+the eternal stars look dim, can imagine the aspect the tray presented.
+
+As if to increase the admiration of the beholders, Simoun took the
+stones out with his tapering brown fingers, gloating over their
+crystalline hardness, their luminous stream, as they poured from his
+hands like drops of water reflecting the tints of the rainbow. The
+reflections from so many facets, the thought of their great value,
+fascinated the gaze of every one.
+
+Cabesang Tales, who had approached out of curiosity, closed his eyes
+and drew back hurriedly, as if to drive away an evil thought. Such
+great riches were an insult to his misfortunes; that man had come there
+to make an exhibition of his immense wealth on the very day that he,
+Tales, for lack of money, for lack of protectors, had to abandon the
+house raised by his own hands.
+
+"Here you have two black diamonds, among the largest in existence,"
+explained the jeweler. "They're very difficult to cut because they're
+the very hardest. This somewhat rosy stone is also a diamond, as is
+this green one that many take for an emerald. Quiroga the Chinaman
+offered me six thousand pesos for it in order to present it to a very
+influential lady, and yet it is not the green ones that are the most
+valuable, but these blue ones."
+
+He selected three stones of no great size, but thick and well-cut,
+of a delicate azure tint.
+
+"For all that they are smaller than the green," he continued,
+"they cost twice as much. Look at this one, the smallest of all,
+weighing not more than two carats, which cost me twenty thousand
+pesos and which I won't sell for less than thirty. I had to make a
+special trip to buy it. This other one, from the mines of Golconda,
+weighs three and a half carats and is worth over seventy thousand. The
+Viceroy of India, in a letter I received the day before yesterday,
+offers me twelve thousand pounds sterling for it."
+
+Before such great wealth, all under the power of that man who talked
+so unaffectedly, the spectators felt a kind of awe mingled with
+dread. Sinang clucked several times and her mother did not pinch
+her, perhaps because she too was overcome, or perhaps because she
+reflected that a jeweler like Simoun was not going to try to gain
+five pesos more or less as a result of an exclamation more or less
+indiscreet. All gazed at the gems, but no one showed any desire to
+handle them, they were so awe-inspiring. Curiosity was blunted by
+wonder. Cabesang Tales stared out into the field, thinking that with
+a single diamond, perhaps the very smallest there, he could recover
+his daughter, keep his house, and perhaps rent another farm. Could
+it be that those gems were worth more than a man's home, the safety
+of a maiden, the peace of an old man in his declining days?
+
+As if he guessed the thought, Simoun remarked to those about him: "Look
+here--with one of these little blue stones, which appear so innocent
+and inoffensive, pure as sparks scattered over the arch of heaven,
+with one of these, seasonably presented, a man was able to have his
+enemy deported, the father of a family, as a disturber of the peace;
+and with this other little one like it, red as one's heart-blood,
+as the feeling of revenge, and bright as an orphan's tears, he was
+restored to liberty, the man was returned to his home, the father to
+his children, the husband to the wife, and a whole family saved from
+a wretched future."
+
+He slapped the chest and went on in a loud tone in bad Tagalog: "Here
+I have, as in a medicine-chest, life and death, poison and balm,
+and with this handful I can drive to tears all the inhabitants of
+the Philippines!"
+
+The listeners gazed at him awe-struck, knowing him to be right. In
+his voice there could be detected a strange ring, while sinister
+flashes seemed to issue from behind the blue goggles.
+
+Then as if to relieve the strain of the impression made by the gems on
+such simple folk, he lifted up the tray and exposed at the bottom the
+_sanctum sanctorum_. Cases of Russian leather, separated by layers of
+cotton, covered a bottom lined with gray velvet. All expected wonders,
+and Sinang's husband thought he saw carbuncles, gems that flashed
+fire and shone in the midst of the shadows. Capitan Basilio was on
+the threshold of immortality: he was going to behold something real,
+something beyond his dreams.
+
+"This was a necklace of Cleopatra's," said Simoun, taking out carefully
+a flat case in the shape of a half-moon. "It's a jewel that can't be
+appraised, an object for a museum, only for a rich government."
+
+It was a necklace fashioned of bits of gold representing little idols
+among green and blue beetles, with a vulture's head made from a single
+piece of rare jasper at the center between two extended wings--the
+symbol and decoration of Egyptian queens.
+
+Sinang turned up her nose and made a grimace of childish depreciation,
+while Capitan Basilio, with all his love for antiquity, could not
+restrain an exclamation of disappointment.
+
+"It's a magnificent jewel, well-preserved, almost two thousand
+years old."
+
+"Pshaw!" Sinang made haste to exclaim, to prevent her father's falling
+into temptation.
+
+"Fool!" he chided her, after overcoming his first disappointment. "How
+do you know but that to this necklace is due the present condition
+of the world? With this Cleopatra may have captivated Caesar, Mark
+Antony! This has heard the burning declarations of love from the
+greatest warriors of their time, it has listened to speeches in the
+purest and most elegant Latin, and yet you would want to wear it!"
+
+"I? I wouldn't give three pesos for it."
+
+"You could give twenty, silly," said Capitana Tika in a judicial
+tone. "The gold is good and melted down would serve for other jewelry."
+
+"This is a ring that must have belonged to Sulla," continued Simoun,
+exhibiting a heavy ring of solid gold with a seal on it.
+
+"With that he must have signed the death-wrarrants during his
+dictatorship!" exclaimed Capitan Basilio, pale with emotion. He
+examined it and tried to decipher the seal, but though he turned
+it over and over he did not understand paleography, so he could not
+read it.
+
+"What a finger Sulla had!" he observed finally. "This would fit two
+of ours--as I've said, we're degenerating!"
+
+"I still have many other jewels--"
+
+"If they're all that kind, never mind!" interrupted Sinang. "I think
+I prefer the modern."
+
+Each one selected some piece of jewelry, one a ring, another a watch,
+another a locket. Capitana Tika bought a reliquary that contained a
+fragment of the stone on which Our Saviour rested at his third fall;
+Sinang a pair of earrings; and Capitan Basilio the watch-chain for
+the alferez, the lady's earrings for the curate, and other gifts. The
+families from the town of Tiani, not to be outdone by those of San
+Diego, in like manner emptied their purses.
+
+Simoun bought or exchanged old jewelry, brought there by economical
+mothers, to whom it was no longer of use.
+
+"You, haven't you something to sell?" he asked Cabesang Tales,
+noticing the latter watching the sales and exchanges with covetous
+eyes, but the reply was that all his daughter's jewels had been sold,
+nothing of value remained.
+
+"What about Maria Clara's locket?" inquired Sinang.
+
+"True!" the man exclaimed, and his eyes blazed for a moment.
+
+"It's a locket set with diamonds and emeralds," Sinang told the
+jeweler. "My old friend wore it before she became a nun."
+
+Simoun said nothing, but anxiously watched Cabesang Tales, who, after
+opening several boxes, found the locket. He examined it carefully,
+opening and shutting it repeatedly. It was the same locket that Maria
+Clara had worn during the fiesta in San Diego and which she had in
+a moment of compassion given to a leper.
+
+"I like the design," said Simoun. "How much do you want for it?"
+
+Cabesang Tales scratched his head in perplexity, then his ear, then
+looked at the women.
+
+"I've taken a fancy to this locket," Simoun went on. "Will you take a
+hundred, five hundred pesos? Do you want to exchange it for something
+else? Take your choice here!"
+
+Tales stared foolishly at Simoun, as if in doubt of what he
+heard. "Five hundred pesos?" he murmured.
+
+"Five hundred," repeated the jeweler in a voice shaking with emotion.
+
+Cabesang Tales took the locket and made several turns about the room,
+with his heart beating violently and his hands trembling. Dared he ask
+more? That locket could save him, this was an excellent opportunity,
+such as might not again present itself.
+
+The women winked at him to encourage him to make the sale, excepting
+Penchang, who, fearing that Juli would be ransomed, observed piously:
+"I would keep it as a relic. Those who have seen Maria Clara in the
+nunnery say she has got so thin and weak that she can scarcely talk
+and it's thought that she'll die a saint. Padre Salvi speaks very
+highly of her and he's her confessor. That's why Juli didn't want
+ito give it up, but rather preferred to pawn herself."
+
+This speech had its effect--the thought of his daughter restrained
+Tales. "If you will allow me," he said, "I'll go to the town to
+consult my daughter. I'll be back before night."
+
+This was agreed upon and Tales set out at once. But when he found
+himself outside of the village, he made out at a distance, on a path,
+that entered the woods, the friar-administrator and a man whom he
+recognized as the usurper of his land. A husband seeing his wife
+enter a private room with another man could not feel more wrath or
+jealousy than Cabesang Tales experienced when he saw them moving
+over his fields, the fields cleared by him, which he had thought to
+leave to his children. It seemed to him that they were mocking him,
+laughing at his powerlessness. There flashed into his memory what he
+had said about never giving up his fields except to him who irrigated
+them with his own blood and buried in them his wife and daughter.
+
+He stopped, rubbed his hand over his forehead, and shut his eyes. When
+he again opened them, he saw that the man had turned to laugh and
+that the friar had caught his sides as though to save himself from
+bursting with merriment, then he saw them point toward his house and
+laugh again.
+
+A buzz sounded in his ears, he felt the crack of a whip around his
+chest, the red mist reappeared before his eyes, he again saw the
+corpses of his wife and daughter, and beside them the usurper with
+the friar laughing and holding his sides. Forgetting everything else,
+he turned aside into the path they had taken, the one leading to
+his fields.
+
+Simoun waited in vain for Cabesang Tales to return that night. But
+the next morning when he arose he noticed that the leather holster of
+his revolver was empty. Opening it he found inside a scrap of paper
+wrapped around the locket set with emeralds and diamonds, with these
+few lines written on it in Tagalog:
+
+
+    "Pardon, sir, that in my own house I relieve you of what
+    belongs to you, but necessity drives me to it. In exchange
+    for your revolver I leave the locket you desired so much. I
+    need the weapon, for I am going out to join the tulisanes.
+
+    "I advise you not to keep on your present road, because if
+    you fall into our power, not then being my guest, we will
+    require of you a large ransom.
+
+        Telesforo Juan de Dios."
+
+
+"At last I've found my man!" muttered Simoun with a deep breath. "He's
+somewhat scrupulous, but so much the better--he'll keep his promises."
+
+He then ordered a servant to go by boat over the lake to Los Ba�os with
+the larger chest and await him there. He would go on overland, taking
+the smaller chest, the one containing his famous jewels. The arrival
+of four civil-guards completed his good humor. They came to arrest
+Cabesang Tales and not finding him took Tandang Selo away instead.
+
+Three murders had been committed during the night. The
+friar-administrator and the new tenant of Cabesang Tales' land had
+been found dead, with their heads split open and their mouths full
+of earth, on the border of the fields. In the town the wife of the
+usurper was found dead at dawn, her mouth also filled with earth and
+her throat cut, with a fragment of paper beside her, on which was
+the name _Tales_, written in blood as though traced by a finger.
+
+Calm yourselves, peaceful inhabitants of Kalamba! None of you are
+named Tales, none of you have committed any crime! You are called
+Luis Haba�a, Mat�as Belarmino, Nicasio Eigasani, Cayetano de Jes�s,
+Mateo Elejorde, Leandro Lopez, Antonino Lopez, Silvestre Ubaldo,
+Manuel Hidalgo, Paciano Mercado, your name is the whole village of
+Kalamba. [19] You cleared your fields, on them you have spent the
+labor of your whole lives, your savings, your vigils and privations,
+and you have been despoiled of them, driven from your homes, with the
+rest forbidden to show you hospitality! Not content with outraging
+justice, they [20] have trampled upon the sacred traditions of your
+country! You have served Spain and the King, and when in their name
+you have asked for justice, you were banished without trial, torn
+from your wives' arms and your children's caresses! Any one of you has
+suffered more than Cabesang Tales, and yet none, not one of you, has
+received justice! Neither pity nor humanity has been shown you--you
+have been persecuted beyond the tomb, as was Mariano Herbosa! [21]
+Weep or laugh, there in those lonely isles where you wander vaguely,
+uncertain of the future! Spain, the generous Spain, is watching over
+you, and sooner or later you will have justice!
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+LOS BA�OS
+
+
+His Excellency, the Captain-General and Governor of the Philippine
+Islands, had been hunting in Bosoboso. But as he had to be
+accompanied by a band of music,--since such an exalted personage
+was not to be esteemed less than the wooden images carried in the
+processions,--and as devotion to the divine art of St. Cecilia has
+not yet been popularized among the deer and wild boars of Bosoboso,
+his Excellency, with the band of music and train of friars, soldiers,
+and clerks, had not been able to catch a single rat or a solitary bird.
+
+The provincial authorities foresaw dismissals and transfers, the poor
+gobernadorcillos and cabezas de barangay were restless and sleepless,
+fearing that the mighty hunter in his wrath might have a notion to make
+up with their persons for the lack of submissiveness on the part of the
+beasts of the forest, as had been done years before by an alcalde who
+had traveled on the shoulders of impressed porters because he found no
+horses gentle enough to guarantee his safety. There was not lacking
+an evil rumor that his Excellency had decided to take some action,
+since in this he saw the first symptoms of a rebellion which should be
+strangled in its infancy, that a fruitless hunt hurt the prestige of
+the Spanish name, that he already had his eye on a wretch to be dressed
+up as a deer, when his Excellency, with clemency that Ben-Zayb lacked
+words to extol sufficiently, dispelled all the fears by declaring that
+it pained him to sacrifice to his pleasure the beasts of the forest.
+
+But to tell the truth, his Excellency was secretly very well satisfied,
+for what would have happened had he missed a shot at a deer, one of
+those not familiar with political etiquette? What would the prestige
+of the sovereign power have come to then? A Captain-General of the
+Philippines missing a shot, like a raw hunter? What would have been
+said by the Indians, among whom there were some fair huntsmen? The
+integrity of the fatherland would have been endangered.
+
+So it was that his Excellency, with a sheepish smile, and posing as a
+disappointed hunter, ordered an immediate return to Los Ba�os. During
+the journey he related with an indifferent air his hunting exploits
+in this or that forest of the Peninsula, adopting a tone somewhat
+depreciative, as suited the case, toward hunting in Filipinas. The bath
+in Dampalit, the hot springs on the shore of the lake, card-games in
+the palace, with an occasional excursion to some neighboring waterfall,
+or the lake infested with caymans, offered more attractions and fewer
+risks to the integrity of the fatherland.
+
+Thus on one of the last days of December, his Excellency found himself
+in the sala, taking a hand at cards while he awaited the breakfast
+hour. He had come from the bath, with the usual glass of coconut-milk
+and its soft meat, so he was in the best of humors for granting favors
+and privileges. His good humor was increased by his winning a good many
+hands, for Padre Irene and Padre Sibyla, with whom he was playing,
+were exercising all their skill in secretly trying to lose, to the
+great irritation of Padre Camorra, who on account of his late arrival
+only that morning was not informed as to the game they were playing
+on the General. The friar-artilleryman was playing in good faith and
+with great care, so he turned red and bit his lip every time Padre
+Sibyla seemed inattentive or blundered, but he dared not say a word
+by reason of the respect he felt for the Dominican. In exchange he
+took his revenge out on Padre Irene, whom he looked upon as a base
+fawner and despised for his coarseness. Padre Sibyla let him scold,
+while the humbler Padre Irene tried to excuse himself by rubbing his
+long nose. His Excellency was enjoying it and took advantage, like
+the good tactician that the Canon hinted he was, of all the mistakes
+of his opponents. Padre Camorra was ignorant of the fact that across
+the table they were playing for the intellectual development of the
+Filipinos, the instruction in Castilian, but had he known it he would
+doubtless have joyfully entered into that _game_.
+
+The open balcony admitted the fresh, pure breeze and revealed the lake,
+whose waters murmured sweetly around the base of the edifice, as if
+rendering homage. On the right, at a distance, appeared Talim Island,
+a deep blue in the midst of the lake, while almost in front lay the
+green and deserted islet of Kalamba, in the shape of a half-moon. To
+the left the picturesque shores were fringed with clumps of bamboo,
+then a hill overlooking the lake, with wide ricefields beyond, then
+red roofs amid the deep green of the trees,--the town of Kalamba,--and
+beyond the shore-line fading into the distance, with the horizon at
+the back closing down over the water, giving the lake the appearance
+of a sea and justifying the name the Indians give it of _dagat na
+tabang_, or fresh-water sea.
+
+At the end of the sala, seated before a table covered with documents,
+was the secretary. His Excellency was a great worker and did not
+like to lose time, so he attended to business in the intervals of
+the game or while dealing the cards. Meanwhile, the bored secretary
+yawned and despaired. That morning he had worked, as usual, over
+transfers, suspensions of employees, deportations, pardons, and the
+like, but had not yet touched the great question that had stirred so
+much interest--the petition of the students requesting permission to
+establish an academy of Castilian. Pacing from one end of the room to
+the other and conversing animatedly but in low tones were to be seen
+Don Custodio, a high official, and a friar named Padre Fernandez, who
+hung his head with an air either of meditation or annoyance. From an
+adjoining room issued the click of balls striking together and bursts
+of laughter, amid which might be heard the sharp, dry voice of Simoun,
+who was playing billiards with Ben-Zayb.
+
+Suddenly Padre Camorra arose. "The devil with this game, _pu�ales!_"
+he exclaimed, throwing his cards at Padre Irene's head. "_Pu�ales_,
+that trick, if not all the others, was assured and we lost by
+default! _Pu�ales!_ The devil with this game!"
+
+He explained the situation angrily to all the occupants of the sala,
+addressing himself especially to the three walking about, as if he had
+selected them for judges. The general played thus, he replied with
+such a card, Padre Irene had a certain card; he led, and then that
+fool of a Padre Irene didn't play his card! Padre Irene was giving
+the game away! It was a devil of a way to play! His mother's son had
+not come here to rack his brains for nothing and lose his money!
+
+Then he added, turning very red, "If the booby thinks my money grows
+on every bush!... On top of the fact that my Indians are beginning to
+haggle over payments!" Fuming, and disregarding the excuses of Padre
+Irene, who tried to explain while he rubbed the tip of his beak in
+order to conceal his sly smile, he went into the billiardroom.
+
+"Padre Fernandez, would you like to take a hand?" asked Fray Sibyla.
+
+"I'm a very poor player," replied the friar with a grimace.
+
+"Then get Simoun," said the General. "Eh, Simoun! Eh, Mister, won't
+you try a hand?"
+
+"What is your disposition concerning the arms for sporting
+purposes?" asked the secretary, taking advantage of the pause.
+
+Simoun thrust his head through the doorway.
+
+"Don't you want to take Padre Camorra's place, Se�or Sindbad?" inquired
+Padre Irene. "You can bet diamonds instead of chips."
+
+"I don't care if I do," replied Simoun, advancing while he brushed
+the chalk from his hands. "What will you bet?"
+
+"What should we bet?" returned Padre Sibyla. "The General can bet
+what he likes, but we priests, clerics--"
+
+"Bah!" interrupted Simoun ironically. "You and Padre Irene can pay
+with deeds of charity, prayers, and virtues, eh?"
+
+"You know that the virtues a person may possess," gravely argued
+Padre Sibyla, "are not like the diamonds that may pass from hand to
+hand, to be sold and resold. They are inherent in the being, they
+are essential attributes of the subject--"
+
+"I'll be satisfied then if you pay me with promises," replied Simoun
+jestingly. "You, Padre Sibyla, instead of paying me five something
+or other in money, will say, for example: for five days I renounce
+poverty, humility, and obedience. You, Padre Irene: I renounce
+chastity, liberality, and so on. Those are small matters, and I'm
+putting up my diamonds."
+
+"What a peculiar man this Simoun is, what notions he has!" exclaimed
+Padre Irene with a smile.
+
+"And _he_," continued Simoun, slapping his Excellency familiarly on
+the shoulder, "he will pay me with an order for five days in prison,
+or five months, or an order of deportation made out in blank, or let
+us say a summary execution by the Civil Guard while my man is being
+conducted from one town to another."
+
+This was a strange proposition, so the three who had been pacing
+about gathered around.
+
+"But, Se�or Simoun," asked the high official, "what good will you
+get out of winning promises of virtues, or lives and deportations
+and summary executions?"
+
+"A great deal! I'm tired of hearing virtues talked about and would
+like to have the whole of them, all there are in the world, tied up
+in a sack, in order to throw them into the sea, even though I had to
+use my diamonds for sinkers."
+
+"What an idea!" exclaimed Padre Irene with another smile. "And the
+deportations and executions, what of them?"
+
+"Well, to clean the country and destroy every evil seed."
+
+"Get out! You're still sore at the tulisanes. But you were lucky
+that they didn't demand a larger ransom or keep all your jewels. Man,
+don't be ungrateful!"
+
+Simoun proceeded to relate how he had been intercepted by a band of
+tulisanes, who, after entertaining him for a day, had let him go on
+his way without exacting other ransom than his two fine revolvers and
+the two boxes of cartridges he carried with him. He added that the
+tulisanes had charged him with many kind regards for his Excellency,
+the Captain-General.
+
+As a result of this, and as Simoun reported that the tulisanes were
+well provided with shotguns, rifles, and revolvers, and against such
+persons one man alone, no matter how well armed, could not defend
+himself, his Excellency, to prevent the tulisanes from getting
+weapons in the future, was about to dictate a new decree forbidding
+the introduction of sporting arms.
+
+"On the contrary, on the contrary!" protested Simoun, "for me the
+tulisanes are the most respectable men in the country, they're the
+only ones who earn their living honestly. Suppose I had fallen into
+the hands--well, of you yourselves, for example, would you have let
+me escape without taking half of my jewels, at least?"
+
+Don Custodio was on the point of protesting; that Simoun was really
+a rude American mulatto taking advantage of his friendship with the
+Captain-General to insult Padre Irene, although it may be true also
+that Padre Irene would hardly have set him free for so little.
+
+"The evil is not," went on Simoun, "in that there are tulisanes in
+the mountains and uninhabited parts--the evil lies in the tulisanes
+in the towns and cities."
+
+"Like yourself," put in the Canon with a smile.
+
+"Yes, like myself, like all of us! Let's be frank, for no Indian
+is listening to us here," continued the jeweler. "The evil is that
+we're not all openly declared tulisanes. When that happens and we all
+take to the woods, on that day the country will be saved, on that
+day will rise a new social order which will take care of itself,
+and his Excellency will be able to play his game in peace, without
+the necessity of having his attention diverted by his secretary."
+
+The person mentioned at that moment yawned, extending his folded
+arms above his head and stretching his crossed legs under the table
+as far as possible, upon noticing which all laughed. His Excellency
+wished to change the course of the conversation, so, throwing down
+the cards he had been shuffling, he said half seriously: "Come, come,
+enough of jokes and cards! Let's get to work, to work in earnest,
+since we still have a half-hour before breakfast. Are there many
+matters to be got through with?"
+
+All now gave their attention. That was the day for joining battle
+over the question of instruction in Castilian, for which purpose
+Padre Sibyla and Padre Irene had been there several days. It was known
+that the former, as Vice-Rector, was opposed to the project and that
+the latter supported it, and his activity was in turn supported by
+the Countess.
+
+"What is there, what is there?" asked his Excellency impatiently.
+
+"The petition about sporting arms," replied the secretary with a
+stifled yawn.
+
+"Forbidden!"
+
+"Pardon, General," said the high official gravely, "your Excellency
+will permit me to invite your attention to the fact that the use of
+sporting arms is permitted in all the countries of the world."
+
+The General shrugged his shoulders and remarked dryly, "We are not
+imitating any nation in the world."
+
+Between his Excellency and the high official there was always a
+difference of opinion, so it was sufficient that the latter offer
+any suggestion whatsoever to have the former remain stubborn.
+
+The high official tried another tack. "Sporting arms can harm only
+rats and chickens. They'll say--"
+
+"But are we chickens?" interrupted the General, again shrugging his
+shoulders. "Am I? I've demonstrated that I'm not."
+
+"But there's another thing," observed the secretary. "Four months ago,
+when the possession of arms was prohibited, the foreign importers
+were assured that sporting arms would be admitted."
+
+His Excellency knitted his brows.
+
+"That can be arranged," suggested Simoun.
+
+"How?"
+
+"Very simply. Sporting arms nearly all have a caliber of six
+millimeters, at least those now in the market. Authorize only the
+sale of those that haven't these six millimeters."
+
+All approved this idea of Simoun's, except the high official, who
+muttered into Padre Fernandez's ear that this was not dignified,
+nor was it the way to govern.
+
+"The schoolmaster of Tiani," proceeded the secretary, shuffling some
+papers about, "asks for a better location for--"
+
+"What better location can he want than the storehouse that he has
+all to himself?" interrupted Padre Camorra, who had returned, having
+forgotten about the card-game.
+
+"He says that it's roofless," replied the secretary, "and that having
+purchased out of his own pocket some maps and pictures, he doesn't
+want to expose them to the weather."
+
+"But I haven't anything to do with that," muttered his Excellency. "He
+should address the head secretary, [22] the governor of the province,
+or the nuncio."
+
+"I want to tell you," declared Padre Camorra, "that this little
+schoolmaster is a discontented filibuster. Just imagine--the heretic
+teaches that corpses rot just the same, whether buried with great pomp
+or without any! Some day I'm going to punch him!" Here he doubled up
+his fists.
+
+"To tell the truth," observed Padre Sibyla, as if speaking only to
+Padre Irene, "he who wishes to teach, teaches everywhere, in the open
+air. Socrates taught in the public streets, Plato in the gardens of
+the Academy, even Christ among the mountains and lakes."
+
+"I've heard several complaints against this schoolmaster," said his
+Excellency, exchanging a glance with Simoun. "I think the best thing
+would be to suspend him."
+
+"Suspended!" repeated the secretary.
+
+The luck of that unfortunate, who had asked for help and received
+his dismissal, pained the high official and he tried to do something
+for him.
+
+"It's certain," he insinuated rather timidly, "that education is not
+at all well provided for--"
+
+"I've already decreed large sums for the purchase of supplies,"
+exclaimed his Excellency haughtily, as if to say, "I've done more
+than I ought to have done."
+
+"But since suitable locations are lacking, the supplies purchased
+get ruined."
+
+"Everything can't be done at once," said his Excellency dryly. "The
+schoolmasters here are doing wrong in asking for buildings when those
+in Spain starve to death. It's great presumption to be better off
+here than in the mother country itself!"
+
+"Filibusterism--"
+
+"Before everything the fatherland! Before everything else we are
+Spaniards!" added Ben-Zayb, his eyes glowing with patriotism, but he
+blushed somewhat when he noticed that he was speaking alone.
+
+"In the future," decided the General, "all who complain will be
+suspended."
+
+"If my project were accepted--" Don Custodio ventured to remark,
+as if talking to himself.
+
+"For the construction of schoolhouses?"
+
+"It's simple, practical, economical, and, like all my projects,
+derived from long experience and knowledge of the country. The towns
+would have schools without costing the government a cuarto."
+
+"That's easy," observed the secretary sarcastically. "Compel the
+towns to construct them at their own expense," whereupon all laughed.
+
+"No, sir! No, sir!" cried the exasperated Don Custodio, turning
+very red. "The buildings are already constructed and only wait to be
+utilized. Hygienic, unsurpassable, spacious--"
+
+The friars looked at one another uneasily. Would Don Custodio propose
+that the churches and conventos be converted into schoolhouses?
+
+"Let's hear it," said the General with a frown.
+
+"Well, General, it's very simple," replied Don Custodio, drawing
+himself up and assuming his hollow voice of ceremony. "The schools
+are open only on week-days and the cockpits on holidays. Then convert
+these into schoolhouses, at least during the week."
+
+"Man, man, man!"
+
+"What a lovely idea!"
+
+"What's the matter with you, Don Custodio?"
+
+"That's a grand suggestion!"
+
+"That beats them all!"
+
+"But, gentlemen," cried Don Custodio, in answer to so many
+exclamations, "let's be practical--what places are more suitable
+than the cockpits? They're large, well constructed, and under a
+curse for the use to which they are put during the week-days. From
+a moral standpoint my project would be acceptable, by serving as a
+kind of expiation and weekly purification of the temple of chance,
+as we might say."
+
+"But the fact remains that sometimes there are cockfights during the
+week," objected Padre Camorra, "and it wouldn't be right when the
+contractors of the cockpits pay the government--" [23]
+
+"Well, on those days close the school!"
+
+"Man, man!" exclaimed the scandalized Captain-General. "Such an outrage
+shall never be perpetrated while I govern! To close the schools in
+order to gamble! Man, man, I'll resign first!" His Excellency was
+really horrified.
+
+"But, General, it's better to close them for a few days than for
+months."
+
+"It would be immoral," observed Padre Irene, more indignant even than
+his Excellency.
+
+"It's more immoral that vice has good buildings and learning
+none. Let's be practical, gentlemen, and not be carried away by
+sentiment. In politics there's nothing worse than sentiment. While
+from humane considerations we forbid the cultivation of opium in our
+colonies, we tolerate the smoking of it, and the result is that we
+do not combat the vice but impoverish ourselves."
+
+"But remember that it yields to the government, without any effort,
+more than four hundred and fifty thousand pesos," objected Padre Irene,
+who was getting more and more on the governmental side.
+
+"Enough, enough, enough!" exclaimed his Excellency, to end the
+discussion. "I have my own plans in this regard and will devote special
+attention to the matter of public instruction. Is there anything else?"
+
+The secretary looked uneasily toward Padre Sibyla and Padre Irene. The
+cat was about to come out of the bag. Both prepared themselves.
+
+"The petition of the students requesting authorization to open an
+academy of Castilian," answered the secretary.
+
+A general movement was noted among those in the room. After glancing
+at one another they fixed their eyes on the General to learn what
+his disposition would be. For six months the petition had lain there
+awaiting a decision and had become converted into a kind of _casus
+belli_ in certain circles. His Excellency had lowered his eyes,
+as if to keep his thoughts from being read.
+
+The silence became embarrassing, as the General understood, so he
+asked the high official, "What do you think?"
+
+"What should I think, General?" responded the person addressed, with
+a shrug of his shoulders and a bitter smile. "What should I think
+but that the petition is just, very just, and that I am surprised
+that six months should have been taken to consider it."
+
+"The fact is that it involves other considerations," said Padre Sibyla
+coldly, as he half closed his eyes.
+
+The high official again shrugged his shoulders, like one who did not
+comprehend what those considerations could be.
+
+"Besides the intemperateness of the demand," went on the Dominican,
+"besides the fact that it is in the nature of an infringement on
+our prerogatives--"
+
+Padre Sibyla dared not go on, but looked at Simoun.
+
+"The petition has a somewhat suspicious character," corroborated
+that individual, exchanging a look with the Dominican, who winked
+several times.
+
+Padre Irene noticed these things and realized that his cause was
+almost lost--Simoun was against him.
+
+"It's a peaceful rebellion, a revolution on stamped paper," added
+Padre Sibyla.
+
+"Revolution? Rebellion?" inquired the high official, staring from
+one to the other as if he did not understand what they could mean.
+
+"It's headed by some young men charged with being too radical and
+too much interested in reforms, not to use stronger terms," remarked
+the secretary, with a look at the Dominican. "Among them is a certain
+Isagani, a poorly balanced head, nephew of a native priest--"
+
+"He's a pupil of mine," put in Padre Fernandez, "and I'm much pleased
+with him."
+
+"_Pu�ales,_ I like your taste!" exclaimed Padre Camorra. "On the
+steamer we nearly had a fight. He's so insolent that when I gave him
+a shove aside he returned it."
+
+"There's also one Makaragui or Makarai--"
+
+"Makaraig," Padre Irene joined in. "A very pleasant and agreeable
+young man."
+
+Then he murmured into the General's ear, "He's the one I've talked
+to you about, he's very rich. The Countess recommends him strongly."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"A medical student, one Basilio--"
+
+"Of that Basilio, I'll say nothing," observed Padre Irene, raising
+his hands and opening them, as if to say _Dominus vobiscum_. "He's
+too deep for me. I've never succeeded in fathoming what he wants or
+what he is thinking about. It's a pity that Padre Salvi isn't present
+to tell us something about his antecedents. I believe that I've heard
+that when a boy he got into trouble with the Civil Guard. His father
+was killed in--I don't remember what disturbance."
+
+Simoun smiled faintly, silently, showing his sharp white teeth.
+
+"Aha! Aha!" said his Excellency nodding. "That's the kind we have! Make
+a note of that name."
+
+"But, General," objected the high official, seeing that the matter
+was taking a bad turn, "up to now nothing positive is known against
+these young men. Their position is a very just one, and we have no
+right to deny it on the ground of mere conjectures. My opinion is that
+the government, by exhibiting confidence in the people and in its own
+stability, should grant what is asked, then it could freely revoke the
+permission when it saw that its kindness was being abused--reasons
+and pretexts would not be wanting, we can watch them. Why cause
+disaffection among some young men, who later on may feel resentment,
+when what they ask is commanded by royal decrees?"
+
+Padre Irene, Don Custodio, and Padre Fernandez nodded in agreement.
+
+"But the Indians must not understand Castilian, you know," cried Padre
+Camorra. "They mustn't learn it, for then they'll enter into arguments
+with us, and the Indians must not argue, but obey and pay. They mustn't
+try to interpret the meaning of the laws and the books, they're so
+tricky and pettifogish! Just as soon as they learn Castilian they
+become enemies of God and of Spain. Just read the _Tandang Basio
+Macunat_--that's a book! It tells truths like this!" And he held up
+his clenched fists.
+
+Padre Sibyla rubbed his hand over his tonsure in sign of
+impatience. "One word," he began in the most conciliatory tone, though
+fuming with irritation, "here we're not dealing with the instruction
+in Castilian alone. Here there is an underhand fight between the
+students and the University of Santo Tomas. If the students win this,
+our prestige will be trampled in the dirt, they will say that they've
+beaten us and will exult accordingly. Then, good-by to moral strength,
+good-by to everything! The first dike broken down, who will restrain
+this youth? With our fall we do no more than signal your own. After
+us, the government!"
+
+"_Pu�ales_, that's not so!" exclaimed Padre Camorra. "We'll see first
+who has the biggest fists!"
+
+At this point Padre Fernandez, who thus far in the discussion had
+merely contented himself with smiling, began to talk. All gave him
+their attention, for they knew him to be a thoughtful man.
+
+"Don't take it ill of me, Padre Sibyla, if I differ from your view
+of the affair, but it's my peculiar fate to be almost always in
+opposition to my brethren. I say, then, that we ought not to be so
+pessimistic. The instruction in Castilian can be allowed without any
+risk whatever, and in order that it may not appear to be a defeat
+of the University, we Dominicans ought to put forth our efforts and
+be the first to rejoice over it--that should be our policy. To what
+end are we to be engaged in an everlasting struggle with the people,
+when after all we are the few and they are the many, when we need them
+and they do not need us? Wait, Padre Camorra, wait! Admit that now the
+people may be weak and ignorant--I also believe that--but it will not
+be true tomorrow or the day after. Tomorrow and the next day they will
+be the stronger, they will know what is good for them, and we cannot
+keep it from them, just as it is not possible to keep from children
+the knowledge of many things when they reach a certain age. I say,
+then, why should we not take advantage of this condition of ignorance
+to change our policy completely, to place it upon a basis solid and
+enduring--on the basis of justice, for example, instead of on the basis
+of ignorance? There's nothing like being just; that I've always said to
+my brethren, but they won't believe me. The Indian idolizes justice,
+like every race in its youth; he asks for punishment when he has
+done wrong, just as he is exasperated when he has not deserved it. Is
+theirs a just desire? Then grant it! Let's give them all the schools
+they want, until they are tired of them. Youth is lazy, and what urges
+them to activity is our opposition. Our bond of prestige, Padre Sibyla,
+is about worn out, so let's prepare another, the bond of gratitude,
+for example. Let's not be fools, let's do as the crafty Jesuits--"
+
+"Padre Fernandez!" Anything could be tolerated by Padre Sibyla except
+to propose the Jesuits to him as a model. Pale and trembling, he
+broke out into bitter recrimination. "A Franciscan first! Anything
+before a Jesuit!" He was beside himself.
+
+"Oh, oh!"
+
+"Eh, Padre--"
+
+A general discussion broke out, regardless of the Captain-General. All
+talked at once, they yelled, they misunderstood and contradicted
+one another. Ben-Zayb and Padre Camorra shook their fists in each
+other's faces, one talking of simpletons and the other of ink-slingers,
+Padre Sibyla kept harping on the _Capitulum_, and Padre Fernandez on
+the _Summa_ of St. Thomas, until the curate of Los Ba�os entered to
+announce that breakfast was served.
+
+His Excellency arose and so ended the discussion. "Well, gentlemen,"
+he said, "we've worked like niggers and yet we're on a vacation. Some
+one has said that grave matters should he considered at dessert. I'm
+entirely of that opinion."
+
+"We might get indigestion," remarked the secretary, alluding to the
+heat of the discussion.
+
+"Then we'll lay it aside until tomorrow."
+
+As they rose the high official whispered to the General, "Your
+Excellency, the daughter of Cabesang Tales has been here again begging
+for the release of her sick grandfather, who was arrested in place
+of her father."
+
+His Excellency looked at him with an expression of impatience and
+rubbed his hand across his broad forehead. "_Carambas_! Can't one be
+left to eat his breakfast in peace?"
+
+"This is the third day she has come. She's a poor girl--"
+
+"Oh, the devil!" exclaimed Padre Camorra. "I've just thought of it. I
+have something to say to the General about that--that's what I came
+over for--to support that girl's petition."
+
+The General scratched the back of his ear and said, "Oh, go along! Have
+the secretary make out an order to the lieutenant of the Civil Guard
+for the old man's release. They sha'n't say that we're not clement
+and merciful."
+
+He looked at Ben-Zayb. The journalist winked.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+PLACIDO PENITENTE
+
+
+Reluctantly, and almost with tearful eyes, Placido Penitente was going
+along the Escolta on his way to the University of Santo Tomas. It
+had hardly been a week since he had come from his town, yet he had
+already written to his mother twice, reiterating his desire to abandon
+his studies and go back there to work. His mother answered that he
+should have patience, that at the least he must be graduated as a
+bachelor of arts, since it would be unwise to desert his books after
+four years of expense and sacrifices on both their parts.
+
+Whence came to Penitente this aversion to study, when he had been
+one of the most diligent in the famous college conducted by Padre
+Valerio in Tanawan? There Penitente had been considered one of the
+best Latinists and the subtlest disputants, one who could tangle or
+untangle the simplest as well as the most abstruse questions. His
+townspeople considered him very clever, and his curate, influenced by
+that opinion, already classified him as a filibuster--a sure proof that
+he was neither foolish nor incapable. His friends could not explain
+those desires for abandoning his studies and returning: he had no
+sweethearts, was not a gambler, hardly knew anything about _hunk�an_
+and rarely tried his luck at the more familiar _revesino_. He did
+not believe in the advice of the curates, laughed at _Tandang Basio
+Macunat_, had plenty of money and good clothes, yet he went to school
+reluctantly and looked with repugnance on his books.
+
+On the Bridge of Spain, a bridge whose name alone came from Spain,
+since even its ironwork came from foreign countries, he fell in with
+the long procession of young men on their way to the Walled City to
+their respective schools. Some were dressed in the European fashion and
+walked rapidly, carrying books and notes, absorbed in thoughts of their
+lessons and essays--these were the students of the Ateneo. Those from
+San Juan de Letran were nearly all dressed in the Filipino costume, but
+were more numerous and carried fewer books. Those from the University
+are dressed more carefully and elegantly and saunter along carrying
+canes instead of books. The collegians of the Philippines are not very
+noisy or turbulent. They move along in a preoccupied manner, such that
+upon seeing them one would say that before their eyes shone no hope,
+no smiling future. Even though here and there the line is brightened
+by the attractive appearance of the schoolgirls of the _Escuela
+Municipal_, [24] with their sashes across their shoulders and their
+books in their hands, followed by their servants, yet scarcely a laugh
+resounds or a joke can be heard--nothing of song or jest, at best a few
+heavy jokes or scuffles among the smaller boys. The older ones nearly
+always proceed seriously and composedly, like the German students.
+
+Placido was proceeding along the Paseo de Magallanes toward the
+breach--formerly the gate--of Santo Domingo, when he suddenly felt
+a slap on the shoulder, which made him turn quickly in ill humor.
+
+"Hello, Penitente! Hello, Penitente!"
+
+It was his schoolmate Juanito Pelaez, the _barbero_ or pet of the
+professors, as big a rascal as he could be, with a roguish look and
+a clownish smile. The son of a Spanish mestizo--a rich merchant in
+one of the suburbs, who based all his hopes and joys on the boy's
+talent--he promised well with his roguery, and, thanks to his custom
+of playing tricks on every one and then hiding behind his companions,
+he had acquired a peculiar hump, which grew larger whenever he was
+laughing over his deviltry.
+
+"What kind of time did you have, Penitente?" was his question as he
+again slapped him on the shoulder.
+
+"So, so," answered Placido, rather bored. "And you?"
+
+"Well, it was great! Just imagine--the curate of Tiani invited me to
+spend the vacation in his town, and I went. Old man, you know Padre
+Camorra, I suppose? Well, he's a liberal curate, very jolly, frank,
+very frank, one of those like Padre Paco. As there were pretty girls,
+we serenaded them all, he with his guitar and songs and I with my
+violin. I tell you, old man, we had a great time--there wasn't a
+house we didn't try!"
+
+He whispered a few words in Placido's ear and then broke out into
+laughter. As the latter exhibited some surprise, he resumed:
+"I'll swear to it! They can't help themselves, because with a
+governmental order you get rid of the father, husband, or brother,
+and then--merry Christmas! However, we did run up against a little
+fool, the sweetheart, I believe, of Basilio, you know? Look, what a
+fool this Basilio is! To have a sweetheart who doesn't know a word
+of Spanish, who hasn't any money, and who has been a servant! She's
+as shy as she can be, but pretty. Padre Camorra one night started to
+club two fellows who were serenading her and I don't know how it was
+he didn't kill them, yet with all that she was just as shy as ever. But
+it'll result for her as it does with all the women, all of them!"
+
+Juanito Pelaez laughed with a full mouth, as though he thought this
+a glorious thing, while Placido stared at him in disgust.
+
+"Listen, what did the professor explain yesterday?" asked Juanito,
+changing the conversation.
+
+"Yesterday there was no class."
+
+"Oho, and the day before yesterday?"
+
+"Man, it was Thursday!"
+
+"Right! What an ass I am! Don't you know, Placido, that I'm getting
+to be a regular ass? What about Wednesday?"
+
+"Wednesday? Wait--Wednesday, it was a little wet."
+
+"Fine! What about Tuesday, old man?"
+
+"Tuesday was the professor's nameday and we went to entertain him
+with an orchestra, present him flowers and some gifts."
+
+"Ah, _carambas!_" exclaimed Juanito, "that I should have forgotten
+about it! What an ass I am! Listen, did he ask for me?"
+
+Penitente shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know, but they gave him
+a list of his entertainers."
+
+"_Carambas!_ Listen--Monday, what happened?"
+
+"As it was the first school-day, he called the roll and assigned the
+lesson--about mirrors. Look, from here to here, by memory, word for
+word. We jump all this section, we take that." He was pointing out
+with his finger in the "Physics" the portions that were to be learned,
+when suddenly the book flew through the air, as a result of the slap
+Juanito gave it from below.
+
+"Thunder, let the lessons go! Let's have a _dia pichido!_"
+
+The students in Manila call _dia pichido_ a school-day that falls
+between two holidays and is consequently suppressed, as though forced
+out by their wish.
+
+"Do you know that you really are an ass?" exclaimed Placido, picking
+up his book and papers.
+
+"Let's have a _dia pichido!_" repeated Juanito.
+
+Placido was unwilling, since for only two the authorities were hardly
+going to suspend a class of more than a hundred and fifty. He recalled
+the struggles and privations his mother was suffering in order to keep
+him in Manila, while she went without even the necessities of life.
+
+They were just passing through the breach of Santo Domingo, and
+Juanito, gazing across the little plaza [25] in front of the old
+Customs building, exclaimed, "Now I think of it, I'm appointed to
+take up the collection."
+
+"What collection?"
+
+"For the monument."
+
+"What monument?"
+
+"Get out! For Padre Balthazar, you know."
+
+"And who was Padre Balthazar?"
+
+"Fool! A Dominican, of course--that's why the padres call on the
+students. Come on now, loosen up with three or four pesos, so that they
+may see we are sports. Don't let them say afterwards that in order
+to erect a statue they had to dig down into their own pockets. Do,
+Placido, it's not money thrown away."
+
+He accompanied these words with a significant wink. Placido recalled
+the case of a student who had passed through the entire course by
+presenting canary-birds, so he subscribed three pesos.
+
+"Look now, I'll write your name plainly so that the professor will read
+it, you see--Placido Penitente, three pesos. Ah, listen! In a couple
+of weeks comes the nameday of the professor of natural history. You
+know that he's a good fellow, never marks absences or asks about the
+lesson. Man, we must show our appreciation!"
+
+"That's right!"
+
+"Then don't you think that we ought to give him a celebration? The
+orchestra must not be smaller than the one you had for the professor
+of physics."
+
+"That's right!"
+
+"What do you think about making the contribution two pesos? Come,
+Placido, you start it, so you'll be at the head of the list."
+
+Then, seeing that Placido gave the two pesos without hesitation,
+he added, "Listen, put up four, and afterwards I'll return you
+two. They'll serve as a decoy."
+
+"Well, if you're going to return them to me, why give them to
+you? It'll be sufficient, for you to write four."
+
+"Ah, that's right! What an ass I am! Do you know, I'm getting to be
+a regular ass! But let me have them anyhow, so that I can show them."
+
+Placido, in order not to give the lie to the priest who christened him,
+gave what was asked, just as they reached the University.
+
+In the entrance and along the walks on each side of it were gathered
+the students, awaiting the appearance of the professors. Students of
+the preparatory year of law, of the fifth of the secondary course,
+of the preparatory in medicine, formed lively groups. The latter
+were easily distinguished by their clothing and by a certain air
+that was lacking in the others, since the greater part of them came
+from the Ateneo Municipal. Among them could be seen the poet Isagani,
+explaining to a companion the theory of the refraction of light. In
+another group they were talking, disputing, citing the statements
+of the professor, the text-books, and scholastic principles; in
+yet another they were gesticulating and waving their books in the
+air or making demonstrations with their canes by drawing diagrams
+on the ground; farther on, they were entertaining themselves in
+watching the pious women go into the neighboring church, all the
+students making facetious remarks. An old woman leaning on a young
+girl limped piously, while the girl moved along writh downcast eyes,
+timid and abashed to pass before so many curious eyes. The old lady,
+catching up her coffee-colored skirt, of the Sisterhood of St. Rita,
+to reveal her big feet and white stockings, scolded her companion
+and shot furious glances at the staring bystanders.
+
+"The rascals!" she grunted. "Don't look at them, keep your eyes down."
+
+Everything was noticed; everything called forth jokes and comments. Now
+it was a magnificent victoria which stopped at the door to set down a
+family of votaries on their way to visit the Virgin of the Rosary [26]
+on her favorite day, while the inquisitive sharpened their eyes to get
+a glimpse of the shape and size of the young ladies' feet as they got
+out of the carriages; now it was a student who came out of the door
+with devotion still shining in his eyes, for he had passed through
+the church to beg the Virgin's help in understanding his lesson and
+to see if his sweetheart was there, to exchange a few glances with
+her and go on to his class with the recollection of her loving eyes.
+
+Soon there was noticed some movement in the groups, a certain air of
+expectancy, while Isagani paused and turned pale. A carriage drawn
+by a pair of well-known white horses had stopped at the door. It
+was that of Paulita Gomez, and she had already jumped down, light
+as a bird, without giving the rascals time to see her foot. With a
+bewitching whirl of her body and a sweep of her hand she arranged
+the folds of her skirt, shot a rapid and apparently careless glance
+toward Isagani, spoke to him and smiled. Do�a Victorina descended
+in her turn, gazed over her spectacles, saw Juanito Pelaez, smiled,
+and bowed to him affably.
+
+Isagani, flushed with excitement, returned a timid salute, while
+Juanito bowed profoundly, took off his hat, and made the same gesture
+as the celebrated clown and caricaturist Panza when he received
+applause.
+
+"Heavens, what a girl!" exclaimed one of the students, starting
+forward. "Tell the professor that I'm seriously ill." So Tadeo,
+as this invalid youth was known, entered the church to follow the girl.
+
+Tadeo went to the University every day to ask if the classes would be
+held and each time seemed to be more and more astonished that they
+would. He had a fixed idea of a latent and eternal _holiday_, and
+expected it to come any day. So each morning, after vainly proposing
+that they play truant, he would go away alleging important business,
+an appointment, or illness, just at the very moment when his companions
+were going to their classes. But by some occult, thaumaturgic art
+Tadeo passed the examinations, was beloved by the professors, and
+had before him a promising future.
+
+Meanwhile, the groups began to move inside, for the professor
+of physics and chemistry had put in his appearance. The students
+appeared to be cheated in their hopes and went toward the interior
+of the building with exclamations of discontent. Placido went along
+with the crowd.
+
+"Penitente, Penitente!" called a student with a certain mysterious
+air. "Sign this!"
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Never mind--sign it!"
+
+It seemed to Placido that some one was twitching his ears. He recalled
+the story of a cabeza de barangay in his town who, for having signed
+a document that he did not understand, was kept a prisoner for months
+and months, and came near to deportation. An uncle of Placido's,
+in order to fix the lesson in his memory, had given him a severe
+ear-pulling, so that always whenever he heard signatures spoken of,
+his ears reproduced the sensation.
+
+"Excuse me, but I can't sign anything without first understanding
+what it's about."
+
+"What a fool you are! If two _celestial carbineers_ have signed it,
+what have you to fear?"
+
+The name of _celestial carbineers_ inspired confidence, being, as it
+was, a sacred company created to aid God in the warfare against the
+evil spirit and to prevent the smuggling of heretical contraband into
+the markets of the New Zion. [27]
+
+Placido was about to sign to make an end of it, because he was in
+a hurry,--already his classmates were reciting the _O Thoma_,--but
+again his ears twitched, so he said, "After the class! I want to read
+it first."
+
+"It's very long, don't you see? It concerns the presentation of a
+counter-petition, or rather, a protest. Don't you understand? Makaraig
+and some others have asked that an academy of Castilian be opened,
+which is a piece of genuine foolishness--"
+
+"All right, all right, after awhile. They're already beginning,"
+answered Placido, trying to get away.
+
+"But your professor may not call the roll--"
+
+"Yes, yes; but he calls it sometimes. Later on, later on! Besides,
+I don't want to put myself in opposition to Makaraig."
+
+"But it's not putting yourself in opposition, it's only--"
+
+Placido heard no more, for he was already far away, hurrying to his
+class. He heard the different voices--_adsum, adsum_--the roll was
+being called! Hastening his steps he got to the door just as the
+letter Q was reached.
+
+"_Tinam�an �g--!_" [28] he muttered, biting his lips.
+
+He hesitated about entering, for the mark was already down against
+him and was not to be erased. One did not go to the class to
+learn but in order not to get this absence mark, for the class was
+reduced to reciting the lesson from memory, reading the book, and
+at the most answering a few abstract, profound, captious, enigmatic
+questions. True, the usual preachment was never lacking--the same
+as ever, about humility, submission, and respect to the clerics,
+and he, Placido, was humble, submissive, and respectful. So he was
+about to turn away when he remembered that the examinations were
+approaching and his professor had not yet asked him a question nor
+appeared to notice him--this would be a good opportunity to attract
+his attention and become known! To be known was to gain a year, for
+if it cost nothing to suspend one who was not known, it required a
+hard heart not to be touched by the sight of a youth who by his daily
+presence was a reproach over a year of his life wasted.
+
+So Placido went in, not on tiptoe as was his custom, but noisily on his
+heels, and only too well did he succeed in his intent! The professor
+stared at him, knitted his brows, and shook his head, as though to say,
+"Ah, little impudence, you'll pay for that!"
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE CLASS IN PHYSICS
+
+
+The classroom was a spacious rectangular hall with large grated
+windows that admitted an abundance of light and air. Along the two
+sides extended three wide tiers of stone covered with wood, filled
+with students arranged in alphabetical order. At the end opposite the
+entrance, under a print of St. Thomas Aquinas, rose the professor's
+chair on an elevated platform with a little stairway on each side. With
+the exception of a beautiful blackboard in a narra frame, scarcely
+ever used, since there was still written on it the _viva_ that had
+appeared on the opening day, no furniture, either useful or useless,
+was to be seen. The walls, painted white and covered with glazed tiles
+to prevent scratches, were entirely bare, having neither a drawing
+nor a picture, nor even an outline of any physical apparatus. The
+students had no need of any, no one missed the practical instruction
+in an extremely experimental science; for years and years it has been
+so taught and the country has not been upset, but continues just as
+ever. Now and then some little instrument descended from heaven and
+was exhibited to the class from a distance, like the monstrance to
+the prostrate worshipers--look, but touch not! From time to time,
+when some complacent professor appeared, one day in the year was
+set aside for visiting the mysterious laboratory and gazing from
+without at the puzzling apparatus arranged in glass cases. No one
+could complain, for on that day there were to be seen quantities of
+brass and glassware, tubes, disks, wheels, bells, and the like--the
+exhibition did not get beyond that, and the country was not upset.
+
+Besides, the students were convinced that those instruments had not
+been purchased for them--the friars would be fools! The laboratory
+was intended to be shown to the visitors and the high officials who
+came from the Peninsula, so that upon seeing it they would nod their
+heads with satisfaction, while their guide would smile, as if to say,
+"Eh, you thought you were going to find some backward monks! Well,
+we're right up with the times--we have a laboratory!"
+
+The visitors and high officials, after being handsomely entertained,
+would then write in their _Travels_ or _Memoirs_: "The Royal
+and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas of Manila, in charge of
+the enlightened Dominican Order, possesses a magnificent physical
+laboratory for the instruction of youth. Some two hundred and fifty
+students annually study this subject, but whether from apathy,
+indolence, the limited capacity of the Indian, or some other
+ethnological or incomprehensible reason, up to now there has not
+developed a Lavoisier, a Secchi, or a Tyndall, not even in miniature,
+in the Malay-Filipino race."
+
+Yet, to be exact, we will say that in this laboratory are held the
+classes of thirty or forty _advanced_ students, under the direction of
+an instructor who performs his duties well enough, but as the greater
+part of these students come from the Ateneo of the Jesuits, where
+science is taught practically in the laboratory itself, its utility
+does not come to be so great as it would be if it could be utilized by
+the two hundred and fifty who pay their matriculation fees, buy their
+books, memorize them, and waste a year to know nothing afterwards. As
+a result, with the exception of some rare usher or janitor who has
+had charge of the museum for years, no one has ever been known to
+get any advantage from the lessons memorized with so great effort.
+
+But let us return to the class. The professor was a young Dominican,
+who had filled several chairs in San Juan de Letran with zeal and
+good repute. He had the reputation of being a great logician as well
+as a profound philosopher, and was one of the most promising in his
+clique. His elders treated him with consideration, while the younger
+men envied him, for there were also cliques among them. This was the
+third year of his professorship and, although the first in which he
+had taught physics and chemistry, he already passed for a sage, not
+only with the complaisant students but also among the other nomadic
+professors. Padre Millon did not belong to the common crowd who each
+year change their subject in order to acquire scientific knowledge,
+students among other students, with the difference only that they
+follow a single course, that they quiz instead of being quizzed,
+that they have a better knowledge of Castilian, and that they are not
+examined at the completion of the course. Padre Millon went deeply
+into science, knew the physics of Aristotle and Padre Amat, read
+carefully his "Ramos," and sometimes glanced at "Ganot." With all that,
+he would often shake his head with an air of doubt, as he smiled and
+murmured: "_transeat_." In regard to chemistry, no common knowledge
+was attributed to him after he had taken as a premise the statement of
+St. Thomas that water is a mixture and proved plainly that the Angelic
+Doctor had long forestalled Berzelius, Gay-Lussac, Bunsen, and other
+more or less presumptuous materialists. Moreover, in spite of having
+been an instructor in geography, he still entertained certain doubts as
+to the rotundity of the earth and smiled maliciously when its rotation
+and revolution around the sun were mentioned, as he recited the verses
+
+
+    "El mentir de las estrellas
+    Es un c�modo mentir." [29]
+
+
+He also smiled maliciously in the presence of certain physical
+theories and considered visionary, if not actually insane, the
+Jesuit Secchi, to whom he imputed the making of triangulations on
+the host as a result of his astronomical mania, for which reason it
+was said that he had been forbidden to celebrate mass. Many persons
+also noticed in him some aversion to the sciences that he taught,
+but these vagaries were trifles, scholarly and religious prejudices
+that were easily explained, not only by the fact that the physical
+sciences were eminently practical, of pure observation and deduction,
+while his forte was philosophy, purely speculative, of abstraction
+and induction, but also because, like any good Dominican, jealous
+of the fame of his order, he could hardly feel any affection for a
+science in which none of his brethren had excelled--he was the first
+who did not accept the chemistry of St. Thomas Aquinas--and in which
+so much renown had been acquired by hostile, or rather, let us say,
+rival orders.
+
+This was the professor who that morning called the roll and directed
+many of the students to recite the lesson from memory, word for
+word. The phonographs got into operation, some well, some ill, some
+stammering, and received their grades. He who recited without an error
+earned a good mark and he who made more than three mistakes a bad mark.
+
+A fat boy with a sleepy face and hair as stiff and hard as the bristles
+of a brush yawned until he seemed to be about to dislocate his jaws,
+and stretched himself with his arms extended as though he were in
+his bed. The professor saw this and wished to startle him.
+
+"Eh, there, sleepy-head! What's this? Lazy, too, so it's sure you
+[30] don't know the lesson, ha?"
+
+Padre Millon not only used the depreciative _tu_ with the students,
+like a good friar, but he also addressed them in the slang of the
+markets, a practise that he had acquired from the professor of
+canonical law: whether that reverend gentleman wished to humble the
+students or the sacred decrees of the councils is a question not yet
+settled, in spite of the great attention that has been given to it.
+
+This question, instead of offending the class, amused them, and many
+laughed--it was a daily occurrence. But the sleeper did not laugh;
+he arose with a bound, rubbed his eyes, and, as though a steam-engine
+were turning the phonograph, began to recite.
+
+"The name of mirror is applied to all polished surfaces intended to
+produce by the reflection of light the images of the objects placed
+before said surfaces. From the substances that form these surfaces,
+they are divided into metallic mirrors and glass mirrors--"
+
+"Stop, stop, stop!" interrupted the professor. "Heavens, what a
+rattle! We are at the point where the mirrors are divided into
+metallic and glass, eh? Now if I should present to you a block of
+wood, a piece of kamagon for instance, well polished and varnished,
+or a slab of black marble well burnished, or a square of jet, which
+would reflect the images of objects placed before them, how would
+you classify those mirrors?"
+
+Whether he did not know what to answer or did not understand
+the question, the student tried to get out of the difficulty by
+demonstrating that he knew the lesson, so he rushed on like a torrent.
+
+"The first are composed of brass or an alloy of different metals and
+the second of a sheet of glass, with its two sides well polished,
+one of which has an amalgam of tin adhering to it."
+
+"Tut, tut, tut! That's not it! I say to you '_Dominus vobiscum_,'
+and you answer me with '_Requiescat in pace!_' "
+
+The worthy professor then repeated the question in the vernacular of
+the markets, interspersed with _cosas_ and _ab�s_ at every moment.
+
+The poor youth did not know how to get out of the quandary: he doubted
+whether to include the kamagon with the metals, or the marble with
+glasses, and leave the jet as a neutral substance, until Juanito
+Pelaez maliciously prompted him:
+
+"The mirror of kamagon among the wooden mirrors."
+
+The incautious youth repeated this aloud and half the class was
+convulsed with laughter.
+
+"A good sample of wood you are yourself!" exclaimed the professor,
+laughing in spite of himself. "Let's see from what you would define a
+mirror--from a surface _per se, in quantum est superficies_, or from a
+substance that forms the surface, or from the substance upon which the
+surface rests, the raw material, modified by the attribute 'surface,'
+since it is clear that, surface being an accidental property of bodies,
+it cannot exist without substance. Let's see now--what do you say?"
+
+"I? Nothing!" the wretched boy was about to reply, for he did not
+understand what it was all about, confused as he was by so many
+surfaces and so many accidents that smote cruelly on his ears, but
+a sense of shame restrained him. Filled with anguish and breaking
+into a cold perspiration, he began to repeat between his teeth:
+"The name of mirror is applied to all polished surfaces--"
+
+"_Ergo, per te_, the mirror is the surface," angled the
+professor. "Well, then, clear up this difficulty. If the surface is the
+mirror, it must be of no consequence to the 'essence' of the mirror
+what may be found behind this surface, since what is behind it does
+not affect the 'essence' that is before it, _id est_, the surface,
+_quae super faciem est, quia vocatur superficies, facies ea quae
+supra videtur_. Do you admit that or do you not admit it?"
+
+The poor youth's hair stood up straighter than ever, as though acted
+upon by some magnetic force.
+
+"Do you admit it or do you not admit it?"
+
+"Anything! Whatever you wish, Padre," was his thought, but he did
+not dare to express it from fear of ridicule. That was a dilemma
+indeed, and he had never been in a worse one. He had a vague idea
+that the most innocent thing could not be admitted to the friars
+but that they, or rather their estates and curacies, would get out
+of it all the results and advantages imaginable. So his good angel
+prompted him to deny everything with all the energy of his soul and
+refractoriness of his hair, and he was about to shout a proud _nego_,
+for the reason that he who denies everything does not compromise
+himself in anything, as a certain lawyer had once told him; but the
+evil habit of disregarding the dictates of one's own conscience,
+of having little faith in legal folk, and of seeking aid from others
+where one is sufficient unto himself, was his undoing. His companions,
+especially Juanito Pelaez, were making signs to him to admit it,
+so he let himself be carried away by his evil destiny and exclaimed,
+"_Concedo_, Padre," in a voice as faltering as though he were saying,
+"_In manus tuas commendo spiritum meum._"
+
+"_Concedo antecedentum_," echoed the professor, smiling
+maliciously. "_Ergo_, I can scratch the mercury off a looking-glass,
+put in its place a piece of _bibinka_, and we shall still have a
+mirror, eh? Now what shall we have?"
+
+The youth gazed at his prompters, but seeing them surprised and
+speechless, contracted his features into an expression of bitterest
+reproach. "_Deus meus, Deus meus, quare dereliquiste me,_" said his
+troubled eyes, while his lips muttered "_Linintikan!_" Vainly he
+coughed, fumbled at his shirt-bosom, stood first on one foot and then
+on the other, but found no answer.
+
+"Come now, what have we?" urged the professor, enjoying the effect
+of his reasoning.
+
+"_Bibinka!_" whispered Juanito Pelaez. "_Bibinka!_"
+
+"Shut up, you fool!" cried the desperate youth, hoping to get out of
+the difficulty by turning it into a complaint.
+
+"Let's see, Juanito, if you can answer the question for me," the
+professor then said to Pelaez, who was one of his pets.
+
+The latter rose slowly, not without first giving Penitente, who
+followed him on the roll, a nudge that meant, "Don't forget to
+prompt me."
+
+"_Nego consequentiam_, Padre," he replied resolutely.
+
+"Aha, then _probo consequentiam! Per te_, the polished surface
+constitutes the 'essence' of the mirror--"
+
+_"Nego suppositum!"_ interrupted Juanito, as he felt Placido pulling
+at his coat.
+
+"How? _Per te_--"
+
+"_Nego!_"
+
+"_Ergo,_ you believe that what is behind affects what is in front?"
+
+_"Nego!"_ the student cried with still more ardor, feeling another
+jerk at his coat.
+
+Juanito, or rather Placido, who was prompting him, was unconsciously
+adopting Chinese tactics: not to admit the most inoffensive foreigner
+in order not to be invaded.
+
+"Then where are we?" asked the professor, somewhat disconcerted,
+and looking uneasily at the refractory student. "Does the substance
+behind affect, or does it not affect, the surface?"
+
+To this precise and categorical question, a kind of ultimatum, Juanito
+did not know what to reply and his coat offered no suggestions. In vain
+he made signs to Placido, but Placido himself was in doubt. Juanito
+then took advantage of a moment in which the professor was staring
+at a student who was cautiously and secretly taking off the shoes
+that hurt his feet, to step heavily on Placido's toes and whisper,
+"Tell me, hurry up, tell me!"
+
+"I distinguish--Get out! What an ass you are!" yelled Placido
+unreservedly, as he stared with angry eyes and rubbed his hand over
+his patent-leather shoe.
+
+The professor heard the cry, stared at the pair, and guessed what
+had happened.
+
+"Listen, you meddler," he addressed Placido, "I wasn't questioning
+you, but since you think you can save others, let's see if you can
+save yourself, _salva te ipsum,_ and decide this question."
+
+Juanito sat down in content, and as a mark of gratitude stuck out
+his tongue at his prompter, who had arisen blushing with shame and
+muttering incoherent excuses.
+
+For a moment Padre Millon regarded him as one gloating over a favorite
+dish. What a good thing it would be to humiliate and hold up to
+ridicule that dudish boy, always smartly dressed, with head erect
+and serene look! It would be a deed of charity, so the charitable
+professor applied himself to it with all his heart, slowly repeating
+the question.
+
+"The book says that the metallic mirrors are made of brass and an
+alloy of different metals--is that true or is it not true?"
+
+"So the book says, Padre."
+
+"_Liber dixit, ergo ita est_. Don't pretend that you know more than the
+book does. It then adds that the glass mirrors are made of a sheet of
+glass whose two surfaces are well polished, one of them having applied
+to it an amalgam of tin, _nota bene_, an amalgam of tin! Is that true?"
+
+"If the book says so, Padre."
+
+"Is tin a metal?"
+
+"It seems so, Padre. The book says so."
+
+"It is, it is, and the word amalgam means that it is compounded with
+mercury, which is also a metal. _Ergo_, a glass mirror is a metallic
+mirror; _ergo_, the terms of the distinction are confused; _ergo_,
+the classification is imperfect--how do you explain that, meddler?"
+
+He emphasized the _ergos_ and the familiar "you's" with indescribable
+relish, at the same time winking, as though to say, "You're done for."
+
+"It means that, it means that--" stammered Placido.
+
+"It means that you haven't learned the lesson, you petty meddler,
+you don't understand it yourself, and yet you prompt your neighbor!"
+
+The class took no offense, but on the contrary many thought the
+epithet funny and laughed. Placido bit his lips.
+
+"What's your name?" the professor asked him.
+
+"Placido," was the curt reply.
+
+"Aha! Placido Penitente, although you look more like Placido the
+Prompter--or the Prompted. But, _Penitent_, I'm going to impose some
+_penance_ on you for your promptings."
+
+Pleased with his play on words, he ordered the youth to recite the
+lesson, and the latter, in the state of mind to which he was reduced,
+made more than three mistakes. Shaking his head up and down, the
+professor slowly opened the register and slowly scanned it while he
+called off the names in a low voice.
+
+"Palencia--Palomo--Panganiban--Pedraza--Pelado--Pelaez--Penitents,
+aha! Placido Penitente, fifteen unexcused absences--"
+
+Placido started up. "Fifteen absences, Padre?"
+
+"Fifteen unexcused absences," continued the professor, "so that you
+only lack one to be dropped from the roll."
+
+"Fifteen absences, fifteen absences," repeated Placido in
+amazement. "I've never been absent more than four times, and with
+today, perhaps five."
+
+"Jesso, jesso, monseer," [31] replied the professor, examining the
+youth over his gold eye-glasses. "You confess that you have missed
+five times, and God knows if you may have missed oftener. _Atqui_,
+as I rarely call the roll, every time I catch any one I put five
+marks against him; _ergo_, how many are five times five? Have you
+forgotten the multiplication table? Five times five?"
+
+"Twenty-five."
+
+"Correct, correct! Thus you've still got away with ten, because I have
+caught you only three times. Huh, if I had caught you every time--Now,
+how many are three times five?"
+
+"Fifteen."
+
+"Fifteen, right you are!" concluded the professor, closing the
+register. "If you miss once more--out of doors with you, get out! Ah,
+now a mark for the failure in the daily lesson."
+
+He again opened the register, sought out the name, and entered the
+mark. "Come, only one mark," he said, "since you hadn't any before."
+
+"But, Padre," exclaimed Placido, restraining himself, "if your
+Reverence puts a mark against me for failing in the lesson, your
+Reverence owes it to me to erase the one for absence that you have
+put against me for today."
+
+His Reverence made no answer. First he slowly entered the mark,
+then contemplated it with his head on one side,--the mark must be
+artistic,--closed the register, and asked with great sarcasm, "_Ab�_,
+and why so, sir?"
+
+"Because I can't conceive, Padre, how one can be absent from the
+class and at the same time recite the lesson in it. Your Reverence
+is saying that to be is not to be."
+
+"_Nak�_, a metaphysician, but a rather premature one! So you can't
+conceive of it, eh? _Sed patet experientia_ and _contra experientiam
+negantem, fusilibus est arguendum_, do you understand? And can't
+you conceive, with your philosophical head, that one can be absent
+from the class and not know the lesson at the same time? Is it a fact
+that absence necessarily implies knowledge? What do you say to that,
+philosophaster?"
+
+This last epithet was the drop of water that made the full cup
+overflow. Placido enjoyed among his friends the reputation of being
+a philosopher, so he lost his patience, threw down his book, arose,
+and faced the professor.
+
+"Enough, Padre, enough! Your Reverence can put all the marks against me
+that you wish, but you haven't the right to insult me. Your Reverence
+may stay with the class, I can't stand any more." Without further
+farewell, he stalked away.
+
+The class was astounded; such an assumption of dignity had scarcely
+ever been seen, and who would have thought it of Placido Penitente? The
+surprised professor bit his lips and shook his head threateningly as he
+watched him depart. Then in a trembling voice he began his preachment
+on the same old theme, delivered however with more energy and more
+eloquence. It dealt with the growing arrogance, the innate ingratitude,
+the presumption, the lack of respect for superiors, the pride that
+the spirit of darkness infused in the young, the lack of manners,
+the absence of courtesy, and so on. From this he passed to coarse
+jests and sarcasm over the presumption which some good-for-nothing
+"prompters" had of teaching their teachers by establishing an academy
+for instruction in Castilian.
+
+"Aha, aha!" he moralized, "those who the day before yesterday scarcely
+knew how to say, 'Yes, Padre,' 'No, Padre,' now want to know more
+than those who have grown gray teaching them. He who wishes to learn,
+will learn, academies or no academies! Undoubtedly that fellow who
+has just gone out is one of those in the project. Castilian is in good
+hands with such guardians! When are you going to get the time to attend
+the academy if you have scarcely enough to fulfill your duties in the
+regular classes? We wish that you may all know Spanish and that you
+pronounce it well, so that you won't split our ear-drums with your
+twist of expression and your 'p's'; [32] but first business and then
+pleasure: finish your studies first, and afterwards learn Castilian,
+and all become clerks, if you so wish."
+
+So he went on with his harangue until the bell rang and the class was
+over. The two hundred and thirty-four students, after reciting their
+prayers, went out as ignorant as when they went in, but breathing more
+freely, as if a great weight had been lifted from them. Each youth had
+lost another hour of his life and with it a portion of his dignity and
+self-respect, and in exchange there was an increase of discontent,
+of aversion to study, of resentment in their hearts. After all this
+ask for knowledge, dignity, gratitude!
+
+_De nobis, post haec, tristis sententia fertur_!
+
+Just as the two hundred and thirty-four spent their class hours,
+so the thousands of students who preceded them have spent theirs,
+and, if matters do not mend, so will those yet to come spend theirs,
+and be brutalized, while wounded dignity and youthful enthusiasm
+will be converted into hatred and sloth, like the waves that become
+polluted along one part of the shore and roll on one after another,
+each in succession depositing a larger sediment of filth. But yet He
+who from eternity watches the consequences of a deed develop like a
+thread through the loom of the centuries, He who weighs the value
+of a second and has ordained for His creatures as an elemental
+law progress and development, He, if He is just, will demand a
+strict accounting from those who must render it, of the millions of
+intelligences darkened and blinded, of human dignity trampled upon
+in millions of His creatures, and of the incalculable time lost and
+effort wasted! And if the teachings of the Gospel are based on truth,
+so also will these have to answer--the millions and millions who do
+not know how to preserve the light of their intelligences and their
+dignity of mind, as the master demanded an accounting from the cowardly
+servant for the talent that he let be taken from him.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+IN THE HOUSE OF THE STUDENTS
+
+
+The house where Makaraig lived was worth visiting. Large and spacious,
+with two entresols provided with elegant gratings, it seemed to be
+a school during the first hours of the morning and pandemonium from
+ten o'clock on. During the boarders' recreation hours, from the lower
+hallway of the spacious entrance up to the main floor, there was a
+bubbling of laughter, shouts, and movement. Boys in scanty clothing
+played _sipa_ or practised gymnastic exercises on improvised trapezes,
+while on the staircase a fight was in progress between eight or nine
+armed with canes, sticks, and ropes, but neither attackers nor attacked
+did any great damage, their blows generally falling sidewise upon the
+shoulders of the Chinese pedler who was there selling his outlandish
+mixtures and indigestible pastries. Crowds of boys surrounded him,
+pulled at his already disordered queue, snatched pies from him,
+haggled over the prices, and committed a thousand deviltries. The
+Chinese yelled, swore, forswore, in all the languages he could jabber,
+not omitting his own; he whimpered, laughed, pleaded, put on a smiling
+face when an ugly one would not serve, or the reverse.
+
+He cursed them as devils, savages, _no kilistanos_ [33] but that
+mattered nothing. A whack would bring his face around smiling, and
+if the blow fell only upon his shoulders he would calmly continue
+his business transactions, contenting himself with crying out to
+them that he was not in the game, but if it struck the flat basket
+on which were placed his wares, then he would swear never to come
+again, as he poured out upon them all the imprecations and anathemas
+imaginable. Then the boys would redouble their efforts to make him
+rage the more, and when at last his vocabulary was exhausted and they
+were satiated with his fearful mixtures, they paid him religiously,
+and sent him away happy, winking, chuckling to himself, and receiving
+as caresses the light blows from their canes that the students gave
+him as tokens of farewell.
+
+Concerts on the piano and violin, the guitar, and the accordion,
+alternated with the continual clashing of blades from the fencing
+lessons. Around a long, wide table the students of the Ateneo prepared
+their compositions or solved their problems by the side of others
+writing to their sweethearts on pink perforated note-paper covered
+with drawings. Here one was composing a melodrama at the side of
+another practising on the flute, from which he drew wheezy notes. Over
+there, the older boys, students in professional courses, who affected
+silk socks and embroidered slippers, amused themselves in teasing
+the smaller boys by pulling their ears, already red from repeated
+fillips, while two or three held down a little fellow who yelled and
+cried, defending himself with his feet against being reduced to the
+condition in which he was born, kicking and howling. In one room,
+around a small table, four were playing _revesino_ with laughter and
+jokes, to the great annoyance of another who pretended to be studying
+his lesson but who was in reality waiting his turn to play.
+
+Still another came in with exaggerated wonder, scandalized as he
+approached the table. "How wicked you are! So early in the morning
+and already gambling! Let's see, let's see! You fool, take it with
+the three of spades!" Closing his book, he too joined in the game.
+
+Cries and blows were heard. Two boys were fighting in the adjoining
+room--a lame student who was very sensitive about his infirmity and
+an unhappy newcomer from the provinces who was just commencing his
+studies. He was working over a treatise on philosophy and reading
+innocently in a loud voice, with a wrong accent, the Cartesian
+principle: "_Cogito, ergo sum!_"
+
+The little lame boy (_el cojito_) took this as an insult and the others
+intervened to restore peace, but in reality only to sow discord and
+come to blows themselves.
+
+In the dining-room a young man with a can of sardines, a bottle of
+wine, and the provisions that he had just brought from his town, was
+making heroic efforts to the end that his friends might participate
+in his lunch, while they were offering in their turn heroic resistance
+to his invitation. Others were bathing on the azotea, playing firemen
+with the water from the well, and joining in combats with pails of
+water, to the great delight of the spectators.
+
+But the noise and shouts gradually died away with the coming of leading
+students, summoned by Makaraig to report to them the progress of the
+academy of Castilian. Isagani was cordially greeted, as was also the
+Peninsular, Sandoval, who had come to Manila as a government employee
+and was finishing his studies, and who had completely identified
+himself with the cause of the Filipino students. The barriers that
+politics had established between the races had disappeared in the
+schoolroom as though dissolved by the zeal of science and youth.
+
+From lack of lyceums and scientific, literary, or political centers,
+Sandoval took advantage of all the meetings to cultivate his great
+oratorical gifts, delivering speeches and arguing on any subject,
+to draw forth applause from his friends and listeners. At that moment
+the subject of conversation was the instruction in Castilian, but as
+Makaraig had not yet arrived conjecture was still the order of the day.
+
+"What can have happened?"
+
+"What has the General decided?"
+
+"Has he refused the permit?"
+
+"Has Padre Irene or Padre Sibyla won?"
+
+Such were the questions they asked one another, questions that could
+be answered only by Makaraig.
+
+Among the young men gathered together there were optimists like Isagani
+and Sandoval, who saw the thing already accomplished and talked of
+congratulations and praise from the government for the patriotism of
+the students--outbursts of optimism that led Juanito Pelaez to claim
+for himself a large part of the glory of founding the society.
+
+All this was answered by the pessimist Pecson, a chubby youth with
+a wide, clownish grin, who spoke of outside influences, whether the
+Bishop A., the Padre B., or the Provincial C., had been consulted or
+not, whether or not they had advised that the whole association should
+be put in jail--a suggestion that made Juanito Pelaez so uneasy that
+he stammered out, "_Carambas_, don't you drag me into--"
+
+Sandoval, as a Peninsular and a liberal, became furious at
+this. "But pshaw!" he exclaimed, "that is holding a bad opinion of his
+Excellency! I know that he's quite a friar-lover, but in such a matter
+as this he won't let the friars interfere. Will you tell me, Pecson, on
+what you base your belief that the General has no judgment of his own?"
+
+"I didn't say that, Sandoval," replied Pecson, grinning until he
+exposed his wisdom-tooth. "For me the General has _his own_ judgment,
+that is, the judgment of all those within his reach. That's plain!"
+
+"You're dodging--cite me a fact, cite me a fact!" cried
+Sandoval. "Let's get away from hollow arguments, from empty phrases,
+and get on the solid ground of facts,"--this with an elegant
+gesture. "Facts, gentlemen, facts! The rest is prejudice--I won't
+call it filibusterism."
+
+Pecson smiled like one of the blessed as he retorted, "There comes the
+filibusterism. But can't we enter into a discussion without resorting
+to accusations?"
+
+Sandoval protested in a little extemporaneous speech, again demanding
+facts.
+
+"Well, not long ago there was a dispute between some private persons
+and certain friars, and the acting Governor rendered a decision
+that it should be settled by the Provincial of the Order concerned,"
+replied Pecson, again breaking out into a laugh, as though he were
+dealing with an insignificant matter, he cited names and dates,
+and promised documents that would prove how justice was dispensed.
+
+"But, on what ground, tell me this, on what ground can they refuse
+permission for what plainly appears to be extremely useful and
+necessary?" asked Sandoval.
+
+Pecson shrugged his shoulders. "It's that it endangers the integrity
+of the fatherland," he replied in the tone of a notary reading an
+allegation.
+
+"That's pretty good! What has the integrity of the fatherland to do
+with the rules of syntax?"
+
+"The Holy Mother Church has learned doctors--what do I know? Perhaps
+it is feared that we may come to understand the laws so that we can
+obey them. What will become of the Philippines on the day when we
+understand one another?"
+
+Sandoval did not relish the dialectic and jesting turn of the
+conversation; along that path could rise no speech worth the
+while. "Don't make a joke of things!" he exclaimed. "This is a
+serious matter."
+
+"The Lord deliver me from joking when there are friars concerned!"
+
+"But, on what do you base--"
+
+"On the fact that, the hours for the classes having to come at
+night," continued Pecson in the same tone, as if he were quoting
+known and recognized formulas, "there may be invoked as an obstacle
+the immorality of the thing, as was done in the case of the school
+at Malolos."
+
+"Another! But don't the classes of the Academy of Drawing, and the
+novenaries and the processions, cover themselves with the mantle
+of night?"
+
+"The scheme affects the dignity of the University," went on the chubby
+youth, taking no notice of the question.
+
+"Affects nothing! The University has to accommodate itself to the needs
+of the students. And granting that, what is a university then? Is it
+an institution to discourage study? Have a few men banded themselves
+together in the name of learning and instruction in order to prevent
+others from becoming enlightened?"
+
+"The fact is that movements initiated from below are regarded as
+discontent--"
+
+"What about projects that come from above?" interpolated one of the
+students. "There's the School of Arts and Trades!"
+
+"Slowly, slowly, gentlemen," protested Sandoval. "I'm not a
+friar-lover, my liberal views being well known, but render unto Caesar
+that which is Caesar's. Of that School of Arts and Trades, of which I
+have been the most enthusiastic supporter and the realization of which
+I shall greet as the first streak of dawn for these fortunate islands,
+of that School of Arts and Trades the friars have taken charge--"
+
+"Or the cat of the canary, which amounts to the same thing," added
+Pecson, in his turn interrupting the speech.
+
+"Get out!" cried Sandoval, enraged at the interruption, which had
+caused him to lose the thread of his long, well-rounded sentence. "As
+long as we hear nothing bad, let's not be pessimists, let's not be
+unjust, doubting the liberty and independence of the government."
+
+Here he entered upon a defense in beautiful phraseology of the
+government and its good intentions, a subject that Pecson dared not
+break in upon.
+
+"The Spanish government," he said among other things, "has given
+you everything, it has denied you nothing! We had absolutism in
+Spain and you had absolutism here; the friars covered our soil with
+conventos, and conventos occupy a third part of Manila; in Spain
+the garrote prevails and here the garrote is the extreme punishment;
+we are Catholics and we have made you Catholics; we were scholastics
+and scholasticism sheds its light in your college halls; in short,
+gentlemen, we weep when you weep, we suffer when you suffer, we have
+the same altars, the same courts, the same punishments, and it is
+only just that we should give you our rights and our joys."
+
+As no one interrupted him, he became more and more enthusiastic,
+until he came to speak of the future of the Philippines.
+
+"As I have said, gentlemen, the dawn is not far distant. Spain is now
+breaking the eastern sky for her beloved Philippines, and the times
+are changing, as I positively know, faster than we imagine. This
+government, which, according to you, is vacillating and weak, should
+be strengthened by our confidence, that we may make it see that it is
+the custodian of our hopes. Let us remind it by our conduct (should
+it ever forget itself, which I do not believe can happen) that we
+have faith in its good intentions and that it should be guided by no
+other standard than justice and the welfare of all the governed. No,
+gentlemen," he went on in a tone more and more declamatory, "we must
+not admit at all in this matter the possibility of a consultation with
+other more or less hostile entities, as such a supposition would imply
+our resignation to the fact. Your conduct up to the present has been
+frank, loyal, without vacillation, above suspicion; you have addressed
+it simply and directly; the reasons you have presented could not be
+more sound; your aim is to lighten the labor of the teachers in the
+first years and to facilitate study among the hundreds of students
+who fill the college halls and for whom one solitary professor cannot
+suffice. If up to the present the petition has not been granted, it
+has been for the reason, as I feel sure, that there has been a great
+deal of material accumulated, but I predict that the campaign is
+won, that the summons of Makaraig is to announce to us the victory,
+and tomorrow we shall see our efforts crowned with the applause and
+appreciation of the country, and who knows, gentlemen, but that the
+government may confer upon you some handsome decoration of merit,
+benefactors as you are of the fatherland!"
+
+Enthusiastic applause resounded. All immediately believed in the
+triumph, and many in the decoration.
+
+"Let it be remembered, gentlemen," observed Juanito, "that I was one
+of the first to propose it."
+
+The pessimist Pecson was not so enthusiastic. "Just so we don't get
+that decoration on our ankles," he remarked, but fortunately for
+Pelaez this comment was not heard in the midst of the applause.
+
+When they had quieted down a little, Pecson replied, "Good, good,
+very good, but one supposition: if in spite of all that, the General
+consults and consults and consults, and afterwards refuses the permit?"
+
+This question fell like a dash of cold water. All turned to Sandoval,
+who was taken aback. "Then--" he stammered.
+
+"Then?"
+
+"Then," he exclaimed in a burst of enthusiasm, still excited by the
+applause, "seeing that in writing and in printing it boasts of desiring
+your enlightenment, and yet hinders and denies it when called upon to
+make it a reality--then, gentlemen, your efforts will not have been
+in vain, you will have accomplished what no one else has been able
+to do. Make them drop the mask and fling down the gauntlet to you!"
+
+"Bravo, bravo!" cried several enthusiastically.
+
+"Good for Sandoval! Hurrah for the gauntlet!" added others.
+
+"Let them fling down the gauntlet to us!" repeated Pecson
+disdainfully. "But afterwards?"
+
+Sandoval seemed to be cut short in his triumph, but with the vivacity
+peculiar to his race and his oratorical temperament he had an
+immediate reply.
+
+"Afterwards?" he asked. "Afterwards, if none of the Filipinos dare
+to accept the challenge, then I, Sandoval, in the name of Spain, will
+take up the gauntlet, because such a policy would give the lie to the
+good intentions that she has always cherished toward her provinces,
+and because he who is thus faithless to the trust reposed in him and
+abuses his unlimited authority deserves neither the protection of
+the fatherland nor the support of any Spanish citizen!"
+
+The enthusiasm of his hearers broke all bounds. Isagani embraced him,
+the others following his example. They talked of the fatherland,
+of union, of fraternity, of fidelity. The Filipinos declared that
+if there were only Sandovals in Spain all would be Sandovals in the
+Philippines. His eyes glistened, and it might well be believed that if
+at that moment any kind of gauntlet had been flung at him he would have
+leaped upon any kind of horse to ride to death for the Philippines.
+
+The "cold water" alone replied: "Good, that's very good, Sandoval. I
+could also say the same if I were a Peninsular, but not being one,
+if I should say one half of what you have, you yourself would take
+me for a filibuster."
+
+Sandoval began a speech in protest, but was interrupted.
+
+"Rejoice, friends, rejoice! Victory!" cried a youth who entered at
+that moment and began to embrace everybody.
+
+"Rejoice, friends! Long live the Castilian tongue!"
+
+An outburst of applause greeted this announcement. They fell to
+embracing one another and their eyes filled with tears. Pecson alone
+preserved his skeptical smile.
+
+The bearer of such good news was Makaraig, the young man at the head
+of the movement. This student occupied in that house, by himself, two
+rooms, luxuriously furnished, and had his servant and a cochero to look
+after his carriage and horses. He was of robust carriage, of refined
+manners, fastidiously dressed, and very rich. Although studying law
+only that he might have an academic degree, he enjoyed a reputation for
+diligence, and as a logician in the scholastic way had no cause to envy
+the most frenzied quibblers of the University faculty. Nevertheless
+he was not very far behind in regard to modern ideas and progress,
+for his fortune enabled him to have all the books and magazines that a
+watchful censor was unable to keep out. With these qualifications and
+his reputation for courage, his fortunate associations in his earlier
+years, and his refined and delicate courtesy, it was not strange that
+he should exercise such great influence over his associates and that
+he should have been chosen to carry out such a difficult undertaking
+as that of the instruction in Castilian.
+
+After the first outburst of enthusiasm, which in youth always takes
+hold in such exaggerated forms, since youth finds everything beautiful,
+they wanted to be informed how the affair had been managed.
+
+"I saw Padre Irene this morning," said Makaraig with a certain air
+of mystery.
+
+"Hurrah for Padre Irene!" cried an enthusiastic student.
+
+"Padre Irene," continued Makaraig, "has told me about everything that
+took place at Los Ba�os. It seems that they disputed for at least
+a week, he supporting and defending our case against all of them,
+against Padre Sibyla, Padre Fernandez, Padre Salvi, the General,
+the jeweler Simoun--"
+
+"The jeweler Simoun!" interrupted one of his listeners. "What has that
+Jew to do with the affairs of our country? We enrich him by buying--"
+
+"Keep quiet!" admonished another impatiently, anxious to learn how
+Padre Irene had been able to overcome such formidable opponents.
+
+"There were even high officials who were opposed to our project,
+the Head Secretary, the Civil Governor, Quiroga the Chinaman--"
+
+"Quiroga the Chinaman! The pimp of the--"
+
+"Shut up!"
+
+"At last," resumed Makaraig, "they were going to pigeonhole the
+petition and let it sleep for months and months, when Padre Irene
+remembered the Superior Commission of Primary Instruction and proposed,
+since the matter concerned the teaching of the Castilian tongue,
+that the petition be referred to that body for a report upon it."
+
+"But that Commission hasn't been in operation for a long time,"
+observed Pecson.
+
+"That's exactly what they replied to Padre Irene, and he answered
+that this was a good opportunity to revive it, and availing himself
+of the presence of Don Custodio, one of its members, he proposed on
+the spot that a committee should be appointed. Don Custodio's activity
+being known and recognized, he was named as arbiter and the petition
+is now in his hands. He promised that he would settle it this month."
+
+"Hurrah for Don Custodio!"
+
+"But suppose Don Custodio should report unfavorably upon it?" inquired
+the pessimist Pecson.
+
+Upon this they had not reckoned, being intoxicated with the thought
+that the matter would not be pigeonholed, so they all turned to
+Makaraig to learn how it could be arranged.
+
+"The same objection I presented to Padre Irene, but with his sly smile
+he said to me: 'We've won a great deal, we have succeeded in getting
+the matter on the road to a decision, the opposition sees itself
+forced to join battle.' If we can bring some influence to bear upon
+Don Custodio so that he, in accordance with his liberal tendencies,
+may report favorably, all is won, for the General showed himself to
+be absolutely neutral."
+
+Makaraig paused, and an impatient listener asked, "How can we
+influence him?"
+
+"Padre Irene pointed out to me two ways--"
+
+"Quiroga," some one suggested.
+
+"Pshaw, great use Quiroga--"
+
+"A fine present."
+
+"No, that won't do, for he prides himself upon being incorruptible."
+
+"Ah, yes, I know!" exclaimed Pecson with a laugh. "Pepay the dancing
+girl."
+
+"Ah, yes, Pepay the dancing girl," echoed several.
+
+This Pepay was a showy girl, supposed to be a great friend of
+Don Custodio. To her resorted the contractors, the employees, the
+intriguers, when they wanted to get something from the celebrated
+councilor. Juanito Pelaez, who was also a great friend of the dancing
+girl, offered to look after the matter, but Isagani shook his head,
+saying that it was sufficient that they had made use of Padre Irene
+and that it would be going too far to avail themselves of Pepay in
+such an affair.
+
+"Show us the other way."
+
+"The other way is to apply to his attorney and adviser, Se�or Pasta,
+the oracle before whom Don Custodio bows."
+
+"I prefer that," said Isagani. "Se�or Pasta is a Filipino, and was
+a schoolmate of my uncle's. But how can we interest him?"
+
+"There's the _quid_," replied Makaraig, looking earnestly at
+Isagani. "Se�or Pasta has a dancing girl--I mean, a seamstress."
+
+Isagani again shook his head.
+
+"Don't be such a puritan," Juanito Pelaez said to him. "The end
+justifies the means! I know the seamstress, Matea, for she has a shop
+where a lot of girls work."
+
+"No, gentlemen," declared Isagani, "let's first employ decent
+methods. I'll go to Se�or Pasta and, if I don't accomplish anything,
+then you can do what you wish with the dancing girls and seamstresses."
+
+They had to accept this proposition, agreeing that Isagani should
+talk to Se�or Pasta that very day, and in the afternoon report to
+his associates at the University the result of the interview.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+SE�OR PASTA
+
+
+Isagani presented himself in the house of the lawyer, one of the
+most talented minds in Manila, whom the friars consulted in their
+great difficulties. The youth had to wait some time on account of the
+numerous clients, but at last his turn came and he entered the office,
+or _bufete_, as it is generally called in the Philippines. The lawyer
+received him with a slight cough, looking down furtively at his feet,
+but he did not rise or offer a seat, as he went on writing. This gave
+Isagani an opportunity for observation and careful study of the lawyer,
+who had aged greatly. His hair was gray and his baldness extended
+over nearly the whole crown of his head. His countenance was sour
+and austere.
+
+There was complete silence in the study, except for the whispers of the
+clerks and understudies who were at work in an adjoining room. Their
+pens scratched as though quarreling with the paper.
+
+At length the lawyer finished what he was writing, laid down his pen,
+raised his head, and, recognizing the youth, let his face light up
+with a smile as he extended his hand affectionately.
+
+"Welcome, young man! But sit down, and excuse me, for I didn't know
+that it was you. How is your uncle?"
+
+Isagani took courage, believing that his case would get on well. He
+related briefly what had been done, the while studying the effect of
+his words. Se�or Pasta listened impassively at first and, although
+he was informed of the efforts of the students, pretended ignorance,
+as if to show that he had nothing to do with such childish matters,
+but when he began to suspect what was wanted of him and heard mention
+of the Vice-Rector, friars, the Captain-General, a project, and so on,
+his face slowly darkened and he finally exclaimed, "This is the land
+of projects! But go on, go on!"
+
+Isagani was not yet discouraged. He spoke of the manner in which a
+decision was to be reached and concluded with an expression of the
+confidence which the young men entertained that he, Se�or Pasta,
+would _intercede_ in their behalf in case Don Custodio should consult
+him, as was to be expected. He did not dare to say would _advise_,
+deterred by the wry face the lawyer put on.
+
+But Se�or Pasta had already formed his resolution, and it was not
+to mix at all in the affair, either as consulter or consulted. He
+was familiar with what had occurred at Los Ba�os, he knew that there
+existed two factions, and that Padre Irene was not the only champion
+on the side of the students, nor had he been the one who proposed
+submitting the petition to the Commission of Primary Instruction,
+but quite the contrary. Padre Irene, Padre Fernandez, the Countess,
+a merchant who expected to sell the materials for the new academy,
+and the high official who had been citing royal decree after royal
+decree, were about to triumph, when Padre Sibyla, wishing to gain
+time, had thought of the Commission. All these facts the great lawyer
+had present in his mind, so that when Isagani had finished speaking,
+he determined to confuse him with evasions, tangle the matter up,
+and lead the conversation to other subjects.
+
+"Yes," he said, pursing his lips and scratching his head, "there is
+no one who surpasses me in love for the country and in aspirations
+toward progress, but--I can't compromise myself, I don't know whether
+you clearly understand my position, a position that is very delicate,
+I have so many interests, I have to labor within the limits of strict
+prudence, it's a risk--"
+
+The lawyer sought to bewilder the youth with an exuberance of words,
+so he went on speaking of laws and decrees, and talked so much that
+instead of confusing the youth, he came very near to entangling
+himself in a labyrinth of citations.
+
+"In no way do we wish to compromise you," replied Isagani with great
+calmness. "God deliver us from injuring in the least the persons
+whose lives are so useful to the rest of the Filipinos! But, as
+little versed as I may be in the laws, royal decrees, writs, and
+resolutions that obtain in this country, I can't believe that there
+can be any harm in furthering the high purposes of the government,
+in trying to secure a proper interpretation of these purposes. We
+are seeking the same end and differ only about the means."
+
+The lawyer smiled, for the youth had allowed himself to wander away
+from the subject, and there where the former was going to entangle
+him he had already entangled himself.
+
+"That's exactly the _quid_, as is vulgarly said. It's clear that it
+is laudable to aid the government, when one aids it submissively,
+following out its desires and the true spirit of the laws in agreement
+with the just beliefs of the governing powers, and when not in
+contradiction to the fundamental and general way of thinking of the
+persons to whom is intrusted the common welfare of the individuals that
+form a social organism. Therefore, it is criminal, it is punishable,
+because it is offensive to the high principle of authority, to attempt
+any action contrary to its initiative, even supposing it to be better
+than the governmental proposition, because such action would injure
+its prestige, which is the elementary basis upon which all colonial
+edifices rest."
+
+Confident that this broadside had at least stunned Isagani, the old
+lawyer fell back in his armchair, outwardly very serious, but laughing
+to himself.
+
+Isagani, however, ventured to reply. "I should think that governments,
+the more they are threatened, would be all the more careful to seek
+bases that are impregnable. The basis of prestige for colonial
+governments is the weakest of all, since it does not depend upon
+themselves but upon the consent of the governed, while the latter
+are willing to recognize it. The basis of justice or reason would
+seem to be the most durable."
+
+The lawyer raised his head. How was this--did that youth dare to reply
+and argue with him, _him_, Se�or Pasta? Was he not yet bewildered
+with his big words?
+
+"Young man, you must put those considerations aside, for they are
+dangerous," he declared with a wave of his hand. "What I advise is
+that you let the government attend to its own business."
+
+"Governments are established for the welfare of the peoples, and
+in order to accomplish this purpose properly they have to follow
+the suggestions of the citizens, who are the ones best qualified to
+understand their own needs."
+
+"Those who constitute the government are also citizens, and among
+the most enlightened."
+
+"But, being men, they are fallible, and ought not to disregard the
+opinions of others."
+
+"They must be trusted, they have to attend to everything."
+
+"There is a Spanish proverb which says, 'No tears, no milk,' in other
+words, 'To him who does not ask, nothing is given.' "
+
+"Quite the reverse," replied the lawyer with a sarcastic smile;
+"with the government exactly the reverse occurs--"
+
+But he suddenly checked himself, as if he had said too much and
+wished to correct his imprudence. "The government has given us things
+that we have not asked for, and that we could not ask for, because
+to ask--to ask, presupposes that it is in some way incompetent and
+consequently is not performing its functions. To suggest to it a course
+of action, to try to guide it, when not really antagonizing it, is to
+presuppose that it is capable of erring, and as I have already said
+to you such suppositions are menaces to the existence of colonial
+governments. The common crowd overlooks this and the young men who
+set to work thoughtlessly do not know, do not comprehend, do not try
+to comprehend the counter-effect of asking, the menace to order there
+is in that idea--"
+
+"Pardon me," interrupted Isagani, offended by the arguments the jurist
+was using with him, "but when by legal methods people ask a government
+for something, it is because they think it good and disposed to grant a
+blessing, and such action, instead of irritating it, should flatter it
+--to the mother one appeals, never to the stepmother. The government,
+in my humble opinion, is not an omniscient being that can see and
+anticipate everything, and even if it could, it ought not to feel
+offended, for here you have the church itself doing nothing but asking
+and begging of God, who sees and knows everything, and you yourself
+ask and demand many things in the courts of this same government,
+yet neither God nor the courts have yet taken offense. Every one
+realizes that the government, being the human institution that it is,
+needs the support of all the people, it needs to be made to see and
+feel the reality of things. You yourself are not convinced of the
+truth of your objection, you yourself know that it is a tyrannical
+and despotic government which, in order to make a display of force
+and independence, denies everything through fear or distrust, and
+that the tyrannized and enslaved peoples are the only ones whose duty
+it is never to ask for anything. A people that hates its government
+ought to ask for nothing but that it abdicate its power."
+
+The old lawyer grimaced and shook his head from side to side, in sign
+of discontent, while he rubbed his hand over his bald pate and said
+in a tone of condescending pity: "Ahem! those are bad doctrines, bad
+theories, ahem! How plain it is that you are young and inexperienced
+in life. Look what is happening with the inexperienced young men
+who in Madrid are asking for so many reforms. They are accused of
+filibusterism, many of them don't dare return here, and yet, what
+are they asking for? Things holy, ancient, and recognized as quite
+harmless. But there are matters that can't be explained, they're so
+delicate. Let's see--I confess to you that there are other reasons
+besides those expressed that might lead a sensible government to
+deny systematically the wishes of the people--no--but it may happen
+that we find ourselves under rulers so fatuous and ridiculous--but
+there are always other reasons, even though what is asked be quite
+just--different governments encounter different conditions--"
+
+The old man hesitated, stared fixedly at Isagani, and then with a
+sudden resolution made a sign with his hand as though he would dispel
+some idea.
+
+"I can guess what you mean," said Isagani, smiling sadly. "You mean
+that a colonial government, for the very reason that it is imperfectly
+constituted and that it is based on premises--"
+
+"No, no, not that, no!" quickly interrupted the old lawyer, as he
+sought for something among his papers. "No, I meant--but where are
+my spectacles?"
+
+"There they are," replied Isagani.
+
+The old man put them on and pretended to look over some papers, but
+seeing that the youth was waiting, he mumbled, "I wanted to tell you
+something, I wanted to say--but it has slipped from my mind. You
+interrupted me in your eagerness--but it was an insignificant
+matter. If you only knew what a whirl my head is in, I have so much
+to do!"
+
+Isagani understood that he was being dismissed. "So," he said, rising,
+"we--"
+
+"Ah, you will do well to leave the matter in the hands of the
+government, which will settle it as it sees fit. You say that the
+Vice-Rector is opposed to the teaching of Castilian. Perhaps he may
+be, not as to the fact but as to the form. It is said that the Rector
+who is on his way will bring a project for reform in education. Wait
+a while, give time a chance, apply yourself to your studies as
+the examinations are near, and--_carambas!_--you who already speak
+Castilian and express yourself easily, what are you bothering yourself
+about? What interest have you in seeing it specially taught? Surely
+Padre Florentino thinks as I do! Give him my regards."
+
+"My uncle," replied Isagani, "has always admonished me to think of
+others as much as of myself. I didn't come for myself, I came in the
+name of those who are in worse condition."
+
+"What the devil! Let them do as you have done, let them singe their
+eyebrows studying and come to be bald like myself, stuffing whole
+paragraphs into their memories! I believe that if you talk Spanish it
+is because you have studied it--you're not of Manila or of Spanish
+parents! Then let them learn it as you have, and do as I have done:
+I've been a servant to all the friars, I've prepared their chocolate,
+and while with my right hand I stirred it, with the left I held a
+grammar, I learned, and, thank God! have never needed other teachers
+or academies or permits from the government. Believe me, he who wishes
+to learn, learns and becomes wise!"
+
+"But how many among those who wish to learn come to be what you
+are? One in ten thousand, and more!"
+
+"Pish! Why any more?" retorted the old man, shrugging his
+shoulders. "There are too many lawyers now, many of them become mere
+clerks. Doctors? They insult and abuse one another, and even kill
+each other in competition for a patient. Laborers, sir, laborers,
+are what we need, for agriculture!"
+
+Isagani realized that he was losing time, but still could not forbear
+replying: "Undoubtedly, there are many doctors and lawyers, but I won't
+say there are too many, since we have towns that lack them entirely,
+and if they do abound in quantity, perhaps they are deficient in
+quality. Since the young men can't be prevented from studying, and
+no other professions are open to us, why let them waste their time
+and effort? And if the instruction, deficient as it is, does not keep
+many from becoming lawyers and doctors, if we must finally have them,
+why not have good ones? After all, even if the sole wish is to make
+the country a country of farmers and laborers, and condemn in it all
+intellectual activity, I don't see any evil in enlightening those
+same farmers and laborers, in giving them at least an education that
+will aid them in perfecting themselves and in perfecting their work,
+in placing them in a condition to understand many things of which
+they are at present ignorant."
+
+"Bah, bah, bah!" exclaimed the lawyer, drawing circles in the air
+with his hand to dispel the ideas suggested. "To be a good farmer no
+great amount of rhetoric is needed. Dreams, illusions, fancies! Eh,
+will you take a piece of advice?"
+
+He arose and placed his hand affectionately on the youth's shoulder,
+as he continued: "I'm going to give you one, and a very good one,
+because I see that you are intelligent and the advice will not be
+wasted. You're going to study medicine? Well, confine yourself to
+learning how to put on plasters and apply leeches, and don't ever try
+to improve or impair the condition of your kind. When you become a
+licentiate, marry a rich and devout girl, try to make cures and charge
+well, shun everything that has any relation to the general state of
+the country, attend mass, confession, and communion when the rest do,
+and you will see afterwards how you will thank me, and I shall see
+it, if I am still alive. Always remember that charity begins at home,
+for man ought not to seek on earth more than the greatest amount of
+happiness for himself, as Bentham says. If you involve yourself in
+quixotisms you will have no career, nor will you get married, nor
+will you ever amount to anything. All will abandon you, your own
+countrymen will be the first to laugh at your simplicity. Believe
+me, you will remember me and see that I am right, when you have gray
+hairs like myself, gray hairs such as these!"
+
+Here the old lawyer stroked his scanty white hair, as he smiled sadly
+and shook his head.
+
+"When I have gray hairs like those, sir," replied Isagani with equal
+sadness, "and turn my gaze back over my past and see that I have
+worked only for myself, without having done what I plainly could
+and should have done for the country that has given me everything,
+for the citizens that have helped me to live--then, sir, every gray
+hair will be a thorn, and instead of rejoicing, they will shame me!"
+
+So saying, he took his leave with a profound bow. The lawyer remained
+motionless in his place, with an amazed look on his face. He listened
+to the footfalls that gradually died away, then resumed his seat.
+
+"Poor boy!" he murmured, "similar thoughts also crossed my mind
+once! What more could any one desire than to be able to say: 'I
+have done this for the good of the fatherland, I have consecrated
+my life to the welfare of others!' A crown of laurel, steeped in
+aloes, dry leaves that cover thorns and worms! That is not life,
+that does not get us our daily bread, nor does it bring us honors--
+the laurel would hardly serve for a salad, nor produce ease, nor aid
+us in winning lawsuits, but quite the reverse! Every country has its
+code of ethics, as it has its climate and its diseases, different
+from the climate and the diseases of other countries."
+
+After a pause, he added: "Poor boy! If all should think and act as
+he does, I don't say but that--Poor boy! Poor Florentino!"
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE TRIBULATIONS OF A CHINESE
+
+
+In the evening of that same Saturday, Quiroga, the Chinese, who
+aspired to the creation of a consulate for his nation, gave a dinner
+in the rooms over his bazaar, located in the Escolta. His feast was
+well attended: friars, government employees, soldiers, merchants,
+all of them his customers, partners or patrons, were to be seen
+there, for his store supplied the curates and the conventos with
+all their necessities, he accepted the chits of all the employees,
+and he had servants who were discreet, prompt, and complaisant. The
+friars themselves did not disdain to pass whole hours in his store,
+sometimes in view of the public, sometimes in the chambers with
+agreeable company.
+
+That night, then, the sala presented a curious aspect, being filled
+with friars and clerks seated on Vienna chairs, stools of black wood,
+and marble benches of Cantonese origin, before little square tables,
+playing cards or conversing among themselves, under the brilliant glare
+of the gilt chandeliers or the subdued light of the Chinese lanterns,
+which were brilliantly decorated with long silken tassels. On the
+walls there was a lamentable medley of landscapes in dim and gaudy
+colors, painted in Canton or Hongkong, mingled with tawdry chromos
+of odalisks, half-nude women, effeminate lithographs of Christ,
+the deaths of the just and of the sinners--made by Jewish houses in
+Germany to be sold in the Catholic countries. Nor were there lacking
+the Chinese prints on red paper representing a man seated, of venerable
+aspect, with a calm, smiling face, behind whom stood a servant, ugly,
+horrible, diabolical, threatening, armed with a lance having a wide,
+keen blade. Among the Indians some call this figure Mohammed, others
+Santiago, [34] we do not know why, nor do the Chinese themselves give
+a very clear explanation of this popular pair. The pop of champagne
+corks, the rattle of glasses, laughter, cigar smoke, and that odor
+peculiar to a Chinese habitation--a mixture of punk, opium, and dried
+fruits--completed the collection.
+
+Dressed as a Chinese mandarin in a blue-tasseled cap, Quiroga moved
+from room to room, stiff and straight, but casting watchful glances
+here and there as though to assure himself that nothing was being
+stolen. Yet in spite of this natural distrust, he exchanged handshakes
+with each guest, greeted some with a smile sagacious and humble,
+others with a patronizing air, and still others with a certain shrewd
+look that seemed to say, "I know! You didn't come on my account,
+you came for the dinner!"
+
+And Quiroga was right! That fat gentleman who is now praising him
+and speaking of the advisability of a Chinese consulate in Manila,
+intimating that to manage it there could be no one but Quiroga, is the
+Se�or Gonzalez who hides behind the pseudonym _Pitil�_ when he attacks
+Chinese immigration through the columns of the newspapers. That
+other, an elderly man who closely examines the lamps, pictures,
+and other furnishings with grimaces and ejaculations of disdain,
+is Don Timoteo Pelaez, Juanito's father, a merchant who inveighs
+against the Chinese competition that is ruining his business. The
+one over there, that thin, brown individual with a sharp look and a
+pale smile, is the celebrated originator of the dispute over Mexican
+pesos, which so troubled one of Quiroga's prot�ges: that government
+clerk is regarded in Manila as very clever. That one farther on, he
+of the frowning look and unkempt mustache, is a government official
+who passes for a most meritorious fellow because he has the courage
+to speak ill of the business in lottery tickets carried on between
+Quiroga and an exalted dame in Manila society. The fact is that
+two thirds of the tickets go to China and the few that are left in
+Manila are sold at a premium of a half-real. The honorable gentleman
+entertains the conviction that some day he will draw the first prize,
+and is in a rage at finding himself confronted with such tricks.
+
+The dinner, meanwhile, was drawing to an end. From the dining-room
+floated into the sala snatches of toasts, interruptions, bursts and
+ripples of laughter. The name of Quiroga was often heard mingled with
+the words "consul," "equality," "justice." The amphitryon himself
+did not eat European dishes, so he contented himself with drinking
+a glass of wine with his guests from time to time, promising to dine
+with those who were not seated at the first table.
+
+Simoun, who was present, having already dined, was in the sala talking
+with some merchants, who were complaining of business conditions:
+everything was going wrong, trade was paralyzed, the European exchanges
+were exorbitantly high. They sought information from the jeweler
+or insinuated to him a few ideas, with the hope that these would be
+communicated to the Captain-General. To all the remedies suggested
+Simoun responded with a sarcastic and unfeeling exclamation about
+nonsense, until one of them in exasperation asked him for his opinion.
+
+"My opinion?" he retorted. "Study how other nations prosper, and then
+do as they do."
+
+"And why do they prosper, Se�or Simoun?"
+
+Simoun replied with a shrug of his shoulders.
+
+"The port works, which weigh so heavily upon commerce, and the port
+not yet completed!" sighed Don Timoteo Pelaez. "A Penelope's web,
+as my son says, that is spun and unspun. The taxes--"
+
+"You complaining!" exclaimed another. "Just as the General has decreed
+the destruction of houses of light materials! [35] And you with a
+shipment of galvanized iron!"
+
+"Yes," rejoined Don Timoteo, "but look what that decree cost me! Then,
+the destruction will not be carried out for a month, not until Lent
+begins, and other shipments may arrive. I would have wished them
+destroyed right away, but--Besides, what are the owners of those
+houses going to buy from me if they are all poor, all equally beggars?"
+
+"You can always buy up their shacks for a trifle."
+
+"And afterwards have the decree revoked and sell them back at double
+the price--that's business!"
+
+Simoun smiled his frigid smile. Seeing Quiroga approach, he left the
+querulous merchants to greet the future consul, who on catching sight
+of him lost his satisfied expression and assigned a countenance like
+those of the merchants, while he bent almost double.
+
+Quiroga respected the jeweler greatly, not only because he knew him
+to be very wealthy, but also on account of his rumored influence
+with the Captain-General. It was reported that Simoun favored
+Quiroga's ambitions, that he was an advocate for the consulate,
+and a certain newspaper hostile to the Chinese had alluded to him
+in many paraphrases, veiled allusions, and suspension points, in the
+celebrated controversy with another sheet that was favorable to the
+queued folk. Some prudent persons added with winks and half-uttered
+words that his Black Eminence was advising the General to avail himself
+of the Chinese in order to humble the tenacious pride of the natives.
+
+"To hold the people in subjection," he was reported to have said,
+"there's nothing like humiliating them and humbling them in their
+own eyes."
+
+To this end an opportunity had soon presented itself. The guilds
+of mestizos and natives were continually watching one another,
+venting their bellicose spirits and their activities in jealousy
+and distrust. At mass one day the gobernadorcillo of the natives was
+seated on a bench to the right, and, being extremely thin, happened
+to cross one of his legs over the other, thus adopting a nonchalant
+attitude, in order to expose his thighs more and display his pretty
+shoes. The gobernadorcillo of the guild of mestizos, who was seated on
+the opposite bench, as he had bunions, and could not cross his legs on
+account of his obesity, spread his legs wide apart to expose a plain
+waistcoat adorned with a beautiful gold chain set with diamonds. The
+two cliques comprehended these maneuvers and joined battle. On the
+following Sunday all the mestizos, even the thinnest, had large
+paunches and spread their legs wide apart as though on horseback,
+while the natives placed one leg over the other, even the fattest,
+there being one cabeza de barangay who turned a somersault. Seeing
+these movements, the Chinese all adopted their own peculiar attitude,
+that of sitting as they do in their shops, with one leg drawn back
+and upward, the other swinging loose. There resulted protests and
+petitions, the police rushed to arms ready to start a civil war,
+the curates rejoiced, the Spaniards were amused and made money out
+of everybody, until the General settled the quarrel by ordering that
+every one should sit as the Chinese did, since they were the heaviest
+contributors, even though they were not the best Catholics. The
+difficulty for the mestizos and natives then was that their trousers
+were too tight to permit of their imitating the Chinese. But to make
+the intention of humiliating them the more evident, the measure was
+carried out with great pomp and ceremony, the church being surrounded
+by a troop of cavalry, while all those within were sweating. The matter
+was carried to the Cortes, but it was repeated that the Chinese, as
+the ones who paid, should have their way in the religious ceremonies,
+even though they apostatized and laughed at Christianity immediately
+after. The natives and the mestizos had to be content, learning thus
+not to waste time over such fatuity. [36]
+
+Quiroga, with his smooth tongue and humble smile, was lavishly and
+flatteringly attentive to Simoun. His voice was caressing and his
+bows numerous, but the jeweler cut his blandishments short by asking
+brusquely:
+
+"Did the bracelets suit her?"
+
+At this question all Quiroga's liveliness vanished like a dream. His
+caressing voice became plaintive; he bowed lower, gave the Chinese
+salutation of raising his clasped hands to the height of his face,
+and groaned: "Ah, Se�or Simoun! I'm lost, I'm ruined!" [37]
+
+"How, Quiroga, lost and ruined when you have so many bottles of
+champagne and so many guests?"
+
+Quiroga closed his eyes and made a grimace. Yes, the affair of that
+afternoon, that affair of the bracelets, had ruined him. Simoun smiled,
+for when a Chinese merchant complains it is because all is going well,
+and when he makes a show that things are booming it is quite certain
+that he is planning an assignment or flight to his own country.
+
+"You didn't know that I'm lost, I'm ruined? Ah, Se�or Simoun, I'm
+_busted!_" To make his condition plainer, he illustrated the word by
+making a movement as though he were falling in collapse.
+
+Simoun wanted to laugh, but restrained himself and said that he knew
+nothing, nothing at all, as Quiroga led him to a room and closed the
+door. He then explained the cause of his misfortune.
+
+Three diamond bracelets that he had secured from Simoun on pretense
+of showing them to his wife were not for her, a poor native shut up in
+her room like a Chinese woman, but for a beautiful and charming lady,
+the friend of a powerful man, whose influence was needed by him in
+a certain deal in which he could clear some six thousand pesos. As
+he did not understand feminine tastes and wished to be gallant, the
+Chinese had asked for the three finest bracelets the jeweler had, each
+priced at three to four thousand pesos. With affected simplicity and
+his most caressing smile, Quiroga had begged the lady to select the
+one she liked best, and the lady, more simple and caressing still,
+had declared that she liked all three, and had kept them.
+
+Simoun burst out into laughter.
+
+"Ah, sir, I'm lost, I'm ruined!" cried the Chinese, slapping himself
+lightly with his delicate hands; but the jeweler continued his
+laughter.
+
+"Ugh, bad people, surely not a real lady," went on the Chinaman,
+shaking his head in disgust. "What! She has no decency, while me,
+a Chinaman, me always polite! Ah, surely she not a real lady--a
+_cigarrera_ has more decency!"
+
+"They've caught you, they've caught you!" exclaimed Simoun, poking
+him in the chest.
+
+"And everybody's asking for loans and never pays--what about
+that? Clerks, officials, lieutenants, soldiers--" he checked them off
+on his long-nailed fingers--"ah, Se�or Simoun, I'm lost, I'm _busted_!"
+
+"Get out with your complaints," said Simoun. "I've saved you from many
+officials that wanted money from you. I've lent it to them so that
+they wouldn't bother you, even when I knew that they couldn't pay."
+
+"But, Se�or Simoun, you lend to officials; I lend to women, sailors,
+everybody."
+
+"I bet you get your money back."
+
+"Me, money back? Ah, surely you don't understand! When it's lost in
+gambling they never pay. Besides, you have a consul, you can force
+them, but I haven't."
+
+Simoun became thoughtful. "Listen, Quiroga," he said, somewhat
+abstractedly, "I'll undertake to collect what the officers and sailors
+owe you. Give me their notes."
+
+Quiroga again fell to whining: they had never given him any notes.
+
+"When they come to you asking for money, send them to me. I want to
+help you."
+
+The grateful Quiroga thanked him, but soon fell to lamenting again
+about the bracelets. "A _cigarrera_ wouldn't be so shameless!" he
+repeated.
+
+"The devil!" exclaimed Simoun, looking askance at the Chinese, as
+though studying him. "Exactly when I need the money and thought that
+you could pay me! But it can all be arranged, as I don't want you
+to fail for such a small amount. Come, a favor, and I'll reduce to
+seven the nine thousand pesos you owe me. You can get anything you
+wish through the Customs--boxes of lamps, iron, copper, glassware,
+Mexican pesos--you furnish arms to the conventos, don't you?"
+
+The Chinese nodded affirmation, but remarked that he had to do a good
+deal of bribing. "I furnish the padres everything!"
+
+"Well, then," added Simoun in a low voice, "I need you to get in for
+me some boxes of rifles that arrived this evening. I want you to keep
+them in your warehouse; there isn't room for all of them in my house."
+
+Quiroga began to show symptoms of fright.
+
+"Don't get scared, you don't run any risk. These rifles are to be
+concealed, a few at a time, in various dwellings, then a search will
+be instituted, and many people will be sent to prison. You and I can
+make a haul getting them set free. Understand me?"
+
+Quiroga wavered, for he was afraid of firearms. In his desk he had
+an empty revolver that he never touched without turning his head away
+and closing his eyes.
+
+"If you can't do it, I'll have to apply to some one else, but then I'll
+need the nine thousand pesos to cross their palms and shut their eyes."
+
+"All right, all right!" Quiroga finally agreed. "But many people will
+be arrested? There'll be a search, eh?"
+
+When Quiroga and Simoun returned to the sala they found there, in
+animated conversation, those who had finished their dinner, for the
+champagne had loosened their tongues and stirred their brains. They
+were talking rather freely.
+
+In a group where there were a number of government clerks, some ladies,
+and Don Custodio, the topic was a commission sent to India to make
+certain investigations about footwear for the soldiers.
+
+"Who compose it?" asked an elderly lady.
+
+"A colonel, two other officers, and his Excellency's nephew."
+
+"Four?" rejoined a clerk. "What a commission! Suppose they
+disagree--are they competent?"
+
+"That's what I asked," replied a clerk. "It's said that one civilian
+ought to go, one who has no military prejudices--a shoemaker,
+for instance."
+
+"That's right," added an importer of shoes, "but it wouldn't do
+to send an Indian or a Chinaman, and the only Peninsular shoemaker
+demanded such large fees--"
+
+"But why do they have to make any investigations about
+footwear?" inquired the elderly lady. "It isn't for the Peninsular
+artillerymen. The Indian soldiers can go barefoot, as they do in
+their towns." [38]
+
+"Exactly so, and the treasury would save more," corroborated another
+lady, a widow who was not satisfied with her pension.
+
+"But you must remember," remarked another in the group, a friend of
+the officers on the commission, "that while it's true they go barefoot
+in the towns, it's not the same as moving about under orders in the
+service. They can't choose the hour, nor the road, nor rest when
+they wish. Remember, madam, that, with the noonday sun overhead and
+the earth below baking like an oven, they have to march over sandy
+stretches, where there are stones, the sun above and fire below,
+bullets in front--"
+
+"It's only a question of getting used to it!"
+
+"Like the donkey that got used to not eating! In our present campaign
+the greater part of our losses have been due to wounds on the soles
+of the feet. Remember the donkey, madam, remember the donkey!"
+
+"But, my dear sir," retorted the lady, "look how much money is wasted
+on shoe-leather. There's enough to pension many widows and orphans
+in order to maintain our prestige. Don't smile, for I'm not talking
+about myself, and I have my pension, even though a very small one,
+insignificant considering the services my husband rendered, but I'm
+talking of others who are dragging out miserable lives! It's not
+right that after so much persuasion to come and so many hardships in
+crossing the sea they should end here by dying of hunger. What you say
+about the soldiers may be true, but the fact is that I've been in the
+country more than three years, and I haven't seen any soldier limping."
+
+"In that I agree with the lady," said her neighbor. "Why issue them
+shoes when they were born without them?"
+
+"And why shirts?"
+
+"And why trousers?"
+
+"Just calculate what we should economize on soldiers clothed only in
+their skins!" concluded he who was defending the army.
+
+In another group the conversation was more heated. Ben-Zayb was
+talking and declaiming, while Padre Camorra, as usual, was constantly
+interrupting him. The friar-journalist, in spite of his respect for
+the cowled gentry, was always at loggerheads with Padre Camorra,
+whom he regarded as a silly half-friar, thus giving himself the
+appearance of being independent and refuting the accusations of those
+who called him Fray Iba�ez. Padre Camorra liked his adversary, as the
+latter was the only person who would take seriously what he styled
+his arguments. They were discussing magnetism, spiritualism, magic,
+and the like. Their words flew through the air like the knives and
+balls of jugglers, tossed back and forth from one to the other.
+
+That year great attention had been attracted in the Quiapo fair
+by a head, wrongly called a sphinx, exhibited by Mr. Leeds, an
+American. Glaring advertisements covered the walls of the houses,
+mysterious and funereal, to excite the curiosity of the public. Neither
+Ben-Zayb nor any of the padres had yet seen it; Juanito Pelaez was the
+only one who had, and he was describing his wonderment to the party.
+
+Ben-Zayb, as a journalist, looked for a natural explanation. Padre
+Camorra talked of the devil, Padre Irene smiled, Padre Salvi remained
+grave.
+
+"But, Padre, the devil doesn't need to come--we are sufficient to
+damn ourselves--"
+
+"It can't be explained any other way."
+
+"If science--"
+
+"Get out with science, _pu�ales_!"
+
+"But, listen to me and I'll convince you. It's all a question of
+optics. I haven't yet seen the head nor do I know how it looks, but
+this gentleman"--indicating Juanito Pelaez--"tells us that it does not
+look like the talking heads that are usually exhibited. So be it! But
+the principle is the same--it's all a question of optics. Wait! A
+mirror is placed thus, another mirror behind it, the image is
+reflected--I say, it is purely a problem in physics."
+
+Taking down from the walls several mirrors, he arranged them, turned
+them round and round, but, not getting the desired result, concluded:
+"As I say, it's nothing more or less than a question of optics."
+
+"But what do you want mirrors for, if Juanito tells us that the head is
+inside a box placed on the table? I see in it spiritualism, because the
+spiritualists always make use of tables, and I think that Padre Salvi,
+as the ecclesiastical governor, ought to prohibit the exhibition."
+
+Padre Salvi remained silent, saying neither yes nor no.
+
+"In order to learn if there are devils or mirrors inside it,"
+suggested Simoun, "the best thing would be for you to go and see the
+famous sphinx."
+
+The proposal was a good one, so it was accepted, although Padre
+Salvi and Don Custodio showed some repugnance. They at a fair, to rub
+shoulders with the public, to see sphinxes and talking heads! What
+would the natives say? These might take them for mere men, endowed
+with the same passions and weaknesses as others. But Ben-Zayb, with
+his journalistic ingenuity, promised to request Mr. Leeds not to
+admit the public while they were inside. They would be honoring him
+sufficiently by the visit not to admit of his refusal, and besides
+he would not charge any admission fee. To give a show of probability
+to this, he concluded: "Because, remember, if I should expose the
+trick of the mirrors to the public, it would ruin the poor American's
+business." Ben-Zayb was a conscientious individual.
+
+About a dozen set out, among them our acquaintances, Padres Salvi,
+Camorra, and Irene, Don Custodio, Ben-Zayb, and Juanito Pelaez. Their
+carriages set them down at the entrance to the Quiapo Plaza.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE QUIAPO FAIR
+
+
+It was a beautiful night and the plaza presented a most animated
+aspect. Taking advantage of the freshness of the breeze and the
+splendor of the January moon, the people filled the fair to see, be
+seen, and amuse themselves. The music of the cosmoramas and the lights
+of the lanterns gave life and merriment to every one. Long rows of
+booths, brilliant with tinsel and gauds, exposed to view clusters of
+balls, masks strung by the eyes, tin toys, trains, carts, mechanical
+horses, carriages, steam-engines with diminutive boilers, Lilliputian
+tableware of porcelain, pine Nativities, dolls both foreign and
+domestic, the former red and smiling, the latter sad and pensive like
+little ladies beside gigantic children. The beating of drums, the roar
+of tin horns, the wheezy music of the accordions and the hand-organs,
+all mingled in a carnival concert, amid the coming and going of the
+crowd, pushing, stumbling over one another, with their faces turned
+toward the booths, so that the collisions were frequent and often
+amusing. The carriages were forced to move slowly, with the _tab�_ of
+the cocheros repeated every moment. Met and mingled government clerks,
+soldiers, friars, students, Chinese, girls with their mammas or aunts,
+all greeting, signaling, calling to one another merrily.
+
+Padre Camorra was in the seventh heaven at the sight of so many pretty
+girls. He stopped, looked back, nudged Ben-Zayb, chuckled and swore,
+saying, "And that one, and that one, my ink-slinger? And that one
+over there, what say you?" In his contentment he even fell to using
+the familiar _tu_ toward his friend and adversary. Padre Salvi stared
+at him from time to time, but he took little note of Padre Salvi. On
+the contrary, he pretended to stumble so that he might brush against
+the girls, he winked and made eyes at them.
+
+"_Pu�ales!_" he kept saying to himself. "When shall I be the curate
+of Quiapo?"
+
+Suddenly Ben-Zayb let go an oath, jumped aside, and slapped his hand
+on his arm; Padre Camorra in his excess of enthusiasm had pinched
+him. They were approaching a dazzling se�orita who was attracting the
+attention of the whole plaza, and Padre Camorra, unable to restrain
+his delight, had taken Ben-Zayb's arm as a substitute for the girl's.
+
+It was Paulita Gomez, the prettiest of the pretty, in company with
+Isagani, followed by Do�a Victorina. The young woman was resplendent
+in her beauty: all stopped and craned their necks, while they ceased
+their conversation and followed her with their eyes--even Do�a
+Victorina was respectfully saluted.
+
+Paulita was arrayed in a rich camisa and pa�uelo of embroidered pi�a,
+different from those she had worn that morning to the church. The
+gauzy texture of the pi�a set off her shapely head, and the Indians
+who saw her compared her to the moon surrounded by fleecy clouds. A
+silk rose-colored skirt, caught up in rich and graceful folds by her
+little hand, gave majesty to her erect figure, the movement of which,
+harmonizing with her curving neck, displayed all the triumphs of vanity
+and satisfied coquetry. Isagani appeared to be rather disgusted,
+for so many curious eyes fixed upon the beauty of his sweetheart
+annoyed him. The stares seemed to him robbery and the girl's smiles
+faithlessness.
+
+Juanito saw her and his hump increased when he spoke to her. Paulita
+replied negligently, while Do�a Victorina called to him, for Juanito
+was her favorite, she preferring him to Isagani.
+
+"What a girl, what a girl!" muttered the entranced Padre Camorra.
+
+"Come, Padre, pinch yourself and let me alone," said Ben-Zayb
+fretfully.
+
+"What a girl, what a girl!" repeated the friar. "And she has for a
+sweetheart a pupil of mine, the boy I had the quarrel with."
+
+"Just my luck that she's not of my town," he added, after turning
+his head several times to follow her with his looks. He was even
+tempted to leave his companions to follow the girl, and Ben-Zayb had
+difficulty in dissuading him. Paulita's beautiful figure moved on,
+her graceful little head nodding with inborn coquetry.
+
+Our promenaders kept on their way, not without sighs on the part
+of the friar-artilleryman, until they reached a booth surrounded by
+sightseers, who quickly made way for them. It was a shop of little
+wooden figures, of local manufacture, representing in all shapes and
+sizes the costumes, races, and occupations of the country: Indians,
+Spaniards, Chinese, mestizos, friars, clergymen, government clerks,
+gobernadorcillos, students, soldiers, and so on.
+
+Whether the artists had more affection for the priests, the folds
+of whose habits were better suited to their esthetic purposes, or
+whether the friars, holding such an important place in Philippine life,
+engaged the attention of the sculptor more, the fact was that, for one
+cause or another, images of them abounded, well-turned and finished,
+representing them in the sublimest moments of their lives--the opposite
+of what is done in Europe, where they are pictured as sleeping on
+casks of wine, playing cards, emptying tankards, rousing themselves
+to gaiety, or patting the cheeks of a buxom girl. No, the friars
+of the Philippines were different: elegant, handsome, well-dressed,
+their tonsures neatly shaven, their features symmetrical and serene,
+their gaze meditative, their expression saintly, somewhat rosy-cheeked,
+cane in hand and patent-leather shoes on their feet, inviting adoration
+and a place in a glass case. Instead of the symbols of gluttony and
+incontinence of their brethren in Europe, those of Manila carried the
+book, the crucifix, and the palm of martyrdom; instead of kissing the
+simple country lasses, those of Manila gravely extended the hand to
+be kissed by children and grown men doubled over almost to kneeling;
+instead of the full refectory and dining-hall, their stage in Europe,
+in Manila they had the oratory, the study-table; instead of the
+mendicant friar who goes from door to door with his donkey and sack,
+begging alms, the friars of the Philippines scattered gold from full
+hands among the miserable Indians.
+
+"Look, here's Padre Camorra!" exclaimed Ben-Zayb, upon whom the effect
+of the champagne still lingered. He pointed to a picture of a lean
+friar of thoughtful mien who was seated at a table with his head
+resting on the palm of his hand, apparently writing a sermon by the
+light of a lamp. The contrast suggested drew laughter from the crowd.
+
+Padre Camorra, who had already forgotten about Paulita, saw what was
+meant and laughing his clownish laugh, asked in turn, "Whom does this
+other figure resemble, Ben-Zayb?"
+
+It was an old woman with one eye, with disheveled hair, seated on
+the ground like an Indian idol, ironing clothes. The sad-iron was
+carefully imitated, being of copper with coals of red tinsel and
+smoke-wreaths of dirty twisted cotton.
+
+"Eh, Ben-Zayb, it wasn't a fool who designed that" asked Padre Camorra
+with a laugh.
+
+"Well, I don't see the point," replied the journalist.
+
+"But, _pu�ales_, don't you see the title, _The Philippine Press_? That
+utensil with which the old woman is ironing is here called the press!"
+
+All laughed at this, Ben-Zayb himself joining in good-naturedly.
+
+Two soldiers of the Civil Guard, appropriately labeled, were placed
+behind a man who was tightly bound and had his face covered by his
+hat. It was entitled _The Country of Abaka_, [39] and from appearances
+they were going to shoot him.
+
+Many of our visitors were displeased with the exhibition. They talked
+of rules of art, they sought proportion--one said that this figure did
+not have seven heads, that the face lacked a nose, having only three,
+all of which made Padre Camorra somewhat thoughtful, for he did not
+comprehend how a figure, to be correct, need have four noses and
+seven heads. Others said, if they were muscular, that they could not
+be Indians; still others remarked that it was not sculpture, but mere
+carpentry. Each added his spoonful of criticism, until Padre Camorra,
+not to be outdone, ventured to ask for at least thirty legs for each
+doll, because, if the others wanted noses, couldn't he require feet? So
+they fell to discussing whether the Indian had or had not any aptitude
+for sculpture, and whether it would be advisable to encourage that
+art, until there arose a general dispute, which was cut short by Don
+Custodio's declaration that the Indians had the aptitude, but that
+they should devote themselves exclusively to the manufacture of saints.
+
+"One would say," observed Ben-Zayb, who was full of bright ideas
+that night, "that this Chinaman is Quiroga, but on close examination
+it looks like Padre Irene. And what do you say about that British
+Indian? He looks like Simoun!"
+
+Fresh peals of laughter resounded, while Padre Irene rubbed his nose.
+
+"That's right!"
+
+"It's the very image of him!"
+
+"But where is Simoun? Simoun should buy it."
+
+But the jeweler had disappeared, unnoticed by any one.
+
+"_Pu�ales!_" exclaimed Padre Camorra, "how stingy the American
+is! He's afraid we would make him pay the admission for all of us
+into Mr. Leeds' show."
+
+"No!" rejoined Ben-Zayb, "what he's afraid of is that he'll compromise
+himself. He may have foreseen the joke in store for his friend
+Mr. Leeds and has got out of the way."
+
+Thus, without purchasing the least trifle, they continued on their
+way to see the famous sphinx. Ben-Zayb offered to manage the affair,
+for the American would not rebuff a journalist who could take revenge
+in an unfavorable article. "You'll see that it's all a question
+of mirrors," he said, "because, you see--" Again he plunged into a
+long demonstration, and as he had no mirrors at hand to discredit
+his theory he tangled himself up in all kinds of blunders and wound
+up by not knowing himself what he was saying. "In short, you'll see
+how it's all a question of optics."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+LEGERDEMAIN
+
+
+Mr. Leeds, a genuine Yankee, dressed completely in black, received his
+visitors with great deference. He spoke Spanish well, from having been
+for many years in South America, and offered no objection to their
+request, saying that they might examine everything, both before and
+after the exhibition, but begged that they remain quiet while it was
+in progress. Ben-Zayb smiled in pleasant anticipation of the vexation
+he had prepared for the American.
+
+The room, hung entirely in black, was lighted by ancient lamps burning
+alcohol. A rail wrapped in black velvet divided it into two almost
+equal parts, one of which was filled with seats for the spectators and
+the other occupied by a platform covered with a checkered carpet. In
+the center of this platform was placed a table, over which was spread
+a piece of black cloth adorned with skulls and cabalistic signs. The
+_mise en sc�ne_ was therefore lugubrious and had its effect upon
+the merry visitors. The jokes died away, they spoke in whispers,
+and however much some tried to appear indifferent, their lips framed
+no smiles. All felt as if they had entered a house where there was a
+corpse, an illusion accentuated by an odor of wax and incense. Don
+Custodio and Padre Salvi consulted in whispers over the expediency
+of prohibiting such shows.
+
+Ben-Zayb, in order to cheer the dispirited group and embarrass
+Mr. Leeds, said to him in a familiar tone: "Eh, Mister, since there
+are none but ourselves here and we aren't Indians who can be fooled,
+won't you let us see the trick? We know of course that it's purely
+a question of optics, but as Padre Camorra won't be convinced--"
+
+Here he started to jump over the rail, instead of going through the
+proper opening, while Padre Camorra broke out into protests, fearing
+that Ben-Zayb might be right.
+
+"And why not, sir?" rejoined the American. "But don't break anything,
+will you?"
+
+The journalist was already on the platform. "You will allow me,
+then?" he asked, and without waiting for the permission, fearing that
+it might not be granted, raised the cloth to look for the mirrors
+that he expected should be between the legs of the table. Ben-Zayb
+uttered an exclamation and stepped back, again placed both hands under
+the table and waved them about; he encountered only empty space. The
+table had three thin iron legs, sunk into the floor.
+
+The journalist looked all about as though seeking something.
+
+"Where are the mirrors?" asked Padre Camorra.
+
+Ben-Zayb looked and looked, felt the table with his fingers, raised
+the cloth again, and rubbed his hand over his forehead from time to
+time, as if trying to remember something.
+
+"Have you lost anything?" inquired Mr. Leeds.
+
+"The mirrors, Mister, where are the mirrors?"
+
+"I don't know where yours are--mine are at the hotel. Do you want to
+look at yourself? You're somewhat pale and excited."
+
+Many laughed, in spite of their weird impressions, on seeing the
+jesting coolness of the American, while Ben-Zayb retired, quite
+abashed, to his seat, muttering, "It can't be. You'll see that he
+doesn't do it without mirrors. The table will have to be changed
+later."
+
+Mr. Leeds placed the cloth on the table again and turning toward his
+illustrious audience, asked them, "Are you satisfied? May we begin?"
+
+"Hurry up! How cold-blooded he is!" said the widow.
+
+"Then, ladies and gentlemen, take your seats and get your questions
+ready."
+
+Mr. Leeds disappeared through a doorway and in a few moments returned
+with a black box of worm-eaten wood, covered with inscriptions in
+the form of birds, beasts, and human heads.
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen," he began solemnly, "once having had occasion
+to visit the great pyramid of Khufu, a Pharaoh of the fourth dynasty,
+I chanced upon a sarcophagus of red granite in a forgotten chamber. My
+joy was great, for I thought that I had found a royal mummy, but what
+was my disappointment on opening the coffin, at the cost of infinite
+labor, to find nothing more than this box, which you may examine."
+
+He handed the box to those in the front row. Padre Camorra drew back in
+loathing, Padre Salvi looked at it closely as if he enjoyed sepulchral
+things, Padre Irene smiled a knowing smile, Don Custodio affected
+gravity and disdain, while Ben-Zayb hunted for his mirrors--there
+they must be, for it was a question of mirrors.
+
+"It smells like a corpse," observed one lady, fanning herself
+furiously. "Ugh!"
+
+"It smells of forty centuries," remarked some one with emphasis.
+
+Ben-Zayb forgot about his mirrors to discover who had made this
+remark. It was a military official who had read the history of
+Napoleon.
+
+Ben-Zayb felt jealous and to utter another epigram that might annoy
+Padre Camorra a little said, "It smells of the Church."
+
+"This box, ladies and gentlemen," continued the American, "contained
+a handful of ashes and a piece of papyrus on which were written
+some words. Examine them yourselves, but I beg of you not to breathe
+heavily, because if any of the dust is lost my sphinx will appear in
+a mutilated condition."
+
+The humbug, described with such seriousness and conviction, was
+gradually having its effect, so much so that when the box was passed
+around, no one dared to breathe. Padre Camorra, who had so often
+depicted from the pulpit of Tiani the torments and sufferings of hell,
+while he laughed in his sleeves at the terrified looks of the sinners,
+held his nose, and Padre Salvi--the same Padre Salvi who had on All
+Souls' Day prepared a phantasmagoria of the souls in purgatory with
+flames and transparencies illuminated with alcohol lamps and covered
+with tinsel, on the high altar of the church in a suburb, in order
+to get alms and orders for masses--the lean and taciturn Padre Salvi
+held his breath and gazed suspiciously at that handful of ashes.
+
+"_Memento, homo, quia pulvis es_!" muttered Padre Irene with a smile.
+
+"Pish!" sneered Ben-Zayb--the same thought had occurred to him,
+and the Canon had taken the words out of his mouth.
+
+"Not knowing what to do," resumed Mr. Leeds, closing the box carefully,
+"I examined the papyrus and discovered two words whose meaning
+was unknown to me. I deciphered them, and tried to pronounce them
+aloud. Scarcely had I uttered the first word when I felt the box
+slipping from my hands, as if pressed down by an enormous weight,
+and it glided along the floor, whence I vainly endeavored to remove
+it. But my surprise was converted into terror when it opened and I
+found within a human head that stared at me fixedly. Paralyzed with
+fright and uncertain what to do in the presence of such a phenomenon,
+I remained for a time stupefied, trembling like a person poisoned
+with mercury, but after a while recovered myself and, thinking that
+it was a vain illusion, tried to divert my attention by reading
+the second word. Hardly had I pronounced it when the box closed,
+the head disappeared, and in its place I again found the handful of
+ashes. Without suspecting it I had discovered the two most potent
+words in nature, the words of creation and destruction, of life and
+of death!"
+
+He paused for a few moments to note the effect of his story, then
+with grave and measured steps approached the table and placed the
+mysterious box upon it.
+
+"The cloth, Mister!" exclaimed the incorrigible Ben-Zayb.
+
+"Why not?" rejoined Mr. Leeds, very complaisantly.
+
+Lifting the box with his right hand, he caught up the cloth with his
+left, completely exposing the table sustained by its three legs. Again
+he placed the box upon the center and with great gravity turned to
+his audience.
+
+"Here's what I want to see," said Ben-Zayb to his neighbor. "You
+notice how he makes some excuse."
+
+Great attention was depicted on all countenances and silence
+reigned. The noise and roar of the street could be distinctly heard,
+but all were so affected that a snatch of dialogue which reached them
+produced no effect.
+
+"Why can't we go in?" asked a woman's voice.
+
+"_Ab�_, there's a lot of friars and clerks in there," answered a
+man. "The sphinx is for them only."
+
+"The friars are inquisitive too," said the woman's voice, drawing
+away. "They don't want us to know how they're being fooled. Why,
+is the head a friar's _querida_?"
+
+In the midst of a profound silence the American announced in a tone
+of emotion: "Ladies and gentlemen, with a word I am now going to
+reanimate the handful of ashes, and you will talk with a being that
+knows the past, the present, and much of the future!"
+
+Here the prestidigitator uttered a soft cry, first mournful, then
+lively, a medley of sharp sounds like imprecations and hoarse notes
+like threats, which made Ben-Zayb's hair stand on end.
+
+"_Deremof_!" cried the American.
+
+The curtains on the wall rustled, the lamps burned low, the table
+creaked. A feeble groan responded from the interior of the box. Pale
+and uneasy, all stared at one another, while one terrified se�ora
+caught hold of Padre Salvi.
+
+The box then opened of its own accord and presented to the eyes of
+the audience a head of cadaverous aspect, surrounded by long and
+abundant black hair. It slowly opened its eyes and looked around
+the whole audience. Those eyes had a vivid radiance, accentuated by
+their cavernous sockets, and, as if deep were calling unto deep,
+fixed themselves upon the profound, sunken eyes of the trembling
+Padre Salvi, who was staring unnaturally, as though he saw a ghost.
+
+"Sphinx," commanded Mr. Leeds, "tell the audience who you are."
+
+A deep silence prevailed, while a chill wind blew through the room
+and made the blue flames of the sepulchral lamps flicker. The most
+skeptical shivered.
+
+"I am Imuthis," declared the head in a funereal, but strangely
+menacing, voice. "I was born in the time of Amasis and died under the
+Persian domination, when Cambyses was returning from his disastrous
+expedition into the interior of Libya. I had come to complete my
+education after extensive travels through Greece, Assyria, and Persia,
+and had returned to my native laud to dwell in it until Thoth should
+call me before his terrible tribunal. But to my undoing, on passing
+through Babylonia, I discovered an awful secret--the secret of the
+false Smerdis who usurped the throne, the bold Magian Gaumata who
+governed as an impostor. Fearing that I would betray him to Cambyses,
+he determined upon my ruin through the instrumentality of the Egyptian
+priests, who at that time ruled my native country. They were the
+owners of two-thirds of the land, the monopolizers of learning, they
+held the people down in ignorance and tyranny, they brutalized them,
+thus making them fit to pass without resistance from one domination
+to another. The invaders availed themselves of them, and knowing their
+usefulness, protected and enriched them. The rulers not only depended
+on their will, but some were reduced to mere instruments of theirs. The
+Egyptian priests hastened to execute Gaumata's orders, with greater
+zeal from their fear of me, because they were afraid that I would
+reveal their impostures to the people. To accomplish their purpose,
+they made use of a young priest of Abydos, who passed for a saint."
+
+A painful silence followed these words. That head was talking
+of priestly intrigues and impostures, and although referring to
+another age and other creeds, all the friars present were annoyed,
+possibly because they could see in the general trend of the speech
+some analogy to the existing situation. Padre Salvi was in the grip
+of convulsive shivering; he worked his lips and with bulging eyes
+followed the gaze of the head as though fascinated. Beads of sweat
+began to break out on his emaciated face, but no one noticed this,
+so deeply absorbed and affected were they.
+
+"What was the plot concocted by the priests of your country against
+you?" asked Mr. Leeds.
+
+The head uttered a sorrowful groan, which seemed to come from the
+bottom of the heart, and the spectators saw its eyes, those fiery
+eyes, clouded and filled with tears. Many shuddered and felt their
+hair rise. No, that was not an illusion, it was not a trick: the head
+was the victim and what it told was its own story.
+
+"Ay!" it moaned, shaking with affliction, "I loved a maiden,
+the daughter of a priest, pure as light, like the freshly opened
+lotus! The young priest of Abydos also desired her and planned a
+rebellion, using my name and some papyri that he had secured from
+my beloved. The rebellion broke out at the time when Cambyses was
+returning in rage over the disasters of his unfortunate campaign. I was
+accused of being a rebel, was made a prisoner, and having effected my
+escape was killed in the chase on Lake Moeris. From out of eternity
+I saw the imposture triumph. I saw the priest of Abydos night and
+day persecuting the maiden, who had taken refuge in a temple of Isis
+on the island of Philae. I saw him persecute and harass her, even
+in the subterranean chambers, I saw him drive her mad with terror
+and suffering, like a huge bat pursuing a white dove. Ah, priest,
+priest of Abydos, I have returned to life to expose your infamy, and
+after so many years of silence, I name thee murderer, hypocrite, liar!"
+
+A dry, hollow laugh accompanied these words, while a choked voice
+responded, "No! Mercy!"
+
+It was Padre Salvi, who had been overcome with terror and with arms
+extended was slipping in collapse to the floor.
+
+"What's the matter with your Reverence? Are you ill?" asked Padre
+Irene.
+
+"The heat of the room--"
+
+"This odor of corpses we're breathing here--"
+
+"Murderer, slanderer, hypocrite!" repeated the head. "I accuse
+you--murderer, murderer, murderer!"
+
+Again the dry laugh, sepulchral and menacing, resounded, as though
+that head were so absorbed in contemplation of its wrongs that it
+did not see the tumult that prevailed in the room.
+
+"Mercy! She still lives!" groaned Padre Salvi, and then lost
+consciousness. He was as pallid as a corpse. Some of the ladies
+thought it their duty to faint also, and proceeded to do so.
+
+"He is out of his head! Padre Salvi!"
+
+"I told him not to eat that bird's-nest soup," said Padre Irene. "It
+has made him sick."
+
+"But he didn't eat anything," rejoined Don Custodio shivering. "As
+the head has been staring at him fixedly, it has mesmerized him."
+
+So disorder prevailed, the room seemed to be a hospital or a
+battlefield. Padre Salvi looked like a corpse, and the ladies,
+seeing that no one was paying them any attention, made the best of
+it by recovering.
+
+Meanwhile, the head had been reduced to ashes, and Mr. Leeds, having
+replaced the cloth on the table, bowed his audience out.
+
+"This show must be prohibited," said Don Custodio on leaving. "It's
+wicked and highly immoral."
+
+"And above all, because it doesn't use mirrors," added Ben-Zayb,
+who before going out of the room tried to assure himself finally,
+so he leaped over the rail, went up to the table, and raised the
+cloth: nothing, absolutely nothing! [40] On the following day he
+wrote an article in which he spoke of occult sciences, spiritualism,
+and the like.
+
+An order came immediately from the ecclesiastical governor prohibiting
+the show, but Mr. Leeds had already disappeared, carrying his secret
+with him to Hongkong.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+THE FUSE
+
+
+Placido Penitente left the class with his heart overflowing with
+bitterness and sullen gloom in his looks. He was worthy of his name
+when not driven from his usual course, but once irritated he was a
+veritable torrent, a wild beast that could only be stopped by the
+death of himself or his foe. So many affronts, so many pinpricks,
+day after day, had made his heart quiver, lodging in it to sleep the
+sleep of lethargic vipers, and they now were awaking to shake and
+hiss with fury. The hisses resounded in his ears with the jesting
+epithets of the professor, the phrases in the slang of the markets,
+and he seemed to hear blows and laughter. A thousand schemes for
+revenge rushed into his brain, crowding one another, only to fade
+immediately like phantoms in a dream. His vanity cried out to him
+with desperate tenacity that he must do something.
+
+"Placido Penitente," said the voice, "show these youths that you
+have dignity, that you are the son of a valiant and noble province,
+where wrongs are washed out with blood. You're a Batangan, Placido
+Penitente! Avenge yourself, Placido Penitente!"
+
+The youth groaned and gnashed his teeth, stumbling against every
+one in the street and on the Bridge of Spain, as if he were seeking
+a quarrel. In the latter place he saw a carriage in which was the
+Vice-Rector, Padre Sibyla, accompanied by Don Custodio, and he had
+a great mind to seize the friar and throw him into the river.
+
+He proceeded along the Escolta and was tempted to assault two
+Augustinians who were seated in the doorway of Quiroga's bazaar,
+laughing and joking with other friars who must have been inside in
+joyous conversation, for their merry voices and sonorous laughter
+could be heard. Somewhat farther on, two cadets blocked up the
+sidewalk, talking with the clerk of a warehouse, who was in his
+shirtsleeves. Penitents moved toward them to force a passage and
+they, perceiving his dark intention, good-humoredly made way for
+him. Placido was by this time under the influence of the _amok_,
+as the Malayists say.
+
+As he approached his home--the house of a silversmith where he lived as
+a boarder--he tried to collect his thoughts and make a plan--to return
+to his town and avenge himself by showing the friars that they could
+not with impunity insult a youth or make a joke of him. He decided to
+write a letter immediately to his mother, Cabesang Andang, to inform
+her of what had happened and to tell her that the schoolroom had closed
+forever for him. Although there was the Ateneo of the Jesuits, where he
+might study that year, yet it was not very likely that the Dominicans
+would grant him the transfer, and, even though he should secure it,
+in the following year he would have to return to the University.
+
+"They say that we don't know how to avenge ourselves!" he
+muttered. "Let the lightning strike and we'll see!"
+
+But Placido was not reckoning upon what awaited him in the house
+of the silversmith. Cabesang Andang had just arrived from Batangas,
+having come to do some shopping, to visit her son, and to bring him
+money, jerked venison, and silk handkerchiefs.
+
+The first greetings over, the poor woman, who had at once noticed her
+son's gloomy look, could no longer restrain her curiosity and began
+to ask questions. His first explanations Cabesang Andang regarded as
+some subterfuge, so she smiled and soothed her son, reminding him of
+their sacrifices and privations. She spoke of Capitana Simona's son,
+who, having entered the seminary, now carried himself in the town like
+a bishop, and Capitana Simona already considered herself a Mother of
+God, clearly so, for her son was going to be another Christ.
+
+"If the son becomes a priest," said she, "the mother won't have to
+pay us what she owes us. Who will collect from her then?"
+
+But on seeing that Placido was speaking seriously and reading in his
+eyes the storm that raged within him, she realized that what he was
+telling her was unfortunately the strict truth. She remained silent
+for a while and then broke out into lamentations.
+
+"Ay!" she exclaimed. "I promised your father that I would care for
+you, educate you, and make a lawyer of you! I've deprived myself of
+everything so that you might go to school! Instead of joining the
+_panguingui_ where the stake is a half peso, I Ve gone only where it's
+a half real, enduring the bad smells and the dirty cards. Look at my
+patched camisa; for instead of buying new ones I've spent the money in
+masses and presents to St. Sebastian, even though I don't have great
+confidence in his power, because the curate recites the masses fast
+and hurriedly, he's an entirely new saint and doesn't yet know how
+to perform miracles, and isn't made of _batikulin_ but of _lanete._
+Ay, what will your father say to me when I die and see him again!"
+
+So the poor woman lamented and wept, while Placido became gloomier
+and let stifled sighs escape from his breast.
+
+"What would I get out of being a lawyer?" was his response.
+
+"What will become of you?" asked his mother, clasping her
+hands. "They'll call you a filibuster and garrote you. I've told you
+that you must have patience, that you must be humble. I don't tell
+you that you must kiss the hands of the curates, for I know that
+you have a delicate sense of smell, like your father, who couldn't
+endure European cheese. [41] But we have to suffer, to be silent,
+to say yes to everything. What are we going to do? The friars own
+everything, and if they are unwilling, no one will become a lawyer
+or a doctor. Have patience, my son, have patience!"
+
+"But I've had a great deal, mother, I've suffered for months and
+months."
+
+Cabesang Andang then resumed her lamentations. She did not ask that he
+declare himself a partizan of the friars, she was not one herself--it
+was enough to know that for one good friar there were ten bad, who
+took the money from the poor and deported the rich. But one must be
+silent, suffer, and endure--there was no other course. She cited this
+man and that one, who by being _patient_ and humble, even though in
+the bottom of his heart he hated his masters, had risen from servant
+of the friars to high office; and such another who was rich and
+could commit abuses, secure of having patrons who would protect him
+from the law, yet who had been nothing more than a poor sacristan,
+humble and obedient, and who had married a pretty girl whose son had
+the curate for a godfather. So Cabesang Andang continued her litany
+of humble and _patient_ Filipinos, as she called them, and was about
+to cite others who by not being so had found themselves persecuted
+and exiled, when Placido on some trifling pretext left the house to
+wander about the streets.
+
+He passed through Sibakong, [42] Tondo, San Nicolas, and Santo Cristo,
+absorbed in his ill-humor, without taking note of the sun or the hour,
+and only when he began to feel hungry and discovered that he had no
+money, having given it all for celebrations and contributions, did
+he return to the house. He had expected that he would not meet his
+mother there, as she was in the habit, when in Manila, of going out
+at that hour to a neighboring house where _panguingui_ was played,
+but Cabesang Andang was waiting to propose her plan. She would avail
+herself of the procurator of the Augustinians to restore her son to
+the good graces of the Dominicans.
+
+Placido stopped her with a gesture. "I'll throw myself into the sea
+first," he declared. "I'll become a tulisan before I'll go back to
+the University."
+
+Again his mother began her preachment about patience and humility,
+so he went away again without having eaten anything, directing his
+steps toward the quay where the steamers tied up. The sight of a
+steamer weighing anchor for Hongkong inspired him with an idea--to go
+to Hongkong, to run away, get rich there, and make war on the friars.
+
+The thought of Hongkong awoke in his mind the recollection of
+a story about frontals, cirials, and candelabra of pure silver,
+which the piety of the faithful had led them to present to a certain
+church. The friars, so the silversmith told, had sent to Hongkong to
+have duplicate frontals, cirials, and candelabra made of German silver,
+which they substituted for the genuine ones, these being melted down
+and coined into Mexican pesos. Such was the story he had heard, and
+though it was no more than a rumor or a story, his resentment gave it
+the color of truth and reminded him of other tricks of theirs in that
+same style. The desire to live free, and certain half-formed plans,
+led him to decide upon Hongkong. If the corporations sent all their
+money there, commerce must be flourishing and he could enrich himself.
+
+"I want to be free, to live free!"
+
+Night surprised him wandering along San Fernando, but not meeting any
+sailor he knew, he decided to return home. As the night was beautiful,
+with a brilliant moon transforming the squalid city into a fantastic
+fairy kingdom, he went to the fair. There he wandered back and forth,
+passing booths without taking any notice of the articles in them, ever
+with the thought of Hongkong, of living free, of enriching himself.
+
+He was about to leave the fair when he thought he recognized the
+jeweler Simoun bidding good-by to a foreigner, both of them speaking
+in English. To Placido every language spoken in the Philippines
+by Europeans, when not Spanish, had to be English, and besides, he
+caught the name Hongkong. If only the jeweler would recommend him to
+that foreigner, who must be setting out for Hongkong!
+
+Placido paused. He was acquainted with the jeweler, as the latter had
+been in his town peddling his wares, and he had accompanied him on
+one of his trips, when Simoun had made himself very amiable indeed,
+telling him of the life in the universities of the free countries--what
+a difference!
+
+So he followed the jeweler. "Se�or Simoun, Se�or Simoun!" he called.
+
+The jeweler was at that moment entering his carriage. Recognizing
+Placido, he checked himself.
+
+"I want to ask a favor of you, to say a few words to you."
+
+Simoun made a sign of impatience which Placido in his perturbation
+did not observe. In a few words the youth related what had happened
+and made known his desire to go to Hongkong.
+
+"Why?" asked Simoun, staring fixedly at Placido through his blue
+goggles.
+
+Placido did not answer, so Simoun threw back his head, smiled his cold,
+silent smile and said, "All right! Come with me. To Calle Iris!" he
+directed the cochero.
+
+Simoun remained silent throughout the whole drive, apparently absorbed
+in meditation of a very important nature. Placido kept quiet, waiting
+for him to speak first, and entertained himself in watching the
+promenaders who were enjoying the clear moonlight: pairs of infatuated
+lovers, followed by watchful mammas or aunts; groups of students
+in white clothes that the moonlight made whiter still; half-drunken
+soldiers in a carriage, six together, on their way to visit some nipa
+temple dedicated to Cytherea; children playing their games and Chinese
+selling sugar-cane. All these filled the streets, taking on in the
+brilliant moonlight fantastic forms and ideal outlines. In one house
+an orchestra was playing waltzes, and couples might be seen dancing
+under the bright lamps and chandeliers--what a sordid spectacle they
+presented in comparison with the sight the streets afforded! Thinking
+of Hongkong, he asked himself if the moonlit nights in that island
+were so poetical and sweetly melancholy as those of the Philippines,
+and a deep sadness settled down over his heart.
+
+Simoun ordered the carriage to stop and both alighted, just at the
+moment when Isagani and Paulita Gomez passed them murmuring sweet
+inanities. Behind them came Do�a Victorina with Juanito Pelaez, who
+was talking in a loud voice, busily gesticulating, and appearing to
+have a larger hump than ever. In his preoccupation Pelaez did not
+notice his former schoolmate.
+
+"There's a fellow who's happy!" muttered Placido with a sigh,
+as he gazed toward the group, which became converted into vaporous
+silhouettes, with Juanito's arms plainly visible, rising and falling
+like the arms of a windmill.
+
+"That's all he's good for," observed Simoun. "It's fine to be young!"
+
+To whom did Placido and Simoun each allude?
+
+The jeweler made a sign to the young man, and they left the street
+to pick their way through a labyrinth of paths and passageways among
+various houses, at times leaping upon stones to avoid the mudholes
+or stepping aside from the sidewalks that were badly constructed and
+still more badly tended. Placido was surprised to see the rich jeweler
+move through such places as if he were familiar with them. They at
+length reached an open lot where a wretched hut stood off by itself
+surrounded by banana-plants and areca-palms. Some bamboo frames and
+sections of the same material led Placido to suspect that they were
+approaching the house of a pyrotechnist.
+
+Simoun rapped on the window and a man's face appeared.
+
+"Ah, sir!" he exclaimed, and immediately came outside.
+
+"Is the powder here?" asked Simoun.
+
+"In sacks. I'm waiting for the shells."
+
+"And the bombs?"
+
+"Are all ready."
+
+"All right, then. This very night you must go and inform the lieutenant
+and the corporal. Then keep on your way, and in Lamayan you will find a
+man in a banka. You will say _Cabesa_ and he will answer _Tales_. It's
+necessary that he be here tomorrow. There's no time to be lost."
+
+Saying this, he gave him some gold coins.
+
+"How's this, sir?" the man inquired in very good Spanish. "Is there
+any news?"
+
+"Yes, it'll be done within the coming week."
+
+"The coming week!" exclaimed the unknown, stepping backward. "The
+suburbs are not yet ready, they hope that the General will withdraw
+the decree. I thought it was postponed until the beginning of Lent."
+
+Simoun shook his head. "We won't need the suburbs," he said. "With
+Cabesang Tales' people, the ex-carbineers, and a regiment, we'll have
+enough. Later, Maria Clara may be dead. Start at once!"
+
+The man disappeared. Placido, who had stood by and heard all of this
+brief interview, felt his hair rise and stared with startled eyes at
+Simoun, who smiled.
+
+"You're surprised," he said with his icy smile, "that this Indian,
+so poorly dressed, speaks Spanish well? He was a schoolmaster who
+persisted in teaching Spanish to the children and did not stop until
+he had lost his position and had been deported as a disturber of
+the public peace, and for having been a friend of the unfortunate
+Ibarra. I got him back from his deportation, where he had been working
+as a pruner of coconut-palms, and have made him a pyrotechnist."
+
+They returned to the street and set out for Trozo. Before a wooden
+house of pleasant and well-kept appearance was a Spaniard on crutches,
+enjoying the moonlight. When Simoun accosted him, his attempt to rise
+was accompanied by a stifled groan.
+
+"You're ready?" Simoun inquired of him.
+
+"I always am!"
+
+"The coming week?"
+
+"So soon?"
+
+"At the first cannon-shot!"
+
+He moved away, followed by Placido, who was beginning to ask himself
+if he were not dreaming.
+
+"Does it surprise you," Simoun asked him, "to see a Spaniard so young
+and so afflicted with disease? Two years ago he was as robust as you
+are, but his enemies succeeded in sending him to Balabak to work in a
+penal settlement, and there he caught the rheumatism and fever that
+are dragging him into the grave. The poor devil had married a very
+beautiful woman."
+
+As an empty carriage was passing, Simoun hailed it and with Placido
+directed it to his house in the Escolta, just at the moment when the
+clocks were striking half-past ten.
+
+Two hours later Placido left the jeweler's house and walked gravely
+and thoughtfully along the Escolta, then almost deserted, in spite
+of the fact that the caf�s were still quite animated. Now and then
+a carriage passed rapidly, clattering noisily over the worn pavement.
+
+From a room in his house that overlooked the Pasig, Simoun turned
+his gaze toward the Walled City, which could be seen through the open
+windows, with its roofs of galvanized iron gleaming in the moonlight
+and its somber towers showing dull and gloomy in the midst of the
+serene night. He laid aside his blue goggles, and his white hair,
+like a frame of silver, surrounded his energetic bronzed features,
+dimly lighted by a lamp whose flame was dying out from lack of
+oil. Apparently wrapped in thought, he took no notice of the fading
+light and impending darkness.
+
+"Within a few days," he murmured, "when on all sides that accursed city
+is burning, den of presumptuous nothingness and impious exploitation
+of the ignorant and the distressed, when the tumults break out in the
+suburbs and there rush into the terrorized streets my avenging hordes,
+engendered by rapacity and wrongs, then will I burst the walls of
+your prison, I will tear you from the clutches of fanaticism, and my
+white dove, you will be the Phoenix that will rise from the glowing
+embers! A revolution plotted by men in darkness tore me from your
+side--another revolution will sweep me into your arms and revive
+me! That moon, before reaching the apogee of its brilliance, will
+light the Philippines cleansed of loathsome filth!"
+
+Simoun, stopped suddenly, as though interrupted. A voice in his inner
+consciousness was asking if he, Simoun, were not also a part of the
+filth of that accursed city, perhaps its most poisonous ferment. Like
+the dead who are to rise at the sound of the last trumpet, a thousand
+bloody specters--desperate shades of murdered men, women violated,
+fathers torn from their families, vices stimulated and encouraged,
+virtues mocked, now rose in answer to the mysterious question. For
+the first time in his criminal career, since in Havana he had by
+means of corruption and bribery set out to fashion an instrument
+for the execution of his plans--a man without faith, patriotism, or
+conscience--for the first time in that life, something within rose up
+and protested against his actions. He closed his eyes and remained
+for some time motionless, then rubbed his hand over his forehead,
+tried to be deaf to his conscience, and felt fear creeping over
+him. No, he must not analyze himself, he lacked the courage to turn
+his gaze toward his past. The idea of his courage, his conviction,
+his self-confidence failing him at the very moment when his work was
+set before him! As the ghosts of the wretches in whose misfortunes
+he had taken a hand continued to hover before his eyes, as if issuing
+from the shining surface of the river to invade the room with appeals
+and hands extended toward him, as reproaches and laments seemed to
+fill the air with threats and cries for vengeance, he turned his gaze
+from the window and for the first time began to tremble.
+
+"No, I must be ill, I can't be feeling well," he muttered. "There
+are many who hate me, who ascribe their misfortunes to me, but--"
+
+He felt his forehead begin to burn, so he arose to approach the window
+and inhale the fresh night breeze. Below him the Pasig dragged along
+its silvered stream, on whose bright surface the foam glittered,
+winding slowly about, receding and advancing, following the course of
+the little eddies. The city loomed up on the opposite bank, and its
+black walls looked fateful, mysterious, losing their sordidness in
+the moonlight that idealizes and embellishes everything. But again
+Simoun shivered; he seemed to see before him the severe countenance
+of his father, dying in prison, but dying for having done good; then
+the face of another man, severer still, who had given his life for him
+because he believed that he was going to bring about the regeneration
+of his country.
+
+"No, I can't turn back," he exclaimed, wiping the perspiration from
+his forehead. "The work is at hand and its success will justify me! If
+I had conducted myself as you did, I should have succumbed. Nothing
+of idealism, nothing of fallacious theories! Fire and steel to the
+cancer, chastisement to vice, and afterwards destroy the instrument,
+if it be bad! No, I have planned well, but now I feel feverish, my
+reason wavers, it is natural--If I have done ill, it has been that I
+may do good, and the end justifies the means. What I will do is not
+to expose myself--"
+
+With his thoughts thus confused he lay down, and tried to fall asleep.
+
+On the following morning Placido listened submissively, with a smile
+on his lips, to his mother's preachment. When she spoke of her plan of
+interesting the Augustinian procurator he did not protest or object,
+but on the contrary offered himself to carry it out, in order to
+save trouble for his mother, whom he begged to return at once to the
+province, that very day, if possible. Cabesang Andang asked him the
+reason for such haste.
+
+"Because--because if the procurator learns that you are here he won't
+do anything until you send him a present and order some masses."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+THE ARBITER
+
+
+True it was that Padre Irene had said: the question of the academy of
+Castilian, so long before broached, was on the road to a solution. Don
+Custodio, the active Don Custodio, the most active of all the arbiters
+in the world, according to Ben-Zayb, was occupied with it, spending
+his days reading the petition and falling asleep without reaching any
+decision, waking on the following day to repeat the same performance,
+dropping off to sleep again, and so on continuously.
+
+How the good man labored, the most active of all the arbiters
+in the world! He wished to get out of the predicament by pleasing
+everybody--the friars, the high official, the Countess, Padre Irene,
+and his own liberal principles. He had consulted with Se�or Pasta, and
+Se�or Pasta had left him stupefied and confused, after advising him to
+do a million contradictory and impossible things. He had consulted with
+Pepay the dancing girl, and Pepay, who had no idea what he was talking
+about, executed a pirouette and asked him for twenty-five pesos to
+bury an aunt of hers who had suddenly died for the fifth time, or the
+fifth aunt who had suddenly died, according to fuller explanations, at
+the same time requesting that he get a cousin of hers who could read,
+write, and play the violin, a job as assistant on the public works--all
+things that were far from inspiring Don Custodio with any saving idea.
+
+Two days after the events in the Quiapo fair, Don Custodio was as
+usual busily studying the petition, without hitting upon the happy
+solution. While he yawns, coughs, smokes, and thinks about Pepay's
+legs and her pirouettes, let us give some account of this exalted
+personage, in order to understand Padre Sibyla's reason for proposing
+him as the arbiter of such a vexatious matter and why the other clique
+accepted him.
+
+Don Custodio de Salazar y Sanchez de Monteredondo, often referred
+to as _Good Authority_, belonged to that class of Manila society
+which cannot take a step without having the newspapers heap titles
+upon them, calling each _indedefatigable, distinguished, zealous,
+active, profound, intelligent, well-informed, influential_, and so
+on, as if they feared that he might be confused with some idle and
+ignorant possessor of the same name. Besides, no harm resulted from
+it, and the watchful censor was not disturbed. The _Good Authority_
+resulted from his friendship with Ben-Zayb, when the latter, in his two
+noisiest controversies, which he carried on for weeks and months in the
+columns of the newspapers about whether it was proper to wear a high
+hat, a derby, or a _salakot,_ and whether the plural of _car�cter_
+should be _car�cteres_ or _caract�res,_ in order to strengthen his
+argument always came out with, "We have this on good authority,"
+"We learn this from good authority," later letting it be known,
+for in Manila everything becomes known, that this _Good Authority_
+was no other than Don Custodio de Salazar y Sanchez de Monteredondo.
+
+He had come to Manila very young, with a good position that had enabled
+him to marry a pretty mestiza belonging to one of the wealthiest
+families of the city. As he had natural talent, boldness, and great
+self-possession, and knew how to make use of the society in which
+he found himself, he launched into business with his wife's money,
+filling contracts for the government, by reason of which he was
+made alderman, afterwards alcalde, member of the Economic Society,
+[43] councilor of the administration, president of the directory of
+the _Obras Pias_, [44] member of the Society of Mercy, director of
+the Spanish-Filipino Bank, etc., etc. Nor are these _etceteras_ to be
+taken like those ordinarily placed after a long enumeration of titles:
+Don Custodio, although never having seen a treatise on hygiene, came
+to be vice-chairman of the Board of Health, for the truth was that of
+the eight who composed this board only one had to be a physician and
+he could not be that one. So also he was a member of the Vaccination
+Board, which was composed of three physicians and seven laymen, among
+these being the Archbishop and three Provincials. He was a brother in
+all the confraternities of the common and of the most exalted dignity,
+and, as we have seen, director of the Superior Commission of Primary
+Instruction, which usually did not do anything--all these being quite
+sufficient reason for the newspapers to heap adjectives upon him no
+less when he traveled than when he sneezed.
+
+In spite of so many offices, Don Custodio was not among those who
+slept through the sessions, contenting themselves, like lazy and timid
+delegates, in voting with the majority. The opposite of the numerous
+kings of Europe who bear the title of King of Jerusalem, Don Custodio
+made his dignity felt and got from it all the benefit possible, often
+frowning, making his voice impressive, coughing out his words, often
+taking up the whole session telling a story, presenting a project, or
+disputing with a colleague who had placed himself in open opposition
+to him. Although not past forty, he already talked of acting with
+circumspection, of letting the figs ripen (adding under his breath
+"pumpkins"), of pondering deeply and of stepping with careful tread,
+of the necessity for understanding the country, because the nature of
+the Indians, because the prestige of the Spanish name, because they
+were first of all Spaniards, because religion--and so on. Remembered
+yet in Manila is a speech of his when for the first time it was
+proposed to light the city with kerosene in place of the old coconut
+oil: in such an innovation, far from seeing the extinction of the
+coconut-oil industry, he merely discerned the interests of a certain
+alderman--because Don Custodio saw a long way--and opposed it with
+all the resonance of his bucal cavity, considering the project too
+premature and predicting great social cataclysms. No less celebrated
+was his opposition to a sentimental serenade that some wished to tender
+a certain governor on the eve of his departure. Don Custodio, who felt
+a little resentment over some slight or other, succeeded in insinuating
+the idea that the rising star was the mortal enemy of the setting one,
+whereat the frightened promoters of the serenade gave it up.
+
+One day he was advised to return to Spain to be cured of a liver
+complaint, and the newspapers spoke of him as an Antaeus who had
+to set foot in the mother country to gain new strength. But the
+Manila Antaeus found himself a small and insignificant person at the
+capital. There he was nobody, and he missed his beloved adjectives. He
+did not mingle with the upper set, and his lack of education prevented
+him from amounting to much in the academies and scientific centers,
+while his backwardness and his parish-house politics drove him from
+the clubs disgusted, vexed, seeing nothing clearly but that there
+they were forever borrowing money and gambling heavily. He missed the
+submissive servants of Manila, who endured all his peevishness, and
+who now seemed to be far preferable; when a winter kept him between
+a fireplace and an attack of pneumonia, he sighed for the Manila
+winter during which a single quilt is sufficient, while in summer he
+missed the easy-chair and the boy to fan him. In short, in Madrid he
+was only one among many, and in spite of his diamonds he was once
+taken for a rustic who did not know how to comport himself and at
+another time for an _Indiano_. His scruples were scoffed at, and he
+was shamelessly flouted by some borrowers whom he offended. Disgusted
+with the conservatives, who took no great notice of his advice, as well
+as with the sponges who rifled his pockets, he declared himself to be
+of the liberal party and returned within a year to the Philippines,
+if not sound in his liver, yet completely changed in his beliefs.
+
+The eleven months spent at the capital among caf� politicians, nearly
+all retired half-pay office-holders, the various speeches caught here
+and there, this or that article of the opposition, all the political
+life that permeates the air, from the barber-shop where amid the
+scissors-clips the Figaro announces his program to the banquets
+where in harmonious periods and telling phrases the different
+shades of political opinion, the divergences and disagreements,
+are adjusted--all these things awoke in him the farther he got from
+Europe, like the life-giving sap within the sown seed prevented from
+bursting out by the thick husk, in such a way that when he reached
+Manila he believed that he was going to regenerate it and actually
+had the holiest plans and the purest ideals.
+
+During the first months after his return he was continually talking
+about the capital, about his good friends, about Minister So-and-So,
+ex-Minister Such-a-One, the delegate C., the author B., and there was
+not a political event, a court scandal, of which he was not informed
+to the last detail, nor was there a public man the secrets of whose
+private life were unknown to him, nor could anything occur that he
+had not foreseen, nor any reform be ordered but he had first been
+consulted. All this was seasoned with attacks on the conservatives
+in righteous indignation, with apologies of the liberal party, with
+a little anecdote here, a phrase there from some great man, dropped
+in as one who did not wish offices and employments, which same he
+had refused in order not to be beholden to the conservatives. Such
+was his enthusiasm in these first days that various cronies in
+the grocery-store which he visited from time to time affiliated
+themselves with the liberal party and began to style themselves
+liberals: Don Eulogio Badana, a retired sergeant of carbineers;
+the honest Armendia, by profession a pilot, and a rampant Carlist;
+Don Eusebio Picote, customs inspector; and Don Bonifacio Tacon, shoe-
+and harness-maker. [45]
+
+But nevertheless, from lack of encouragement and of opposition, his
+enthusiasm gradually waned. He did not read the newspapers that came
+from Spain, because they arrived in packages, the sight of which made
+him yawn. The ideas that he had caught having been all expended, he
+needed reinforcement, and his orators were not there, and although in
+the casinos of Manila there was enough gambling, and money was borrowed
+as in Madrid, no speech that would nourish his political ideas was
+permitted in them. But Don Custodio was not lazy, he did more than
+wish--he worked. Foreseeing that he was going to leave his bones in
+the Philippines, he began to consider that country his proper sphere
+and to devote his efforts to its welfare. Thinking to liberalize it,
+he commenced to draw up a series of reforms or projects, which were
+ingenious, to say the least. It was he who, having heard in Madrid
+mention of the wooden street pavements of Paris, not yet adopted in
+Spain, proposed the introduction of them in Manila by covering the
+streets with boards nailed down as they are on the sides of houses;
+it was he who, deploring the accidents to two-wheeled vehicles,
+planned to avoid them by putting on at least three wheels; it was
+also he who, while acting as vice-president of the Board of Health,
+ordered everything fumigated, even the telegrams that came from
+infected places; it was also he who, in compassion for the convicts
+that worked in the sun and with a desire of saving to the government
+the cost of their equipment, suggested that they be clothed in a
+simple breech-clout and set to work not by day but at night. He
+marveled, he stormed, that his projects should encounter objectors,
+but consoled himself with the reflection that the man who is worth
+enemies has them, and revenged himself by attacking and tearing to
+pieces any project, good or bad, presented by others.
+
+As he prided himself on being a liberal, upon being asked what he
+thought of the Indians he would answer, like one conferring a great
+favor, that they were fitted for manual labor and the _imitative
+arts_ (meaning thereby music, painting, and sculpture), adding his
+old postscript that to know them one must have resided many, many
+years in the country. Yet when he heard of any one of them excelling
+in something that was not manual labor or an _imitative art_--in
+chemistry, medicine, or philosophy, for example--he would exclaim:
+"Ah, he promises fairly, fairly well, he's not a fool!" and feel sure
+that a great deal of Spanish blood must flow in the veins of such an
+_Indian_. If unable to discover any in spite of his good intentions,
+he then sought a Japanese origin, for it was at that time the fashion
+began of attributing to the Japanese or the Arabs whatever good the
+Filipinos might have in them. For him the native songs were Arabic
+music, as was also the alphabet of the ancient Filipinos--he was
+certain of this, although he did not know Arabic nor had he ever seen
+that alphabet.
+
+"Arabic, the purest Arabic," he said to Ben-Zayb in a tone that
+admitted no reply. "At best, Chinese!"
+
+Then he would add, with a significant wink: "Nothing can be, nothing
+ought to be, original with the Indians, you understand! I like them
+greatly, but they mustn't be allowed to pride themselves upon anything,
+for then they would take heart and turn into a lot of wretches."
+
+At other times he would say: "I love the Indians fondly, I've
+constituted myself their father and defender, but it's necessary to
+keep everything in its proper place. Some were born to command and
+others to serve--plainly, that is a truism which can't be uttered very
+loudly, but it can be put into practise without many words. For look,
+the trick depends upon trifles. When you wish to reduce a people
+to subjection, assure it that it is in subjection. The first day it
+will laugh, the second protest, the third doubt, and the fourth be
+convinced. To keep the Filipino docile, he must have repeated to him
+day after day what he is, to convince him that he is incompetent. What
+good would it do, besides, to have him believe in something else that
+would make him wretched? Believe me, it's an act of charity to hold
+every creature in his place--that is order, harmony. That constitutes
+the _science_ of government."
+
+In referring to his policies, Don Custodio was not satisfied with the
+word _art_, and upon pronouncing the word _government_, he would extend
+his hand downwards to the height of a man bent over on his knees.
+
+In regard to his religious ideas, he prided himself on being a
+Catholic, very much a Catholic--ah, Catholic Spain, the land of
+_Mar�a Sant�sima_! A liberal could be and ought to be a Catholic,
+when the reactionaries were setting themselves up as gods or saints,
+just as a mulatto passes for a white man in Kaffirland. But with all
+that, he ate meat during Lent, except on Good Friday, never went to
+confession, believed neither in miracles nor the infallibility of the
+Pope, and when he attended mass, went to the one at ten o'clock, or
+to the shortest, the military mass. Although in Madrid he had spoken
+ill of the religious orders, so as not to be out of harmony with his
+surroundings, considering them anachronisms, and had hurled curses
+against the Inquisition, while relating this or that lurid or droll
+story wherein the habits danced, or rather friars without habits,
+yet in speaking of the Philippines, which should be ruled by special
+laws, he would cough, look wise, and again extend his hand downwards
+to that mysterious altitude.
+
+"The friars are necessary, they're a necessary evil," he would declare.
+
+But how he would rage when any Indian dared to doubt the miracles
+or did not acknowledge the Pope! All the tortures of the Inquisition
+were insufficient to punish such temerity.
+
+When it was objected that to rule or to live at the expense of
+ignorance has another and somewhat ugly name and is punished by law
+when the culprit is a single person, he would justify his position
+by referring to other colonies. "We," he would announce in his
+official tone, "can speak out plainly! We're not like the British
+and the Dutch who, in order to hold people in subjection, make use
+of the lash. We avail ourselves of other means, milder and surer. The
+salutary influence of the friars is superior to the British lash."
+
+This last remark made his fortune. For a long time Ben-Zayb continued
+to use adaptations of it, and with him all Manila. The thinking
+part of Manila applauded it, and it even got to Madrid, where it
+was quoted in the Parliament as from _a liberal of long residence
+there_. The friars, flattered by the comparison and seeing their
+prestige enhanced, sent him sacks of chocolate, presents which the
+incorruptible Don Custodio returned, so that Ben-Zayb immediately
+compared him to Epaminondas. Nevertheless, this modern Epaminondas
+made use of the rattan in his choleric moments, and advised its use!
+
+At that time the conventos, fearful that he would render a decision
+favorable to the petition of the students, increased their gifts,
+so that on the afternoon when we see him he was more perplexed than
+ever, his reputation for energy was being compromised. It had been
+more than a fortnight since he had had the petition in his hands,
+and only that morning the high official, after praising his zeal,
+had asked for a decision. Don Custodio had replied with mysterious
+gravity, giving him to understand that it was not yet completed. The
+high official had smiled a smile that still worried and haunted him.
+
+As we were saying, he yawned and yawned. In one of these movements, at
+the moment when he opened his eyes and closed his mouth, his attention
+was caught by a file of red envelopes, arranged in regular order on a
+magnificent kamagon desk. On the back of each could be read in large
+letters: PROJECTS.
+
+For a moment he forgot his troubles and Pepay's pirouettes, to
+reflect upon all that those files contained, which had issued from his
+prolific brain in his hours of inspiration. How many original ideas,
+how many sublime thoughts, how many means of ameliorating the woes
+of the Philippines! Immortality and the gratitude of the country were
+surely his!
+
+Like an old lover who discovers a moldy package of amorous epistles,
+Don Custodio arose and approached the desk. The first envelope, thick,
+swollen, and plethoric, bore the title: PROJECTS IN PROJECT.
+
+"No," he murmured, "they're excellent things, but it would take a
+year to read them over."
+
+The second, also quite voluminous, was entitled: PROJECTS UNDER
+CONSIDERATION. "No, not those either."
+
+Then came the PROJECTS NEARING COMPLETION, PROJECTS PRESENTED, PROJECTS
+REJECTED, PROJECTS APPROVED, PROJECTS POSTPONED. These last envelopes
+held little, but the least of all was that of the PROJECTS EXECUTED.
+
+Don Custodio wrinkled up his nose--what did it contain? He had
+completely forgotten what was in it. A sheet of yellowish paper
+showed from under the flap, as though the envelope were sticking out
+its tongue. This he drew out and unfolded: it was the famous project
+for the School of Arts and Trades!
+
+"What the devil!" he exclaimed. "If the Augustinian padres took charge
+of it--"
+
+Suddenly he slapped his forehead and arched his eyebrows, while a look
+of triumph overspread his face. "I have reached a decision!" he cried
+with an oath that was not exactly _eureka_. "My decision is made!"
+
+Repeating his peculiar _eureka_ five or six times, which struck the
+air like so many gleeful lashes, he sat down at his desk, radiant
+with joy, and began to write furiously.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+MANILA TYPES
+
+
+That night there was a grand function at the Teatro de
+Variedades. Mr. Jouay's French operetta company was giving its initial
+performance, _Les Cloches de Corneville_. To the eyes of the public
+was to be exhibited his select troupe, whose fame the newspapers had
+for days been proclaiming. It was reported that among the actresses
+was a very beautiful voice, with a figure even more beautiful, and
+if credit could be given to rumor, her amiability surpassed even her
+voice and figure.
+
+At half-past seven in the evening there were no more tickets to be
+had, not even though they had been for Padre Salvi himself in his
+direct need, and the persons waiting to enter the general admission
+already formed a long queue. In the ticket-office there were scuffles
+and fights, talk of filibusterism and races, but this did not produce
+any tickets, so that by a quarter before eight fabulous prices were
+being offered for them. The appearance of the building, profusely
+illuminated, with flowers and plants in all the doors and windows,
+enchanted the new arrivals to such an extent that they burst out into
+exclamations and applause. A large crowd surged about the entrance,
+gazing enviously at those going in, those who came early from fear
+of missing their seats. Laughter, whispering, expectation greeted the
+later arrivals, who disconsolately joined the curious crowd, and now
+that they could not get in contented themselves with watching those
+who did.
+
+Yet there was one person who seemed out of place amid such great
+eagerness and curiosity. He was a tall, meager man, who dragged one
+leg stiffly when he walked, dressed in a wretched brown coat and dirty
+checkered trousers that fitted his lean, bony limbs tightly. A straw
+sombrero, artistic in spite of being broken, covered an enormous
+head and allowed his dirty gray, almost red, hair to straggle out
+long and kinky at the end like a poet's curls. But the most notable
+thing about this man was not his clothing or his European features,
+guiltless of beard or mustache, but his fiery red face, from which he
+got the nickname by which he was known, _Camaroncocido_. [46] He was
+a curious character belonging to a prominent Spanish family, but he
+lived like a vagabond and a beggar, scoffing at the prestige which he
+flouted indifferently with his rags. He was reputed to be a kind of
+reporter, and in fact his gray goggle-eyes, so cold and thoughtful,
+always showed up where anything publishable was happening. His manner
+of living was a mystery to all, as no one seemed to know where he
+ate and slept. Perhaps he had an empty hogshead somewhere.
+
+But at that moment Camaroncocido lacked his usual hard and indifferent
+expression, something like mirthful pity being reflected in his
+looks. A funny little man accosted him merrily.
+
+"Friend!" exclaimed the latter, in a raucous voice, as hoarse as a
+frog's, while he displayed several Mexican pesos, which Camaroncocido
+merely glanced at and then shrugged his shoulders. What did they
+matter to him?
+
+The little old man was a fitting contrast to him. Small, very small,
+he wore on his head a high hat, which presented the appearance of a
+huge hairy worm, and lost himself in an enormous frock coat, too wide
+and too long for him, to reappear in trousers too short, not reaching
+below his calves. His body seemed to be the grandfather and his legs
+the grandchildren, while as for his shoes he appeared to be floating
+on the land, for they were of an enormous sailor type, apparently
+protesting against the hairy worm worn on his head with all the energy
+of a convento beside a World's Exposition. If Camaroncocido was red,
+he was brown; while the former, although of Spanish extraction, had
+not a single hair on his face, yet he, an Indian, had a goatee and
+mustache, both long, white, and sparse. His expression was lively. He
+was known as _Tio Quico_, [47] and like his friend lived on publicity,
+advertising the shows and posting the theatrical announcements,
+being perhaps the only Filipino who could appear with impunity in a
+silk hat and frock coat, just as his friend was the first Spaniard
+who laughed at the prestige of his race.
+
+"The Frenchman has paid me well," he said smiling and showing his
+picturesque gums, which looked like a street after a conflagration. "I
+did a good job in posting the bills."
+
+Camaroncocido shrugged his shoulders again. "Quico," he rejoined in
+a cavernous voice, "if they've given you six pesos for your work,
+how much will they give the friars?"
+
+Tio Quico threw back his head in his usual lively manner. "To the
+friars?"
+
+"Because you surely know," continued Camaroncocido, "that all this
+crowd was secured for them by the conventos."
+
+The fact was that the friars, headed by Padre Salvi, and some lay
+brethren captained by Don Custodio, had opposed such shows. Padre
+Camorra, who could not attend, watered at the eyes and mouth, but
+argued with Ben-Zayb, who defended them feebly, thinking of the free
+tickets they would send his newspaper. Don Custodio spoke of morality,
+religion, good manners, and the like.
+
+"But," stammered the writer, "if our own farces with their plays on
+words and phrases of double meaning--"
+
+"But at least they're in Castilian!" the virtuous councilor interrupted
+with a roar, inflamed to righteous wrath. "Obscenities in French,
+man, Ben-Zayb, for God's sake, in French! Never!"
+
+He uttered this _never_ with the energy of three Guzmans threatened
+with being killed like fleas if they did not surrender twenty
+Tarifas. Padre Irene naturally agreed with Don Custodio and execrated
+French operetta. Whew, he had been in Paris, but had never set foot
+in a theater, the Lord deliver him!
+
+Yet the French operetta also counted numerous partizans. The officers
+of the army and navy, among them the General's aides, the clerks,
+and many society people were anxious to enjoy the delicacies of the
+French language from the mouths of genuine _Parisiennes_, and with
+them were affiliated those who had traveled by the M.M. [48] and had
+jabbered a little French during the voyage, those who had visited
+Paris, and all those who wished to appear learned.
+
+Hence, Manila society was divided into two factions, operettists
+and anti-operettists. The latter were supported by the elderly
+ladies, wives jealous and careful of their husbands' love, and by
+those who were engaged, while those who were free and those who
+were beautiful declared themselves enthusiastic operettists. Notes
+and then more notes were exchanged, there were goings and comings,
+mutual recriminations, meetings, lobbyings, arguments, even talk of
+an insurrection of the natives, of their indolence, of inferior and
+superior races, of prestige and other humbugs, so that after much
+gossip and more recrimination, the permit was granted, Padre Salvi
+at the same time publishing a pastoral that was read by no one but
+the proof-reader. There were questionings whether the General had
+quarreled with the Countess, whether she spent her time in the halls
+of pleasure, whether His Excellency was greatly annoyed, whether
+there had been presents exchanged, whether the French consul--, and
+so on and on. Many names were bandied about: Quiroga the Chinaman's,
+Simoun's, and even those of many actresses.
+
+Thanks to these scandalous preliminaries, the people's impatience had
+been aroused, and since the evening before, when the troupe arrived,
+there was talk of nothing but attending the first performance. From
+the hour when the red posters announced _Les Cloches de Corneville_ the
+victors prepared to celebrate their triumph. In some offices, instead
+of the time being spent in reading newspapers and gossiping, it was
+devoted to devouring the synopsis and spelling out French novels, while
+many feigned business outside to consult their pocket-dictionaries
+on the sly. So no business was transacted, callers were told to come
+back the next day, but the public could not take offense, for they
+encountered some very polite and affable clerks, who received and
+dismissed them with grand salutations in the French style. The clerks
+were practising, brushing the dust off their French, and calling to
+one another _oui, monsieur, s'il vous plait_, and _pardon_! at every
+turn, so that it was a pleasure to see and hear them.
+
+But the place where the excitement reached its climax was the newspaper
+office. Ben-Zayb, having been appointed critic and translator of the
+synopsis, trembled like a poor woman accused of witchcraft, as he saw
+his enemies picking out his blunders and throwing up to his face his
+deficient knowledge of French. When the Italian opera was on, he had
+very nearly received a challenge for having mistranslated a tenor's
+name, while an envious rival had immediately published an article
+referring to him as an ignoramus--him, the foremost thinking head in
+the Philippines! All the trouble he had had to defend himself! He
+had had to write at least seventeen articles and consult fifteen
+dictionaries, so with these salutary recollections, the wretched
+Ben-Zayb moved about with leaden hands, to say nothing of his feet,
+for that would be plagiarizing Padre Camorra, who had once intimated
+that the journalist wrote with them.
+
+"You see, Quico?" said Camaroncocido. "One half of the people have
+come because the friars told them not to, making it a kind of public
+protest, and the other half because they say to themselves, 'Do the
+friars object to it? Then it must be instructive!' Believe me, Quico,
+your advertisements are a good thing but the pastoral was better,
+even taking into consideration the fact that it was read by no one."
+
+"Friend, do you believe," asked Tio Quico uneasily, "that on account
+of the competition with Padre Salvi my business will in the future
+be prohibited?"
+
+"Maybe so, Quico, maybe so," replied the other, gazing at the
+sky. "Money's getting scarce."
+
+Tio Quico muttered some incoherent words: if the friars were going to
+turn theatrical advertisers, he would become a friar. After bidding his
+friend good-by, he moved away coughing and rattling his silver coins.
+
+With his eternal indifference Camaroncocido continued to wander about
+here and there with his crippled leg and sleepy looks. The arrival
+of unfamiliar faces caught his attention, coming as they did from
+different parts and signaling to one another with a wink or a cough. It
+was the first time that he had ever seen these individuals on such
+an occasion, he who knew all the faces and features in the city. Men
+with dark faces, humped shoulders, uneasy and uncertain movements,
+poorly disguised, as though they had for the first time put on sack
+coats, slipped about among the shadows, shunning attention, instead
+of getting in the front rows where they could see well.
+
+"Detectives or thieves?" Camaroncocido asked himself and immediately
+shrugged his shoulders. "But what is it to me?"
+
+The lamp of a carriage that drove up lighted in passing a group of
+four or five of these individuals talking with a man who appeared to
+be an army officer.
+
+"Detectives! It must be a new corps," he muttered with his shrug
+of indifference. Soon, however, he noticed that the officer, after
+speaking to two or three more groups, approached a carriage and seemed
+to be talking vigorously with some person inside. Camaroncocido took
+a few steps forward and without surprise thought that he recognized
+the jeweler Simoun, while his sharp ears caught this short dialogue.
+
+"The signal will be a gunshot!"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Don't worry--it's the General who is ordering it, but be careful about
+saying so. If you follow my instructions, you'll get a promotion."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"So, be ready!"
+
+The voice ceased and a second later the carriage drove away. In spite
+of his indifference Camaroncocido could not but mutter, "Something's
+afoot--hands on pockets!"
+
+But feeling his own to be empty, he again shrugged his shoulders. What
+did it matter to him, even though the heavens should fall?
+
+So he continued his pacing about. On passing near two persons engaged
+in conversation, he caught what one of them, who had rosaries and
+scapularies around his neck, was saying in Tagalog: "The friars are
+more powerful than the General, don't be a fool! He'll go away and
+they'll stay here. So, if we do well, we'll get rich. The signal is
+a gunshot."
+
+"Hold hard, hold hard," murmured Camaroncocido, tightening his
+fingers. "On that side the General, on this Padre Salvi. Poor
+country! But what is it to me?"
+
+Again shrugging his shoulders and expectorating at the same time,
+two actions that with him were indications of supreme indifference,
+he continued his observations.
+
+Meanwhile, the carriages were arriving in dizzy streams, stopping
+directly before the door to set down the members of the select
+society. Although the weather was scarcely even cool, the ladies
+sported magnificent shawls, silk neckerchiefs, and even light
+cloaks. Among the escorts, some who were in frock coats with white
+ties wore overcoats, while others carried them on their arms to
+display the rich silk linings.
+
+In a group of spectators, Tadeo, he who was always taken ill the
+moment the professor appeared, was accompanied by a fellow townsman
+of his, the novice whom we saw suffer evil consequences from reading
+wrongly the Cartesian principle. This novice was very inquisitive and
+addicted to tiresome questions, and Tadeo was taking advantage of his
+ingenuousness and inexperience to relate to him the most stupendous
+lies. Every Spaniard that spoke to him, whether clerkling or underling,
+was presented as a leading merchant, a marquis, or a count, while on
+the other hand any one who passed him by was a greenhorn, a petty
+official, a nobody! When pedestrians failed him in keeping up the
+novice's astonishment, he resorted to the resplendent carriages that
+came up. Tadeo would bow politely, wave his hand in a friendly manner,
+and call out a familiar greeting.
+
+"Who's he?"
+
+"Bah!" was the negligent reply. "The Civil Governor, the Vice-Governor,
+Judge ----, Se�ora ----, all friends of mine!"
+
+The novice marveled and listened in fascination, taking care to keep
+on the left. Tadeo the friend of judges and governors!
+
+Tadeo named all the persons who arrived, when he did not know them
+inventing titles, biographies, and interesting sketches.
+
+"You see that tall gentleman with dark whiskers, somewhat squint-eyed,
+dressed in black--he's Judge A ----, an intimate friend of the wife of
+Colonel B ----. One day if it hadn't been for me they would have come
+to blows. Hello, here comes that Colonel! What if they should fight?"
+
+The novice held his breath, but the colonel and the judge shook hands
+cordially, the soldier, an old bachelor, inquiring about the health
+of the judge's family.
+
+"Ah, thank heaven!" breathed Tadeo. "I'm the one who made them
+friends."
+
+"What if they should invite us to go in?" asked the novice timidly.
+
+"Get out, boy! I never accept favors!" retorted Tadeo majestically. "I
+confer them, but disinterestedly."
+
+The novice bit his lip and felt smaller than ever, while he placed
+a respectful distance between himself and his fellow townsman.
+
+Tadeo resumed: "That is the musician H----; that one, the lawyer
+J----, who delivered as his own a speech printed in all the books and
+was congratulated and admired for it; Doctor K----, that man just
+getting out of a hansom, is a specialist in diseases of children,
+so he's called Herod; that's the banker L----, who can talk only of
+his money and his hoards; the poet M----, who is always dealing with
+the stars and _the beyond_. There goes the beautiful wife of N----,
+whom Padre Q----is accustomed to meet when he calls upon the absent
+husband; the Jewish merchant P----, who came to the islands with a
+thousand pesos and is now a millionaire. That fellow with the long
+beard is the physician R----, who has become rich by making invalids
+more than by curing them."
+
+"Making invalids?"
+
+"Yes, boy, in the examination of the conscripts. Attention! That
+finely dressed gentleman is not a physician but a homeopathist _sui
+generis_--he professes completely the _similis similibus_. The young
+cavalry captain with him is his chosen disciple. That man in a light
+suit with his hat tilted back is the government clerk whose maxim
+is never to be polite and who rages like a demon when he sees a hat
+on any one else's head--they say that he does it to ruin the German
+hatters. The man just arriving with his family is the wealthy merchant
+C----, who has an income of over a hundred thousand pesos. But what
+would you say if I should tell you that he still owes me four pesos,
+five reales, and twelve cuartos? But who would collect from a rich
+man like him?"
+
+"That gentleman in debt to you?"
+
+"Sure! One day I got him out of a bad fix. It was on a Friday at
+half-past six in the morning, I still remember, because I hadn't
+breakfasted. That lady who is followed by a duenna is the celebrated
+Pepay, the dancing girl, but she doesn't dance any more now that a
+very Catholic gentleman and a great friend of mine has--forbidden
+it. There's the death's-head Z----, who's surely following her to get
+her to dance again. He's a good fellow, and a great friend of mine,
+but has one defect--he's a Chinese mestizo and yet calls himself a
+Peninsular Spaniard. Sssh! Look at Ben-Zayb, him with the face of a
+friar, who's carrying a pencil and a roll of paper in his hand. He's
+the great writer, Ben-Zayb, a good friend of mine--he has talent!"
+
+"You don't say! And that little man with white whiskers?"
+
+"He's the official who has appointed his daughters, those three little
+girls, assistants in his department, so as to get their names on the
+pay-roll. He's a clever man, very clever! When he makes a mistake he
+blames it on somebody else, he buys things and pays for them out of
+the treasury. He's clever, very, very clever!"
+
+Tadeo was about to say more, but suddenly checked himself.
+
+"And that gentleman who has a fierce air and gazes at everybody over
+his shoulders?" inquired the novice, pointing to a man who nodded
+haughtily.
+
+But Tadeo did not answer. He was craning his neck to see Paulita
+Gomez, who was approaching with a friend, Do�a Victorina, and Juanito
+Pelaez. The latter had presented her with a box and was more humped
+than ever.
+
+Carriage after carriage drove up; the actors and actresses arrived
+and entered by a separate door, followed by their friends and admirers.
+
+After Paulita had gone in, Tadeo resumed: "Those are the nieces of
+the rich Captain D----, those coming up in a landau; you see how
+pretty and healthy they are? Well, in a few years they'll be dead or
+crazy. Captain D---- is opposed to their marrying, and the insanity
+of the uncle is appearing in the nieces. That's the Se�orita E----,
+the rich heiress whom the world and the conventos are disputing
+over. Hello, I know that fellow! It's Padre Irene, in disguise, with
+a false mustache. I recognize him by his nose. And he was so greatly
+opposed to this!"
+
+The scandalized novice watched a neatly cut coat disappear behind a
+group of ladies.
+
+"The Three Fates!" went on Tadeo, watching the arrival of three
+withered, bony, hollow-eyed, wide-mouthed, and shabbily dressed
+women. "They're called--"
+
+"Atropos?" ventured the novice, who wished to show that he also knew
+somebody, at least in mythology.
+
+"No, boy, they're called the Weary Waiters--old, censorious, and
+dull. They pretend to hate everybody--men, women, and children. But
+look how the Lord always places beside the evil a remedy, only that
+sometimes it comes late. There behind the Fates, the frights of
+the city, come those three girls, the pride of their friends, among
+whom I count myself. That thin young man with goggle-eyes, somewhat
+stooped, who is wildly gesticulating because he can't get tickets,
+is the chemist S----, author of many essays and scientific treatises,
+some of which are notable and have captured prizes. The Spaniards say
+of him, 'There's some hope for him, some hope for him.' The fellow who
+is soothing him with his Voltairian smile is the poet T----, a young
+man of talent, a great friend of mine, and, for the very reason that
+he has talent, he has thrown away his pen. That fellow who is trying to
+get in with the actors by the other door is the young physician U----,
+who has effected some remarkable cures--it's also said of him that he
+promises well. He's not such a scoundrel as Pelaez but he's cleverer
+and slyer still. I believe that he'd shake dice with death and win."
+
+"And that brown gentleman with a mustache like hog-bristles?"
+
+"Ah, that's the merchant F----, who forges everything, even his
+baptismal certificate. He wants to be a Spanish mestizo at any cost,
+and is making heroic efforts to forget his native language."
+
+"But his daughters are very white."
+
+"Yes, that's the reason rice has gone up in price, and yet they eat
+nothing but bread."
+
+The novice did not understand the connection between the price of
+rice and the whiteness of those girls, but he held his peace.
+
+"There goes the fellow that's engaged to one of them, that thin brown
+youth who is following them with a lingering movement and speaking with
+a protecting air to the three friends who are laughing at him. He's
+a martyr to his beliefs, to his consistency."
+
+The novice was filled with admiration and respect for the young man.
+
+"He has the look of a fool, and he is one," continued Tadeo. "He
+was born in San Pedro Makati and has inflicted many privations upon
+himself. He scarcely ever bathes or eats pork, because, according to
+him, the Spaniards don't do those things, and for the same reason he
+doesn't eat rice and dried fish, although he may be watering at the
+mouth and dying of hunger. Anything that comes from Europe, rotten
+or preserved, he considers divine--a month ago Basilio cured him of
+a severe attack of gastritis, for he had eaten a jar of mustard to
+prove that he's a European."
+
+At that moment the orchestra struck up a waltz.
+
+"You see that gentleman--that hypochondriac who goes along turning
+his head from side to side, seeking salutes? That's the celebrated
+governor of Pangasinan, a good man who loses his appetite whenever any
+Indian fails to salute him. He would have died if he hadn't issued the
+proclamation about salutes to which he owes his celebrity. Poor fellow,
+it's only been three days since he came from the province and look how
+thin he has become! Oh, here's the great man, the illustrious--open
+your eyes!"
+
+"Who? That man with knitted brows?"
+
+"Yes, that's Don Custodio, the liberal, Don Custodio. His brows are
+knit because he's meditating over some important project. If the
+ideas he has in his head were carried out, this would be a different
+world! Ah, here comes Makaraig, your housemate."
+
+It was in fact Makaraig, with Pecson, Sandoval, and Isagani. Upon
+seeing them, Tadeo advanced and spoke to them.
+
+"Aren't you coming in?" Makaraig asked him.
+
+"We haven't been able to get tickets."
+
+"Fortunately, we have a box," replied Makaraig. "Basilio couldn't
+come. Both of you, come in with us."
+
+Tadeo did not wait for the invitation to be repeated, but the novice,
+fearing that he would intrude, with the timidity natural to the
+provincial Indian, excused himself, nor could he be persuaded to enter.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+THE PERFORMANCE
+
+
+The interior of the theater presented a lively aspect. It was filled
+from top to bottom, with people standing in the corridors and in
+the aisles, fighting to withdraw a head from some hole where they
+had inserted it, or to shove an eye between a collar and an ear. The
+open boxes, occupied for the most part by ladies, looked like baskets
+of flowers, whose petals--the fans--shook in a light breeze, wherein
+hummed a thousand bees. However, just as there are flowers of strong
+or delicate fragrance, flowers that kill and flowers that console,
+so from our baskets were exhaled like emanations: there were to be
+heard dialogues, conversations, remarks that bit and stung. Three
+or four boxes, however, were still vacant, in spite of the lateness
+of the hour. The performance had been advertised for half-past eight
+and it was already a quarter to nine, but the curtain did not go up,
+as his Excellency had not yet arrived. The gallery-gods, impatient
+and uncomfortable in their seats, started a racket, clapping their
+hands and pounding the floor with their canes.
+
+"Boom--boom--boom! Ring up the curtain! Boom--boom--boom!"
+
+The artillerymen were not the least noisy. Emulators of Mars, as
+Ben-Zayb called them, they were not satisfied with this music; thinking
+themselves perhaps at a bullfight, they made remarks at the ladies who
+passed before them in words that are euphemistically called flowers
+in Madrid, although at times they seem more like foul weeds. Without
+heeding the furious looks of the husbands, they bandied from one to
+another the sentiments and longings inspired by so many beauties.
+
+In the reserved seats, where the ladies seemed to be afraid to venture,
+as few were to be seen there, a murmur of voices prevailed amid
+suppressed laughter and clouds of tobacco smoke. They discussed the
+merits of the players and talked scandal, wondering if his Excellency
+had quarreled with the friars, if his presence at such a show was
+a defiance or mere curiosity. Others gave no heed to these matters,
+but were engaged in attracting the attention of the ladies, throwing
+themselves into attitudes more or less interesting and statuesque,
+flashing diamond rings, especially when they thought themselves the
+foci of insistent opera-glasses, while yet another would address a
+respectful salute to this or that se�ora or se�orita, at the same time
+lowering his head gravely to whisper to a neighbor, "How ridiculous
+she is! And such a bore!"
+
+The lady would respond with one of her most gracious smiles and an
+enchanting nod of her head, while murmuring to a friend sitting near,
+amid lazy flourishes of her fan, "How impudent he is! He's madly in
+love, my dear."
+
+Meanwhile, the noise increased. There remained only two vacant
+boxes, besides that of his Excellency, which was distinguished by
+its curtains of red velvet. The orchestra played another waltz, the
+audience protested, when fortunately there arose a charitable hero to
+distract their attention and relieve the manager, in the person of
+a man who had occupied a reserved seat and refused to give it up to
+its owner, the philosopher Don Primitivo. Finding his own arguments
+useless, Don Primitivo had appealed to an usher. "I don't care to,"
+the hero responded to the latter's protests, placidly puffing at his
+cigarette. The usher appealed to the manager. "I don't care to," was
+the response, as he settled back in the seat. The manager went away,
+while the artillerymen in the gallery began to sing out encouragement
+to the usurper.
+
+Our hero, now that he had attracted general attention, thought that
+to yield would be to lower himself, so he held on to the seat, while
+he repeated his answer to a pair of guards the manager had called
+in. These, in consideration of the rebel's rank, went in search of
+their corporal, while the whole house broke out into applause at the
+firmness of the hero, who remained seated like a Roman senator.
+
+Hisses were heard, and the inflexible gentleman turned angrily to see
+if they were meant for him, but the galloping of horses resounded
+and the stir increased. One might have said that a revolution had
+broken out, or at least a riot, but no, the orchestra had suspended
+the waltz and was playing the royal march: it was his Excellency, the
+Captain-General and Governor of the islands, who was entering. All
+eyes sought and followed him, then lost sight of him, until he
+finally appeared in his box. After looking all about him and making
+some persons happy with a lordly salute, he sat down, as though he
+were indeed the man for whom the chair was waiting. The artillerymen
+then became silent and the orchestra tore into the prelude.
+
+Our students occupied a box directly facing that of Pepay, the
+dancing girl. Her box was a present from Makaraig, who had already
+got on good terms with her in order to propitiate Don Custodio. Pepay
+had that very afternoon written a note to the illustrious arbiter,
+asking for an answer and appointing an interview in the theater. For
+this reason, Don Custodio, in spite of the active opposition he
+had manifested toward the French operetta, had gone to the theater,
+which action won him some caustic remarks on the part of Don Manuel,
+his ancient adversary in the sessions of the Ayuntamiento.
+
+"I've come to judge the operetta," he had replied in the tone of a
+Cato whose conscience was clear.
+
+So Makaraig was exchanging looks of intelligence with Pepay, who was
+giving him to understand that she had something to tell him. As the
+dancing girl's face wore a happy expression, the students augured
+that a favorable outcome was assured. Sandoval, who had just returned
+from making calls in other boxes, also assured them that the decision
+had been favorable, that that very afternoon the Superior Commission
+had considered and approved it. Every one was jubilant, even Pecson
+having laid aside his pessimism when he saw the smiling Pepay display
+a note. Sandoval and Makaraig congratulated one another, Isagani alone
+remaining cold and unsmiling. What had happened to this young man?
+
+Upon entering the theater, Isagani had caught sight of Paulita in a
+box, with Juanito Pelaez talking to her. He had turned pale, thinking
+that he must be mistaken. But no, it was she herself, she who greeted
+him with a gracious smile, while her beautiful eyes seemed to be
+asking pardon and promising explanations. The fact was that they had
+agreed upon Isagani's going first to the theater to see if the show
+contained anything improper for a young woman, but now he found her
+there, and in no other company than that of his rival. What passed in
+his mind is indescribable: wrath, jealousy, humiliation, resentment
+raged within him, and there were moments even when he wished that
+the theater would fall in; he had a violent desire to laugh aloud,
+to insult his sweetheart, to challenge his rival, to make a scene, but
+finally contented himself with sitting quiet and not looking at her at
+all. He was conscious of the beautiful plans Makaraig and Sandoval were
+making, but they sounded like distant echoes, while the notes of the
+waltz seemed sad and lugubrious, the whole audience stupid and foolish,
+and several times he had to make an effort to keep back the tears. Of
+the trouble stirred up by the hero who refused to give up the seat,
+of the arrival of the Captain-General, he was scarcely conscious. He
+stared toward the drop-curtain, on which was depicted a kind of
+gallery with sumptuous red hangings, affording a view of a garden in
+which a fountain played, yet how sad the gallery looked to him and how
+melancholy the painted landscape! A thousand vague recollections surged
+into his memory like distant echoes of music heard in the night, like
+songs of infancy, the murmur of lonely forests and gloomy rivulets,
+moonlit nights on the shore of the sea spread wide before his eyes. So
+the enamored youth considered himself very wretched and stared fixedly
+at the ceiling so that the tears should not fall from his eyes.
+
+A burst of applause drew him from these meditations. The curtain
+had just risen, and the merry chorus of peasants of Corneville was
+presented, all dressed in cotton caps, with heavy wooden sabots on
+their feet. Some six or seven girls, well-rouged on the lips and
+cheeks, with large black circles around their eyes to increase their
+brilliance, displayed white arms, fingers covered with diamonds,
+round and shapely limbs. While they were chanting the Norman phrase
+"_Allez, marchez! Allez, marchez!_" they smiled at their different
+admirers in the reserved seats with such openness that Don Custodio,
+after looking toward Pepay's box to assure himself that she was
+not doing the same thing with some other admirer, set down in his
+note-book this indecency, and to make sure of it lowered his head a
+little to see if the actresses were not showing their knees.
+
+"Oh, these Frenchwomen!" he muttered, while his imagination lost
+itself in considerations somewhat more elevated, as he made comparisons
+and projects.
+
+"_Quoi v'la tous les cancans d'la s'maine!_" sang Gertrude, a proud
+damsel, who was looking roguishly askance at the Captain-General.
+
+"We're going to have the cancan!" exclaimed Tadeo, the winner of the
+first prize in the French class, who had managed to make out this
+word. "Makaraig, they're going to dance the cancan!"
+
+He rubbed his hands gleefully. From the moment the curtain rose,
+Tadeo had been heedless of the music. He was looking only for the
+prurient, the indecent, the immoral in actions and dress, and with
+his scanty French was sharpening his ears to catch the obscenities
+that the austere guardians of the fatherland had foretold.
+
+Sandoval, pretending to know French, had converted himself into a
+kind of interpreter for his friends. He knew as much about it as
+Tadeo, but the published synopsis helped him and his fancy supplied
+the rest. "Yes," he said, "they're going to dance the cancan--she's
+going to lead it."
+
+Makaraig and Pecson redoubled their attention, smiling in anticipation,
+while Isagani looked away, mortified to think that Paulita should
+be present at such a show and reflecting that it was his duty to
+challenge Juanito Pelaez the next day.
+
+But the young men waited in vain. Serpolette came on, a charming girl,
+in her cotton cap, provoking and challenging. "_Hein, qui parle de
+Serpolette?_" she demanded of the gossips, with her arms akimbo in
+a combative attitude. Some one applauded, and after him all those in
+the reserved seats. Without changing her girlish attitude, Serpolette
+gazed at the person who had started the applause and paid him with a
+smile, displaying rows of little teeth that looked like a string of
+pearls in a case of red velvet.
+
+Tadeo followed her gaze and saw a man in a false mustache with an
+extraordinarily large nose. "By the monk's cowl!" he exclaimed. "It's
+Irene!"
+
+"Yes," corroborated Sandoval, "I saw him behind the scenes talking
+with the actresses."
+
+The truth was that Padre Irene, who was a melomaniac of the first
+degree and knew French well, had been sent to the theater by Padre
+Salvi as a sort of religious detective, or so at least he told
+the persons who recognized him. As a faithful critic, who should
+not be satisfied with viewing the piece from a distance, he wished
+to examine the actresses at first hand, so he had mingled in the
+groups of admirers and gallants, had penetrated into the greenroom,
+where was whispered and talked a French required by the situation,
+a _market French_, a language that is readily comprehensible for the
+vender when the buyer seems disposed to pay well.
+
+Serpolette was surrounded by two gallant officers, a sailor, and a
+lawyer, when she caught sight of him moving about, sticking the tip
+of his long nose into all the nooks and corners, as though with it
+he were ferreting out all the mysteries of the stage. She ceased her
+chatter, knitted her eyebrows, then raised them, opened her lips and
+with the vivacity of a _Parisienne_ left her admirers to hurl herself
+like a torpedo upon our critic.
+
+"_Tiens, tiens, Toutou! Mon lapin!_" she cried, catching Padre Irene's
+arm and shaking it merrily, while the air rang with her silvery laugh.
+
+"Tut, tut!" objected Padre Irene, endeavoring to conceal himself.
+
+"_Mais, comment! Toi ici, grosse b�te! Et moi qui t'croyais--_"
+
+"_'Tais pas d'tapage, Lily! Il faut m'respecter! 'Suis ici l'Pape!_"
+
+With great difficulty Padre Irene made her listen to reason, for Lily
+was _enchante�_ to meet in Manila an old friend who reminded her of
+the _coulisses_ of the Grand Opera House. So it was that Padre Irene,
+fulfilling at the same time his duties as a friend and a critic, had
+initiated the applause to encourage her, for Serpolette deserved it.
+
+Meanwhile, the young men were waiting for the cancan. Pecson became
+all eyes, but there was everything except cancan. There was presented
+the scene in which, but for the timely arrival of the representatives
+of the law, the women would have come to blows and torn one another's
+hair out, incited thereto by the mischievous peasants, who, like our
+students, hoped to see something more than the cancan.
+
+
+    Scit, scit, scit, scit, scit, scit,
+    Disputez-vous, battez-vous,
+    Scit, scit, scit, scit, scit, scit,
+    Nous allons compter les coups.
+
+
+The music ceased, the men went away, the women returned, a few at
+a time, and started a conversation among themselves, of which our
+friends understood nothing. They were slandering some absent person.
+
+"They look like the Chinamen of the _pansiteria!_" whispered Pecson.
+
+"But, the cancan?" asked Makaraig.
+
+"They're talking about the most suitable place to dance it," gravely
+responded Sandoval.
+
+"They look like the Chinamen of the _pansiteria_," repeated Pecson
+in disgust.
+
+A lady accompanied by her husband entered at that moment and took her
+place in one of the two vacant boxes. She had the air of a queen and
+gazed disdainfully at the whole house, as if to say, "I've come later
+than all of you, you crowd of upstarts and provincials, I've come later
+than you!" There are persons who go to the theater like the contestants
+in a mule-race: the last one in, wins, and we know very sensible men
+who would ascend the scaffold rather than enter a theater before the
+first act. But the lady's triumph was of short duration--she caught
+sight of the other box that was still empty, and began to scold her
+better half, thus starting such a disturbance that many were annoyed.
+
+"Ssh! Ssh!"
+
+"The blockheads! As if they understood French!" remarked the lady,
+gazing with supreme disdain in all directions, finally fixing her
+attention on Juanito's box, whence she thought she had heard an
+impudent hiss.
+
+Juanito was in fact guilty, for he had been pretending to understand
+everything, holding himself up proudly and applauding at times as
+though nothing that was said escaped him, and this too without guiding
+himself by the actors' pantomime, because he scarcely looked toward
+the stage. The rogue had intentionally remarked to Paulita that,
+as there was so much more beautiful a woman close at hand, he did
+not care to strain his eyes looking beyond her. Paulita had blushed,
+covered her face with her fan, and glanced stealthily toward where
+Isagani, silent and morose, was abstractedly watching the show.
+
+Paulita felt nettled and jealous. Would Isagani fall in love with
+any of those alluring actresses? The thought put her in a bad humor,
+so she scarcely heard the praises that Do�a Victorina was heaping
+upon her own favorite.
+
+Juanito was playing his part well: he shook his head at times in sign
+of disapproval, and then there could be heard coughs and murmurs in
+some parts, at other times he smiled in approbation, and a second later
+applause resounded. Do�a Victorina was charmed, even conceiving some
+vague ideas of marrying the young man the day Don Tiburcio should
+die--Juanito knew French and De Espada�a didn't! Then she began to
+flatter him, nor did he perceive the change in the drift of her talk,
+so occupied was he in watching a Catalan merchant who was sitting
+next to the Swiss consul. Having observed that they were conversing in
+French, Juanito was getting his inspiration from their countenances,
+and thus grandly giving the cue to those about him.
+
+Scene followed scene, character succeeded character, comic and
+ridiculous like the bailiff and Grenicheux, imposing and winsome like
+the marquis and Germaine. The audience laughed heartily at the slap
+delivered by Gaspard and intended for the coward Grenicheux, which was
+received by the grave bailiff, whose wig went flying through the air,
+producing disorder and confusion as the curtain dropped.
+
+"Where's the cancan?" inquired Tadeo.
+
+But the curtain rose again immediately, revealing a scene in a servant
+market, with three posts on which were affixed signs bearing the
+announcements: _servantes_, _cochers_, and _domestiques_. Juanito, to
+improve the opportunity, turned to Do�a Victorina and said in a loud
+voice, so that Paulita might hear and he convinced of his learning:
+
+"_Servantes_ means servants, _domestiques_ domestics."
+
+"And in what way do the _servantes_ differ from the
+_domestiques_?" asked Paulita.
+
+Juanito was not found wanting. "_Domestiques_ are those that are
+domesticated--haven't you noticed that some of them have the air of
+savages? Those are the _servantes_."
+
+"That's right," added Do�a Victorina, "some have very bad manners--and
+yet I thought that in Europe everybody was cultivated. But as it
+happens in France,--well, I see!"
+
+"Ssh! Ssh!"
+
+But what was Juanito's predicament when the time came for the opening
+of the market and the beginning of the sale, and the servants who were
+to be hired placed themselves beside the signs that indicated their
+class! The men, some ten or twelve rough characters in livery, carrying
+branches in their hands, took their place under the sign _domestiques_!
+
+"Those are the domestics," explained Juanito.
+
+"Really, they have the appearance of being only recently domesticated,"
+observed Do�a Victorina. "Now let's have a look at the savages."
+
+Then the dozen girls headed by the lively and merry Serpolette, decked
+out in their best clothes, each wearing a big bouquet of flowers at
+the waist, laughing, smiling, fresh and attractive, placed themselves,
+to Juanito's great desperation, beside the post of the _servantes_.
+
+"How's this?" asked Paulita guilelessly. "Are those the savages that
+you spoke of?"
+
+"No," replied the imperturbable Juanito, "there's a mistake--they've
+got their places mixed--those coming behind--"
+
+"Those with the whips?"
+
+Juanito nodded assent, but he was rather perplexed and uneasy.
+
+"So those girls are the _cochers_?"
+
+Here Juanito was attacked by such a violent fit of coughing that some
+of the spectators became annoyed.
+
+"Put him out! Put the consumptive out!" called a voice.
+
+Consumptive! To be called a consumptive before Paulita! Juanito
+wanted to find the blackguard and make him swallow that
+"consumptive." Observing that the women were trying to hold him back,
+his bravado increased, and he became more conspicuously ferocious. But
+fortunately it was Don Custodio who had made the diagnosis, and he,
+fearful of attracting attention to himself, pretended to hear nothing,
+apparently busy with his criticism of the play.
+
+"If it weren't that I am with you," remarked Juanito, rolling his
+eyes like some dolls that are moved by clockwork, and to make the
+resemblance more real he stuck out his tongue occasionally.
+
+Thus that night he acquired in Do�a Victorina's eyes the reputation
+of being brave and punctilious, so she decided in her heart that
+she would marry him just as soon as Don Tiburcio was out of the
+way. Paulita became sadder and sadder in thinking about how the girls
+called _cochers_ could occupy Isagani's attention, for the name had
+certain disagreeable associations that came from the slang of her
+convent school-days.
+
+At length the first act was concluded, the marquis taking away as
+servants Serpolette and Germaine, the representative of timid beauty
+in the troupe, and for coachman the stupid Grenicheux. A burst of
+applause brought them out again holding hands, those who five seconds
+before had been tormenting one another and were about to come to blows,
+bowing and smiling here and there to the gallant Manila public and
+exchanging knowing looks with various spectators.
+
+While there prevailed the passing tumult occasioned by those who
+crowded one another to get into the greenroom and felicitate the
+actresses and by those who were going to make calls on the ladies in
+the boxes, some expressed their opinions of the play and the players.
+
+"Undoubtedly, Serpolette is the best," said one with a knowing air.
+
+"I prefer Germaine, she's an ideal blonde."
+
+"But she hasn't any voice."
+
+"What do I care about the voice?"
+
+"Well, for shape, the tall one."
+
+"Pshaw," said Ben-Zayb, "not a one is worth a straw, not a one is
+an artist!"
+
+Ben-Zayb was the critic for _El Grito de la Integridad_, and his
+disdainful air gave him great importance in the eyes of those who
+were satisfied with so little.
+
+"Serpolette hasn't any voice, nor Germaine grace, nor is that
+music, nor is it art, nor is it anything!" he concluded with marked
+contempt. To set oneself up as a great critic there is nothing like
+appearing to be discontented with everything. Besides, the management
+had sent only two seats for the newspaper staff.
+
+In the boxes curiosity was aroused as to who could be the possessor
+of the empty one, for that person, would surpass every one in chic,
+since he would be the last to arrive. The rumor started somewhere
+that it belonged to Simoun, and was confirmed: no one had seen the
+jeweler in the reserved seats, the greenroom, or anywhere else.
+
+"Yet I saw him this afternoon with Mr. Jouay," some one said. "He
+presented a necklace to one of the actresses."
+
+"To which one?" asked some of the inquisitive ladies.
+
+"To the finest of all, the one who made eyes at his Excellency."
+
+This information was received with looks of intelligence, winks,
+exclamations of doubt, of confirmation, and half-uttered commentaries.
+
+"He's trying to play the Monte Cristo," remarked a lady who prided
+herself on being literary.
+
+"Or purveyor to the Palace!" added her escort, jealous of Simoun.
+
+In the students' box, Pecson, Sandoval, and Isagani had remained,
+while Tadeo had gone to engage Don Custodio in conversation about
+his projects, and Makaraig to hold an interview with Pepay.
+
+"In no way, as I have observed to you before, friend Isagani,"
+declared Sandoval with violent gestures and a sonorous voice, so
+that the ladies near the box, the daughters of the rich man who was
+in debt to Tadeo, might hear him, "in no way does the French language
+possess the rich sonorousness or the varied and elegant cadence of the
+Castilian tongue. I cannot conceive, I cannot imagine, I cannot form
+any idea of French orators, and I doubt that they have ever had any
+or can have any now in the strict construction of the term orator,
+because we must not confuse the name orator with the words babbler
+and charlatan, for these can exist in any country, in all the regions
+of the inhabited world, among the cold and curt Englishmen as among
+the lively and impressionable Frenchmen."
+
+Thus he delivered a magnificent review of the nations, with his
+poetical characterizations and most resounding epithets. Isagani nodded
+assent, with his thoughts fixed on Paulita, whom he had surprised
+gazing at him with an expressive look which contained a wealth of
+meaning. He tried to divine what those eyes were expressing--those
+eyes that were so eloquent and not at all deceptive.
+
+"Now you who are a poet, a slave to rhyme and meter, a son of the
+Muses," continued Sandoval, with an elegant wave of his hand, as
+though he were saluting, on the horizon, the Nine Sisters, "do you
+comprehend, can you conceive, how a language so harsh and unmusical
+as French can give birth to poets of such gigantic stature as our
+Garcilasos, our Herreras, our Esproncedas, our Calderons?"
+
+"Nevertheless," objected Pecson, "Victor Hugo--"
+
+"Victor Hugo, my friend Pecson, if Victor Hugo is a poet, it is
+because he owes it to Spain, because it is an established fact, it
+is a matter beyond all doubt, a thing admitted even by the Frenchmen
+themselves, so envious of Spain, that if Victor Hugo has genius, if
+he really is a poet, it is because his childhood was spent in Madrid;
+there he drank in his first impressions, there his brain was molded,
+there his imagination was colored, his heart modeled, and the most
+beautiful concepts of his mind born. And after all, who is Victor
+Hugo? Is he to be compared at all with our modern--"
+
+This peroration was cut short by the return of Makaraig with a
+despondent air and a bitter smile on his lips, carrying in his hand
+a note, which he offered silently to Sandoval, who read:
+
+
+    "MY DOVE: Your letter has reached me late, for I have already
+    handed in my decision, and it has been approved. However,
+    as if I had guessed your wish, I have decided the matter
+    according to the desires of your prot�g�s. I'll be at the
+    theater and wait for you after the performance.
+
+        "Your duckling,
+
+            "CUSTODINING."
+
+
+"How tender the man is!" exclaimed Tadeo with emotion.
+
+"Well?" said Sandoval. "I don't see anything wrong about this--quite
+the reverse!"
+
+"Yes," rejoined Makaraig with his bitter smile, "decided
+favorably! I've just seen Padre Irene."
+
+"What does Padre Irene say?" inquired Pecson.
+
+"The same as Don Custodio, and the rascal still had the audacity
+to congratulate me. The Commission, which has taken as its own the
+decision of the arbiter, approves the idea and felicitates the students
+on their patriotism and their thirst for knowledge--"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Only that, considering our duties--in short, it says that in order
+that the idea may not be lost, it concludes that the direction
+and execution of the plan should be placed in charge of one of
+the religious corporations, in case the Dominicans do not wish to
+incorporate the academy with the University."
+
+Exclamations of disappointment greeted the announcement. Isagani rose,
+but said nothing.
+
+"And in order that we may participate in the management of the
+academy," Makaraig went on, "we are intrusted with the collection
+of contributions and dues, with the obligation of turning them over
+to the treasurer whom the corporation may designate, which treasurer
+will issue us receipts."
+
+"Then we're tax-collectors!" remarked Tadeo.
+
+"Sandoval," said Pecson, "there's the gauntlet--take it up!"
+
+"Huh! That's not a gauntlet--from its odor it seems more like a sock."
+
+"The funniest, part of it," Makaraig added, "is that Padre Irene has
+advised us to celebrate the event with a banquet or a torchlight
+procession--a public demonstration of the students _en masse_ to
+render thanks to all the persons who have intervened in the affair."
+
+"Yes, after the blow, let's sing and give thanks. _Super flumina
+Babylonis sedimus_!"
+
+"Yes, a banquet like that of the convicts," said Tadeo.
+
+"A banquet at which we all wear mourning and deliver funeral orations,"
+added Sandoval.
+
+"A serenade with the Marseillaise and funeral marches," proposed
+Isagani.
+
+"No, gentlemen," observed Pecson with his clownish grin, "to celebrate
+the event there's nothing like a banquet in a _pansiter�a_, served
+by the Chinamen without camisas. I insist, without camisas!"
+
+The sarcasm and grotesqueness of this idea won it ready acceptance,
+Sandoval being the first to applaud it, for he had long wished to see
+the interior of one of those establishments which at night appeared
+to be so merry and cheerful.
+
+Just as the orchestra struck up for the second act, the young men
+arose and left the theater, to the scandal of the whole house.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+A CORPSE
+
+
+Simoun had not, in fact, gone to the theater. Already, at seven o'clock
+in the evening, he had left his house looking worried and gloomy. His
+servants saw him return twice, accompanied by different individuals,
+and at eight o'clock Makaraig encountered him pacing along Calle
+Hospital near the nunnery of St. Clara, just when the bells of its
+church were ringing a funeral knell. At nine Camaroncocido saw him
+again, in the neighborhood of the theater, speak with a person who
+seemed to be a student, pay the latter's admission to the show,
+and again disappear among the shadows of the trees.
+
+"What is it to me?" again muttered Camaroncocido. "What do I get out
+of watching over the populace?"
+
+Basilio, as Makaraig said, had not gone to the show. The poor student,
+after returning from San Diego, whither he had gone to ransom Juli,
+his future bride, from her servitude, had turned again to his studies,
+spending his time in the hospital, in studying, or in nursing Capitan
+Tiago, whose affliction he was trying to cure.
+
+The invalid had become an intolerable character. During his bad spells,
+when he felt depressed from lack of opium, the doses of which Basilio
+was trying to reduce, he would scold, mistreat, and abuse the boy, who
+bore it resignedly, conscious that he was doing good to one to whom
+he owed so much, and yielded only in the last extremity. His vicious
+appetite satisfied, Capitan Tiago would fall into a good humor, become
+tender, and call him his son, tearfully recalling the youth's services,
+how well he administered the estates, and would even talk of making him
+his heir. Basilio would smile bitterly and reflect that in this world
+complaisance with vice is rewarded better than fulfilment of duty. Not
+a few times did he feel tempted to give free rein to the craving and
+conduct his benefactor to the grave by a path of flowers and smiling
+illusions rather than lengthen his life along a road of sacrifice.
+
+"What a fool I am!" he often said to himself. "People are stupid and
+then pay for it."
+
+But he would shake his head as he thought of Juli, of the wide
+future before him. He counted upon living without a stain on his
+conscience, so he continued the treatment prescribed, and bore
+everything patiently.
+
+Yet with all his care the sick man, except for short periods of
+improvement, grew worse. Basilio had planned gradually to reduce
+the amount of the dose, or at least not to let him injure himself
+by increasing it, but on returning from the hospital or some visit
+he would find his patient in the heavy slumber produced by the opium,
+driveling, pale as a corpse. The young man could not explain whence the
+drug came: the only two persons who visited the house were Simoun and
+Padre Irene, the former rarely, while the latter never ceased exhorting
+him to be severe and inexorable with the treatment, to take no notice
+of the invalid's ravings, for the main object was to save him.
+
+"Do your duty, young man," was Padre Irene's constant admonition. "Do
+your duty." Then he would deliver a sermon on this topic with such
+great conviction and enthusiasm that Basilio would begin to feel
+kindly toward the preacher. Besides, Padre Irene promised to get him a
+fine assignment, a good province, and even hinted at the possibility
+of having him appointed a professor. Without being carried away by
+illusions, Basilio pretended to believe in them and went on obeying
+the dictates of his own conscience.
+
+That night, while _Les Cloches de Corneville_ was being presented,
+Basilio was studying at an old table by the light of an oil-lamp, whose
+thick glass globe partly illuminated his melancholy features. An old
+skull, some human bones, and a few books carefully arranged covered
+the table, whereon there was also a pan of water with a sponge. The
+smell of opium that proceeded from the adjoining bedroom made the
+air heavy and inclined him to sleep, but he overcame the desire by
+bathing his temples and eyes from time to time, determined not to go
+to sleep until he had finished the book, which he had borrowed and
+must return as soon as possible. It was a volume of the _Medicina
+Legal y Toxicolog�a_ of Dr. Friata, the only book that the professor
+would use, and Basilio lacked money to buy a copy, since, under
+the pretext of its being forbidden by the censor in Manila and the
+necessity for bribing many government employees to get it in, the
+booksellers charged a high price for it.
+
+So absorbed wras the youth in his studies that he had not given any
+attention at all to some pamphlets that had been sent to him from
+some unknown source, pamphlets that treated of the Philippines, among
+which figured those that were attracting the greatest notice at the
+time because of their harsh and insulting manner of referring to the
+natives of the country. Basilio had no time to open them, and he was
+perhaps restrained also by the thought that there is nothing pleasant
+about receiving an insult or a provocation without having any means
+of replying or defending oneself. The censorship, in fact, permitted
+insults to the Filipinos but prohibited replies on their part.
+
+In the midst of the silence that reigned in the house, broken only by
+a feeble snore that issued now and then from the adjoining bedroom,
+Basilio heard light footfalls on the stairs, footfalls that soon
+crossed the hallway and approached the room where he was. Raising
+his head, he saw the door open and to his great surprise appeared
+the sinister figure of the jeweler Simoun, who since the scene in
+San Diego had not come to visit either himself or Capitan Tiago.
+
+"How is the sick man?" he inquired, throwing a rapid glance about the
+room and fixing his attention on the pamphlets, the leaves of which
+were still uncut.
+
+"The beating of his heart is scarcely perceptible, his pulse is very
+weak, his appetite entirely gone," replied Basilio in a low voice
+with a sad smile. "He sweats profusely in the early morning."
+
+Noticing that Simoun kept his face turned toward the pamphlets and
+fearing that he might reopen the subject of their conversation in
+the wood, he went on: "His system is saturated with poison. He may
+die any day, as though struck by lightning. The least irritation,
+any excitement may kill him."
+
+"Like the Philippines!" observed Simoun lugubriously.
+
+Basilio was unable to refrain from a gesture of impatience, but he
+was determined not to recur to the old subject, so he proceeded as if
+he had heard nothing: "What weakens him the most is the nightmares,
+his terrors--"
+
+"Like the government!" again interrupted Simoun.
+
+"Several nights ago he awoke in the dark and thought that he had
+gone blind. He raised a disturbance, lamenting and scolding me,
+saying that I had put his eyes out. When I entered his room with a
+light he mistook me for Padre Irene and called me his saviour."
+
+"Like the government, exactly!"
+
+"Last night," continued Basilio, paying no attention, "he got up
+begging for his favorite game-cock, the one that died three years
+ago, and I had to give him a chicken. Then he heaped blessings upon
+me and promised me many thousands--"
+
+At that instant a clock struck half-past ten. Simoun shuddered and
+stopped the youth with a gesture.
+
+"Basilio," he said in a low, tense voice, "listen to me carefully,
+for the moments are precious. I see that you haven't opened the
+pamphlets that I sent you. You're not interested in your country."
+
+The youth started to protest.
+
+"It's useless," went on Simoun dryly. "Within an hour the revolution
+is going to break out at a signal from me, and tomorrow there'll
+be no studies, there'll be no University, there'll be nothing but
+fighting and butchery. I have everything ready and my success is
+assured. When we triumph, all those who could have helped us and did
+not do so will be treated as enemies. Basilio, I've come to offer
+you death or a future!"
+
+"Death or a future!" the boy echoed, as though he did not understand.
+
+"With us or with the government," rejoined Simoun. "With your country
+or with your oppressors. Decide, for time presses! I've come to save
+you because of the memories that unite us!"
+
+"With my country or with the oppressors!" repeated Basilio in a low
+tone. The youth was stupefied. He gazed at the jeweler with eyes
+in which terror was reflected, he felt his limbs turn cold, while a
+thousand confused ideas whirled about in his mind. He saw the streets
+running blood, he heard the firing, he found himself among the dead and
+wounded, and by the peculiar force of his inclinations fancied himself
+in an operator's blouse, cutting off legs and extracting bullets.
+
+"The will of the government is in my hands," said Simoun. "I've
+diverted and wasted its feeble strength and resources on foolish
+expeditions, dazzling it with the plunder it might seize. Its heads
+are now in the theater, calm and unsuspecting, thinking of a night
+of pleasure, but not one shall again repose upon a pillow. I have
+men and regiments at my disposition: some I have led to believe that
+the uprising is ordered by the General; others that the friars are
+bringing it about; some I have bought with promises, with employments,
+with money; many, very many, are acting from revenge, because they are
+oppressed and see it as a matter of killing or being killed. Cabesang
+Tales is below, he has come with me here! Again I ask you--will you
+come with us or do you prefer to expose yourself to the resentment
+of my followers? In critical moments, to declare oneself neutral is
+to be exposed to the wrath of both the contending parties."
+
+Basilio rubbed his hand over his face several times, as if he were
+trying to wake from a nightmare. He felt that his brow was cold.
+
+"Decide!" repeated Simoun.
+
+"And what--what would I have to do?" asked the youth in a weak and
+broken voice.
+
+"A very simple thing," replied Simoun, his face lighting up with a
+ray of hope. "As I have to direct the movement, I cannot get away from
+the scene of action. I want you, while the attention of the whole city
+is directed elsewhere, at the head of a company to force the doors of
+the nunnery of St. Clara and take from there a person whom only you,
+besides myself and Capitan Tiago, can recognize. You'll run no risk
+at all."
+
+"Maria Clara!" exclaimed Basilio.
+
+"Yes, Maria Clara," repeated Simoun, and for the first time his voice
+became human and compassionate. "I want to save her; to save her I
+have wished to live, I have returned. I am starting the revolution,
+because only a revolution can open the doors of the nunneries."
+
+"Ay!" sighed Basilio, clasping his hands. "You've come late, too late!"
+
+"Why?" inquired Simoun with a frown.
+
+"Maria Clara is dead!"
+
+Simoun arose with a bound and stood over the youth. "She's dead?" he
+demanded in a terrible voice.
+
+"This afternoon, at six. By now she must be--"
+
+"It's a lie!" roared Simoun, pale and beside himself. "It's
+false! Maria Clara lives, Maria Clara must live! It's a cowardly
+excuse! She's not dead, and this night I'll free her or tomorrow
+you die!"
+
+Basilio shrugged his shoulders. "Several days ago she was taken ill
+and I went to the nunnery for news of her. Look, here is Padre Salvi's
+letter, brought by Padre Irene. Capitan Tiago wept all the evening,
+kissing his daughter's picture and begging her forgiveness, until at
+last he smoked an enormous quantity of opium. This evening her knell
+was tolled."
+
+"Ah!" exclaimed Simoun, pressing his hands to his head and standing
+motionless. He remembered to have actually heard the knell while he
+was pacing about in the vicinity of the nunnery.
+
+"Dead!" he murmured in a voice so low that it seemed to be a ghost
+whispering. "Dead! Dead without my having seen her, dead without
+knowing that I lived for her--dead!"
+
+Feeling a terrible storm, a tempest of whirlwind and thunder without
+a drop of water, sobs without tears, cries without words, rage in his
+breast and threaten to burst out like burning lava long repressed,
+he rushed precipitately from the room. Basilio heard him descend the
+stairs with unsteady tread, stepping heavily, he heard a stifled cry,
+a cry that seemed to presage death, so solemn, deep, and sad that
+he arose from his chair pale and trembling, but he could hear the
+footsteps die away and the noisy closing of the door to the street.
+
+"Poor fellow!" he murmured, while his eyes filled with tears. Heedless
+now of his studies, he let his gaze wander into space as he pondered
+over the fate of those two beings: he--young, rich, educated, master
+of his fortunes, with a brilliant future before him; she--fair as
+a dream, pure, full of faith and innocence, nurtured amid love and
+laughter, destined to a happy existence, to be adored in the family
+and respected in the world; and yet of those two beings, filled with
+love, with illusions and hopes, by a fatal destiny he wandered over
+the world, dragged ceaselessly through a whirl of blood and tears,
+sowing evil instead of doing good, undoing virtue and encouraging vice,
+while she was dying in the mysterious shadows of the cloister where
+she had sought peace and perhaps found suffering, where she entered
+pure and stainless and expired like a crushed flower!
+
+Sleep in peace, ill-starred daughter of my hapless fatherland! Bury
+in the grave the enchantments of youth, faded in their prime! When a
+people cannot offer its daughters a tranquil home under the protection
+of sacred liberty, when a man can only leave to his widow blushes,
+tears to his mother, and slavery to his children, you do well to
+condemn yourself to perpetual chastity, stifling within you the germ
+of a future generation accursed! Well for you that you have not
+to shudder in your grave, hearing the cries of those who groan in
+darkness, of those who feel that they have wings and yet are fettered,
+of those who are stifled from lack of liberty! Go, go with your poet's
+dreams into the regions of the infinite, spirit of woman dim-shadowed
+in the moonlight's beam, whispered in the bending arches of the
+bamboo-brakes! Happy she who dies lamented, she who leaves in the
+heart that loves her a pure picture, a sacred remembrance, unspotted
+by the base passions engendered by the years! Go, we shall remember
+you! In the clear air of our native land, under its azure sky, above
+the billows of the lake set amid sapphire hills and emerald shores,
+in the crystal streams shaded by the bamboos, bordered by flowers,
+enlivened by the beetles and butterflies with their uncertain and
+wavering flight as though playing with the air, in the silence of
+our forests, in the singing of our rivers, in the diamond showers of
+our waterfalls, in the resplendent light of our moon, in the sighs of
+the night breeze, in all that may call up the vision of the beloved,
+we must eternally see you as we dreamed of you, fair, beautiful,
+radiant with hope, pure as the light, yet still sad and melancholy
+in the contemplation of our woes!
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+DREAMS
+
+
+    Amor, qu� astro eres?
+
+
+On the following day, Thursday, at the hour of sunset, Isagani
+was walking along the beautiful promenade of Maria Cristina in the
+direction of the Malecon to keep an appointment which Paulita had that
+morning given him. The young man had no doubt that they were to talk
+about what had happened on the previous night, and as he was determined
+to ask for an explanation, and knew how proud and haughty she was,
+he foresaw an estrangement. In view of this eventuality he had brought
+with him the only two letters he had ever received from Paulita, two
+scraps of paper, whereon were merely a few hurriedly written lines
+with various blots, but in an even handwriting, things that did not
+prevent the enamored youth from preserving them with more solicitude
+than if they had been the autographs of Sappho and the Muse Polyhymnia.
+
+This decision to sacrifice his love on the altar of dignity, the
+consciousness of suffering in the discharge of duty, did not prevent
+a profound melancholy from taking possession of Isagani and brought
+back into his mind the beautiful days, and nights more beautiful
+still, when they had whispered sweet nothings through the flowered
+gratings of the entresol, nothings that to the youth took on such a
+character of seriousness and importance that they seemed to him the
+only matters worthy of meriting the attention of the most exalted human
+understanding. He recalled the walks on moonlit nights, the fair, the
+dark December mornings after the mass of Nativity, the holy water that
+he used to offer her, when she would thank him with a look charged
+with a whole epic of love, both of them trembling as their fingers
+touched. Heavy sighs, like small rockets, issued from his breast
+and brought back to him all the verses, all the sayings of poets and
+writers about the inconstancy of woman. Inwardly he cursed the creation
+of theaters, the French operetta, and vowed to get revenge on Pelaez at
+the first opportunity. Everything about him appeared under the saddest
+and somberest colors: the bay, deserted and solitary, seemed more
+solitary still on account of the few steamers that were anchored in
+it; the sun was dying behind Mariveles without poetry or enchantment,
+without the capricious and richly tinted clouds of happier evenings;
+the Anda monument, in bad taste, mean and squat, without style, without
+grandeur, looked like a lump of ice-cream or at best a chunk of cake;
+the people who were promenading along the Malecon, in spite of their
+complacent and contented air, appeared distant, haughty, and vain;
+mischievous and bad-mannered, the boys that played on the beach,
+skipping flat stones over the surface of the water or searching in
+the sand for mollusks and crustaceans which they caught for the mere
+fun of catching and killed without benefit to themselves; in short,
+even the eternal port works to which he had dedicated more than three
+odes, looked to him absurd, ridiculous child's play.
+
+The port, ah, the port of Manila, a bastard that since its conception
+had brought tears of humiliation and shame to all! If only after so
+many tears there were not being brought forth a useless abortion!
+
+Abstractedly he saluted two Jesuits, former teachers of his, and
+scarcely noticed a tandem in which an American rode and excited
+the envy of the gallants who were in calesas only. Near the Anda
+monument he heard Ben-Zayb talking with another person about
+Simoun, learning that the latter had on the previous night been
+taken suddenly ill, that he refused to see any one, even the very
+aides of the General. "Yes!" exclaimed Isagani with a bitter smile,
+"for him attentions because he is rich. The soldiers return from
+their expeditions sick and wounded, but no one visits them."
+
+Musing over these expeditions, over the fate of the poor soldiers,
+over the resistance offered by the islanders to the foreign yoke, he
+thought that, death for death, if that of the soldiers was glorious
+because they were obeying orders, that of the islanders was sublime
+because they were defending their homes. [49]
+
+"A strange destiny, that of some peoples!" he mused. "Because a
+traveler arrives at their shores, they lose their liberty and become
+subjects and slaves, not only of the traveler, not only of his heirs,
+but even of all his countrymen, and not for a generation, but for
+all time! A strange conception of justice! Such a state of affairs
+gives ample right to exterminate every foreigner as the most ferocious
+monster that the sea can cast up!"
+
+He reflected that those islanders, against whom his country was waging
+war, after all were guilty of no crime other than that of weakness. The
+travelers also arrived at the shores of other peoples, but finding
+them strong made no display of their strange pretension. With all
+their weakness the spectacle they presented seemed beautiful to him,
+and the names of the enemies, whom the newspapers did not fail to call
+cowards and traitors, appeared glorious to him, as they succumbed with
+glory amid the ruins of their crude fortifications, with greater glory
+even than the ancient Trojan heroes, for those islanders had carried
+away no Philippine Helen! In his poetic enthusiasm he thought of the
+young men of those islands who could cover themselves with glory in
+the eyes of their women, and in his amorous desperation he envied
+them because they could find a brilliant suicide.
+
+"Ah, I should like to die," he exclaimed, "be reduced to nothingness,
+leave to my native land a glorious name, perish in its cause, defending
+it from foreign invasion, and then let the sun afterwards illumine
+my corpse, like a motionless sentinel on the rocks of the sea!"
+
+The conflict with the Germans [50] came into his mind and he almost
+felt sorry that it had been adjusted: he would gladly have died for
+the Spanish-Filipino banner before submitting to the foreigner.
+
+"Because, after all," he mused, "with Spain we are united by firm
+bonds--the past, history, religion, language--"
+
+Language, yes, language! A sarcastic smile curled his lips. That very
+night they would hold a banquet in the _pansiter�a_ to _celebrate_
+the demise of the academy of Castilian.
+
+"Ay!" he sighed, "provided the liberals in Spain are like those we
+have here, in a little while the mother country will be able to count
+the number of the faithful!"
+
+Slowly the night descended, and with it melancholy settled more heavily
+upon the heart of the young man, who had almost lost hope of seeing
+Paulita. The promenaders one by one left the Malecon for the Luneta,
+the music from which was borne to him in snatches of melodies on the
+fresh evening breeze; the sailors on a warship anchored in the river
+performed their evening drill, skipping about among the slender ropes
+like spiders; the boats one by one lighted their lamps, thus giving
+signs of life; while the beach,
+
+
+    Do el viento riza las calladas olas
+    Que con blando murmullo en la ribera
+    Se deslizan veloces por s� solas. [51]
+
+
+as Alaejos says, exhaled in the distance thin, vapors that the moon,
+now at its full, gradually converted into mysterious transparent gauze.
+
+A distant sound became audible, a noise that rapidly
+approached. Isagani turned his head and his heart began to beat
+violently. A carriage was coming, drawn by white horses, the white
+horses that he would know among a hundred thousand. In the carriage
+rode Paulita and her friend of the night before, with Do�a Victorina.
+
+Before the young man could take a step, Paulita had leaped to the
+ground with sylph-like agility and smiled at him with a smile full of
+conciliation. He smiled in return, and it seemed to him that all the
+clouds, all the black thoughts that before had beset him, vanished
+like smoke, the sky lighted up, the breeze sang, flowers covered the
+grass by the roadside. But unfortunately Do�a Victorina was there and
+she pounced upon the young man to ask him for news of Don Tiburcio,
+since Isagani had undertaken to discover his hiding-place by inquiry
+among the students he knew.
+
+"No one has been able to tell me up to now," he answered, and he was
+telling the truth, for Don Tiburcio was really hidden in the house
+of the youth's own uncle, Padre Florentino.
+
+"Let him know," declared Do�a Victorina furiously, "that I'll call in
+the Civil Guard. Alive or dead, I want to know where he is--because
+one has to wait ten years before marrying again."
+
+Isagani gazed at her in fright--Do�a Victorina was thinking of
+remarrying! Who could the unfortunate be?
+
+"What do you think of Juanito Pelaez?" she asked him suddenly.
+
+Juanito! Isagani knew not what to reply. He was tempted to tell all
+the evil he knew of Pelaez, but a feeling of delicacy triumphed in his
+heart and he spoke well of his rival, for the very reason that he was
+such. Do�a Victorina, entirely satisfied and becoming enthusiastic,
+then broke out into exaggerations of Pelaez's merits and was already
+going to make Isagani a confidant of her new passion when Paulita's
+friend came running to say that the former's fan had fallen among
+the stones of the beach, near the Malecon. Stratagem or accident, the
+fact is that this mischance gave an excuse for the friend to remain
+with the old woman, while Isagani might talk with Paulita. Moreover,
+it was a matter of rejoicing to Do�a Victorina, since to get Juanito
+for herself she was favoring Isagani's love.
+
+Paulita had her plan ready. On thanking him she assumed the role of
+the offended party, showed resentment, and gave him to understand that
+she was surprised to meet him there when everybody was on the Luneta,
+even the French actresses.
+
+"You made the appointment for me, how could I be elsewhere?"
+
+"Yet last night you did not even notice that I was in the theater. I
+was watching you all the time and you never took your eyes off those
+_cochers_."
+
+So they exchanged parts: Isagani, who had come to demand explanations,
+found himself compelled to give them and considered himself very happy
+when Paulita said that she forgave him. In regard to her presence
+at the theater, he even had to thank her for that: forced by her
+aunt, she had decided to go in the hope of seeing him during the
+performance. Little she cared for Juanito Pelaez!
+
+"My aunt's the one who is in love with him," she said with a merry
+laugh.
+
+Then they both laughed, for the marriage of Pelaez with Do�a Victorina
+made them really happy, and they saw it already an accomplished
+fact, until Isagani remembered that Don Tiburcio was still living and
+confided the secret to his sweetheart, after exacting her promise that
+she would tell no one. Paulita promised, with the mental reservation
+of relating it to her friend.
+
+This led the conversation to Isagani's town, surrounded by forests,
+situated on the shore of the sea which roared at the base of the
+high cliffs. Isagani's gaze lighted up when he spoke of that obscure
+spot, a flush of pride overspread his cheeks, his voice trembled,
+his poetic imagination glowed, his words poured forth burning,
+charged with enthusiasm, as if he were talking of love to his love,
+and he could not but exclaim:
+
+"Oh, in the solitude of my mountains I feel free, free as the air,
+as the light that shoots unbridled through space! A thousand cities, a
+thousand palaces, would I give for that spot in the Philippines, where,
+far from men, I could feel myself to have genuine liberty. There,
+face to face with nature, in the presence of the mysterious and the
+infinite, the forest and the sea, I think, speak, and work like a
+man who knows not tyrants."
+
+In the presence of such enthusiasm for his native place, an enthusiasm
+that she did not comprehend, for she was accustomed to hear her country
+spoken ill of, and sometimes joined in the chorus herself, Paulita
+manifested some jealousy, as usual making herself the offended party.
+
+But Isagani very quickly pacified her. "Yes," he said, "I loved it
+above all things before I knew you! It was my delight to wander through
+the thickets, to sleep in the shade of the trees, to seat myself upon
+a cliff to take in with my gaze the Pacific which rolled its blue
+waves before me, bringing to me echoes of songs learned on the shores
+of free America. Before knowing you, that sea was for me my world,
+my delight, my love, my dream! When it slept in calm with the sun
+shining overhead, it was my delight to gaze into the abyss hundreds
+of feet below me, seeking monsters in the forests of madrepores and
+coral that were revealed through the limpid blue, enormous serpents
+that the country folk say leave the forests to dwell in the sea, and
+there take on frightful forms. Evening, they say, is the time when
+the sirens appear, and I saw them between the waves--so great was
+my eagerness that once I thought I could discern them amid the foam,
+busy in their divine sports, I distinctly heard their songs, songs of
+liberty, and I made out the sounds of their silvery harps. Formerly
+I spent hours and hours watching the transformations in the clouds,
+or gazing at a solitary tree in the plain or a high rock, without
+knowing why, without being able to explain the vague feelings they
+awoke in me. My uncle used to preach long sermons to me, and fearing
+that I would become a hypochondriac, talked of placing me under
+a doctor's care. But I met you, I loved you, and during the last
+vacation it seemed that something was lacking there, the forest was
+gloomy, sad the river that glides through the shadows, dreary the sea,
+deserted the sky. Ah, if you should go there once, if your feet should
+press those paths, if you should stir the waters of the rivulet with
+your fingers, if you should gaze upon the sea, sit upon the cliff,
+or make the air ring with your melodious songs, my forest would be
+transformed into an Eden, the ripples of the brook would sing, light
+would burst from the dark leaves, into diamonds would be converted
+the dewdrops and into pearls the foam of the sea."
+
+But Paulita had heard that to reach Isagani's home it was necessary
+to cross mountains where little leeches abounded, and at the mere
+thought of them the little coward shivered convulsively. Humored and
+petted, she declared that she would travel only in a carriage or a
+railway train.
+
+Having now forgotten all his pessimism and seeing only thornless
+roses about him, Isagani answered, "Within a short time all the
+islands are going to be crossed with networks of iron rails.
+
+
+    "'Por donde r�pidas
+    Y voladoras
+    Locomotoras
+    Corriendo ir�n,' [52]
+
+
+as some one said. Then the most beautiful spots of the islands will
+be accessible to all."
+
+"Then, but when? When I'm an old woman?"
+
+"Ah, you don't know what we can do in a few years," replied the
+youth. "You don't realize the energy and enthusiasm that are awakening
+in the country after the sleep of centuries. Spain heeds us; our young
+men in Madrid are working day and night, dedicating to the fatherland
+all their intelligence, all their time, all their strength. Generous
+voices there are mingled with ours, statesmen who realize that there
+is no better bond than community of thought and interest. Justice will
+be meted out to us, and everything points to a brilliant future for
+all. It's true that we've just met with a slight rebuff, we students,
+but victory is rolling along the whole line, it is in the consciousness
+of all! The traitorous repulse that we have suffered indicates the
+last gasp, the final convulsions of the dying. Tomorrow we shall be
+citizens of the Philippines, whose destiny will be a glorious one,
+because it will be in loving hands. Ah, yes, the future is ours! I
+see it rose-tinted, I see the movement that stirs the life of these
+regions so long dead, lethargic. I see towns arise along the railroads,
+and factories everywhere, edifices like that of Mandaloyan! I hear
+the steam hiss, the trains roar, the engines rattle! I see the smoke
+rise--their heavy breathing; I smell the oil--the sweat of monsters
+busy at incessant toil. This port, so slow and laborious of creation,
+this river where commerce is in its death agony, we shall see covered
+with masts, giving us an idea of the forests of Europe in winter. This
+pure air, and these stones, now so clean, will be crowded with coal,
+with boxes and barrels, the products of human industry, but let it
+not matter, for we shall move about rapidly in comfortable coaches to
+seek in the interior other air, other scenes on other shores, cooler
+temperatures on the slopes of the mountains. The warships of our navy
+will guard our coasts, the Spaniard and the Filipino will rival each
+other in zeal to repel all foreign invasion, to defend our homes, and
+let you bask in peace and smiles, loved and respected. Free from the
+system of exploitation, without hatred or distrust, the people will
+labor because then labor will cease to be a despicable thing, it will
+no longer be servile, imposed upon a slave. Then the Spaniard will
+not embitter his character with ridiculous pretensions of despotism,
+but with a frank look and a stout heart we shall extend our hands
+to one another, and commerce, industry, agriculture, the sciences,
+will develop under the mantle of liberty, with wise and just laws,
+as in prosperous England." [53]
+
+Paulita smiled dubiously and shook her head. "Dreams, dreams!" she
+sighed. "I've heard it said that you have many enemies. Aunt says
+that this country must always be enslaved."
+
+"Because your aunt is a fool, because she can't live without
+slaves! When she hasn't them she dreams of them in the future, and if
+they are not obtainable she forces them into her imagination. True
+it is that we have enemies, that there will be a struggle, but we
+shall conquer. The old system may convert the ruins of its castle
+into formless barricades, but we will take them singing hymns of
+liberty, in the light of the eyes of you women, to the applause
+of your lovely hands. But do not be uneasy--the struggle will be a
+pacific one. Enough that you spur us to zeal, that you awake in us
+noble and elevated thoughts and encourage us to constancy, to heroism,
+with your affection for our reward."
+
+Paulita preserved her enigmatic smile and seemed thoughtful, as she
+gazed toward the river, patting her cheek lightly with her fan. "But
+if you accomplish nothing?" she asked abstractedly.
+
+The question hurt Isagani. He fixed his eyes on his sweetheart,
+caught her lightly by the hand, and began: "Listen, if we accomplish
+nothing--"
+
+He paused in doubt, then resumed: "You know how I love you, how I
+adore you, you know that I feel myself a different creature when
+your gaze enfolds me, when I surprise in it the flash of love,
+but yet if we accomplish nothing, I would dream of another look of
+yours and would die happy, because the light of pride could burn
+in your eyes when you pointed to my corpse and said to the world:
+'My love died fighting for the rights of my fatherland!' "
+
+"Come home, child, you're going to catch cold," screeched Do�a
+Victorina at that instant, and the voice brought them back to
+reality. It was time to return, and they kindly invited him to
+enter the carriage, an invitation which the young man did not give
+them cause to repeat. As it was Paulita's carriage, naturally Do�a
+Victorina and the friend occupied the back seat, while the two lovers
+sat on the smaller one in front.
+
+To ride in the same carriage, to have her at his side, to breathe
+her perfume, to rub against the silk of her dress, to see her pensive
+with folded arms, lighted by the moon of the Philippines that lends to
+the meanest things idealism and enchantment, were all dreams beyond
+Isagani's hopes! What wretches they who were returning alone on foot
+and had to give way to the swift carriage! In the whole course of the
+drive, along the beach and down the length of La Sabana, across the
+Bridge of Spain, Isagani saw nothing but a sweet profile, gracefully
+set off by beautiful hair, ending in an arching neck that lost itself
+amid the gauzy pi�a. A diamond winked at him from the lobe of the
+little ear, like a star among silvery clouds. He heard faint echoes
+inquiring for Don Tiburcio de Espada�a, the name of Juanito Pelaez,
+but they sounded to him like distant bells, the confused noises heard
+in a dream. It was necessary to tell him that they had reached Plaza
+Santa Cruz.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+SMILES AND TEARS
+
+
+The sala of the _Pansiteria Macanista de Buen Gusto_ [54] that
+night presented an extraordinary aspect. Fourteen young men of the
+principal islands of the archipelago, from the pure Indian (if there
+be pure ones) to the Peninsular Spaniard, were met to hold the banquet
+advised by Padre Irene in view of the happy solution of the affair
+about instruction in Castilian. They had engaged all the tables for
+themselves, ordered the lights to be increased, and had posted on the
+wall beside the landscapes and Chinese kakemonos this strange versicle:
+
+"GLORY TO CUSTODIO FOR HIS CLEVERNESS AND PANSIT ON EABTH TO THE
+YOUTHS OF GOOD WILL."
+
+In a country where everything grotesque is covered with a mantle
+of seriousness, where many rise by the force of wind and hot air,
+in a country where the deeply serious and sincere may do damage on
+issuing from the heart and may cause trouble, probably this was the
+best way to celebrate the ingenious inspiration of the illustrious
+Don Custodio. The mocked replied to the mockery with a laugh, to the
+governmental joke with a plate of _pansit_, and yet--!
+
+They laughed and jested, but it could be seen that the merriment
+was forced. The laughter had a certain nervous ring, eyes flashed,
+and in more than one of these a tear glistened. Nevertheless, these
+young men were cruel, they were unreasonable! It was not the first
+time that their most beautiful ideas had been so treated, that their
+hopes had been defrauded with big words and small actions: before
+this Don Custodio there had been many, very many others.
+
+In the center of the room under the red lanterns were placed four
+round tables, systematically arranged to form a square. Little wooden
+stools, equally round, served as seats. In the middle of each table,
+according to the practise of the establishment, were arranged four
+small colored plates with four pies on each one and four cups of tea,
+with the accompanying dishes, all of red porcelain. Before each seat
+was a bottle and two glittering wine-glasses.
+
+Sandoval was curious and gazed about scrutinizing everything, tasting
+the food, examining the pictures, reading the bill of fare. The
+others conversed on the topics of the day: about the French actresses,
+about the mysterious illness of Simoun, who, according to some, had
+been found wounded in the street, while others averred that he had
+attempted to commit suicide. As was natural, all lost themselves in
+conjectures. Tadeo gave his particular version, which according to him
+came from a reliable source: Simoun had been assaulted by some unknown
+person in the old Plaza Vivac, [55] the motive being revenge, in proof
+of which was the fact that Simoun himself refused to make the least
+explanation. From this they proceeded to talk of mysterious revenges,
+and naturally of monkish pranks, each one relating the exploits of
+the curate of his town.
+
+A notice in large black letters crowned the frieze of the room with
+this warning:
+
+
+    De esta fonda el cabecilla
+    Al publico advierte
+    Que nada dejen absolutamente
+    Sobre alguna mesa � silla. [56]
+
+
+"What a notice!" exclaimed Sandoval. "As if he might have confidence
+in the police, eh? And what verses! Don Tiburcio converted into a
+quatrain--two feet, one longer than the other, between two crutches! If
+Isagani sees them, he'll present them to his future aunt."
+
+"Here's Isagani!" called a voice from the stairway. The happy youth
+appeared radiant with joy, followed by two Chinese, without camisas,
+who carried on enormous waiters tureens that gave out an appetizing
+odor. Merry exclamations greeted them.
+
+Juanito Pelaez was missing, but the hour fixed had already passed, so
+they sat down happily to the tables. Juanito was always unconventional.
+
+"If in his place we had invited Basilio," said Tadeo, "we should have
+been better entertained. We might have got him drunk and drawn some
+secrets from him."
+
+"What, does the prudent Basilio possess secrets?"
+
+"I should say so!" replied Tadeo. "Of the most important kind. There
+are some enigmas to which he alone has the key: the boy who
+disappeared, the nun--"
+
+"Gentlemen, the _pansit lang-lang_ is the soup _par excellence_!" cried
+Makaraig. "As you will observe, Sandoval, it is composed of vermicelli,
+crabs or shrimps, egg paste, scraps of chicken, and I don't know
+what else. As first-fruits, let us offer the bones to Don Custodio,
+to see if he will project something with them."
+
+A burst of merry laughter greeted this sally.
+
+"If he should learn--"
+
+"He'd come a-running!" concluded Sandoval. "This is excellent
+soup--what is it called?"
+
+"_Pansit lang-lang_, that is, Chinese _pansit_, to distinguish it
+from that which is peculiar to this country."
+
+"Bah! That's a hard name to remember. In honor of Don Custodio,
+I christen it the _soup project_!"
+
+"Gentlemen," said Makaraig, who had prepared the menu, "there are
+three courses yet. Chinese stew made of pork--"
+
+"Which should be dedicated to Padre Irene."
+
+"Get out! Padre Irene doesn't eat pork, unless he turns his nose away,"
+whispered a young man from Iloilo to his neighbor.
+
+"Let him turn his nose away!"
+
+"Down with Padre Irene's nose," cried several at once.
+
+"Respect, gentlemen, more respect!" demanded Pecson with comic gravity.
+
+"The third course is a lobster pie--"
+
+"Which should be dedicated to the friars," suggested he of the Visayas.
+
+"For the lobsters' sake," added Sandoval.
+
+"Right, and call it friar pie!"
+
+The whole crowd took this up, repeating in concert, "Friar pie!"
+
+"I protest in the name of one of them," said Isagani.
+
+"And I, in the name of the lobsters," added Tadeo.
+
+"Respect, gentlemen, more respect!" again demanded Pecson with a
+full mouth.
+
+"The fourth is stewed _pansit_, which is dedicated--to the government
+and the country!"
+
+All turned toward Makaraig, who went on: "Until recently, gentlemen,
+the _pansit_ was believed to be Chinese or Japanese, but the
+fact is that, being unknown in China or Japan, it would seem to be
+Filipino, yet those who prepare it and get the benefit from it are the
+Chinese--the same, the very, very same that happens to the government
+and to the Philippines: they seem to be Chinese, but whether they
+are or not, the Holy Mother has her doctors--all eat and enjoy it,
+yet characterize it as disagreeable and loathsome, the same as with
+the country, the same as with the government. All live at its cost,
+all share in its feast, and afterwards there is no worse country than
+the Philippines, there is no government more imperfect. Let us then
+dedicate the _pansit_ to the country and to the government."
+
+"Agreed!" many exclaimed.
+
+"I protest!" cried Isagani.
+
+"Respect for the weaker, respect for the victims," called Pecson in
+a hollow voice, waving a chicken-bone in the air.
+
+"Let's dedicate the _pansit_ to Quiroga the Chinaman, one of the four
+powers of the Filipino world," proposed Isagani.
+
+"No, to his Black Eminence."
+
+"Silence!" cautioned one mysteriously. "There are people in the plaza
+watching us, and walls have ears."
+
+True it was that curious groups were standing by the windows, while
+the talk and laughter in the adjoining houses had ceased altogether, as
+if the people there were giving their attention to what was occurring
+at the banquet. There was something extraordinary about the silence.
+
+"Tadeo, deliver your speech," Makaraig whispered to him.
+
+It had been agreed that Sandoval, who possessed the most oratorical
+ability, should deliver the last toast as a summing up.
+
+Tadeo, lazy as ever, had prepared nothing, so he found himself in a
+quandary. While disposing of a long string of vermicelli, he meditated
+how to get out of the difficulty, until he recalled a speech learned
+in school and decided to plagiarize it, with adulterations.
+
+"Beloved brethren in project!" he began, gesticulating with two
+Chinese chop-sticks.
+
+"Brute! Keep that chop-stick out of my hair!" cried his neighbor.
+
+"Called by you to fill the void that has been left in--"
+
+"Plagiarism!" Sandoval interrupted him. "That speech was delivered
+by the president of our lyceum."
+
+"Called by your election," continued the imperturbable Tadeo, "to fill
+the void that has been left in my mind"--pointing to his stomach--"by
+a man famous for his Christian principles and for his inspirations
+and projects, worthy of some little remembrance, what can one like
+myself say of him, I who am very hungry, not having breakfasted?"
+
+"Have a neck, my friend!" called a neighbor, offering that portion
+of a chicken.
+
+"There is one course, gentlemen, the treasure of a people who are
+today a tale and a mockery in the world, wherein have thrust their
+hands the greatest gluttons of the western regions of the earth--"
+Here he pointed with his chopsticks to Sandoval, who was struggling
+with a refractory chicken-wing.
+
+"And eastern!" retorted the latter, describing a circle in the air
+with his spoon, in order to include all the banqueters.
+
+"No interruptions!"
+
+"I demand the floor!"
+
+"I demand pickles!" added Isagani.
+
+"Bring on the stew!"
+
+All echoed this request, so Tadeo sat down, contented with having
+got out of his quandary.
+
+The dish consecrated to Padre Irene did not appear to be extra good,
+as Sandoval cruelly demonstrated thus: "Shining with grease outside
+and with pork inside! Bring on the third course, the friar pie!"
+
+The pie was not yet ready, although the sizzling of the grease in the
+frying-pan could be heard. They took advantage of the delay to drink,
+begging Pecson to talk.
+
+Pecson crossed himself gravely and arose, restraining his clownish
+laugh with an effort, at the same time mimicking a certain Augustinian
+preacher, then famous, and beginning in a murmur, as though he were
+reading a text.
+
+"_Si tripa plena laudal Deum, tripa famelica laudabit fratres_--if
+the full stomach praises God, the hungry stomach will praise the
+friars. Words spoken by the Lord Custodio through the mouth of
+Ben-Zayb, in the journal _El Grito de la Integridad_, the second
+article, absurdity the one hundred and fifty-seventh.
+
+"Beloved brethren in Christ: Evil blows its foul breath over
+the verdant shores of Frailandia, commonly called the Philippine
+Archipelago. No day passes but the attack is renewed, but there
+is heard some sarcasm against the reverend, venerable, infallible
+corporations, defenseless and unsupported. Allow me, brethren, on
+this occasion to constitute myself a knight-errant to sally forth in
+defense of the unprotected, of the holy corporations that have reared
+us, thus again confirming the saving idea of the adage--a full stomach
+praises God, which is to say, a hungry stomach will praise the friars."
+
+"Bravo, bravo!"
+
+"Listen," said Isagani seriously, "I want you to understand that,
+speaking of friars, I respect one."
+
+Sandoval was getting merry, so he began to sing a shady couplet about
+the friars.
+
+"Hear me, brethren!" continued Pecson. "Turn your gaze toward the
+happy days of your infancy, endeavor to analyze the present and ask
+yourselves about the future. What do you find? Friars, friars, and
+friars! A friar baptized you, confirmed you, visited you in school
+with loving zeal; a friar heard your first secret; he was the first to
+bring you into communion with God, to set your feet upon the pathway
+of life; friars were your first and friars will be your last teachers;
+a friar it is who opens the hearts of your sweethearts, disposing
+them to heed your sighs; a friar marries you, makes you travel over
+different islands to afford you changes of climate and diversion; he
+will attend your death-bed, and even though you mount the scaffold,
+there will the friar be to accompany you with his prayers and tears,
+and you may rest assured that he will not desert you until he sees you
+thoroughly dead. Nor does his charity end there--dead, he will then
+endeavor to bury you with all pomp, he will fight that your corpse
+pass through the church to receive his supplications, and he will only
+rest satisfied when he can deliver you into the hands of the Creator,
+purified here on earth, thanks to temporal punishments, tortures, and
+humiliations. Learned in the doctrines of Christ, who closes heaven
+against the rich, they, our redeemers and genuine ministers of the
+Saviour, seek every means to lift away our sins and bear them far,
+far off, there where the accursed Chinese and Protestants dwell,
+to leave us this air, limpid, pure, healthful, in such a way that
+even should we so wish afterwards, we could not find a real to bring
+about our condemnation.
+
+"If, then, their existence is necessary to our happiness,
+if wheresoever we turn we must encounter their delicate hands,
+hungering for kisses, that every day smooth the marks of abuse from
+our countenances, why not adore them and fatten them--why demand their
+impolitic expulsion? Consider for a moment the immense void that
+their absence would leave in our social system. Tireless workers,
+they improve and propagate the races! Divided as we are, thanks
+to our jealousies and our susceptibilities, the friars unite us in
+a common lot, in a firm bond, so firm that many are unable to move
+their elbows. Take away the friar, gentlemen, and you will see how the
+Philippine edifice will totter; lacking robust shoulders and hairy
+limbs to sustain it, Philippine life will again become monotonous,
+without the merry note of the playful and gracious friar, without
+the booklets and sermons that split our sides with laughter, without
+the amusing contrast between grand pretensions and small brains,
+without the actual, daily representations of the tales of Boccaccio
+and La Fontaine! Without the girdles and scapularies, what would you
+have our women do in the future--save that money and perhaps become
+miserly and covetous? Without the masses, novenaries, and processions,
+where will you find games of _panguingui_ to entertain them in their
+hours of leisure? They would then have to devote themselves to their
+household duties and instead of reading diverting stories of miracles,
+we should then have to get them works that are not extant.
+
+"Take away the friar and heroism will disappear, the political virtues
+will fall under the control of the vulgar. Take him away and the Indian
+will cease to exist, for the friar is the Father, the Indian is the
+Word! The former is the sculptor, the latter the statue, because all
+that we are, think, or do, we owe to the friar--to his patience,
+his toil, his perseverance of three centuries to modify the form
+Nature gave us. The Philippines without the friar and without the
+Indian--what then would become of the unfortunate government in the
+hands of the Chinamen?"
+
+"It will eat lobster pie," suggested Isagani, whom Pecson's speech
+bored.
+
+"And that's what we ought to be doing. Enough of speeches!"
+
+As the Chinese who should have served the courses did not put in his
+appearance, one of the students arose and went to the rear, toward
+the balcony that overlooked the river. But he returned at once,
+making mysterious signs.
+
+"We're watched! I've seen Padre Sibyla's pet!"
+
+"Yes?" ejaculated Isagani, rising.
+
+"It's no use now. When he saw me he disappeared."
+
+Approaching the window he looked toward the plaza, then made signs to
+his companions to come nearer. They saw a young man leave the door of
+the _pansiter�a_, gaze all about him, then with some unknown person
+enter a carriage that waited at the curb. It was Simoun's carriage.
+
+"Ah!" exclaimed Makaraig. "The slave of the Vice-Rector attended by
+the Master of the General!"
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+PASQUINADES
+
+
+Very early the next morning Basilio arose to go to the hospital. He
+had his plans made: to visit his patients, to go afterwards to the
+University to see about his licentiateship, and then have an interview
+with Makaraig about the expense this would entail, for he had used up
+the greater part of his savings in ransoming Juli and in securing a
+house where she and her grandfather might live, and he had not dared
+to apply to Capitan Tiago, fearing that such a move would be construed
+as an advance on the legacy so often promised him.
+
+Preoccupied with these thoughts, he paid no attention to the groups
+of students who were at such an early hour returning from the Walled
+City, as though the classrooms had been closed, nor did he even note
+the abstracted air of some of them, their whispered conversations,
+or the mysterious signals exchanged among them. So it was that when
+he reached San Juan de Dios and his friends asked him about the
+conspiracy, he gave a start, remembering what Simoun had planned,
+but which had miscarried, owing to the unexplained accident to the
+jeweler. Terrified, he asked in a trembling voice, at the same time
+endeavoring to feign ignorance, "Ah, yes, what conspiracy?"
+
+"It's been discovered," replied one, "and it seems that many are
+implicated in it."
+
+With an effort Basilio controlled himself. "Many implicated?" he
+echoed, trying to learn something from the looks of the others. "Who?"
+
+"Students, a lot of students."
+
+Basilio did not think it prudent to ask more, fearing that he would
+give himself away, so on the pretext of visiting his patients he left
+the group. One of the clinical professors met him and placing his hand
+mysteriously on the youth's shoulder--the professor was a friend of
+his--asked him in a low voice, "Were you at that supper last night?"
+
+In his excited frame of mind Basilio thought the professor had
+said _night before last_, which was the time of his interview with
+Simoun. He tried to explain. "I assure you," he stammered, "that as
+Capitan Tiago was worse--and besides I had to finish that book--"
+
+"You did well not to attend it," said the professor. "But you're a
+member of the students' association?"
+
+"I pay my dues."
+
+"Well then, a piece of advice: go home at once and destroy any papers
+you have that may compromise you."
+
+Basilio shrugged his shoulders--he had no papers, nothing more than
+his clinical notes.
+
+"Has Se�or Simoun--"
+
+"Simoun has nothing to do with the affair, thank God!" interrupted
+the physician. "He was opportunely wounded by some unknown hand and
+is now confined to his bed. No, other hands are concerned in this,
+but hands no less terrible."
+
+Basilio drew a breath of relief. Simoun was the only one who could
+compromise him, although he thought of Cabesang Tales.
+
+"Are there tulisanes--"
+
+"No, man, nothing more than students."
+
+Basilio recovered his serenity. "What has happened then?" he made
+bold to ask.
+
+"Seditious pasquinades have been found; didn't you know about them?"
+
+"Where?"
+
+"In the University."
+
+"Nothing more than that?"
+
+"Whew! What more do you want?" asked the professor, almost in
+a rage. "The pasquinades are attributed to the students of the
+association--but, keep quiet!"
+
+The professor of pathology came along, a man who had more the look
+of a sacristan than of a physician. Appointed by the powerful mandate
+of the Vice-Rector, without other merit than unconditional servility
+to the corporation, he passed for a spy and an informer in the eyes
+of the rest of the faculty.
+
+The first professor returned his greeting coldly, and winked to
+Basilio, as he said to him, "Now I know that Capitan Tiago smells like
+a corpse--the crows and vultures have been gathering around him." So
+saying, he went inside.
+
+Somewhat calmed, Basilio now ventured to inquire for more details,
+but all that he could learn was that pasquinades had been found on
+the doors of the University, and that the Vice-Rector had ordered
+them to be taken down and sent to the Civil Government. It was said
+that they were filled with threats of assassination, invasion, and
+other braggadocio.
+
+The students made their comments on the affair. Their information
+came from the janitor, who had it from a servant in Santo Tomas,
+who had it from an usher. They prognosticated future suspensions and
+imprisonments, even indicating who were to be the victims--naturally
+the members of the association.
+
+Basilio then recalled Simoun's words: "The day in which they can get
+rid of you, you will not complete your course."
+
+"Could he have known anything?" he asked himself. "We'll see who is
+the most powerful."
+
+Recovering his serenity, he went on toward the University, to learn
+what attitude it behooved him to take and at the same time to see
+about his licentiateship. He passed along Calle Legazpi, then down
+through Beaterio, and upon arriving at the corner of this street
+and Calle Solana saw that something important must indeed have
+happened. Instead of the former lively, chattering groups on the
+sidewalks were to be seen civil-guards making the students move on,
+and these latter issuing from the University silent, some gloomy,
+some agitated, to stand off at a distance or make their way home.
+
+The first acquaintance he met was Sandoval, but Basilio called to him
+in vain. He seemed to have been smitten deaf. "Effect of fear on the
+gastro-intestinal juices," thought Basilio.
+
+Later he met Tadeo, who wore a Christmas face--at last that eternal
+holiday seemed to be realized.
+
+"What has happened, Tadeo?"
+
+"We'll have no school, at least for a week, old
+man! Sublime! Magnificent!" He rubbed his hands in glee.
+
+"But what has happened?"
+
+"They're going to arrest all of us in the association."
+
+"And are you glad of that?"
+
+"There'll be no school, there'll be no school!" He moved away almost
+bursting with joy.
+
+Basilio saw Juanito Pelaez approaching, pale and suspicious. This
+time his hump had reached its maximum, so great was his haste to get
+away. He had been one of the most active promoters of the association
+while things were running smoothly.
+
+"Eh, Pelaez, what's happened?"
+
+"Nothing, I know nothing. I didn't have anything to do with it,"
+he responded nervously. "I was always telling you that these things
+were quixotisms. It's the truth, you know I've said so to you?"
+
+Basilio did not remember whether he had said so or not, but to humor
+him replied, "Yes, man, but what's happened?"
+
+"It's the truth, isn't it? Look, you're a witness: I've always been
+opposed--you're a witness, don't forget it!"
+
+"Yes, man, but what's going on?"
+
+"Listen, you're a witness! I've never had anything to do with the
+members of the association, except to give them advice. You're not
+going to deny it now. Be careful, won't you?"
+
+"No, no, I won't deny it, but for goodness' sake, what has happened?"
+
+But Juanito was already far away. He had caught a glimpse of a guard
+approaching and feared arrest.
+
+Basilio then went on toward the University to see if perhaps the
+secretary's office might be open and if he could glean any further
+news. The office was closed, but there was an extraordinary commotion
+in the building. Hurrying up and down the stairways were friars, army
+officers, private persons, old lawyers and doctors, there doubtless
+to offer their services to the endangered cause.
+
+At a distance he saw his friend Isagani, pale and agitated, but radiant
+with youthful ardor, haranguing some fellow students with his voice
+raised as though he cared little that he be heard by everybody.
+
+"It seems preposterous, gentlemen, it seems unreal, that an incident so
+insignificant should scatter us and send us into flight like sparrows
+at whom a scarecrow has been shaken! But is this the first time that
+students have gone to prison for the sake of liberty? Where are those
+who have died, those who have been shot? Would you apostatize now?"
+
+"But who can the fool be that wrote such pasquinades?" demanded an
+indignant listener.
+
+"What does that matter to us?" rejoined Isagani. "We don't have
+to find out, let them find out! Before we know how they are drawn
+up, we have no need to make any show of agreement at a time like
+this. There where the danger is, there must we hasten, because honor
+is there! If what the pasquinades say is compatible with our dignity
+and our feelings, be he who he may that wrote them, he has done well,
+and we ought to be grateful to him and hasten to add our signatures
+to his! If they are unworthy of us, our conduct and our consciences
+will in themselves protest and defend us from every accusation!"
+
+Upon hearing such talk, Basilio, although he liked Isagani very
+much, turned and left. He had to go to Makaraig's house to see about
+the loan.
+
+Near the house of the wealthy student he observed whisperings and
+mysterious signals among the neighbors, but not comprehending what
+they meant, continued serenely on his way and entered the doorway. Two
+guards advanced and asked him what he wanted. Basilio realized that
+he had made a bad move, but he could not now retreat.
+
+"I've come to see my friend Makaraig," he replied calmly.
+
+The guards looked at each other. "Wait here," one of them said to
+him. "Wait till the corporal comes down."
+
+Basilio bit his lips and Simoun's words again recurred to him. Had
+they come to arrest Makaraig?--was his thought, but he dared not give
+it utterance. He did not have to wait long, for in a few moments
+Makaraig came down, talking pleasantly with the corporal. The two
+were preceded by a warrant officer.
+
+"What, you too, Basilio?" he asked.
+
+"I came to see you--"
+
+"Noble conduct!" exclaimed Makaraig laughing. "In time of calm,
+you avoid us."
+
+The corporal asked Basilio his name, then scanned a list. "Medical
+student, Calle Anloague?" he asked.
+
+Basilio bit his lip.
+
+"You've saved us a trip," added the corporal, placing his hand on
+the youth's shoulder. "You're under arrest!"
+
+"What, I also?"
+
+Makaraig burst out into laughter.
+
+"Don't worry, friend. Let's get into the carriage, while I tell you
+about the supper last night."
+
+With a graceful gesture, as though he were in his own house, he
+invited the warrant officer and the corporal to enter the carriage
+that waited at the door.
+
+"To the Civil Government!" he ordered the cochero.
+
+Now that Basilio had again regained his composure, he told Makaraig
+the object of his visit. The rich student did not wait for him to
+finish, but seized his hand. "Count on me, count on me, and to the
+festivities celebrating our graduation we'll invite these gentlemen,"
+he said, indicating the corporal and the warrant officer.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+THE FRIAR AND THE FILIPINO
+
+
+    Vox populi, vox Dei
+
+
+We left Isagani haranguing his friends. In the midst of his enthusiasm
+an usher approached him to say that Padre Fernandez, one of the higher
+professors, wished to talk with him.
+
+Isagani's face fell. Padre Fernandez was a person greatly respected
+by him, being the _one_ always excepted by him whenever the friars
+were attacked.
+
+"What does Padre Fernandez want?" he inquired.
+
+The usher shrugged his shoulders and Isagani reluctantly followed him.
+
+Padre Fernandez, the friar whom we met in Los Ba�os, was waiting
+in his cell, grave and sad, with his brows knitted as if he were
+in deep thought. He arose as Isagani entered, shook hands with him,
+and closed the door. Then he began to pace from one end of the room
+to the other. Isagani stood waiting for him to speak.
+
+"Se�or Isagani," he began at length with some emotion, "from the
+window I've heard you speaking, for though I am a consumptive I have
+good ears, and I want to talk with you. I have always liked the young
+men who express themselves clearly and have their own way of thinking
+and acting, no matter that their ideas may differ from mine. You
+young men, from what I have heard, had a supper last night. Don't
+excuse yourself--"
+
+"I don't intend to excuse myself!" interrupted Isagani.
+
+"So much the better--it shows that you accept the consequences of your
+actions. Besides, you would do ill in retracting, and I don't blame
+you, I take no notice of what may have been said there last night,
+I don't accuse you, because after all you're free to say of the
+Dominicans what seems best to you, you are not a pupil of ours--only
+this year have we had the pleasure of having you, and we shall
+probably not have you longer. Don't think that I'm going to invoke
+considerations of gratitude; no, I'm not going to waste my time in
+stupid vulgarisms. I've had you summoned here because I believe that
+you are one of the few students who act from conviction, and, as I
+like men of conviction, I'm going to explain myself to Se�or Isagani."
+
+Padre Fernandez paused, then continued his walk with bowed head,
+his gaze riveted on the floor.
+
+"You may sit down, if you wish," he remarked. "It's a habit of mine
+to walk about while talking, because my ideas come better then."
+
+Isagani remained standing, with his head erect, waiting for the
+professor to get to the point of the matter.
+
+"For more than eight years I have been a professor here," resumed
+Padre Fernandez, still continuing to pace back and forth, "and in
+that time I've known and dealt with more than twenty-five hundred
+students. I've taught them, I've tried to educate them, I've tried to
+inculcate in them principles of justice and of dignity, and yet in
+these days when there is so much murmuring against us I've not seen
+one who has the temerity to maintain his accusations when he finds
+himself in the presence of a friar, not even aloud in the presence
+of any numbers. Young men there are who behind our backs calumniate
+us and before us kiss our hands, with a base smile begging kind looks
+from us! Bah! What do you wish that we should do with such creatures?"
+
+"The fault is not all theirs, Padre," replied Isagani. "The fault
+lies partly with those who have taught them to be hypocrites,
+with those who have tyrannized over freedom of thought and freedom
+of speech. Here every independent thought, every word that is not an
+echo of the will of those in power, is characterized as filibusterism,
+and you know well enough what that means. A fool would he be who to
+please himself would say aloud what he thinks, who would lay himself
+liable to suffer persecution!"
+
+"What persecution have you had to suffer?" asked Padre Fernandez,
+raising his head. "Haven't I let you express yourself freely in my
+class? Nevertheless, you are an exception that, if what you say is
+true, I must correct, so as to make the rule as general as possible
+and thus avoid setting a bad example."
+
+Isagani smiled. "I thank you, but I will not discuss with you whether
+I am an exception. I will accept your qualification so that you
+may accept mine: you also are an exception, and as here we are not
+going to talk about exceptions, nor plead for ourselves, at least,
+I mean, _I'm not_, I beg of my _professor_ to change the course of
+the conversation."
+
+In spite of his liberal principles, Padre Fernandez raised his head
+and stared in surprise at Isagani. That young man was more independent
+than he had thought--although he called him _professor_, in reality
+he was dealing with him as an equal, since he allowed himself to
+offer suggestions. Like a wise diplomat, Padre Fernandez not only
+recognized the fact but even took his stand upon it.
+
+"Good enough!" he said. "But don't look upon me as your professor. I'm
+a friar and you are a Filipino student, nothing more nor less! Now
+I ask you--what do the Filipino students want of us?"
+
+The question came as a surprise; Isagani was not prepared for it. It
+was a thrust made suddenly while they were preparing their defense,
+as they say in fencing. Thus startled, Isagani responded with a
+violent stand, like a beginner defending himself.
+
+"That you do your duty!" he exclaimed.
+
+Fray Fernandez straightened up--that reply sounded to him like a
+cannon-shot. "That we do our duty!" he repeated, holding himself
+erect. "Don't we, then, do our duty? What duties do you ascribe to us?"
+
+"Those which you voluntarily placed upon yourselves on joining
+the order, and those which afterwards, once in it, you have been
+willing to assume. But, as a Filipino student, I don't think myself
+called upon to examine your conduct with reference to your statutes,
+to Catholicism, to the government, to the Filipino people, and to
+humanity in general--those are questions that you have to settle
+with your founders, with the Pope, with the government, with the
+whole people, and with God. As a Filipino student, I will confine
+myself to your duties toward us. The friars in general, being the
+local supervisors of education in the provinces, and the Dominicans
+in particular, by monopolizing in their hands all the studies of the
+Filipino youth, have assumed the obligation to its eight millions
+of inhabitants, to Spain, and to humanity, of which we form a part,
+of steadily bettering the young plant, morally and physically,
+of training it toward its happiness, of creating a people honest,
+prosperous, intelligent, virtuous, noble, and loyal. Now I ask you
+in my turn--have the friars fulfilled that obligation of theirs?"
+
+"We're fulfilling--"
+
+"Ah, Padre Fernandez," interrupted Isagani, "you with your hand on
+_your_ heart can say that you are fulfilling it, but with your hand
+on the heart of your order, on the heart of all the orders, you cannot
+say that without deceiving yourself. Ah, Padre Fernandez, when I find
+myself in the presence of a person whom I esteem and respect, I prefer
+to be the accused rather than the accuser, I prefer to defend myself
+rather than take the offensive. But now that we have entered upon
+the discussion, let us carry it to the end! How do they fulfill their
+obligation, those who look after education in the towns? By hindering
+it! And those who here monopolize education, those who try to mold the
+mind of youth, to the exclusion of all others whomsoever, how do they
+carry out their mission? By curtailing knowledge as much as possible,
+by extinguishing all ardor and enthusiasm, by trampling on all dignity,
+the soul's only refuge, by inculcating in us worn-out ideas, rancid
+beliefs, false principles incompatible with a life of progress! Ah,
+yes, when it is a question of feeding convicts, of providing for the
+maintenance of criminals, the government calls for bids in order
+to find the purveyor who offers the best means of subsistence,
+he who at least will not let them perish from hunger, but when it
+is a question of morally feeding a whole people, of nourishing the
+intellect of youth, the healthiest part, that which is later to be the
+country and the all, the government not only does not ask for any bid,
+but restricts the power to that very body which makes a boast of not
+desiring education, of wishing no advancement. What should we say if
+the purveyor for the prisons, after securing the contract by intrigue,
+should then leave the prisoners to languish in want, giving them only
+what is stale and rancid, excusing himself afterwards by saying that
+it is not convenient for the prisoners to enjoy good health, because
+good health brings merry thoughts, because merriment improves the man,
+and the man ought not to be improved, because it is to the purveyor's
+interest that there be many criminals? What should we say if afterwards
+the government and the purveyor should agree between themselves that
+of the ten or twelve cuartos which one received for each criminal,
+the other should receive five?"
+
+Padre Fernandek bit his lip. "Those are grave charges," he said,
+"and you are overstepping the limits of our agreement."
+
+"No, Padre, not if I continue to deal with the student question. The
+friars--and I do not say, you friars, since I do not confuse you
+with the common herd--the friars of all the orders have constituted
+themselves our mental purveyors, yet they say and shamelessly proclaim
+that it is not expedient for us to become enlightened, because some
+day we shall declare ourselves free! That is just the same as not
+wishing the prisoner to be well-fed so that he may improve and get out
+of prison. Liberty is to man what education is to the intelligence,
+and the friars' unwillingness that we have it is the origin of our
+discontent."
+
+"Instruction is given only to those who deserve it," rejoined Padre
+Fernandez dryly. "To give it to men without character and without
+morality is to prostitute it."
+
+"Why are there men without character and without morality?"
+
+The Dominican shrugged his shoulders. "Defects that they imbibe with
+their mothers' milk, that they breathe in the bosom of the family--how
+do I know?"
+
+"Ah, no, Padre Fernandez!" exclaimed the young man impetuously. "You
+have not dared to go into the subject deeply, you have not wished
+to gaze into the depths from fear of finding yourself there in the
+darkness of your brethren. What we are, you have made us. A people
+tyrannized over is forced to be hypocritical; a people denied the
+truth must resort to lies; and he who makes himself a tyrant breeds
+slaves. There is no morality, you say, so let it be--even though
+statistics can refute you in that here are not committed crimes
+like those among other peoples, blinded by the fumes of their
+moralizers. But, without attempting now to analyze what it is that
+forms the character and how far the education received determines
+morality, I will agree with you that we are defective. Who is to
+blame for that? You who for three centuries and a half have had in
+your hands our education, or we who submit to everything? If after
+three centuries and a half the artist has been able to produce only
+a caricature, stupid indeed he must be!"
+
+"Or bad enough the material he works upon."
+
+"Stupider still then, when, knowing it to be bad, he does not give
+it up, but goes on wasting time. Not only is he stupid, but he is
+a cheat and a robber, because he knows that his work is useless,
+yet continues to draw his salary. Not only is he stupid and a thief,
+he is a villain in that he prevents any other workman from trying
+his skill to see if he might not produce something worth while! The
+deadly jealousy of the incompetent!"
+
+The reply was sharp and Padre Fernandez felt himself caught. To his
+gaze Isagani appeared gigantic, invincible, convincing, and for the
+first time in his life he felt beaten by a Filipino student. He
+repented of having provoked the argument, but it was too late to
+turn back. In this quandary, finding himself confronted with such
+a formidable adversary, he sought a strong shield and laid hold of
+the government.
+
+"You impute all the faults to us, because you see only us, who are
+near," he said in a less haughty tone. "It's natural and doesn't
+surprise me. A person hates the soldier or policeman who arrests him
+and not the judge who sends him to prison. You and we are both dancing
+to the same measure of music--if at the same note you lift your foot in
+unison with us, don't blame us for it, it's the music that is directing
+our movements. Do you think that we friars have no consciences and
+that we do not desire what is right? Do you believe that we do not
+think about you, that we do not heed our duty, that we only eat to
+live, and live to rule? Would that it were so! But we, like you,
+follow the cadence, finding ourselves between Scylla and Charybdis:
+either you reject us or the government rejects us. The government
+commands, and he who commands, commands,--and must be obeyed!"
+
+"From which it may be inferred," remarked Isagani with a bitter smile,
+"that the government wishes our demoralization."
+
+"Oh, no, I didn't mean that! What I meant to say is that there are
+beliefs, there are theories, there are laws, which, dictated with
+the best intention, produce the most deplorable consequences. I'll
+explain myself better by citing an example. To stamp out a small
+evil, there are dictated many laws that cause greater evils still:
+'_corruptissima in republica plurimae leges,_' said Tacitus. To
+prevent one case of fraud, there are provided a million and a half
+preventive or humiliating regulations, which produce the immediate
+effect of awakening in the public the desire to elude and mock
+such regulations. To make a people criminal, there's nothing more
+needed than to doubt its virtue. Enact a law, not only here, but
+even in Spain, and you will see how the means of evading it will be
+sought, and this is for the very reason that the legislators have
+overlooked the fact that the more an object is hidden, the more a
+sight of it is desired. Why are rascality and astuteness regarded
+as great qualities in the Spanish people, when there is no other so
+noble, so proud, so chivalrous as it? Because our legislators, with
+the best intentions, have doubted its nobility, wounded its pride,
+challenged its chivalry! Do you wish to open in Spain a road among the
+rocks? Then place there an imperative notice forbidding the passage,
+and the people, in order to protest against the order, will leave the
+highway to clamber over the rocks. The day on which some legislator in
+Spain forbids virtue and commands vice, then all will become virtuous!"
+
+The Dominican paused for a brief space, then resumed: "But you may
+say that we are getting away from the subject, so I'll return to
+it. What I can say to you, to convince you, is that the vices from
+which you suffer ought to be ascribed by you neither to us nor to the
+government. They are due to the imperfect organization of our social
+system: _qui multum probat, nihil probat_, one loses himself through
+excessive caution, lacking what is necessary and having too much of
+what is superfluous."
+
+"If you admit those defects in your social system," replied Isagani,
+"why then do you undertake to regulate alien societies, instead of
+first devoting your attention to yourselves?"
+
+"We're getting away from the subject, young man. The theory in
+accomplished facts must be accepted."
+
+"So let it be! I accept it because it is an accomplished fact, but
+I will further ask: why, if your social organization is defective,
+do you not change it or at least give heed to the cry of those who
+are injured by it?"
+
+"We're still far away. Let's talk about what the students want from
+the friars."
+
+"From the moment when the friars hide themselves behind the government,
+the students have to turn to it."
+
+This statement was true and there appeared no means of ignoring it.
+
+"I'm not the government and I can't answer for its acts. What do
+the students wish us to do for them within the limits by which we
+are confined?"
+
+"Not to oppose the emancipation of education but to favor it."
+
+The Dominican shook his head. "Without stating my own opinion, that
+is asking us to commit suicide," he said.
+
+"On the contrary, it is asking you for room to pass in order not to
+trample upon and crush you."
+
+"Ahem!" coughed Padre Fernandez, stopping and remaining
+thoughtful. "Begin by asking something that does not cost so much,
+something that any one of us can grant without abatement of dignity
+or privilege, for if we can reach an understanding and dwell in peace,
+why this hatred, why this distrust?"
+
+"Then let's get down to details."
+
+"Yes, because if we disturb the foundation, we'll bring down the
+whole edifice."
+
+"Then let's get down to details, let's leave the region of abstract
+principles," rejoined Isagani with a smile, "and _also without stating
+my own opinion,_"--the youth accented these words--"the students
+would desist from their attitude and soften certain asperities if
+the professors would try to treat them better than they have up to
+the present. That is in their hands."
+
+"What?" demanded the Dominican. "Have the students any complaint to
+make about my conduct?"
+
+"Padre, we agreed from the start not to talk of yourself or of myself,
+we're speaking generally. The students, besides getting no great
+benefit out of the years spent in the classes, often leave there
+remnants of their dignity, if not the whole of it."
+
+Padre Fernandez again bit his lip. "No one forces them to study--the
+fields are uncultivated," he observed dryly.
+
+"Yes, there is something that impels them to study," replied Isagani
+in the same tone, looking the Dominican full in the face. "Besides
+the duty of every one to seek his own perfection, there is the desire
+innate in man to cultivate his intellect, a desire the more powerful
+here in that it is repressed. He who gives his gold and his life to the
+State has the right to require of it opporttmity better to get that
+gold and better to care for his life. Yes, Padre, there is something
+that impels them, and that something is the government itself. It is
+you yourselves who pitilessly ridicule the uncultured Indian and deny
+him his rights, on the ground that he is ignorant. You strip him and
+then scoff at his nakedness."
+
+Padre Fernandez did not reply, but continued to pace about feverishly,
+as though very much agitated.
+
+"You say that the fields are not cultivated," resumed Isagani in a
+changed tone, after a brief pause. "Let's not enter upon an analysis
+of the reason for this, because we should get far away. But you,
+Padre Fernandez, you, a teacher, you, a learned man, do you wish a
+people of peons and laborers? In your opinion, is the laborer the
+perfect state at which man may arrive in his development? Or is it
+that you wish knowledge for yourself and labor for the rest?"
+
+"No, I want knowledge for him who deserves it, for him who knows how
+to use it," was the reply. "When the students demonstrate that they
+love it, when young men of conviction appear, young men who know how
+to maintain their dignity and make it respected, then there will be
+knowledge, then there will be considerate professors! If there are
+now professors who resort to abuse, it is because there are pupils
+who submit to it."
+
+"When there are professors, there will be students!"
+
+"Begin by reforming yourselves, you who have need of change, and we
+will follow."
+
+"Yes," said Isagani with a bitter laugh, "let us begin it, because
+the difficulty is on our side. Well you know what is expected of
+a pupil who stands before a professor--you yourself, with all your
+love of justice, with all your kind sentiments, have been restraining
+yourself by a great effort while I have been telling you bitter truths,
+you yourself, Padre Fernandez! What good has been secured by him among
+us who has tried to inculcate other ideas? What evils have not fallen
+upon you because you have tried to be just and perform your duty?"
+
+"Se�or Isagani," said the Dominican, extending his hand, "although it
+may seem that nothing practical has resulted from this conversation,
+yet something has been gained. I'll talk to my brethren about what
+you have told me and I hope that something can be done. Only I fear
+that they won't believe in your existence."
+
+"I fear the same," returned Isagani, shaking the Dominican's hand. "I
+fear that my friends will not believe in your existence, as you have
+revealed yourself to me today." [57]
+
+Considering the interview at an end, the young man took his leave.
+
+Padre Fernandez opened the door and followed him with his gaze until
+he disappeared around a corner in the corridor. For some time he
+listened to the retreating footsteps, then went back into his cell
+and waited for the youth to appear in the street.
+
+He saw him and actually heard him say to a friend who asked where he
+was going: "To the Civil Government! I'm going to see the pasquinades
+and join the others!"
+
+His startled friend stared at him as one would look at a person who
+is about to commit suicide, then moved away from him hurriedly.
+
+"Poor boy!" murmured Padre Fernandez, feeling his eyes moisten. "I
+grudge you to the Jesuits who educated you."
+
+But Padre Fernandez was completely mistaken; the Jesuits repudiated
+Isagani [58] when that afternoon they learned that he had been
+arrested, saying that he would compromise them. "That young man has
+thrown himself away, he's going to do us harm! Let it be understood
+that he didn't get those ideas here."
+
+Nor were the Jesuits wrong. No! Those ideas come only from God through
+the medium of Nature.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+TATAKUT
+
+
+With prophetic inspiration Ben-Zayb had been for some days past
+maintaining in his newspaper that education was disastrous, very
+disastrous for the Philippine Islands, and now in view of the events of
+that Friday of pasquinades, the writer crowed and chanted his triumph,
+leaving belittled and overwhelmed his adversary _Horatius_, who in
+the _Pirotecnia_ had dared to ridicule him in the following manner:
+
+
+    From our contemporary, _El Grito_:
+
+    "Education is disastrous, very disastrous, for the Philippine
+    Islands."
+
+    Admitted.
+
+    For some time _El Grito_ has pretended to represent the
+    Filipino people--_ergo_, as Fray Iba�ez would say, if he
+    knew Latin.
+
+    But Fray Iba�ez turns Mussulman when he writes, and we know
+    how the Mussulmans dealt with education. _In witness whereof_,
+    as a royal preacher said, the Alexandrian library!
+
+
+Now he was right, he, Ben-Zayb! He was the only one in the islands
+who thought, the only one who foresaw events!
+
+Truly, the news that seditious pasquinades had been found on the
+doors of the University not only took away the appetite from many
+and disturbed the digestion of others, but it even rendered the
+phlegmatic Chinese uneasy, so that they no longer dared to sit in
+their shops with one leg drawn up as usual, from fear of losing time
+in extending it in order to put themselves into flight. At eight
+o'clock in the morning, although the sun continued on its course and
+his Excellency, the Captain-General, did not appear at the head of
+his victorious cohorts, still the excitement had increased. The friars
+who were accustomed to frequent Quiroga's bazaar did not put in their
+appearance, and this symptom presaged terrific cataclysms. If the
+sun had risen a square and the saints appeared only in pantaloons,
+Quiroga would not have been so greatly alarmed, for he would have
+taken the sun for a gaming-table and the sacred images for gamblers
+who had lost their camisas, but for the friars not to come, precisely
+when some novelties had just arrived for them!
+
+By means of a provincial friend of his, Quiroga forbade entrance into
+his gaming-houses to every Indian who was not an old acquaintance,
+as the future Chinese consul feared that they might get possession of
+the sums that the wretches lost there. After arranging his bazaar in
+such a way that he could close it quickly in case of need, he had a
+policeman accompany him for the short distance that separated his house
+from Simoun's. Quiroga thought this occasion the most propitious for
+making use of the rifles and cartridges that he had in his warehouse,
+in the way the jeweler had pointed out; so that on the following
+days there would be searches made, and then--how many prisoners, how
+many terrified people would give up their savings! It was the game of
+the old carbineers, in slipping contraband cigars and tobacco-leaves
+under a house, in order to pretend a search and force the unfortunate
+owner to bribery or fines, only now the art had been perfected and,
+the tobacco monopoly abolished, resort was had to the prohibited arms.
+
+But Simoun refused to see any one and sent word to the Chinese that
+he should leave things as they were, whereupon he went to see Don
+Custodio to inquire whether he should fortify his bazaar, but neither
+would Don Custodio receive him, being at the time engaged in the study
+of a project for defense in case of a siege. He thought of Ben-Zayb
+as a source of information, but finding the writer armed to the teeth
+and using two loaded revolvers for paper-weights, took his leave in
+the shortest possible time, to shut himself up in his house and take
+to his bed under pretense of illness.
+
+At four in the afternoon the talk was no longer of simple
+pasquinades. There were whispered rumors of an understanding between
+the students and the outlaws of San Mateo, it was certain that in the
+_pansiter�a_ they had conspired to surprise the city, there was talk
+of German ships outside the bay to support the movement, of a band
+of young men who under the pretext of protesting and demonstrating
+their Hispanism had gone to the Palace to place themselves at the
+General's orders but had been arrested because it was discovered that
+they were armed. Providence had saved his Excellency, preventing him
+from receiving those precocious criminals, as he was at the time in
+conference with the Provincials, the Vice-Rector, and with Padre Irene,
+Padre Salvi's representative. There was considerable truth in these
+rumors, if we have to believe Padre Irene, who in the afternoon went
+to visit Capitan Tiago. According to him, certain persons had advised
+his Excellency to improve the opportunity in order to inspire terror
+and administer a lasting lesson to the filibusters.
+
+"A number shot," one had advised, "some two dozen reformers deported
+at once, in the silence of the night, would extinguish forever the
+flames of discontent."
+
+"No," rejoined another, who had a kind heart, "sufficient that the
+soldiers parade through the streets, a troop of cavalry, for example,
+with drawn sabers--sufficient to drag along some cannon, that's
+enough! The people are timid and will all retire into their houses."
+
+"No, no," insinuated another. "This is the opportunity to get rid of
+the enemy. It's not sufficient that they retire into their houses, they
+should be made to come out, like evil humors by means of plasters. If
+they are inclined to start riots, they should be stirred up by secret
+agitators. I am of the opinion that the troops should be resting on
+their arms and appearing careless and indifferent, so the people may be
+emboldened, and then in case of any disturbance--out on them, action!"
+
+"The end justifies the means," remarked another. "Our end is our
+holy religion and the integrity of the fatherland. Proclaim a state
+of siege, and in case of the least disturbance, arrest all the rich
+and educated, and--clean up the country!"
+
+"If I hadn't got there in time to counsel moderation," added Padre
+Irene, speaking to Capitan Tiago, "it's certain that blood would
+now be flowing through the streets. I thought of you, Capitan--The
+partizans of force couldn't do much with the General, and they missed
+Simoun. Ah, if Simoun had not been taken ill--"
+
+With the arrest of Basilio and the search made later among his books
+and papers, Capitan Tiago had become much worse. Now Padre Irene had
+come to augment his terror with hair-raising tales. Ineffable fear
+seized upon the wretch, manifesting itself first by a light shiver,
+which was rapidly accentuated, until he was unable to speak. With his
+eyes bulging and his brow covered with sweat, he caught Padre Irene's
+arm and tried to rise, but could not, and then, uttering two groans,
+fell heavily back upon the pillow. His eyes were wide open and he
+was slavering--but he was dead. The terrified Padre Irene fled, and,
+as the dying man had caught hold of him, in his flight he dragged the
+corpse from the bed, leaving it sprawling in the middle of the room.
+
+By night the terror had reached a climax. Several incidents had
+occurred to make the timorous believe in the presence of secret
+agitators.
+
+During a baptism some cuartos were thrown to the boys and naturally
+there was a scramble at the door of the church. It happened that at
+the time there was passing a bold soldier, who, somewhat preoccupied,
+mistook the uproar for a gathering of filibusters and hurled himself,
+sword in hand, upon the boys. He went into the church, and had he not
+become entangled in the curtains suspended from the choir he would
+not have left a single head on shoulders. It was but the matter of a
+moment for the timorous to witness this and take to flight, spreading
+the news that the revolution had begun. The few shops that had been
+kept open were now hastily closed, there being Chinese who even left
+bolts of cloth outside, and not a few women lost their slippers in
+their flight through the streets. Fortunately, there was only one
+person wounded and a few bruised, among them the soldier himself,
+who suffered a fall fighting with the curtain, which smelt to him of
+filibusterism. Such prowess gained him great renown, and a renown
+so pure that it is to be wished all fame could be acquired in like
+manner--mothers would then weep less and earth would be more populous!
+
+In a suburb the inhabitants caught two unknown individuals burying
+arms under a house, whereupon a tumult arose and the people pursued
+the strangers in order to kill them and turn their bodies over to the
+authorities, but some one pacified the excited crowd by telling them
+that it would be sufficient to hand over the _corpora delictorum_,
+which proved to be some old shotguns that would surely have killed
+the first person who tried to fire them.
+
+"All right," exclaimed one braggart, "if they want us to rebel,
+let's go ahead!" But he was cuffed and kicked into silence, the women
+pinching him as though he had been the owner of the shotguns.
+
+In Ermita the affair was more serious, even though there was less
+excitement, and that when there were shots fired. A certain cautious
+government employee, armed to the teeth, saw at nightfall an object
+near his house, and taking it for nothing less than a student, fired
+at it twice with a revolver. The object proved to be a policeman,
+and they buried him--_pax Christi! Mutis!_
+
+In Dulumbayan various shots also resounded, from which there resulted
+the death of a poor old deaf man, who had not heard the sentinel's
+_qui�n vive_, and of a hog that had heard it and had not answered
+_Espa�a_! The old man was buried with difficulty, since there was no
+money to pay for the obsequies, but the hog was eaten.
+
+In Manila, [59] in a confectionery near the University much frequented
+by the students, the arrests were thus commented upon.
+
+"And have they arrested Tadeo?" [60] asked the proprietess.
+
+"_Ab�_!" answered a student who lived in Parian, "he's already shot!"
+
+"Shot! _Nak�_! He hasn't paid what he owes me."
+
+"Ay, don't mention that or you'll be taken for an accomplice. I've
+already burnt the book [61] you lent me. There might be a search and
+it would be found. Be careful!"
+
+"Did you say that Isagani is a prisoner?"
+
+"Crazy fool, too, that Isagani," replied the indignant student. "They
+didn't try to catch him, but he went and surrendered. Let him bust
+himself--he'll surely be shot."
+
+The se�ora shrugged her shoulders. "He doesn't owe me anything. And
+what about Paulita?"
+
+"She won't lack a husband. Sure, she'll cry a little, and then marry
+a Spaniard."
+
+The night was one of the gloomiest. In the houses the rosary was
+recited and pious women dedicated paternosters and requiems to each
+of the souls of their relatives and friends. By eight o'clock hardly
+a pedestrian could be seen--only from time to time was heard the
+galloping of a horse against whose sides a saber clanked noisily,
+then the whistles of the watchmen, and carriages that whirled along
+at full speed, as though pursued by mobs of filibusters.
+
+Yet terror did not reign everywhere. In the house of the silversmith,
+where Placido Penitente boarded, the events were commented upon and
+discussed with some freedom.
+
+"I don't believe in the pasquinades," declared a workman, lank and
+withered from operating the blowpipe. "To me it looks like Padre
+Salvi's doings."
+
+"Ahem, ahem!" coughed the silversmith, a very prudent man, who did not
+dare to stop the conversation from fear that he would be considered
+a coward. The good man had to content himself with coughing, winking
+to his helper, and gazing toward the street, as if to say, "They may
+be watching us!"
+
+"On account of the operetta," added another workman.
+
+"Aha!" exclaimed one who had a foolish face, "I told you so!"
+
+"Ahem!" rejoined a clerk, in a tone of compassion, "the affair of
+the pasquinades is true, Chichoy, and I can give you the explanation."
+
+Then he added mysteriously, "It's a trick of the Chinaman Quiroga's!"
+
+"Ahem, ahem!" again coughed the silversmith, shifting his quid of
+buyo from one cheek to the other.
+
+"Believe me, Chichoy, of Quiroga the Chinaman! I heard it in the
+office."
+
+"_Nak�_, it's certain then," exclaimed the simpleton, believing it
+at once.
+
+"Quiroga," explained the clerk, "has a hundred thousand pesos in
+Mexican silver out in the bay. How is he to get it in? Very easily. Fix
+up the pasquinades, availing himself of the question of the students,
+and, while every-body is excited, grease the officials' palms, and
+in the cases come!"
+
+"Just it! Just it!" cried the credulous fool, striking the table
+with his fist. "Just it! That's why Quiroga did it! That's why--"
+But he had to relapse into silence as he really did not know what to
+say about Quiroga.
+
+"And we must pay the damages?" asked the indignant Chichoy.
+
+"Ahem, ahem, a-h-hem!" coughed the silversmith, hearing steps in
+the street.
+
+The footsteps approached and all in the shop fell silent.
+
+"St. Pascual Bailon is a great saint," declared the silversmith
+hypocritically, in a loud voice, at the same time winking to the
+others. "St. Pascual Bailon--"
+
+At that moment there appeared the face of Placido Penitente, who was
+accompanied by the pyrotechnician that we saw receiving orders from
+Simoun. The newcomers were surrounded and importuned for news.
+
+"I haven't been able to talk with the prisoners," explained
+Placido. "There are some thirty of them."
+
+"Be on your guard," cautioned the pyrotechnician, exchanging a
+knowing look with Placido. "They say that to-night there's going to
+be a massacre."
+
+"Aha! Thunder!" exclaimed Chichoy, looking about for a weapon. Seeing
+none, he caught up his blowpipe.
+
+The silversmith sat down, trembling in every limb. The credulous
+simpleton already saw himself beheaded and wept in anticipation over
+the fate of his family.
+
+"No," contradicted the clerk, "there's not going to be any
+massacre. The adviser of"--he made a mysterious gesture--"is
+fortunately sick."
+
+"Simoun!"
+
+"Ahem, ahem, a-h-hem!"
+
+Placido and the pyrotechnician exchanged another look.
+
+"If he hadn't got sick--"
+
+"It would look like a revolution," added the pyrotechnician
+negligently, as he lighted a cigarette in the lamp chimney. "And what
+should we do then?"
+
+"Then we'd start a real one, now that they're going to massacre
+us anyhow--"
+
+The violent fit of coughing that seized the silversmith prevented
+the rest of this speech from being heard, but Chichoy must have been
+saying terrible things, to judge from his murderous gestures with
+the blowpipe and the face of a Japanese tragedian that he put on.
+
+"Rather say that he's playing off sick because he's afraid to go
+out. As may be seen--"
+
+The silversmith was attacked by another fit of coughing so severe
+that he finally asked all to retire.
+
+"Nevertheless, get ready," warned the pyrotechnician. "If they want
+to force us to kill or be killed--"
+
+Another fit of coughing on the part of the poor silversmith prevented
+further conversation, so the workmen and apprentices retired to their
+homes, carrying with them hammers and saws, and other implements,
+more or less cutting, more or less bruising, disposed to sell their
+lives dearly. Placido and the pyrotechnician went out again.
+
+"Prudence, prudence!" cautioned the silversmith in a tearful voice.
+
+"You'll take care of my widow and orphans!" begged the credulous
+simpleton in a still more tearful voice, for he already saw himself
+riddled with bullets and buried.
+
+That night the guards at the city gates were replaced with Peninsular
+artillerymen, and on the following morning as the sun rose, Ben-Zayb,
+who had ventured to take a morning stroll to examine the condition of
+the fortifications, found on the glacis near the Luneta the corpse
+of a native girl, half-naked and abandoned. Ben-Zayb was horrified,
+but after touching it with his cane and gazing toward the gates
+proceeded on his way, musing over a sentimental tale he might base
+upon the incident.
+
+However, no allusion to it appeared in the newspapers on the following
+days, engrossed as they were with the falls and slippings caused by
+banana-peels. In the dearth of news Ben-Zayb had to comment at length
+on a cyclone that had destroyed in America whole towns, causing the
+death of more than two thousand persons. Among other beautiful things
+he said:
+
+
+    "_The sentiment of charity_, MORE PREVALENT IN CATHOLIC
+    COUNTRIES THAN IN OTHERS, and the thought of Him who,
+    influenced by that same feeling, sacrificed himself for
+    _humanity, moves (sic)_ us to compassion over the misfortunes
+    of our kind and to render thanks that _in this country_,
+    so scourged by cyclones, there are not enacted scenes so
+    desolating as that which the inhabitants of the United States
+    mus have witnessed!"
+
+
+_Horatius_ did not miss the opportunity, and, also without mentioning
+the dead, or the murdered native girl, or the assaults, answered him
+in his _Pirotecnia_:
+
+
+    "After such great charity and such great humanity, Fray
+    Iba�ez--I mean, Ben-Zayb--brings himself to pray for the
+    Philippines.
+
+    But he is understood.
+
+    Because he is not Catholic, and the sentiment of charity is
+    most prevalent," etc. [62]
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+EXIT CAPITAN TIAGO
+
+
+    Talis vita, finis ita
+
+
+Capitan Tiago had a good end--that is, a quite exceptional
+funeral. True it is that the curate of the parish had ventured
+the observation to Padre Irene that Capitan Tiago had died without
+confession, but the good priest, smiling sardonically, had rubbed
+the tip of his nose and answered:
+
+"Why say that to me? If we had to deny the obsequies to all who
+die without confession, we should forget the _De profundis_! These
+restrictions, as you well know, are enforced when the impenitent is
+also insolvent. But Capitan Tiago--out on you! You've buried infidel
+Chinamen, and with a requiem mass!"
+
+Capitan Tiago had named Padre Irene as his executor and willed his
+property in part to St. Clara, part to the Pope, to the Archbishop, the
+religious corporations, leaving twenty pesos for the matriculation of
+poor students. This last clause had been dictated at the suggestion of
+Padre Irene, in his capacity as protector of studious youths. Capitan
+Tiago had annulled a legacy of twenty-five pesos that he had left
+to Basilio, in view of the ungrateful conduct of the boy during the
+last few days, but Padre Irene had restored it and announced that he
+would take it upon his own purse and conscience.
+
+In the dead man's house, where were assembled on the following day many
+old friends and acquaintances, considerable comment was indulged in
+over a miracle. It was reported that, at the very moment when he was
+dying, the soul of Capitan Tiago had appeared to the nuns surrounded
+by a brilliant light. God had saved him, thanks to the pious legacies,
+and to the numerous masses he had paid for. The story was commented
+upon, it was recounted vividly, it took on particulars, and was
+doubted by no one. The appearance of Capitan Tiago was minutely
+described--of course the frock coat, the cheek bulged out by the
+quid of buyo, without omitting the game-cock and the opium-pipe. The
+senior sacristan, who was present, gravely affirmed these facts with
+his head and reflected that, after death, he would appear with his
+cup of white _taj�_, for without that refreshing breakfast he could
+not comprehend happiness either on earth or in heaven.
+
+On this subject, because of their inability to discuss the events
+of the preceding day and because there were gamblers present, many
+strange speculations were developed. They made conjectures as to
+whether Capitan Tiago would invite St. Peter to a _soltada_, whether
+they would place bets, whether the game-cocks were immortal, whether
+invulnerable, and in this case who would be the referee, who would win,
+and so on: discussions quite to the taste of those who found sciences,
+theories, and systems, based on a text which they esteem infallible,
+revealed or dogmatic. Moreover, there were cited passages from novenas,
+books of miracles, sayings of the curates, descriptions of heaven,
+and other embroidery. Don Primitivo, the philosopher, was in his
+glory quoting opinions of the theologians.
+
+"Because no one can lose," he stated with great authority. "To
+lose would cause hard feelings and in heaven there can't be any
+hard feelings."
+
+"But some one has to win," rejoined the gambler Aristorenas. "The
+fun lies in winning!"
+
+"Well, both win, that's easy!"
+
+This idea of both winning could not be admitted by Aristorenas,
+for he had passed his life in the cockpit and had always seen one
+cock lose and the other win--at best, there was a tie. Vainly Don
+Primitivo argued in Latin. Aristorenas shook his head, and that too
+when Don Primitivo's Latin was easy to understand, for he talked of _an
+gallus talisainus, acuto tari armatus, an gallus beati Petri bulikus
+sasabungus sit_, [63] and so on, until at length he decided to resort
+to the argument which many use to convince and silence their opponents.
+
+"You're going to be damned, friend Martin, you're falling into
+heresy! _Cave ne cadas!_ I'm not going to play monte with you any more,
+and we'll not set up a bank together. You deny the omnipotence of
+God, _peccatum mortale!_ You deny the existence of the Holy Trinity--
+three are one and one is three! Take care! You indirectly deny that
+two natures, two understandings, and two wills can have only one
+memory! Be careful! _Quicumque non crederit anathema sit!_"
+
+Martin Aristorenas shrank away pale and trembling, while Quiroga,
+who had listened with great attention to the argument, with marked
+deference offered the philosopher a magnificent cigar, at the same time
+asking in his caressing voice: "Surely, one can make a contract for a
+cockpit with Kilisto, [64] ha? When I die, I'll be the contractor, ha?"
+
+Among the others, they talked more of the deceased; at least they
+discussed what kind of clothing to put on him. Capitan Tinong proposed
+a Franciscan habit--and fortunately, he had one, old, threadbare, and
+patched, a precious object which, according to the friar who gave it to
+him as alms in exchange for thirty-six pesos, would preserve the corpse
+from the flames of hell and which reckoned in its support various pious
+anecdotes taken from the books distributed by the curates. Although he
+held this relic in great esteem, Capitan Tinong was disposed to part
+with it for the sake of his intimate friend, whom he had not been able
+to visit during his illness. But a tailor objected, with good reason,
+that since the nuns had seen Capitan Tiago ascending to heaven in a
+frock coat, in a frock coat he should be dressed here on earth, nor
+was there any necessity for preservatives and fire-proof garments. The
+deceased had attended balls and fiestas in a frock coat, and nothing
+else would be expected of him in the skies--and, wonderful to relate,
+the tailor accidentally happened to have one ready, which he would part
+with for thirty-two pesos, four cheaper than the Franciscan habit,
+because he didn't want to make any profit on Capitan Tiago, who had
+been his customer in life and would now be his patron in heaven. But
+Padre Irene, trustee and executor, rejected both proposals and ordered
+that the Capitan be dressed in one of his old suits of clothes,
+remarking with holy unction that God paid no attention to clothing.
+
+The obsequies were, therefore, of the very first class. There were
+responsories in the house, and in the street three friars officiated,
+as though one were not sufficient for such a great soul. All the
+rites and ceremonies possible were performed, and it is reported
+that there were even _extras_, as in the benefits for actors. It was
+indeed a delight: loads of incense were burned, there were plenty
+of Latin chants, large quantities of holy water were expended, and
+Padre Irene, out of regard for his old friend, sang the _Dies Irae_
+in a falsetto voice from the choir, while the neighbors suffered real
+headaches from so much knell-ringing.
+
+Do�a Patrocinio, the ancient rival of Capitan Tiago in religiosity,
+actually wanted to die on the next day, so that she might order even
+more sumptuous obsequies. The pious old lady could not bear the thought
+that he, whom she had long considered vanquished forever, should in
+dying come forward again with so much pomp. Yes, she desired to die,
+and it seemed that she could hear the exclamations of the people at
+the funeral: "This indeed is what you call a funeral! This indeed is
+to know how to die, Do�a Patrocinio!"
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+JULI
+
+
+The death of Capitan Tiago and Basilio's imprisonment were soon
+reported in the province, and to the honor of the simple inhabitants
+of San Diego, let it be recorded that the latter was the incident more
+regretted and almost the only one discussed. As was to be expected,
+the report took on different forms, sad and startling details were
+given, what could not be understood was explained, the gaps being
+filled by conjectures, which soon passed for accomplished facts,
+and the phantoms thus created terrified their own creators.
+
+In the town of Tiani it was reported that at least, at the very
+least, the young man was going to be deported and would very
+probably be murdered on the journey. The timorous and pessimistic
+were not satisfied with this but even talked about executions and
+courts-martial--January was a fatal month; in January the Cavite affair
+had occurred, and _they_ [65] even though curates, had been garroted,
+so a poor Basilio without protectors or friends--
+
+"I told him so!" sighed the Justice of the Peace, as if he had at
+some time given advice to Basilio. "I told him so."
+
+"It was to be expected," commented Sister Penchang. "He would go
+into the church and when he saw that the holy water was somewhat
+dirty he wouldn't cross himself with it. He talked about germs and
+disease, _ab�_, it's the chastisement of God! He deserved it, and he
+got it! As though the holy water could transmit diseases! Quite the
+contrary, _ab�!_"
+
+She then related how she had cured herself of indigestion by moistening
+her stomach with holy water, at the same time reciting the _Sanctus
+Deus_, and she recommended the remedy to those present when they should
+suffer from dysentery, or an epidemic occurred, only that then they
+must pray in Spanish:
+
+
+    Santo Di�s,
+    Santo fuerte,
+    Santo inmortal,
+    �Libranos, Se�or, de la peste
+    Y de todo mal! [66]
+
+
+"It's an infallible remedy, but you must apply the holy water to the
+part affected," she concluded.
+
+But there were many persons who did not believe in these things,
+nor did they attribute Basilio's imprisonment to the chastisement of
+God. Nor did they take any stock in insurrections and pasquinades,
+knowing the prudent and ultra-pacific character of the boy, but
+preferred to ascribe it to revenge on the part of the friars, because
+of his having rescued from servitude Juli, the daughter of a tulisan
+who was the mortal enemy of a certain powerful corporation. As they
+had quite a poor idea of the morality of that same corporation and
+could recall cases of petty revenge, their conjecture was believed
+to have more probability and justification.
+
+"What a good thing I did when I drove her from my house!" said Sister
+Penchang. "I don't want to have any trouble with the friars, so I
+urged her to find the money."
+
+The truth was, however, that she regretted Juli's liberty, for Juli
+prayed and fasted for her, and if she had stayed a longer time, would
+also have done penance. Why, if the curates pray for us and Christ
+died for our sins, couldn't Juli do the same for Sister Penchang?
+
+When the news reached the hut where the poor Juli and her grandfather
+lived, the girl had to have it repeated to her. She stared at Sister
+Bali, who was telling it, as though without comprehension, without
+ability to collect her thoughts. Her ears buzzed, she felt a sinking
+at the heart and had a vague presentiment that this event would have
+a disastrous influence on her own future. Yet she tried to seize upon
+a ray of hope, she smiled, thinking that Sister Bali was joking with
+her, a rather strong joke, to be sure, but she forgave her beforehand
+if she would acknowledge that it was such. But Sister Bali made a
+cross with one of her thumbs and a forefinger, and kissed it, to prove
+that she was telling the truth. Then the smile faded forever from the
+girl's lips, she turned pale, frightfully pale, she felt her strength
+leave her and for the first time in her life she lost consciousness,
+falling into a swoon.
+
+When by dint of blows, pinches, dashes of water, crosses, and the
+application of sacred palms, the girl recovered and remembered the
+situation, silent tears sprang from her eyes, drop by drop, without
+sobs, without laments, without complaints! She thought about Basilio,
+who had had no other protector than Capitan Tiago, and who now, with
+the Capitan dead, was left completely unprotected and in prison. In
+the Philippines it is a well-known fact that patrons are needed for
+everything, from the time one is christened until one dies, in order
+to get justice, to secure a passport, or to develop an industry. As
+it was said that his imprisonment was due to revenge on account of
+herself and her father, the girl's sorrow turned to desperation. Now
+it was her duty to liberate him, as he had done in rescuing her from
+servitude, and the inner voice which suggested the idea offered to
+her imagination a horrible means.
+
+"Padre Camorra, the curate," whispered the voice. Juli gnawed at her
+lips and became lost in gloomy meditation.
+
+As a result of her father's crime, her grandfather had been arrested in
+the hope that by such means the son could be made to appear. The only
+one who could get him his liberty was Padre Camorra, and Padre Camorra
+had shown himself to be poorly satisfied with her words of gratitude,
+having with his usual frankness asked for some sacrifices--since which
+time Juli had tried to avoid meeting him. But the curate made her kiss
+his hand, he twitched her nose and patted her cheeks, he joked with
+her, winking and laughing, and laughing he pinched her. Juli was also
+the cause of the beating the good curate had administered to some young
+men who were going about the village serenading the girls. Malicious
+ones, seeing her pass sad and dejected, would remark so that she
+might hear: "If she only wished it, Cabesang Tales would be pardoned."
+
+Juli reached her home, gloomy and with wandering looks. She had
+changed greatly, having lost her merriment, and no one ever saw her
+smile again. She scarcely spoke and seemed to be afraid to look at
+her own face. One day she was seen in the town with a big spot of
+soot on her forehead, she who used to go so trim and neat. Once she
+asked Sister Bali if the people who committed suicide went to hell.
+
+"Surely!" replied that woman, and proceeded to describe the place as
+though she had been there.
+
+Upon Basilio's imprisonment, the simple and grateful relatives had
+planned to make all kinds of sacrifices to save the young man, but
+as they could collect among themselves no more than thirty pesos,
+Sister Bali, as usual, thought of a better plan.
+
+"What we must do is to get some advice from the town clerk," she
+said. To these poor people, the town clerk was what the Delphic oracle
+was to the ancient Greeks.
+
+"By giving him a real and a cigar," she continued, "he'll tell you
+all the laws so that your head bursts listening to him. If you have
+a peso, he'll save you, even though you may be at the foot of the
+scaffold. When my friend Simon was put in jail and flogged for not
+being able to give evidence about a robbery perpetrated near his
+house, _ab�_, for two reales and a half and a string of garlics,
+the town clerk got him out. And I saw Simon myself when he could
+scarcely walk and he had to stay in bed at least a month. Ay, his
+flesh rotted as a result and he died!"
+
+Sister Bali's advice was accepted and she herself volunteered to
+interview the town clerk. Juli gave her four reales and added some
+strips of jerked venison her grand-father had got, for Tandang Selo
+had again devoted himself to hunting.
+
+But the town clerk could do nothing--the prisoner was in Manila,
+and his power did not extend that far. "If at least he were at the
+capital, then--" he ventured, to make a show of his authority, which
+he knew very well did not extend beyond the boundaries of Tiani, but
+he had to maintain his prestige and keep the jerked venison. "But I
+can give you a good piece of advice, and it is that you go with Juli
+to see the Justice of the Peace. But it's very necessary that Juli go."
+
+The Justice of the Peace was a very rough fellow, but if he should
+see Juli he might conduct himself less rudely--this is wherein lay
+the wisdom of the advice.
+
+With great gravity the honorable Justice listened to Sister Bali,
+who did the talking, but not without staring from time to time at
+the girl, who hung her head with shame. People would say that she
+was greatly interested in Basilio, people who did not remember her
+debt of gratitude, nor that his imprisonment, according to report,
+was on her account.
+
+After belching three or four times, for his Honor had that ugly habit,
+he said that the only person who could save Basilio was Padre Camorra,
+_in case he should care to do so_. Here he stared meaningly at the
+girl and advised her to deal with the curate in person.
+
+"You know what influence he has,--he got your grand-father out of
+jail. A report from him is enough to deport a new-born babe or save
+from death a man with the noose about his neck."
+
+Juli said nothing, but Sister Bali took this advice as though she
+had read it in a novena, and was ready to accompany the girl to the
+convento. It so happened that she was just going there to get as alms
+a scapulary in exchange for four full reales.
+
+But Juli shook her head and was unwilling to go to the convento. Sister
+Bali thought she could guess the reason--Padre Camorra was reputed
+to be very fond of the women and was very frolicsome--so she tried
+to reassure her. "You've nothing to fear if I go with you. Haven't
+you read in the booklet _Tandang Basio_, given you by the curate,
+that the girls should go to the convento, even without the knowledge
+of their elders, to relate what is going on at home? _Ab�_, that book
+is printed with the permission of the Archbishop!"
+
+Juli became impatient and wished to cut short such talk, so she begged
+the pious woman to go if she wished, but his Honor observed with a
+belch that the supplications of a youthful face were more moving than
+those of an old one, the sky poured its dew over the fresh flowers
+in greater abundance than over the withered ones. The metaphor was
+fiendishly beautiful.
+
+Juli did not reply and the two left the house. In the street the
+girl firmly refused to go to the convento and they returned to their
+village. Sister Bali, who felt offended at this lack of confidence
+in herself, on the way home relieved her feelings by administering
+a long preachment to the girl.
+
+The truth was that the girl could not take that step without damning
+herself in her own eyes, besides being cursed of men and cursed
+of God! It had been intimated to her several times, whether with
+reason or not, that if she would make that sacrifice her father would
+be pardoned, and yet she had refused, in spite of the cries of her
+conscience reminding her of her filial duty. Now must she make it for
+Basilio, her sweetheart? That would be to fall to the sound of mockery
+and laughter from all creation. Basilio himself would despise her! No,
+never! She would first hang herself or leap from some precipice. At
+any rate, she was already damned for being a wicked daughter.
+
+The poor girl had besides to endure all the reproaches of her
+relatives, who, knowing nothing of what had passed between her and
+Padre Camovra, laughed at her fears. Would Padre Camorra fix his
+attention upon a country girl when there were so many others in the
+town? Hero the good women cited names of unmarried girls, rich and
+beautiful, who had been more or less unfortunate. Meanwhile, if they
+should shoot Basilio?
+
+Juli covered her ears and stared wildly about, as if seeking a voice
+that might plead for her, but she saw only her grandfather, who was
+dumb and had his gaze fixed on his hunting-spear.
+
+That night she scarcely slept at all. Dreams and nightmares, some
+funereal, some bloody, danced before her sight and woke her often,
+bathed in cold perspiration. She fancied that she heard shots, she
+imagined that she saw her father, that father who had done so much
+for her, fighting in the forests, hunted like a wild beast because
+she had refused to save him. The figure of her father was transformed
+and she recognized Basilio, dying, with looks of reproach at her. The
+wretched girl arose, prayed, wept, called upon her mother, upon death,
+and there was even a moment when, overcome with terror, if it had
+not been night-time, she would have run straight to the convento,
+let happen what would.
+
+With the coming of day the sad presentiments and the terrors of
+darkness were partly dissipated. The light inspired hopes in her. But
+the news of the afternoon was terrible, for there was talk of persons
+shot, so the next night was for the girl frightful. In her desperation
+she decided to give herself up as soon as day dawned and then kill
+herself afterwards--anything, rather than enditre such tortures! But
+the dawn brought new hope and she would not go to church or even
+leave the house. She was afraid she would yield.
+
+So passed several days in praying and cursing, in calling upon God
+and wishing for death. The day gave her a slight respite and she
+trusted in some miracle. The reports that came from Manila, although
+they reached there magnified, said that of the prisoners some had
+secured their liberty, thanks to patrons and influence. Some one
+had to be sacrificed--who would it be? Juli shuddered and returned
+home biting her finger-nails. Then came the night with its terrors,
+which took on double proportions and seemed to be converted into
+realities. Juli feared to fall asleep, for her slumbers were a
+continuous nightmare. Looks of reproach would flash across her eyelids
+just as soon as they were closed, complaints and laments pierced
+her ears. She saw her father wandering about hungry, without rest or
+repose; she saw Basilio dying in the road, pierced by two bullets,
+just as she had seen the corpse of that neighbor who had been killed
+while in the charge of the Civil Guard. She saw the bonds that cut
+into the flesh, she saw the blood pouring from the mouth, she heard
+Basilio calling to her, "Save me! Save me! You alone can save me!" Then
+a burst of laughter would resound and she would turn her eyes to see
+her father gazing at her with eyes full of reproach. Juli would wake
+up, sit up on her _petate_, and draw her hands across her forehead
+to arrange her hair--cold sweat, like the sweat of death, moistened it!
+
+"Mother, mother!" she sobbed.
+
+Meanwhile, they who were so carelessly disposing of people's fates,
+he who commanded the legal murders, he who violated justice and made
+use of the law to maintain himself by force, slept in peace.
+
+At last a traveler arrived from Manila and reported that all
+the prisoners had been set free, all except Basilio, who had no
+protector. It was reported in Manila, added the traveler, that the
+young man would be deported to the Carolines, having been forced to
+sign a petition beforehand, in which he declared that he asked it
+voluntarily. [67] The traveler had seen the very steamer that was
+going to take him away.
+
+This report put an end to all the girl's hesitation. Besides, her mind
+was already quite weak from so many nights of watching and horrible
+dreams. Pale and with unsteady eyes, she sought out Sister Bali and,
+in a voice that was cause for alarm, told her that she was ready,
+asking her to accompany her. Sister Bali thereupon rejoiced and tried
+to soothe her, but Juli paid no attention to her, apparently intent
+only upon hurrying to the convento. She had decked herself out in her
+finest clothes, and even pretended to be quite gay, talking a great
+deal, although in a rather incoherent way.
+
+So they set out. Juli went ahead, becoming impatient that her companion
+lagged behind. But as they neared the town, her nervous energy began
+gradually to abate, she fell silent and wavered in her resolution,
+lessened her pace and soon dropped behind, so that Sister Bali had
+to encourage her.
+
+"We'll get there late," she remonstrated.
+
+Juli now followed, pale, with downcast eyes, which she was afraid to
+raise. She felt that the whole world was staring at her and pointing
+its finger at her. A vile name whistled in her ears, but still she
+disregarded it and continued on her way. Nevertheless, when they came
+in sight of the convento, she stopped and began to tremble.
+
+"Let's go home, let's go home," she begged, holding her companion back.
+
+Sister Bali had to take her by the arm and half drag her along,
+reassuring her and telling her about the books of the friars. She
+would not desert her, so there was nothing to fear. Padre Camorra
+had other things in mind--Juli was only a poor country girl.
+
+But upon arriving at the door of the convento, Juli firmly refused
+to go in, catching hold of the wall.
+
+"No, no," she pleaded in terror. "No, no, no! Have pity!"
+
+"But what a fool--"
+
+Sister Bali pushed her gently along, Juli, pallid and with wild
+features, offering resistance. The expression of her face said that
+she saw death before her.
+
+"All right, let's go back, if you don't want to!" at length the good
+woman exclaimed in irritation, as she did not believe there was any
+real danger. Padre Camorra, in spite of all his reputation, would
+dare do nothing before her.
+
+"Let them carry poor Basilio into exile, let them shoot him on the
+way, saying that he tried to escape," she added. "When he's dead,
+then remorse will come. But as for myself, I owe him no favors,
+so he can't reproach me!"
+
+That was the decisive stroke. In the face of that reproach, with wrath
+and desperation mingled, like one who rushes to suicide, Juli closed
+her eyes in order not to see the abyss into which she was hurling
+herself and resolutely entered the convento. A sigh that sounded
+like the rattle of death escaped from her lips. Sister Bali followed,
+telling her how to act.
+
+That night comments were mysteriously whispered about certain events
+which had occurred that afternoon. A girl had leaped from a window
+of the convento, falling upon some stones and killing herself. Almost
+at the same time another woman had rushed out of the convento to run
+through the streets shouting and screaming like a lunatic. The prudent
+townsfolk dared not utter any names and many mothers pinched their
+daughters for letting slip expressions that might compromise them.
+
+Later, very much later, at twilight, an old man came from a village
+and stood calling at the door of the convento, which was closed and
+guarded by sacristans. The old man beat the door with his fists and
+with his head, while he littered cries stifled and inarticulate, like
+those of a dumb person, until he was at length driven away by blows and
+shoves. Then he made his way to the gobernadorcillo's house, but was
+told that the gobernadorcillo was not there, he was at the convento;
+he went to the Justice of the Peace, but neither was the Justice of
+the Peace at home--he had been summoned to the convento; he went to
+the teniente-mayor, but he too was at the convento; he directed his
+steps to the barracks, but the lieutenant of the Civil Guard was at
+the convento. The old man then returned to his village, weeping like a
+child. His wails were heard in the middle of the night, causing men to
+bite their lips and women to clasp their hands, while the dogs slunk
+fearfully back into the houses with their tails between their legs.
+
+"Ah, God, God!" said a poor woman, lean from fasting, "in Thy presence
+there is no rich, no poor, no white, no black--Thou wilt grant us
+justice!"
+
+"Yes," rejoined her husband, "just so that God they preach is not a
+pure invention, a fraud! They themselves are the first not to believe
+in Him."
+
+At eight o'clock in the evening it was rumored that more than
+seven friars, proceeding from neighboring towns, were assembled in
+the convento to hold a conference. On the following day, Tandang
+Selo disappeared forever from the village, carrying with him his
+hunting-spear.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+THE HIGH OFFICIAL
+
+
+    L'Espagne et sa, vertu, l'Espagne et sa grandeur
+    Tout s'en va!--Victor Hugo
+
+
+The newspapers of Manila were so engrossed in accounts of a notorious
+murder committed in Europe, in panegyrics and puffs for various
+preachers in the city, in the constantly increasing success of the
+French operetta, that they could scarcely devote space to the crimes
+perpetrated in the provinces by a band of tulisanes headed by a fierce
+and terrible leader who was called _Matanglawin._ [68] Only when the
+object of the attack was a convento or a Spaniard there then appeared
+long articles giving frightful details and asking for martial law,
+energetic measures, and so on. So it was that they could take no notice
+of what had occurred in the town of Tiani, nor was there the slightest
+hint or allusion to it. In private circles something was whispered,
+but so confused, so vague, and so little consistent, that not even
+the name of the victim was known, while those who showed the greatest
+interest forgot it quickly, trusting that the affair had been settled
+in some way with the wronged family. The only one who knew anything
+certain was Padre Camorra, who had to leave the town, to be transferred
+to another or to remain for some time in the convento in Manila.
+
+"Poor Padre Camorra!" exclaimed Ben-Zayb in a fit of generosity. "He
+was so jolly and had such a good heart!"
+
+It was true that the students had recovered their liberty, thanks to
+the exertions of their relatives, who did not hesitate at expense,
+gifts, or any sacrifice whatsoever. The first to see himself free, as
+was to be expected, was Makaraig, and the last Isagani, because Padre
+Florentine did not reach Manila until a week after the events. So
+many acts of clemency secured for the General the title of clement
+and merciful, which Ben-Zayb hastened to add to his long list of
+adjectives.
+
+The only one who did not obtain his liberty was Basilio, since he was
+also accused of having in his possession prohibited books. We don't
+know whether this referred to his text-book on legal medicine or to
+the pamphlets that were found, dealing with the Philippines, or both
+together--the fact is that it was said that prohibited literature
+was being secretly sold, and upon the unfortunate boy fell all the
+weight of the rod of justice.
+
+It was reported that his Excellency had been thus advised: "It's
+necessary that there be some one, so that the prestige of authority
+may be sustained and that it may not be said that we made a great fuss
+over nothing. Authority before everything. It's necessary that some
+one be made an example of. Let there be just one, one who, according
+to Padre Irene, was the servant of Capitan Tiago--there'll be no one
+to enter a complaint--"
+
+"Servant and student?" asked his Excellency. "That fellow, then! Let
+it be he!"
+
+"Your Excellency will pardon me," observed the high official, who
+happened to be present, "but I've been told that this boy is a medical
+student and his teachers speak well of him. If he remains a prisoner
+he'll lose a year, and as this year he finishes--"
+
+The high official's interference in behalf of Basilio, instead
+of helping, harmed him. For some time there had been between this
+official and his Excellency strained relations and bad feelings,
+augmented by frequent clashes.
+
+"Yes? So much the greater reason that he should be kept prisoner;
+a year longer in his studies, instead of injuring him, will do good,
+not only to himself but to all who afterwards fall into his hands. One
+doesn't become a bad physician by extensive practise. So much the
+more reason that he should remain! Soon the filibustering reformers
+will say that we are not looking out for the country!" concluded his
+Excellency with a sarcastic laugh.
+
+The high official realized that he had made a false move and took
+Basilio's case to heart. "But it seems to me that this young man is
+the most innocent of all," he rejoined rather timidly.
+
+"Books have been seized in his possession," observed the secretary.
+
+"Yes, works on medicine and pamphlets written by Peninsulars, with
+the leaves uncut, and besides, what does that signify? Moreover,
+this young man was not present at the banquet in the _pansiter�a_,
+he hasn't mixed up in anything. As I've said, he's the most innocent--"
+
+"So much the better!" exclaimed his Excellency jocosely. "In that
+way the punishment will prove more salutary and exemplary, since it
+inspires greater terror. To govern is to act in this way, my dear
+sir, as it is often expedient to sacrifice the welfare of one to the
+welfare of many. But I'm doing more--from the welfare of one will
+result the welfare of all, the principle of endangered authority is
+preserved, prestige is respected and maintained. By this act of mine
+I'm correcting my own and other people's faults."
+
+The high official restrained himself with an effort and, disregarding
+the allusion, decided to take another tack. "But doesn't your
+Excellency fear the--responsibility?"
+
+"What have I to fear?" rejoined the General impatiently. "Haven't
+I discretionary powers? Can't I do what I please for the better
+government of these islands? What have I to fear? Can some
+menial perhaps arraign me before the tribunals and exact from me
+responsibility? Even though he had the means, he would have to consult
+the Ministry first, and the Minister--"
+
+He waved his hand and burst out into laughter.
+
+"The Minister who appointed me, the devil knows where he is, and
+he will feel honored in being able to welcome me when I return. The
+present one, I don't even think of him, and the devil take him too! The
+one that relieves him will find himself in so many difficulties with
+his new duties that he won't be able to fool with trifles. I, my dear
+sir, have nothing over me but my conscience, I act according to my
+conscience, and my conscience is satisfied, so I don't care a straw
+for the opinions of this one and that. My conscience, my dear sir,
+my conscience!"
+
+"Yes, General, but the country--"
+
+"Tut, tut, tut, tut! The country--what have I to do Avith the
+country? Have I perhaps contracted any obligations to it? Do I owe
+my office to it? Was it the country that elected me?"
+
+A brief pause ensued, during which the high official stood with bowed
+head. Then, as if reaching a decision, he raised it to stare fixedly
+at the General. Pale and trembling, he said with repressed energy:
+"That doesn't matter, General, that doesn't matter at all! Your
+Excellency has not been chosen by the Filipino people, but by Spain,
+all the more reason why you should treat the Filipinos well so that
+they may not be able to reproach Spain. The greater reason, General,
+the greater reason! Your Excellency, by coming here, has contracted
+the obligation to govern justly, to seek the welfare--"
+
+"Am I not doing it?" interrupted his Excellency in exasperation,
+taking a step forward. "Haven't I told you that I am getting from the
+good of one the good of all? Are you now going to give me lessons? If
+you don't understand my actions, how am I to blame? Do I compel you
+to share my responsibility?"
+
+"Certainly not," replied the high official, drawing himself up
+proudly. "Your Excellency does not compel me, your Excellency cannot
+compel me, _me,_ to share _your_ responsibility. I understand mine in
+quite another way, and because I have it, I'm going to speak--I've held
+my peace a long time. Oh, your Excellency needn't make those gestures,
+because the fact that I've come here in this or that capacity doesn't
+mean that I have given up my rights, that I have been reduced to the
+part of a slave, without voice or dignity.
+
+"I don't want Spain to lose this beautiful empire, these eight
+millions of patient and submissive subjects, who live on hopes and
+delusions, but neither do I wish to soil my hands in their barbarous
+exploitation. I don't wish it ever to be said that, the slave-trade
+abolished, Spain has continued to cloak it with her banner and
+perfect it under a wealth of specious institutions. No, to be great
+Spain does not have to be a tyrant, Spain is sufficient unto herself,
+Spain was greater when she had only her own territory, wrested from
+the clutches of the Moor. I too am a Spaniard, but before being a
+Spaniard I am a man, and before Spain and above Spain is her honor,
+the lofty principles of morality, the eternal principles of immutable
+justice! Ah, you are surprised that I think thus, because you have no
+idea of the grandeur of the Spanish name, no, you haven't any idea of
+it, you identify it with persons and interests. To you the Spaniard may
+be a pirate, he may be a murderer, a hypocrite, a cheat, anything,
+just so he keep what he has--but to me the Spaniard should lose
+everything, empire, power, wealth, everything, before his honor! Ah,
+my dear sir, we protest when we read that might is placed before right,
+yet we applaud when in practise we see might play the hypocrite in
+not only perverting right but even in using it as a tool in order to
+gain control. For the very reason that I love Spain, I'm speaking now,
+and I defy your frown!
+
+"I don't wish that the coming ages accuse Spain of being the stepmother
+of the nations, the vampire of races, the tyrant of small islands,
+since it would be a horrible mockery of the noble principles of our
+ancient kings. How are we carrying out their sacred legacy? They
+promised to these islands protection and justice, and we are playing
+with the lives and liberties of the inhabitants; they promised
+civilization, and^we are curtailing it, fearful that they may aspire
+to a nobler existence; they promised them light, and we cover their
+eyes that they may not witness our orgies; they promised to teach them
+virtue and we are encouraging their vice. Instead of peace, wealth,
+and justice, confusion reigns, commerce languishes, and skepticism
+is fostered among the masses.
+
+"Let us put ourselves in the place of the Filipinos and ask ourselves
+what we would do in their place. Ah, in your silence I read their
+right to rebel, and if matters do not mend they will rebel some day,
+and justice will be on their side, with them will go the sympathy
+of all honest men, of every patriot in the world! When a people is
+denied light, home, liberty, and justice--things that are essential
+to life, and therefore man's patrimony--that people has the right to
+treat him who so despoils it as we would the robber who intercepts us
+on the highway. There are no distinctions, there are no exceptions,
+nothing but a fact, a right, an aggression, and every honest man who
+does not place himself on the side of the wronged makes himself an
+accomplice and stains his conscience.
+
+"True, I am not a soldier, and the years are cooling the little fire
+in my blood, but just as I would risk being torn to pieces to defend
+the integrity of Spain against any foreign invader or against an
+unjustified disloyalty in her provinces, so I also assure you that I
+would place myself beside the oppressed Filipinos, because I would
+prefer to fall in the cause of the outraged rights of humanity to
+triumphing with the selfish interests of a nation, even when that
+nation be called as it is called--Spain!"
+
+"Do you know when the mail-boat leaves?" inquired his Excellency
+coldly, when the high official had finished speaking.
+
+The latter stared at him fixedly, then dropped his head and silently
+left the palace.
+
+Outside he found his carriage awaiting him. "Some day when you declare
+yourselves independent," he said somewhat abstractedly to the native
+lackey who opened the carriage-door for him, "remember that there
+were not lacking in Spain hearts that beat for you and struggled for
+your rights!"
+
+"Where, sir?" asked the lackey, who had understood nothing of this
+and was inquiring whither they should go.
+
+Two hours later the high official handed in his resignation and
+announced his intention of returning to Spain by the next mail-steamer.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+EFFECT OF THE PASQUINADES
+
+
+As a result of the events narrated, many mothers ordered their sons
+immediately to leave off their studies and devote themselves to
+idleness or to agriculture. When the examinations came, suspensions
+were plentiful, and he was a rare exception who finished the course,
+if he had belonged to the famous association, to which no one paid
+any more attention. Pecson, Tadeo, and Juanito Pelaez were all alike
+suspended--the first receiving his dismissal with his foolish grin
+and declaring his intention of becoming an officer in some court,
+while Tadeo, with his eternal holiday realized at last, paid for an
+illumination and made a bonfire of his books. Nor did the others get
+off much better, and at length they too had to abandon their studies,
+to the great satisfaction of their mothers, who always fancy their sons
+hanged if they should come to understand what the books teach. Juanito
+Pelaez alone took the blow ill, since it forced him to leave school for
+his father's store, with whom he was thenceforward to be associated
+in the business: the rascal found the store much less entertaining,
+but after some time his friends again noticed his hump appear,
+a symptom that his good humor was returning. The rich Makaraig,
+in view of the catastrophe, took good care not to expose himself,
+and having secured a passport by means of money set out in haste for
+Europe. It was said that his Excellency, the Captain-General, in his
+desire to do good by good means, and careful of the interests of the
+Filipinos, hindered the departure of every one who could not first
+prove substantially that he had the money to spend and could live in
+idleness in European cities. Among our acquaintances those who got off
+best were Isagani and Sandoval: the former passed in the subject he
+studied under Padre Fernandez and was suspended in the others, while
+the latter was able to confuse the examining-board with his oratory.
+
+Basilio was the only one who did not pass in any subject, who was
+not suspended, and who did not go to Europe, for he remained in
+Bilibid prison, subjected every three days to examinations, almost
+always the same in principle, without other variation than a change of
+inquisitors, since it seemed that in the presence of such great guilt
+all gave up or fell away in horror. And while the documents moldered
+or were shifted about, while the stamped papers increased like the
+plasters of an ignorant physician on the body of a hypochondriac,
+Basilio became informed of all the details of what had happened
+in Tiani, of the death of Juli and the disappearance of Tandang
+Selo. Sinong, the abused cochero, who had driven him to San Diego,
+happened to be in Manila at that time and called to give him all
+the news.
+
+Meanwhile, Simoun had recovered his health, or so at least the
+newspapers said. Ben-Zayb rendered thanks to "the Omnipotent who
+watches over such a precious life," and manifested the hope that the
+Highest would some day reveal the malefactor, whose crime remained
+unpunished, thanks to the charity of the victim, who was too closely
+following the words of the Great Martyr: _Father, forgive them, for
+they know not what they do._ These and other things Ben-Zayb said in
+print, while by mouth he was inquiring whether there was any truth in
+the rumor that the opulent jeweler was going to give a grand fiesta,
+a banquet such as had never before been seen, in part to celebrate
+his recovery and in part as a farewell to the country in which he had
+increased his fortune. It was whispered as certain that Simoun, who
+would have to leave with the Captain-General, whose command expired
+in May, was making every effort to secure from Madrid an extension,
+and that he was advising his Excellency to start a campaign in order to
+have an excuse for remaining, but it was further reported that for the
+first time his Excellency had disregarded the advice of his favorite,
+making it a point of honor not to retain for a single additional day
+the power that had been conferred upon him, a rumor which encouraged
+belief that the fiesta announced would take place; very soon. For
+the rest, Simoun remained unfathomable, since he had become very
+uncommunicative, showed himself seldom, and smiled mysteriously when
+the rumored fiesta was mentioned.
+
+"Come, Se�or Sindbad," Ben-Zayb had once rallied him, "dazzle us with
+something Yankee! You owe something to this country."
+
+"Doubtless!" was Simoun's response, with a dry smile.
+
+"You'll throw the house wide open, eh?"
+
+"Maybe, but as I have no house--"
+
+"You ought to have secured Capitan Tiago's, which Se�or Pelaez got
+for nothing."
+
+Simoun became silent, and from that time on he was often seen in the
+store of Don Timoteo Pelaez, with whom it was said he had entered
+into partnership. Some weeks afterward, in the month of April, it was
+rumored that Juanito Pelaez, Don Timoteo's son, was going to marry
+Paulita Gomez, the girl coveted by Spaniards and foreigners.
+
+"Some men are lucky!" exclaimed other envious merchants. "To buy a
+house for nothing, sell his consignment of galvanized iron well,
+get into partnership with a Simoun, and marry his son to a rich
+heiress--just say if those aren't strokes of luck that all honorable
+men don't have!"
+
+"If you only knew whence came that luck of Se�or Pelaez's!" another
+responded, in a tone which indicated that the speaker did know. "It's
+also assured that there'll be a fiesta and on a grand scale," was
+added with mystery.
+
+It was really true that Paulita was going to marry Juanito Pelaez. Her
+love for Isagani had gradually waned, like all first loves based
+on poetry and sentiment. The events of the pasquinades and the
+imprisonment of the youth had shorn him of all his charms. To whom
+would it have occurred to seek danger, to desire to share the fate
+of his comrades, to surrender himself, when every one was hiding and
+denying any complicity in the affair? It was quixotic, it was madness
+that no sensible person in Manila could pardon, and Juanito was quite
+right in ridiculing him, representing what a sorry figure he cut when
+he went to the Civil Government. Naturally, the brilliant Paulita
+could no longer love a young man who so erroneously understood social
+matters and whom all condemned. Then she began to reflect. Juanito was
+clever, capable, gay, shrewd, the son of a rich merchant of Manila,
+and a Spanish mestizo besides--if Don Timoteo was to be believed,
+a full-blooded Spaniard. On the other hand, Isagani was a provincial
+native who dreamed of forests infested with leeches, he was of doubtful
+family, with a priest for an uncle, who would perhaps be an enemy to
+luxury and balls, of which she was very fond. One beautiful morning
+therefore it occurred to her that she had been a downright fool to
+prefer him to his rival, and from that time on Pelaez's hump steadily
+increased. Unconsciously, yet rigorously, Paulita was obeying the
+law discovered by Darwin, that the female surrenders herself to the
+fittest male, to him who knows how to adapt himself to the medium in
+which he lives, and to live in Manila there was no other like Pelaez,
+who from his infancy had had chicanery at his finger-tips. Lent passed
+with its Holy Week, its array of processions and pompous displays,
+without other novelty than a mysterious mutiny among the artillerymen,
+the cause of which was never disclosed. The houses of light materials
+were torn down in the presence of a troop of cavalry, ready to fall
+upon the owners in case they should offer resistance. There was a
+great deal of weeping and many lamentations, but the affair did not
+get beyond that. The curious, among them Simoun, went to see those
+who were left homeless, walking about indifferently and assuring each
+other that thenceforward they could sleep in peace.
+
+Towards the end of April, all the fears being now forgotten, Manila
+was engrossed with one topic: the fiesta that Don Timoteo Pelaez was
+going to celebrate at the wedding of his son, for which the General
+had graciously and condescendingly agreed to be the patron. Simoun
+was reported to have arranged the matter. The ceremony would
+be solemnized two days before the departure of the General, who
+would honor the house and make a present to the bridegroom. It was
+whispered that the jeweler would pour out cascades of diamonds and
+throw away handfuls of pearls in honor of his partner's son, thus,
+since he could hold no fiesta of his own, as he was a bachelor and
+had no house, improving the opportunity to dazzle the Filipino people
+with a memorable farewell. All Manila prepared to be invited, and
+never did uneasiness take stronger hold of the mind than in view of
+the thought of not being among those bidden. Friendship with Simoun
+became a matter of dispute, and many husbands were forced by their
+wives to purchase bars of steel and sheets of galvanized iron in
+order to make friends with Don Timoteo Pelaez.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+LA ULTIMA RAZ�N [69]
+
+
+At last the great day arrived. During the morning Simoun had not left
+his house, busied as he was in packing his arms and his jewels. His
+fabulous wealth was already locked up in the big steel chest with its
+canvas cover, there remaining only a few cases containing bracelets
+and pins, doubtless gifts that he meant to make. He was going to leave
+with the Captain-General, who cared in no way to lengthen his stay,
+fearful of what people would say. Malicious ones insinuated that Simoun
+did not dare remain alone, since without the General's support he did
+not care to expose himself to the vengeance of the many wretches he
+had exploited, all the more reason for which was the fact that the
+General who was coming was reported to be a model of rectitude and
+might make him disgorge his gains. The superstitious Indians, on the
+other hand, believed that Simoun was the devil who did not wish to
+separate himself from his prey. The pessimists winked maliciously and
+said, "The field laid waste, the locust leaves for other parts!" Only
+a few, a very few, smiled and said nothing.
+
+In the afternoon Simoun had given orders to his servant that if there
+appeared a young man calling himself Basilio he should be admitted
+at once. Then he shut himself up in his room and seemed to become
+lost in deep thought. Since his illness the jeweler's countenance had
+become harder and gloomier, while the wrinkles between his eyebrows
+had deepened greatly. He did not hold himself so erect as formerly,
+and his head was bowed.
+
+So absorbed was he in his meditations that he did not hear a knock
+at the door, and it had to be repeated. He shuddered and called out,
+"Come in!"
+
+It was Basilio, but how altered! If the change that had taken place
+in Simoun during those two months was great, in the young student it
+was frightful. His cheeks were hollow, his hair unkempt, his clothing
+disordered. The tender melancholy had disappeared from his eyes,
+and in its place glittered a dark light, so that it might be said
+that he had died and his corpse had revived, horrified with what it
+had seen in eternity. If not crime, then the shadow of crime, had
+fixed itself upon his whole appearance. Simoun himself was startled
+and felt pity for the wretch.
+
+Without any greeting Basilio slowly advanced into the room, and in
+a voice that made the jeweler shudder said to him, "Se�or Simoun,
+I've been a wicked son and a bad brother--I've overlooked the murder
+of one and the tortures of the other, and God has chastised me! Now
+there remains to me only one desire, and it is to return evil for evil,
+crime for crime, violence for violence!"
+
+Simoun listened in silence, while Basilio continued; "Four months ago
+you talked to me about your plans. I refused to take part in them,
+but I did wrong, you have been right. Three months and a half ago
+the revolution was on the point of breaking out, but I did not then
+care to participate in it, and the movement failed. In payment for
+my conduct I've been arrested and owe my liberty to your efforts
+only. You are right and now I've come to say to you: put a weapon
+in my hand and let the revolution come! I am ready to serve you,
+along with all the rest of the unfortunates."
+
+The cloud that had darkened Simoun's brow suddenly disappeared, a ray
+of triumph darted from his eyes, and like one who has found what he
+sought he exclaimed: "I'm right, yes, I'm right! Right and Justice
+are on my side, because my cause is that of the persecuted. Thanks,
+young man, thanks! You've come to clear away my doubts, to end my
+hesitation."
+
+He had risen and his face was beaming. The zeal that had animated him
+when four months before he had explained his plans to Basilio in the
+wood of his ancestors reappeared in his countenance like a red sunset
+after a cloudy day.
+
+"Yes," he resumed, "the movement failed and many have deserted me
+because they saw me disheartened and wavering at the supreme moment. I
+still cherished something in my heart, I was not the master of all
+my feelings, I still loved! Now everything is dead in me, no longer
+is there even a corpse sacred enough for me to respect its sleep. No
+longer will there be any vacillation, for you yourself, an idealistic
+youth, a gentle dove, understand the necessity and come to spur me to
+action. Somewhat late you have opened your eyes, for between you and
+me together we might have executed marvelous plans, I above in the
+higher circles spreading death amid perfume and gold, brutalizing the
+vicious and corrupting or paralyzing the few good, and you below among
+the people, among the young men, stirring them to life amid blood and
+tears. Our task, instead of being bloody and barbarous, would have
+been holy, perfect, artistic, and surely success would have crowned
+our efforts. But no intelligence would support me, I encountered fear
+or effeminacy among the enlightened classes, selfishness among the
+rich, simplicity among the youth, and only in the mountains, in the
+waste places, among the outcasts, have I found my men. But no matter
+now! If we can't get a finished statue, rounded out in all its details,
+of the rough block we work upon let those to come take charge!"
+
+Seizing the arm of Basilio, who was listening without comprehending
+all he said, he led him to the laboratory where he kept his chemical
+mixtures. Upon the table was placed a large case made of dark shagreen,
+similar to those that hold the silver plate exchanged as gifts among
+the rich and powerful. Opening this, Simoun revealed to sight, upon
+a bottom of red satin, a lamp of very peculiar shape, Its body was in
+the form of a pomegranate as large as a man's head, with fissures in
+it exposing to view the seeds inside, which were fashioned of enormous
+carnelians. The covering was of oxidized gold in exact imitation of
+the wrinkles on the fruit.
+
+Simoun took it out with great care and, removing the burner,
+exposed to view the interior of the tank, which was lined with
+steel two centimeters in thickness and which had a capacity of over a
+liter. Basilio questioned him with his eyes, for as yet he comprehended
+nothing. Without entering upon explanations, Simoun carefully took from
+a cabinet a flask and showed the young man the formula written upon it.
+
+"Nitro-glycerin!" murmured Basilio, stepping backward and instinctively
+thrusting his hands behind him. "Nitro-glycerin! Dynamite!" Beginning
+now to understand, he felt his hair stand on end.
+
+"Yes, nitro-glycerin!" repeated Simoun slowly, with his cold smile and
+a look of delight at the glass flask. "It's also something more than
+nitro-glycerin--it's concentrated tears, repressed hatred, wrongs,
+injustice, outrage. It's the last resort of the weak, force against
+force, violence against violence. A moment ago I was hesitating,
+but you have come and decided me. This night the most dangerous
+tyrants will be blown to pieces, the irresponsible rulers that hide
+themselves behind God and the State, whose abuses remain unpunished
+because no one can bring them to justice. This night the Philippines
+will hear the explosion that will convert into rubbish the formless
+monument whose decay I have fostered."
+
+Basilio was so terrified that his lips worked without producing any
+sound, his tongue was paralyzed, his throat parched. For the first
+time he was looking at the powerful liquid which he had heard talked
+of as a thing distilled in gloom by gloomy men, in open war against
+society. Now he had it before him, transparent and slightly yellowish,
+poured with great caution into the artistic pomegranate. Simoun looked
+to him like the jinnee of the _Arabian Nights_ that sprang from the
+sea, he took on gigantic proportions, his head touched the sky, he
+made the house tremble and shook the whole city with a shrug of his
+shoulders. The pomegranate assumed the form of a colossal sphere,
+the fissures became hellish grins whence escaped names and glowing
+cinders. For the first time in his life Basilio was overcome with
+fright and completely lost his composure.
+
+Simoun, meanwhile, screwed on solidly a curious and complicated
+mechanism, put in place a glass chimney, then the bomb, and crowned
+the whole with an elegant shade. Then he moved away some distance to
+contemplate the effect, inclining his head now to one side, now to
+the other, thus better to appreciate its magnificent appearance.
+
+Noticing that Basilio was watching him with questioning and suspicious
+eyes, he said, "Tonight there will be a fiesta and this lamp will
+be placed in a little dining-kiosk that I've had constructed for
+the purpose. The lamp will give a brilliant light, bright enough to
+suffice for the illumination of the whole place by itself, but at
+the end of twenty minutes the light will fade, and then when some
+one tries to turn up the wick a cap of fulminate of mercury will
+explode, the pomegranate will blow up and with it the dining-room,
+in the roof and floor of which I have concealed sacks of powder,
+so that no one shall escape."
+
+There wras a moment's silence, while Simoun stared at his mechanism
+and Basilio scarcely breathed.
+
+"So my assistance is not needed," observed the young man.
+
+"No, you have another mission to fulfill," replied Simoun
+thoughtfully. "At nine the mechanism will have exploded and the report
+will have been heard in the country round, in the mountains, in the
+caves. The uprising that I had arranged with the artillerymen was
+a failure from lack of plan and timeliness, but this time it won't
+be so. Upon hearing the explosion, the wretched and the oppressed,
+those who wander about pursued by force, will sally forth armed to
+join Cabesang Tales in Santa Mesa, whence they will fall upon the city,
+[70] while the soldiers, whom I have made to believe that the General
+is shamming an insurrection in order to remain, will issue from their
+barracks ready to fire upon whomsoever I may designate. Meanwhile,
+the cowed populace, thinking that the hour of massacre has come,
+will rush out prepared to kill or be killed, and as they have neither
+arms nor organization, you with some others will put yourself at
+their head and direct them to the warehouses of Quiroga, where I
+keep my rifles. Cabesang Tales and I will join one another in the
+city and take possession of it, while you in the suburbs will seize
+the bridges and throw up barricades, and then be ready to come to
+our aid to butcher not only those opposing the revolution but also
+every man who refuses to take up arms and join us."
+
+"All?" stammered Basilio in a choking voice.
+
+"All!" repeated Simoun in a sinister tone. "All--Indians, mestizos,
+Chinese, Spaniards, all who are found to be without courage, without
+energy. The race must be renewed! Cowardly fathers will only breed
+slavish sons, and it wouldn't be worth while to destroy and then try to
+rebuild with rotten materials. What, do you shudder? Do you tremble,
+do you fear to scatter death? What is death? What does a hecatomb of
+twenty thousand wretches signify? Twenty thousand miseries less, and
+millions of wretches saved from birth! The most timid ruler does not
+hesitate to dictate a law that produces misery and lingering death
+for thousands and thousands of prosperous and industrious subjects,
+happy perchance, merely to satisfy a caprice, a whim, his pride,
+and yet you shudder because in one night are to be ended forever the
+mental tortures of many helots, because a vitiated and paralytic people
+has to die to give place to another, young, active, full of energy!
+
+"What is death? Nothingness, or a dream? Can its specters be compared
+to the reality of the agonies of a whole miserable generation? The
+needful thing is to destroy the evil, to kill the dragon and
+bathe the new people in the blood, in order to make it strong and
+invulnerable. What else is the inexorable law of Nature, the law of
+strife in which the weak has to succumb so that the vitiated species
+be not perpetuated and creation thus travel backwards? Away then with
+effeminate scruples! Fulfill the eternal laws, foster them, and then
+the earth will be so much the more fecund the more it is fertilized
+with blood, and the thrones the more solid the more they rest upon
+crimes and corpses. Let there be no hesitation, no doubtings! What is
+the pain of death? A momentary sensation, perhaps confused, perhaps
+agreeable, like the transition from waking to sleep. What is it that
+is being destroyed? Evil, suffering--feeble weeds, in order to set in
+their place luxuriant plants. Do you call that destruction? I should
+call it creating, producing, nourishing, vivifying!"
+
+Such bloody sophisms, uttered with conviction and coolness, overwhelmed
+the youth, weakened as he was by more than three months in prison
+and blinded by his passion for revenge, so he was not in a mood to
+analyze the moral basis of the matter. Instead of replying that the
+worst and cowardliest of men is always something more than a plant,
+because he has a soul and an intelligence, which, however vitiated
+and brutalized they may be, can be redeemed; instead of replying that
+man has no right to dispose of one life for the benefit of another,
+that the right to life is inherent in every individual like the right
+to liberty and to light; instead of replying that if it is an abuse on
+the part of governments to punish in a culprit the faults and crimes
+to which they have driven him by their own negligence or stupidity,
+how much more so would it be in a man, however great and however
+unfortunate he might be, to punish in a wretched people the faults of
+its governments and its ancestors; instead of declaring that God alone
+can use such methods, that God can destroy because He can create,
+God who holds in His hands recompense, eternity, and the future,
+to justify His acts, and man never; instead of these reflections,
+Basilio merely interposed a cant reflection.
+
+"What will the world say at the sight of such butchery?"
+
+"The world will applaud, as usual, conceding the right of
+the strongest, the most violent!" replied Simoun with his cruel
+smile. "Europe applauded when the western nations sacrificed millions
+of Indians in America, and not by any means to found nations much more
+moral or more pacific: there is the North with its egotistic liberty,
+its lynch-law, its political frauds--the South with its turbulent
+republics, its barbarous revolutions, civil wars, pronunciamientos,
+as in its mother Spain! Europe applauded when the powerful Portugal
+despoiled the Moluccas, it applauds while England is destroying the
+primitive races in the Pacific to make room for its emigrants. Europe
+will applaud as the end of a drama, the close of a tragedy, is
+applauded, for the vulgar do not fix their attention on principles,
+they look only at results. Commit the crime well, and you will be
+admired and have more partizans than if you had carried out virtuous
+actions with modesty and timidity."
+
+"Exactly," rejoined the youth, "what does it matter to me, after all,
+whether they praise or censure, when this world takes no care of the
+oppressed, of the poor, and of weak womankind? What obligations have
+I to recognize toward society when it has recognized none toward me?"
+
+"That's what I like to hear," declared the tempter triumphantly. He
+took a revolver from a case and gave it to Basilio, saying, "At
+ten o'clock wait for me in front of the church of St. Sebastian to
+receive my final instructions. Ah, at nine you must be far, very far
+from Calle Anloague."
+
+Basilio examined the weapon, loaded it, and placed it in the inside
+pocket of his coat, then took his leave with a curt, "I'll see
+you later."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+THE WEDDING
+
+
+Once in the street, Basilio began to consider how he might spend the
+time until the fatal hour arrived, for it was then not later than seven
+o'clock. It was the vacation period and all the students were back in
+their towns, Isagani being the only one who had not cared to leave,
+but he had disappeared that morning and no one knew his whereabouts--so
+Basilio had been informed when after leaving the prison he had gone
+to visit his friend and ask him for lodging. The young man did not
+know where to go, for he had no money, nothing but the revolver. The
+memory of the lamp filled his imagination, the great catastrophe that
+would occur within two hours. Pondering over this, he seemed to see
+the men who passed before his eyes walking without heads, and he felt a
+thrill of ferocious joy in telling himself that, hungry and destitute,
+he that night was going to be dreaded, that from a poor student and
+servant, perhaps the sun would see him transformed into some one
+terrible and sinister, standing upon pyramids of corpses, dictating
+laws to all those who were passing before his gaze now in magnificent
+carriages. He laughed like one condemned to death and patted the butt
+of the revolver. The boxes of cartridges were also in his pockets.
+
+A question suddenly occurred to him--where would the drama begin? In
+his bewilderment he had not thought of asking Simoun, but the
+latter had warned him to keep away from Calle Anloague. Then came a
+suspicion: that afternoon, upon leaving the prison, he had proceeded
+to the former house of Capitan Tiago to get his few personal effects
+and had found it transformed, prepared for a fiesta--the wedding of
+Juanito Pelaez! Simoun had spoken of a fiesta.
+
+At this moment he noticed passing in front of him a long line of
+carriages filled with ladies and gentlemen, conversing in a lively
+manner, and he even thought he could make out big bouquets of flowers,
+but he gave the detail no thought. The carriages were going toward
+Calle Rosario and in meeting those that came down off the Bridge
+of Spain had to move along slowly and stop frequently. In one he
+saw Juanito Pelaez at the side of a woman dressed in white with a
+transparent veil, in whom he recognized Paulita Gomez.
+
+"Paulita!" he ejaculated in surprise, realizing that it was indeed
+she, in a bridal gown, along with Juanito Pelaez, as though they
+were just coming from the church. "Poor Isagani!" he murmured,
+"what can have become of him?"
+
+He thought for a while about his friend, a great and generous soul,
+and mentally asked himself if it would not be well to tell him about
+the plan, then answered himself that Isagani would never take part
+in such a butchery. They had not treated Isagani as they had him.
+
+Then he thought that had there been no imprisonment, he would have
+been betrothed, or a husband, at this time, a licentiate in medicine,
+living and working in some corner of his province. The ghost of
+Juli, crushed in her fall, crossed his mind, and dark flames of
+hatred lighted his eyes; again he caressed the butt of the revolver,
+regretting that the terrible hour had not yet come. Just then he saw
+Simoun come out of the door of his house, carrying in his hands the
+case containing the lamp, carefully wrapped up, and enter a carriage,
+which then followed those bearing the bridal party. In order not to
+lose track of Simoun, Basilio took a good look at the cochero and
+with astonishment recognized in him the wretch who had driven him to
+San Diego, Sinong, the fellow maltreated by the Civil Guard, the same
+who had come to the prison to tell him about the occurrences in Tiani.
+
+Conjecturing that Calle Anloague was to be the scene of action, thither
+the youth directed his steps, hurrying forward and getting ahead of
+the carriages, which were, in fact, all moving toward the former house
+of Capitan Tiago--there they were assembling in search of a ball,
+but actually to dance in the air! Basilio smiled when he noticed the
+pairs of civil-guards who formed the escort, and from their number he
+could guess the importance of the fiesta and the guests. The house
+overflowed with people and poured floods of light from its windows,
+the entrance was carpeted and strewn with flowers. Upstairs there,
+perhaps in his former solitary room, an orchestra was playing lively
+airs, which did not completely drown the confused tumult of talk
+and laughter.
+
+Don Timoteo Pelaez was reaching the pinnacle of fortune, and the
+reality surpassed his dreams. He was, at last, marrying his son to
+the rich Gomez heiress, and, thanks to the money Simoun had lent him,
+he had royally furnished that big house, purchased for half its value,
+and was giving in it a splendid fiesta, with the foremost divinities
+of the Manila Olympus for his guests, to gild him with the light of
+their prestige. Since that morning there had been recurring to him,
+with the persistence of a popular song, some vague phrases that he had
+read in the communion service. "Now has the fortunate hour come! Now
+draws nigh the happy moment! Soon there will be fulfilled in you the
+admirable words of Simoun--'I live, and yet not I alone, but the
+Captain-General liveth in me.'" The Captain-General the patron of
+his son! True, he had not attended the ceremony, where Don Custodio
+had represented him, but he would come to dine, he would bring a
+wedding-gift, a lamp which not even Aladdin's--between you and me,
+Simoun was presenting the lamp. Timoteo, what more could you desire?
+
+The transformation that Capitan Tiago's house had undergone was
+considerable--it had been richly repapered, while the smoke and
+the smell of opium had been completely eradicated. The immense
+sala, widened still more by the colossal mirrors that infinitely
+multiplied the lights of the chandeliers, was carpeted throughout,
+for the salons of Europe had carpets, and even though the floor
+was of wide boards brilliantly polished, a carpet it must have too,
+since nothing should be lacking. The rich furniture of Capitan Tiago
+had disappeared and in its place was to be seen another kind, in the
+style of Louis�XV. Heavy curtains of red velvet, trimmed with gold,
+with the initials of the bridal couple worked on them, and upheld by
+garlands of artificial orange-blossoms, hung as porti�res and swept
+the floor with their wide fringes, likewise of gold. In the corners
+appeared enormous Japanese vases, alternating with those of S�vres
+of a clear dark-blue, placed upon square pedestals of carved wood.
+
+The only decorations not in good taste were the screaming chromos
+which Don Timoteo had substituted for the old drawings and pictures
+of saints of Capitan Tiago. Simoun had been unable to dissuade him,
+for the merchant did not want oil-paintings--some one might ascribe
+them to Filipino artists! He, a patron of Filipino artists, never! On
+that point depended his peace of mind and perhaps his life, and he
+knew how to get along in the Philippines! It is true that he had heard
+foreign painters mentioned--Raphael, Murillo, Velasquez--but he did
+not know their addresses, and then they might prove to be somewhat
+seditious. With the chromos he ran no risk, as the Filipinos did not
+make them, they came cheaper, the effect was the same, if not better,
+the colors brighter and the execution very fine. Don't say that Don
+Timoteo did not know how to comport himself in the Philippines!
+
+The large hallway was decorated with flowers, having been converted
+into a dining-room, with a long table for thirty persons in the center,
+and around the sides, pushed against the walls, other smaller ones for
+two or three persons each. Bouquets of flowers, pyramids of fruits
+among ribbons and lights, covered their centers. The groom's place
+was designated by a bunch of roses and the bride's by another of
+orange-blossoms and tuberoses. In the presence of so much finery and
+flowers one could imagine that nymphs in gauzy garments and Cupids
+with iridescent wings were going to serve nectar and ambrosia to
+aerial guests, to the sound of lyres and Aeolian harps.
+
+But the table for the greater gods was not there, being placed
+yonder in the middle of the wide azotea within a magnificent kiosk
+constructed especially for the occasion. A lattice of gilded wood
+over which clambered fragrant vines screened the interior from the
+eyes of the vulgar without impeding the free circulation of air to
+preserve the coolness necessary at that season. A raised platform
+lifted the table above the level of the others at which the ordinary
+mortals were going to dine and an arch decorated by the best artists
+would protect the august heads from the jealous gaze of the stars.
+
+On this table were laid only seven plates. The dishes were of solid
+silver, the cloth and napkins of the finest linen, the wines the
+most costly and exquisite. Don Timoteo had sought the most rare and
+expensive in everything, nor would he have hesitated at crime had he
+been assured that the Captain-General liked to eat human flesh.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+THE FIESTA
+
+
+    "Danzar sobre un volc�n."
+
+
+By seven in the evening the guests had begun to arrive: first, the
+lesser divinities, petty government officials, clerks, and merchants,
+with the most ceremonious greetings and the gravest airs at the start,
+as if they were parvenus, for so much light, so many decorations,
+and so much glassware had some effect. Afterwards, they began to
+be more at ease, shaking their fists playfully, with pats on the
+shoulders, and even familiar slaps on the back. Some, it is true,
+adopted a rather disdainful air, to let it be seen that they were
+accustomed to better things--of course they were! There was one goddess
+who yawned, for she found everything vulgar and even remarked that
+she was ravenously hungry, while another quarreled with her god,
+threatening to box his ears.
+
+Don Timoteo bowed here and bowed there, scattered his best smiles,
+tightened his belt, stepped backward, turned halfway round, then
+completely around, and so on again and again, until one goddess could
+not refrain from remarking to her neighbor, under cover of her fan:
+"My dear, how important the old man is! Doesn't he look like a
+jumping-jack?"
+
+Later came the bridal couple, escorted by Do�a Victorina and the rest
+of the party. Congratulations, hand-shakings, patronizing pats for the
+groom: for the bride, insistent stares and anatomical observations
+on the part of the men, with analyses of her gown, her toilette,
+speculations as to her health and strength on the part of the women.
+
+"Cupid and Psyche appearing on Olympus," thought Ben-Zayb,
+making a mental note of the comparison to spring it at some better
+opportunity. The groom had in fact the mischievous features of the god
+of love, and with a little good-will his hump, which the severity of
+his frock coat did not altogether conceal, could be taken for a quiver.
+
+Don Timoteo began to feel his belt squeezing him, the corns on his
+feet began to ache, his neck became tired, but still the General
+had not come. The greater gods, among them Padre Irene and Padre
+Salvi, had already arrived, it was true, but the chief thunderer was
+still lacking. The poor man became uneasy, nervous; his heart beat
+violently, but still he had to bow and smile; he sat down, he arose,
+failed to hear what was said to him, did not say what he meant. In
+the meantime, an amateur god made remarks to him about his chromos,
+criticizing them with the statement that they spoiled the walls.
+
+"Spoil the walls!" repeated Don Timoteo, with a smile and a desire
+to choke him. "But they were made in Europe and are the most costly
+I could get in Manila! Spoil the walls!" Don Timoteo swore to himself
+that on the very next day he would present for payment all the chits
+that the critic had signed in his store.
+
+Whistles resounded, the galloping of horses was heard--at last! "The
+General! The Captain-General!"
+
+Pale with emotion, Don Timoteo, dissembling the pain of his corns
+and accompanied by his son and some of the greater gods, descended
+to receive the Mighty Jove. The pain at his belt vanished before
+the doubts that now assailed him: should he frame a smile or affect
+gravity; should he extend his hand or wait for the General to offer
+his? _Carambas!_ Why had nothing of this occurred to him before,
+so that he might have consulted his good friend Simoun?
+
+To conceal his agitation, he whispered to his son in a low, shaky
+voice, "Have you a speech prepared?"
+
+"Speeches are no longer in vogue, papa, especially on such an occasion
+as this."
+
+Jupiter arrived in the company of Juno, who was converted into a tower
+of artificial lights--with diamonds in her hair, diamonds around her
+neck, on her arms, on her shoulders, she was literally covered with
+diamonds. She was arrayed in a magnificent silk gown having a long
+train decorated with embossed flowers.
+
+His Excellency literally took possession of the house, as Don Timoteo
+stammeringly begged him to do. [71] The orchestra played the royal
+march while the divine couple majestically ascended the carpeted
+stairway.
+
+Nor was his Excellency's gravity altogether affected. Perhaps for the
+first time since his arrival in the islands he felt sad, a strain
+of melancholy tinged his thoughts. This was the last triumph of
+his three years of government, and within two days he would descend
+forever from such an exalted height. What was he leaving behind? His
+Excellency did not care to turn his head backwards, but preferred to
+look ahead, to gaze into the future. Although he was carrying away a
+fortune, large sums to his credit were awaiting him in European banks,
+and he had residences, yet he had injured many, he had made enemies
+at the Court, the high official was waiting for him there. Other
+Generals had enriched themselves as rapidly as he, and now they were
+ruined. Why not stay longer, as Simoun had advised him to do? No,
+good taste before everything else. The bows, moreover, were not now
+so profound as before, he noticed insistent stares and even looks of
+dislike, but still he replied affably and even attempted to smile.
+
+"It's plain that the sun is setting," observed Padre Irene in
+Ben-Zayb's ear. "Many now stare him in the face."
+
+The devil with the curate--that was just what he was going to remark!
+
+"My dear," murmured into the ear of a neighbor the lady who had
+referred to Don Timoteo as a jumping-jack, "did you ever see such
+a skirt?"
+
+"Ugh, the curtains from the Palace!"
+
+"You don't say! But it's true! They're carrying everything away. You'll
+see how they make wraps out of the carpets."
+
+"That only goes to show that she has talent and taste," observed her
+husband, reproving her with a look. "Women should be economical." This
+poor god was still suffering from the dressmaker's bill.
+
+"My dear, give me curtains at twelve pesos a yard, and you'll see if
+I put on these rags!" retorted the goddess in pique. "Heavens! You
+can talk when you have done something fine like that to give you
+the right!"
+
+Meanwhile, Basilio stood before the house, lost in the throng
+of curious spectators, counting those who alighted from their
+carriages. When he looked upon so many persons, happy and confident,
+when he saw the bride and groom followed by their train of fresh
+and innocent little girls, and reflected that they were going
+to meet there a horrible death, he was sorry and felt his hatred
+waning within him. He wanted to save so many innocents, he thought
+of notifying the police, but a carriage drove up to set down Padre
+Salvi and Padre Irene, both beaming with content, and like a passing
+cloud his good intentions vanished. "What does it matter to me?" he
+asked himself. "Let the righteous suffer with the sinners."
+
+Then he added, to silence his scruples: "I'm not an informer, I mustn't
+abuse the confidence he has placed in me. I owe him, _him_ more than
+I do _them_: he dug my mother's grave, they killed her! What have
+I to do with them? I did everything possible to be good and useful,
+I tried to forgive and forget, I suffered every imposition, and only
+asked that they leave me in peace. I got in no one's way. What have
+they done to me? Let their mangled limbs fly through the air! We've
+suffered enough."
+
+Then he saw Simoun alight with the terrible lamp in his hands, saw him
+cross the entrance with bowed head, as though deep in thought. Basilio
+felt his heart beat fainter, his feet and hands turn cold, while the
+black silhouette of the jeweler assumed fantastic shapes enveloped in
+flames. There at the foot of the stairway Simoun checked his steps,
+as if in doubt, and Basilio held his breath. But the hesitation was
+transient--Simoun raised his head, resolutely ascended the stairway,
+and disappeared.
+
+It then seemed to the student that the house was going to blow up at
+any moment, and that walls, lamps, guests, roof, windows, orchestra,
+would be hurtling through the air like a handful of coals in the midst
+of an infernal explosion. He gazed about him and fancied that he saw
+corpses in place of idle spectators, he saw them torn to shreds, it
+seemed to him that the air was filled with flames, but his calmer self
+triumphed over this transient hallucination, which was due somewhat
+to his hunger.
+
+"Until he comes out, there's no danger," he said to himself. "The
+Captain-General hasn't arrived yet."
+
+He tried to appear calm and control the convulsive trembling in his
+limbs, endeavoring to divert his thoughts to other things. Something
+within was ridiculing him, saying, "If you tremble now, before the
+supreme moment, how will you conduct yourself when you see blood
+flowing, houses burning, and bullets whistling?"
+
+His Excellency arrived, but the young man paid no attention to
+him. He was watching the face of Simoun, who was among those that
+descended to receive him, and he read in that implacable countenance
+the sentence of death for all those men, so that fresh terror seized
+upon him. He felt cold, he leaned against the wall, and, with his
+eyes fixed on the windows and his ears cocked, tried to guess what
+might be happening. In the sala he saw the crowd surround Simoun
+to look at the lamp, he heard congratulations and exclamations of
+admiration--the words "dining-room," "novelty," were repeated many
+times--he saw the General smile and conjectured that the novelty
+was to be exhibited that very night, by the jeweler's arrangement,
+on the table whereat his Excellency was to dine. Simoun disappeared,
+followed by a crowd of admirers.
+
+At that supreme moment his good angel triumphed, he forgot his hatreds,
+he forgot Juli, he wanted to save the innocent. Come what might, he
+would cross the street and try to enter. But Basilio had forgotten
+that he was miserably dressed. The porter stopped him and accosted
+him roughly, and finally, upon his insisting, threatened to call
+the police.
+
+Just then Simoun came down, slightly pale, and the porter turned
+from Basilio to salute the jeweler as though he had been a saint
+passing. Basilio realized from the expression of Simoun's face that he
+was leaving the fated house forever, that the lamp was lighted. _Alea
+jacta est!_ Seized by the instinct of self-preservation, he thought
+then of saving himself. It might occur to any of the guests through
+curiosity to tamper with the wick and then would come the explosion
+to overwhelm them all. Still he heard Simoun say to the cochero,
+"The Escolta, hurry!"
+
+Terrified, dreading that he might at any moment hear the awful
+explosion, Basilio hurried as fast as his legs would carry him to get
+away from the accursed spot, but his legs seemed to lack the necessary
+agility, his feet slipped on the sidewalk as though they were moving
+but not advancing. The people he met blocked the way, and before he had
+gone twenty steps he thought that at least five minutes had elapsed.
+
+Some distance away he stumbled against a young man who was standing
+with his head thrown back, gazing fixedly at the house, and in him
+he recognized Isagani. "What are you doing here?" he demanded. "Come
+away!"
+
+Isagani stared at him vaguely, smiled sadly, and again turned his gaze
+toward the open balconies, across which was revealed the ethereal
+silhouette of the bride clinging to the groom's arm as they moved
+slowly out of sight.
+
+"Come, Isagani, let's get away from that house. Come!" Basilio urged
+in a hoarse voice, catching his friend by the arm.
+
+Isagani gently shook himself free and continued to stare with the
+same sad smile upon his lips.
+
+"For God's sake, let's get away from here!"
+
+"Why should I go away? Tomorrow it will not be she."
+
+There was so much sorrow in those words that Basilio for a moment
+forgot his own terror. "Do you want to die?" he demanded.
+
+Isagani shrugged his shoulders and continued to gaze toward the house.
+
+Basilio again tried to drag him away. "Isagani, Isagani, listen
+to me! Let's not waste any time! That house is mined, it's going
+to blow up at any moment, by the least imprudent act, the least
+curiosity! Isagani, all will perish in its ruins."
+
+"In its ruins?" echoed Isagani, as if trying to understand, but
+without removing his gaze from the window.
+
+"Yes, in its ruins, yes, Isagani! For God's sake, come! I'll explain
+afterwards. Come! One who has been more unfortunate than either you
+or I has doomed them all. Do you see that white, clear light, like an
+electric lamp, shining from the azotea? It's the light of death! A
+lamp charged with dynamite, in a mined dining-room, will burst and
+not a rat will escape alive. Come!"
+
+"No," answered Isagani, shaking his head sadly. "I want to stay here,
+I want to see her for the last time. Tomorrow, you see, she will be
+something different."
+
+"Let fate have its way!" Basilio then exclaimed, hurrying away.
+
+Isagani watched his friend rush away with a precipitation that
+indicated real terror, but continued to stare toward the charmed
+window, like the cavalier of Toggenburg waiting for his sweetheart
+to appear, as Schiller tells. Now the sala was deserted, all having
+repaired to the dining-rooms, and it occurred to Isagani that Basilio's
+fears may have been well-founded. He recalled the terrified countenance
+of him who was always so calm and composed, and it set him to thinking.
+
+Suddenly an idea appeared clear in his imagination--the house was
+going to blow up and Paulita was there, Paulita was going to die a
+frightful death. In the presence of this idea everything was forgotten:
+jealousy, suffering, mental torture, and the generous youth thought
+only of his love. Without reflecting, without hesitation, he ran
+toward the house, and thanks to his stylish clothes and determined
+mien, easily secured admittance.
+
+While these short scenes were occurring in the street, in the
+dining-kiosk of the greater gods there was passed from hand to hand
+a piece of parchment on which were written in red ink these fateful
+words:
+
+
+    _Mene, Tekel, Phares_ [72]
+    _Juan Crisostomo Ibarra_
+
+
+"Juan Crisostomo Ibarra? Who is he?" asked his Excellency, handing
+the paper to his neighbor.
+
+"A joke in very bad taste!" exclaimed Don Custodio. "To sign the name
+of a filibuster dead more than ten years!"
+
+"A filibuster!"
+
+"It's a seditious joke!"
+
+"There being ladies present--"
+
+Padre Irene looked around for the joker and saw Padre Salvi, who was
+seated at the right of the Countess, turn as white as his napkin,
+while he stared at the mysterious words with bulging eyes. The scene
+of the sphinx recurred to him.
+
+"What's the matter, Padre Salvi?" he asked. "Do you recognize your
+friend's signature?"
+
+Padre Salvi did not reply. He made an effort to speak and without being
+conscious of what he was doing wiped his forehead with his napkin.
+
+"What has happened to your Reverence?"
+
+"It is his very handwriting!" was the whispered reply in a scarcely
+perceptible voice. "It's the very handwriting of Ibarra." Leaning
+against the back of his chair, he let his arms fall as though all
+strength had deserted him.
+
+Uneasiness became converted into fright, they all stared at one another
+without uttering a single word. His Excellency started to rise, but
+apprehending that such a move would be ascribed to fear, controlled
+himself and looked about him. There were no soldiers present, even
+the waiters were unknown to him.
+
+"Let's go on eating, gentlemen," he exclaimed, "and pay no attention
+to the joke." But his voice, instead of reassuring, increased the
+general uneasiness, for it trembled.
+
+"I don't suppose that that _Mene, Tekel, Phares_, means that we're
+to be assassinated tonight?" speculated Don Custodio.
+
+All remained motionless, but when he added, "Yet they might poison us,"
+they leaped up from their chairs.
+
+The light, meanwhile, had begun slowly to fade. "The lamp is going
+out," observed the General uneasily. "Will you turn up the wick,
+Padre Irene?"
+
+But at that instant, with the swiftness of a flash of lightning,
+a figure rushed in, overturning a chair and knocking a servant down,
+and in the midst of the general surprise seized the lamp, rushed to
+the azotea, and threw it into the river. The whole thing happened in
+a second and the dining-kiosk was left in darkness.
+
+The lamp had already struck the water before the servants could cry
+out, "Thief, thief!" and rush toward the azotea. "A revolver!" cried
+one of them. "A revolver, quick! After the thief!"
+
+But the figure, more agile than they, had already mounted the
+balustrade and before a light could be brought, precipitated itself
+into the river, striking the water with a loud splash.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+BEN-ZAYB'S AFFLICTIONS
+
+
+Immediately upon hearing of the incident, after lights had been brought
+and the scarcely dignified attitudes of the startled gods revealed,
+Ben-Zayb, filled with holy indignation, and with the approval of the
+press-censor secured beforehand, hastened home--an entresol where
+he lived in a mess with others--to write an article that would be
+the sublimest ever penned under the skies of the Philippines. The
+Captain-General would leave disconsolate if he did not first enjoy
+his dithyrambs, and this Ben-Zayb, in his kindness of heart, could
+not allow. Hence he sacrificed the dinner and ball, nor did he sleep
+that night.
+
+Sonorous exclamations of horror, of indignation, to fancy that
+the world was smashing to pieces and the stars, the eternal stars,
+were clashing together! Then a mysterious introduction, filled with
+allusions, veiled hints, then an account of the affair, and the
+final peroration. He multiplied the flourishes and exhausted all his
+euphemisms in describing the drooping shoulders and the tardy baptism
+of salad his Excellency had received on his Olympian brow, he eulogized
+the agility with which the General had recovered a vertical position,
+placing his head where his legs had been, and vice versa, then intoned
+a hymn to Providence for having so solicitously guarded those sacred
+bones. The paragraph turned out to be so perfect that his Excellency
+appeared as a hero, and fell higher, as Victor Hugo said.
+
+He wrote, erased, added, and polished, so that, without wanting
+in veracity--this was his special merit as a journalist--the whole
+would be an epic, grand for the seven gods, cowardly and base for
+the unknown thief, "who had executed himself, terror-stricken, and
+in the very act convinced of the enormity of his crime."
+
+He explained Padre Irene's act of plunging under the table as
+"an impulse of innate valor, which the habit of a God of peace
+and gentleness, worn throughout a whole life, had been unable to
+extinguish," for Padre Irene had tried to hurl himself upon the
+thief and had taken a straight course along the submensal route. In
+passing, he spoke of submarine passages, mentioned a project of Don
+Custodio's, called attention to the liberal education and wide travels
+of the priest. Padre Salvi's swoon was the excessive sorrow that took
+possession of the virtuous Franciscan to see the little fruit borne
+among the Indians by his pious sermons, while the immobility and
+fright of the other guests, among them the Countess, who "sustained"
+Padre Salvi (she grabbed him), were the serenity and sang-froid of
+heroes, inured to danger in the performance of their duties, beside
+whom the Roman senators surprised by the Gallic invaders were nervous
+schoolgirls frightened at painted cockroaches.
+
+Afterwards, to form a contrast, the picture of the thief: fear,
+madness, confusion, the fierce look, the distorted features,
+and--force of moral superiority in the race--his religious awe to
+see assembled there such august personages! Here came in opportunely
+a long imprecation, a harangue, a diatribe against the perversion of
+good customs, hence the necessity of a permanent military tribunal,
+"a declaration of martial law within the limits already so declared,
+special legislation, energetic and repressive, because it is in
+every way needful, it is of imperative importance to impress upon the
+malefactors and criminals that if the heart is generous and paternal
+for those who are submissive and obedient to the law, the hand is
+strong, firm, inexorable, hard, and severe for those who against all
+reason fail to respect it and who insult the sacred institutions of the
+fatherland. Yes, gentlemen, this is demanded not only for the welfare
+of these islands, not only for the welfare of all mankind, but also
+in the name of Spain, the honor of the Spanish name, the prestige of
+the Iberian people, because before all things else Spaniards we are,
+and the flag of Spain," etc.
+
+He terminated the article with this farewell: "Go in peace, gallant
+warrior, you who with expert hand have guided the destinies of
+this country in such calamitous times! Go in peace to breathe the
+balmy breezes of Manzanares! [73] We shall remain here like faithful
+sentinels to venerate your memory, to admire your wise dispositions,
+to avenge the infamous attempt upon your splendid gift, which we
+will recover even if we have to dry up the seas! Such a precious
+relic will be for this country an eternal monument to your splendor,
+your presence of mind, your gallantry!"
+
+In this rather confused way he concluded the article and before
+dawn sent it to the printing-office, of course with the censor's
+permit. Then he went to sleep like Napoleon, after he had arranged
+the plan for the battle of Jena.
+
+But at dawn he was awakened to have the sheets of copy returned with
+a note from the editor saying that his Excellency had positively
+and severely forbidden any mention of the affair, and had further
+ordered the denial of any versions and comments that might get abroad,
+discrediting them as exaggerated rumors.
+
+To Ben-Zayb this blow was the murder of a beautiful and sturdy child,
+born and nurtured with such great pain and fatigue. Where now hurl the
+Catilinarian pride, the splendid exhibition of warlike crime-avenging
+materials? And to think that within a month or two he was going to
+leave the Philippines, and the article could not be published in Spain,
+since how could he say those things about the criminals of Madrid,
+where other ideas prevailed, where extenuating circumstances were
+sought, where facts were weighed, where there were juries, and so
+on? Articles such as his were like certain poisonous rums that are
+manufactured in Europe, good enough to be sold among the negroes,
+_good for negroes_, [74] with the difference that if the negroes did
+not drink them they would not be destroyed, while Ben-Zayb's articles,
+whether the Filipinos read them or not, had their effect.
+
+"If only some other crime might be committed today or tomorrow,"
+he mused.
+
+With the thought of that child dead before seeing the light, those
+frozen buds, and feeling his eyes fill with tears, he dressed himself
+to call upon the editor. But the editor shrugged his shoulders; his
+Excellency had forbidden it because if it should be divulged that seven
+of the greater gods had let themselves be surprised and robbed by a
+nobody, while they brandished knives and forks, that would endanger
+the integrity of the fatherland! So he had ordered that no search be
+made for the lamp or the thief, and had recommended to his successors
+that they should not run the risk of dining in any private house,
+without being surrounded by halberdiers and guards. As those who knew
+anything about the events that night in Don Timoteo's house were for
+the most part military officials and government employees, it was
+not difficult to suppress the affair in public, for it concerned the
+integrity of the fatherland. Before this name Ben-Zayb bowed his head
+heroically, thinking about Abraham, Guzman El Bueno, [75] or at least,
+Brutus and other heroes of antiquity.
+
+Such a sacrifice could not remain unrewarded, the gods of journalism
+being pleased with Abraham Ben-Zayb. Almost upon the hour came
+the reporting angel bearing the sacrificial lamb in the shape of
+an assault committed at a country-house on the Pasig, where certain
+friars were spending the heated season. Here was his opportunity and
+Ben-Zayb praised his gods.
+
+"The robbers got over two thousand pesos, leaving badly wounded one
+friar and two servants. The curate defended himself as well as he
+could behind a chair, which was smashed in his hands."
+
+"Wait, wait!" said Ben-Zayb, taking notes. "Forty or fifty
+outlaws traitorously--revolvers, bolos, shotguns, pistols--lion at
+bay--chair--splinters flying--barbarously wounded--ten thousand pesos!"
+
+So great was his enthusiasm that he was not content with mere reports,
+but proceeded in person to the scene of the crime, composing on the
+road a Homeric description of the fight. A harangue in the mouth of
+the leader? A scornful defiance on the part of the priest? All the
+metaphors and similes applied to his Excellency, Padre Irene, and
+Padre Salvi would exactly fit the wounded friar and the description
+of the thief would serve for each of the outlaws. The imprecation
+could be expanded, since he could talk of religion, of the faith,
+of charity, of the ringing of bells, of what the Indians owed to
+the friars, he could get sentimental and melt into Castelarian [76]
+epigrams and lyric periods. The se�oritas of the city would read the
+article and murmur, "Ben-Zayb, bold as a lion and tender as a lamb!"
+
+But when he reached the scene, to his great astonishment he learned
+that the wounded friar was no other than Padre Camorra, sentenced by
+his Provincial to expiate in the pleasant country-house on the banks
+of the Pasig his pranks in Tiani. He had a slight scratch on his hand
+and a bruise on his head received from flattening himself out on the
+floor. The robbers numbered three or four, armed only with bolos,
+the sum stolen fifty pesos!
+
+"It won't do!" exclaimed Ben-Zayb. "Shut up! You don't know what
+you're talking about."
+
+"How don't I know, _pu�ales?_"
+
+"Don't be a fool--the robbers must have numbered more."
+
+"You ink-slinger--"
+
+So they had quite an altercation. What chiefly concerned Ben-Zayb
+was not to throw away the article, to give importance to the affair,
+so that he could use the peroration.
+
+But a fearful rumor cut short their dispute. The robbers caught
+had made some important revelations. One of the outlaws under
+_Matanglawin_ (Cabesang Tales) had made an appointment with them to
+join his band in Santa Mesa, thence to sack the conventos and houses
+of the wealthy. They would be guided by a Spaniard, tall and sunburnt,
+with white hair, who said that he was acting under the orders of the
+General, whose great friend he was, and they had been further assured
+that the artillery and various regiments would join them, wherefore
+they were to entertain no fear at all. The tulisanes would be pardoned
+and have a third part of the booty assigned to them. The signal was
+to have been a cannon-shot, but having waited for it in vain the
+tulisanes, thinking themselves deceived, separated, some going back
+to their homes, some returning to the mountains vowing vengeance on
+the Spaniard, who had thus failed twice to keep his word. Then they,
+the robbers caught, had decided to do something on their own account,
+attacking the country-house that they found closest at hand, resolving
+religiously to give two-thirds of the booty to the Spaniard with
+white hair, if perchance he should call upon them for it.
+
+The description being recognized as that of Simoun, the declaration
+was received as an absurdity and the robber subjected to all kinds
+of tortures, including the electric machine, for his impious
+blasphemy. But news of the disappearance of the jeweler having
+attracted the attention of the whole Escolta, and the sacks of powder
+and great quantities of cartridges having been discovered in his
+house, the story began to wear an appearance of truth. Mystery began
+to enwrap the affair, enveloping it in clouds; there were whispered
+conversations, coughs, suspicious looks, suggestive comments, and
+trite second-hand remarks. Those who were on the inside were unable
+to get over their astonishment, they put on long faces, turned pale,
+and but little was wanting for many persons to lose their minds in
+realizing certain things that had before passed unnoticed.
+
+"We've had a narrow escape! Who would have said--"
+
+In the afternoon Ben-Zayb, his pockets filled with revolvers and
+cartridges, went to see Don Custodio, whom he found hard at work over
+a project against American jewelers. In a hushed voice he whispered
+between the palms of his hands into the journalist's ear mysterious
+words.
+
+"Really?" questioned Ben-Zayb, slapping his hand on his pocket and
+paling visibly.
+
+"Wherever he may be found--" The sentence was completed with an
+expressive pantomime. Don Custodio raised both arms to the height of
+his face, with the right more bent than the left, turned the palms
+of his hands toward the floor, closed one eye, and made two movements
+in advance. "Ssh! Ssh!" he hissed.
+
+"And the diamonds?" inquired Ben-Zayb.
+
+"If they find him--" He went through another pantomime with the
+fingers of his right hand, spreading them out and clenching them
+together like the closing of a fan, clutching out with them somewhat
+in the manner of the wings of a wind-mill sweeping imaginary objects
+toward itself with practised skill. Ben-Zayb responded with another
+pantomime, opening his eyes wide, arching his eyebrows and sucking in
+his breath eagerly as though nutritious air had just been discovered.
+
+"Sssh!"
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+THE MYSTERY
+
+
+    Todo se sabe
+
+
+Notwithstanding so many precautions, rumors reached the public,
+even though quite changed and mutilated. On the following night
+they were the theme of comment in the house of Orenda, a rich jewel
+merchant in the industrious district of Santa Cruz, and the numerous
+friends of the family gave attention to nothing else. They were not
+indulging in cards, or playing the piano, while little Tinay, the
+youngest of the girls, became bored playing _chongka_ by herself,
+without being able to understand the interest awakened by assaults,
+conspiracies, and sacks of powder, when there were in the seven holes
+so many beautiful cowries that seemed to be winking at her in unison
+and smiled with their tiny mouths half-opened, begging to be carried
+up to the _home_. Even Isagani, who, when he came, always used to
+play with her and allow himself to be beautifully cheated, did not
+come at her call, for Isagani was gloomily and silently listening to
+something Chichoy the silversmith was relating. Momoy, the betrothed
+of Sensia, the eldest of the daughters--a pretty and vivacious girl,
+rather given to joking--had left the window where he was accustomed
+to spend his evenings in amorous discourse, and this action seemed to
+be very annoying to the lory whose cage hung from the eaves there,
+the lory endeared to the house from its ability to greet everybody
+in the morning with marvelous phrases of love. Capitana Loleng,
+the energetic and intelligent Capitana Loleng, had her account-book
+open before her, but she neither read nor wrote in it, nor was her
+attention fixed on the trays of loose pearls, nor on the diamonds--she
+had completely forgotten herself and was all ears. Her husband himself,
+the great Capitan Toringoy,--a transformation of the name Domingo,--the
+happiest man in the district, without other occupation than to dress
+well, eat, loaf, and gossip, while his whole family worked and toiled,
+had not gone to join his coterie, but was listening between fear and
+emotion to the hair-raising news of the lank Chichoy.
+
+Nor was reason for all this lacking. Chichoy had gone to deliver some
+work for Don Timoteo Pelaez, a pair of earrings for the bride, at the
+very time when they were tearing down the kiosk that on the previous
+night had served as a dining-room for the foremost officials. Here
+Chichoy turned pale and his hair stood on end.
+
+"_Nak�_!" he exclaimed, "sacks and sacks of powder, sacks of powder
+under the floor, in the roof, under the table, under the chairs,
+everywhere! It's lucky none of the workmen were smoking."
+
+"Who put those sacks of powder there?" asked Capitana Loleng, who was
+brave and did not turn pale, as did the enamored Momoy. But Momoy had
+attended the wedding, so his posthumous emotion can be appreciated:
+he had been near the kiosk.
+
+"That's what no one can explain," replied Chichoy. "Who would have any
+interest in breaking up the fiesta? There couldn't have been more than
+one, as the celebrated lawyer Se�or Pasta who was there on a visit
+declared--either an enemy of Don Timoteo's or a rival of Juanito's."
+
+The Orenda girls turned instinctively toward Isagani, who smiled
+silently.
+
+"Hide yourself," Capitana Loleng advised him. "They may accuse
+you. Hide!"
+
+Again Isagani smiled but said nothing.
+
+"Don Timoteo," continued Chichoy, "did not know to whom to attribute
+the deed. He himself superintended the work, he and his friend Simoun,
+and nobody else. The house was thrown into an uproar, the lieutenant
+of the guard came, and after enjoining secrecy upon everybody, they
+sent me away. But--"
+
+"But--but--" stammered the trembling Momoy.
+
+"_Nak�!_" ejaculated Sensia, gazing at her fianc� and trembling
+sympathetically to remember that he had been at the fiesta. "This
+young man--If the house had blown up--" She stared at her sweetheart
+passionately and admired his courage.
+
+"If it had blown up--"
+
+"No one in the whole of Calle Anloague would have been left alive,"
+concluded Capitan Toringoy, feigning valor and indifference in the
+presence of his family.
+
+"I left in consternation," resumed Chichoy, "thinking about how, if a
+mere spark, a cigarette had fallen, if a lamp had been overturned, at
+the present moment we should have neither a General, nor an Archbishop,
+nor any one, not even a government clerk! All who were at the fiesta
+last night--annihilated!"
+
+"_V�rgen Sant�sima!_ This young man--"
+
+"_'Susmariosep!_" exclaimed Capitana Loleng. "All our debtors were
+there, _'Susmariosep!_ And we have a house near there! Who could it
+have been?"
+
+"Now you may know about it," added Chichoy in a whisper, "but you
+must keep it a secret. This afternoon I met a friend, a clerk in an
+office, and in talking about the affair, he gave me the clue to the
+mystery--he had it from some government employees. Who do you suppose
+put the sacks of powder there?"
+
+Many shrugged their shoulders, while Capitan Toringoy merely looked
+askance at Isagani.
+
+"The friars?"
+
+"Quiroga the Chinaman?"
+
+"Some student?"
+
+"Makaraig?"
+
+Capitan Toringoy coughed and glanced at Isagani, while Chichoy shook
+his head and smiled.
+
+"The jeweler Simoun."
+
+"Simoun!!"
+
+The profound silence of amazement followed these words. Simoun, the
+evil genius of the Captain-General, the rich trader to whose house
+they had gone to buy unset gems, Simoun, who had received the Orenda
+girls with great courtesy and had paid them fine compliments! For
+the very reason that the story seemed absurd it was believed. "_Credo
+quia absurdum,_" said St. Augustine.
+
+"But wasn't Simoun at the fiesta last night?" asked Sensia.
+
+"Yes," said Momoy. "But now I remember! He left the house just as we
+were sitting down to the dinner. He went to get his wedding-gift."
+
+"But wasn't he a friend of the General's? Wasn't he a partner of
+Don Timoteo's?"
+
+"Yes, he made himself a partner in order to strike the blow and kill
+all the Spaniards."
+
+"Aha!" cried Sensia. "Now I understand!"
+
+"What?"
+
+"You didn't want to believe Aunt Tentay. Simoun is the devil and he
+has bought up the souls of all the Spaniards. Aunt Tentay said so!"
+
+Capitana Loleng crossed herself and looked uneasily toward the jewels,
+fearing to see them turn into live coals, while Capitan Toringoy took
+off the ring which had come from Simoun.
+
+"Simoun has disappeared without leaving any traces," added
+Chichoy. "The Civil Guard is searching for him."
+
+"Yes," observed Sensia, crossing herself, "searching for the devil."
+
+Now many things were explained: Simoun's fabulous wealth and the
+peculiar smell in his house, the smell of sulphur. Binday, another
+of the daughters, a frank and lovely girl, remembered having seen
+blue flames in the jeweler's house one afternoon when she and her
+mother had gone there to buy jewels. Isagani listened attentively,
+but said nothing.
+
+"So, last night--" ventured Momoy.
+
+"Last night?" echoed Sensia, between curiosity and fear.
+
+Momoy hesitated, but the face Sensia put on banished his fear. "Last
+night, while we were eating, there was a disturbance, the light in
+the General's dining-room went out. They say that some unknown person
+stole the lamp that was presented by Simoun."
+
+"A thief? One of the Black Hand?"
+
+Isagani arose to walk back and forth.
+
+"Didn't they catch him?"
+
+"He jumped into the river before anybody recognized him. Some say he
+was a Spaniard, some a Chinaman, and others an Indian."
+
+"It's believed that with the lamp," added Chichoy, "he was going to
+set fire to the house, then the powder--"
+
+Momoy again shuddered but noticing that Sensia was watching him tried
+to control himself. "What a pity!" he exclaimed with an effort. "How
+wickedly the thief acted. Everybody would have been killed."
+
+Sensia stared at him in fright, the women crossed themselves, while
+Capitan Toringoy, who was afraid of politics, made a move to go away.
+
+Momoy turned to Isagani, who observed with an enigmatic smile: "It's
+always wicked to take what doesn't belong to you. If that thief had
+known what it was all about and had been able to reflect, surely he
+wouldn't have done as he did."
+
+Then, after a pause, he added, "For nothing in the world would I want
+to be in his place!"
+
+So they continued their comments and conjectures until an hour later,
+when Isagani bade the family farewell, to return forever to his
+uncle's side.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+FATALITY
+
+
+_Matanglawin_ was the terror of Luzon. His band had as lief appear
+in one province where it was least expected as make a descent upon
+another that was preparing to resist it. It burned a sugar-mill in
+Batangas and destroyed the crops, on the following day it murdered the
+Justice of the Peace of Tiani, and on the next took possession of the
+town of Cavite, carrying off the arms from the town hall. The central
+provinces, from Tayabas to Pangasinan, suffered from his depredations,
+and his bloody name extended from Albay in the south to Kagayan in
+the north. The towns, disarmed through mistrust on the part of a
+weak government, fell easy prey into his hands--at his approach the
+fields were abandoned by the farmers, the herds were scattered, while
+a trail of blood and fire marked his passage. _Matanglawin_ laughed at
+the severe measures ordered by the government against the tulisanes,
+since from them only the people in the outlying villages suffered,
+being captured and maltreated if they resisted the band, and if they
+made peace with it being flogged and deported by the government,
+provided they completed the journey and did not meet with a fatal
+accident on the way. Thanks to these terrible alternatives many of
+the country folk decided to enlist under his command.
+
+As a result of this reign of terror, trade among the towns, already
+languishing, died out completely. The rich dared not travel, and
+the poor feared to be arrested by the Civil Guard, which, being
+under obligation to pursue the tulisanes, often seized the first
+person encountered and subjected him to unspeakable tortures. In its
+impotence, the government put on a show of energy toward the persons
+whom it suspected, in order that by force of cruelty the people should
+not realize its weakness--the fear that prompted such measures.
+
+A string of these hapless suspects, some six or seven, with their
+arms tied behind them, bound together like a bunch of human meat,
+was one afternoon marching through the excessive heat along a road
+that skirted a mountain, escorted by ten or twelve guards armed with
+rifles. Their bayonets gleamed in the sun, the barrels of their rifles
+became hot, and even the sage-leaves in their helmets scarcely served
+to temper the effect of the deadly May sun.
+
+Deprived of the use of their arms and pressed close against one
+another to save rope, the prisoners moved along almost uncovered and
+unshod, he being the best off who had a handkerchief twisted around
+his head. Panting, suffering, covered with dust which perspiration
+converted into mud, they felt their brains melting, they saw lights
+dancing before them, red spots floating in the air. Exhaustion and
+dejection were pictured in their faces, desperation, wrath, something
+indescribable, the look of one who dies cursing, of a man who is
+weary of life, who hates himself, who blasphemes against God. The
+strongest lowered their heads to rub their faces against the dusky
+backs of those in front of them and thus wipe away the sweat that
+was blinding them. Many were limping, but if any one of them happened
+to fall and thus delay the march he would hear a curse as a soldier
+ran up brandishing a branch torn from a tree and forced him to rise
+by striking about in all directions. The string then started to run,
+dragging, rolling in the dust, the fallen one, who howled and begged
+to be killed; but perchance he succeeded in getting on his feet and
+then went along crying like a child and cursing the hour he was born.
+
+The human cluster halted at times while the guards drank, and then
+the prisoners continued on their way with parched mouths, darkened
+brains, and hearts full of curses. Thirst was for these wretches the
+least of their troubles.
+
+"Move on, you sons of ----!" cried a soldier, again refreshed,
+hurling the insult common among the lower classes of Filipinos.
+
+The branch whistled and fell on any shoulder whatsoever, the nearest
+one, or at times upon a face to leave a welt at first white, then red,
+and later dirty with the dust of the road.
+
+"Move on, you cowards!" at times a voice yelled in Spanish, deepening
+its tone.
+
+"Cowards!" repeated the mountain echoes.
+
+Then the cowards quickened their pace under a sky of red-hot iron,
+over a burning road, lashed by the knotty branch which was worn
+into shreds on their livid skins. A Siberian winter would perhaps be
+tenderer than the May sun of the Philippines.
+
+Yet, among the soldiers there was one who looked with disapproving
+eyes upon so much wanton cruelty, as he marched along silently
+with his brows knit in disgust. At length, seeing that the guard,
+not satisfied with the branch, was kicking the prisoners that fell,
+he could no longer restrain himself but cried out impatiently, "Here,
+Mautang, let them alone!"
+
+Mautang turned toward him in surprise. "What's it to you, Carolino?" he
+asked.
+
+"To me, nothing, but it hurts me," replied Carolino. "They're men
+like ourselves."
+
+"It's plain that you're new to the business!" retorted Mautang with
+a compassionate smile. "How did you treat the prisoners in the war?"
+
+"With more consideration, surely!" answered Carolino.
+
+Mautang remained silent for a moment and then, apparently having
+discovered the reason, calmly rejoined, "Ah, it's because they are
+enemies and fight us, while these--these are our own countrymen."
+
+Then drawing nearer to Carolino he whispered, "How stupid you
+are! They're treated so in order that they may attempt to resist or
+to escape, and then--bang!"
+
+Carolino made no reply.
+
+One of the prisoners then begged that they let him stop for a moment.
+
+"This is a dangerous place," answered the corporal, gazing uneasily
+toward the mountain. "Move on!"
+
+"Move on!" echoed Mautang and his lash whistled.
+
+The prisoner twisted himself around to stare at him with reproachful
+eyes. "You are more cruel than the Spaniard himself," he said.
+
+Mautang replied with more blows, when suddenly a bullet whistled,
+followed by a loud report. Mautang dropped his rifle, uttered an
+oath, and clutching at his breast with both hands fell spinning into
+a heap. The prisoner saw him writhing in the dust with blood spurting
+from his mouth.
+
+"Halt!" called the corporal, suddenly turning pale.
+
+The soldiers stopped and stared about them. A wisp of smoke rose from
+a thicket on the height above. Another bullet sang to its accompanying
+report and the corporal, wounded in the thigh, doubled over vomiting
+curses. The column was attacked by men hidden among the rocks above.
+
+Sullen with rage the corporal motioned toward the string of prisoners
+and laconically ordered, "Fire!"
+
+The wretches fell upon their knees, filled with consternation. As
+they could not lift their hands, they begged for mercy by kissing
+the dust or bowing their heads--one talked of his children, another
+of his mother who would be left unprotected, one promised money,
+another called upon God--but the muzzles were quickly lowered and a
+hideous volley silenced them all.
+
+Then began the sharpshooting against those who were behind the rocks
+above, over which a light cloud of smoke began to hover. To judge from
+the scarcity of their shots, the invisible enemies could not have
+more than three rifles. As they advanced firing, the guards sought
+cover behind tree-trunks or crouched down as they attempted to scale
+the height. Splintered rocks leaped up, broken twigs fell from trees,
+patches of earth were torn up, and the first guard who attempted the
+ascent rolled back with a bullet through his shoulder.
+
+The hidden enemy had the advantage of position, but the valiant
+guards, who did not know how to flee, were on the point of retiring,
+for they had paused, unwilling to advance; that fight against the
+invisible unnerved them. Smoke and rocks alone could be seen--not a
+voice was heard, not a shadow appeared; they seemed to be fighting
+with the mountain.
+
+"Shoot, Carolino! What are you aiming at?" called the corporal.
+
+At that instant a man appeared upon a rock, making signs with his
+rifle.
+
+"Shoot him!" ordered the corporal with a foul oath.
+
+Three guards obeyed the order, but the man continued standing there,
+calling out at the top of his voice something unintelligible.
+
+Carolino paused, thinking that he recognized something familiar about
+that figure, which stood out plainly in the sunlight. But the corporal
+threatened to tie him up if he did not fire, so Carolino took aim and
+the report of his rifle was heard. The man on the rock spun around
+and disappeared with a cry that left Carolino horror-stricken.
+
+Then followed a rustling in the bushes, indicating that those within
+were scattering in all directions, so the soldiers boldly advanced,
+now that there was no more resistance. Another man appeared upon the
+rock, waving a spear, and they fired at him. He sank down slowly,
+catching at the branch of a tree, but with another volley fell face
+downwards on the rock.
+
+The guards climbed on nimbly, with bayonets fixed ready for a
+hand-to-hand fight. Carolino alone moved forward reluctantly, with
+a wandering, gloomy look, the cry of the man struck by his bullet
+still ringing in his ears. The first to reach the spot found an old
+man dying, stretched out on the rock. He plunged his bayonet into
+the body, but the old man did not even wink, his eyes being fixed
+on Carolino with an indescribable gaze, while with his bony hand he
+pointed to something behind the rock.
+
+The soldiers turned to see Caroline frightfully pale, his mouth
+hanging open, with a look in which glimmered the last spark of reason,
+for Carolino, who was no other than Tano, Cabesang Tales' son, and
+who had just returned from the Carolines, recognized in the dying
+man his grandfather, Tandang Selo. No longer able to speak, the old
+man's dying eyes uttered a whole poem of grief--and then a corpse,
+he still continued to point to something behind the rock.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+
+In his solitary retreat on the shore of the sea, whose mobile surface
+was visible through the open, windows, extending outward until it
+mingled with the horizon, Padre Florentino was relieving the monotony
+by playing on his harmonium sad and melancholy tunes, to which the
+sonorous roar of the surf and the sighing of the treetops of the
+neighboring wood served as accompaniments. Notes long, full, mournful
+as a prayer, yet still vigorous, escaped from the old instrument. Padre
+Florentino, who was an accomplished musician, was improvising, and,
+as he was alone, gave free rein to the sadness in his heart.
+
+For the truth was that the old man was very sad. His good friend, Don
+Tiburcio de Espada�a, had just left him, fleeing from the persecution
+of his wife. That morning he had received a note from the lieutenant
+of the Civil Guard, which ran thus:
+
+
+    MY DEAR CHAPLAIN,--I have just received from the commandant
+    a telegram that says, "Spaniard hidden house Padre Florentino
+    capture forward alive dead." As the telegram is quite explicit,
+    warn your friend not to be there when I come to arrest him
+    at eight tonight.
+
+    Affectionately,
+
+    PEREZ
+
+    Burn this note.
+
+
+"T-that V-victorina!" Don Tiburcio had stammered. "S-she's c-capable
+of having me s-shot!"
+
+Padre Florentino was unable to reassure him. Vainly he pointed
+out to him that the word _cojera_ should have read _coger�_,
+[77] and that the hidden Spaniard could not be Don  Tiburcio,
+but the jeweler Simoun, who two days before had arrived, wounded
+and a fugitive, begging for shelter. But Don Tiburcio would not be
+convinced--_cojera_ was his own lameness, his personal description,
+and it was an intrigue of Victorina's to get him back alive or dead,
+as Isagani had written from Manila. So the poor Ulysses had left the
+priest's house to conceal himself in the hut of a woodcutter.
+
+No doubt was entertained by Padre Florentino that the Spaniard wanted
+was the jeweler Simoun, who had arrived mysteriously, himself carrying
+the jewel-chest, bleeding, morose, and exhausted. With the free and
+cordial Filipino hospitality, the priest had taken him in, without
+asking indiscreet questions, and as news of the events in Manila had
+not yet reached his ears he was unable to understand the situation
+clearly. The only conjecture that occurred to him was that the General,
+the jeweler's friend and protector, being gone, probably his enemies,
+the victims of wrong and abuse, were now rising and calling for
+vengeance, and that the acting Governor was pursuing him to make him
+disgorge the wealth he had accumulated--hence his flight. But whence
+came his wounds? Had he tried to commit suicide? Were they the result
+of personal revenge? Or were they merely caused by an accident, as
+Simoun claimed? Had they been received in escaping from the force
+that was pursuing him?
+
+This last conjecture was the one that seemed to have the greatest
+appearance of probability, being further strengthened by the telegram
+received and Simoun's decided unwillingness from the start to be
+treated by the doctor from the capital. The jeweler submitted only
+to the ministrations of Don Tiburcio, and even to them with marked
+distrust. In this situation Padre Florentino was asking himself what
+line of conduct he should pursue when the Civil Guard came to arrest
+Simoun. His condition would not permit his removal, much less a long
+journey--but the telegram said alive or dead.
+
+Padre Florentine ceased playing and approached the window to gaze
+out at the sea, whose desolate surface was without a ship, without
+a sail--it gave him no suggestion. A solitary islet outlined
+in the distance spoke only of solitude and made the space more
+lonely. Infinity is at times despairingly mute.
+
+The old man was trying to analyze the sad and ironical smile with
+which Simoun had received the news that he was to be arrested. What did
+that smile mean? And that other smile, still sadder and more ironical,
+with which he received the news that they would not come before eight
+at night? What did all this mystery signify? Why did Simoun refuse
+to hide? There came into his mind the celebrated saying of St. John
+Chrysostom when he was defending the eunuch Eutropius: "Never was a
+better time than this to say--Vanity of vanities and all is vanity!"
+
+Yes, that Simoun, so rich, so powerful, so feared a week ago, and
+now more unfortunate than Eutropius, was seeking refuge, not at the
+altars of a church, but in the miserable house of a poor native priest,
+hidden in the forest, on the solitary seashore! Vanity of vanities
+and all is vanity! That man would within a few hours be a prisoner,
+dragged from the bed where he lay, without respect for his condition,
+without consideration for his wounds--dead or alive his enemies
+demanded him! How could he save him? Where could he find the moving
+accents of the bishop of Constantinople? What weight would his weak
+words have, the words of a native priest, whose own humiliation this
+same Simoun had in his better days seemed to applaud and encourage?
+
+But Padre Florentine no longer recalled the indifferent reception that
+two months before the jeweler had accorded to him when he had tried
+to interest him in favor of Isagani, then a prisoner on account of
+his imprudent chivalry; he forgot the activity Simoun had displayed in
+urging Paulita's marriage, which had plunged Isagani into the fearful
+misanthropy that was worrying his uncle. He forgot all these things
+and thought only of the sick man's plight and his own obligations as
+a host, until his senses reeled. Where must he hide him to avoid his
+falling into the clutches of the authorities? But the person chiefly
+concerned was not worrying, he was smiling.
+
+While he was pondering over these things, the old man was approached by
+a servant who said that the sick man wished to speak with him, so he
+went into the next room, a clean and well-ventilated apartment with a
+floor of wide boards smoothed and polished, and simply furnished with
+big, heavy armchairs of ancient design, without varnish or paint. At
+one end there was a large kamagon bed with its four posts to support
+the canopy, and beside it a table covered with bottles, lint, and
+bandages. A praying-desk at the feet of a Christ and a scanty library
+led to the suspicion that it was the priest's own bedroom, given up to
+his guest according to the Filipino custom of offering to the stranger
+the best table, the best room, and the best bed in the house. Upon
+seeing the windows opened wide to admit freely the healthful sea-breeze
+and the echoes of its eternal lament, no one in the Philippines would
+have said that a sick person was to be found there, since it is the
+custom to close all the windows and stop up all the cracks just as
+soon as any one catches a cold or gets an insignificant headache.
+
+Padre Florentine looked toward the bed and was astonished to
+see that the sick man's face had lost its tranquil and ironical
+expression. Hidden grief seemed to knit his brows, anxiety was depicted
+in his looks, his lips were curled in a smile of pain.
+
+"Are you suffering, Se�or Simoun?" asked the priest solicitously,
+going to his side.
+
+"Some! But in a little while I shall cease to suffer," he replied
+with a shake of his head.
+
+Padre Florentine clasped his hands in fright, suspecting that he
+understood the terrible truth. "My God, what have you done? What have
+you taken?" He reached toward the bottles.
+
+"It's useless now! There's no remedy at all!" answered Simoun with a
+pained smile. "What did you expect me to do? Before the clock strikes
+eight--alive or dead--dead, yes, but alive, no!"
+
+"My God, what have you done?"
+
+"Be calm!" urged the sick man with a wave of his hand. "What's done
+is done. I must not fall into anybody's hands--my secret would
+be torn from me. Don't get excited, don't lose your head, it's
+useless! Listen--the night is coming on and there's no time to be
+lost. I must tell you my secret, and intrust to you my last request,
+I must lay my life open before you. At the supreme moment I want to
+lighten myself of a load, I want to clear up a doubt of mine. You
+who believe so firmly in God--I want you to tell me if there is a God!"
+
+"But an antidote, Se�or Simoun! I have ether, chloroform--"
+
+The priest began to search for a flask, until Simoun cried impatiently,
+"Useless, it's useless! Don't waste time! I'll go away with my secret!"
+
+The bewildered priest fell down at his desk and prayed at the feet
+of the Christ, hiding his face in his hands. Then he arose serious
+and grave, as if he had received from his God all the force, all
+the dignity, all the authority of the Judge of consciences. Moving
+a chair to the head of the bed he prepared to listen.
+
+At the first words Simoun murmured, when he told his real name,
+the old priest started back and gazed at him in terror, whereat
+the sick man smiled bitterly. Taken by surprise, the priest was not
+master of himself, but he soon recovered, and covering his face with
+a handkerchief again bent over to listen.
+
+Simoun related his sorrowful story: how, thirteen years before, he
+had returned from Europe filled with hopes and smiling illusions,
+having come back to marry a girl whom he loved, disposed to do good
+and forgive all who had wronged him, just so they would let him live
+in peace. But it was not so. A mysterious hand involved him in the
+confusion of an uprising planned by his enemies. Name, fortune, love,
+future, liberty, all were lost, and he escaped only through the heroism
+of a friend. Then he swore vengeance. With the wealth of his family,
+which had been buried in a wood, he had fled, had gone to foreign
+lands and engaged in trade. He took part in the war in Cuba, aiding
+first one side and then another, but always profiting. There he made
+the acquaintance of the General, then a major, whose good-will he won
+first by loans of money, and afterwards he made a friend of him by
+the knowledge of criminal secrets. With his money he had been able to
+secure the General's appointment and, once in the Philippines, he had
+used him as a blind tool and incited him to all kinds of injustice,
+availing himself of his insatiable lust for gold.
+
+The confession was long and tedious, but during the whole of it the
+confessor made no further sign of surprise and rarely interrupted the
+sick man. It was night when Padre Florentino, wiping the perspiration
+from his face, arose and began to meditate. Mysterious darkness
+flooded the room, so that the moonbeams entering through the window
+filled it with vague lights and vaporous reflections.
+
+Into the midst of the silence the priest's voice broke sad and
+deliberate, but consoling: "God will forgive you, Se�or--Simoun,"
+he said. "He knows that we are fallible, He has seen that you have
+suffered, and in ordaining that the chastisement for your faults
+should come as death from the very ones you have instigated to crime,
+we can see His infinite mercy. He has frustrated your plans one by
+one, the best conceived, first by the death of Maria Clara, then by
+a lack of preparation, then in some mysterious way. Let us bow to
+His will and render Him thanks!"
+
+"According to you, then," feebly responded the sick man, "His will
+is that these islands--"
+
+"Should continue in the condition in which they suffer?" finished
+the priest, seeing that the other hesitated. "I don't know, sir,
+I can't read the thought of the Inscrutable. I know that He has not
+abandoned those peoples who in their supreme moments have trusted in
+Him and made Him the Judge of their cause, I know that His arm has
+never failed when, justice long trampled upon and every recourse gone,
+the oppressed have taken up the sword to fight for home and wife and
+children, for their inalienable rights, which, as the German poet says,
+shine ever there above, unextinguished and inextinguishable, like
+the eternal stars themselves. No, God is justice, He cannot abandon
+His cause, the cause of liberty, without which no justice is possible."
+
+"Why then has He denied me His aid?" asked the sick man in a voice
+charged with bitter complaint.
+
+"Because you chose means that He could not sanction," was the
+severe reply. "The glory of saving a country is not for him who has
+contributed to its ruin. You have believed that what crime and iniquity
+have defiled and deformed, another crime and another iniquity can
+purify and redeem. Wrong! Hate never produces anything but monsters
+and crime criminals! Love alone realizes wonderful works, virtue
+alone can save! No, if our country has ever to be free, it will not
+be through vice and crime, it will not be so by corrupting its sons,
+deceiving some and bribing others, no! Redemption presupposes virtue,
+virtue sacrifice, and sacrifice love!"
+
+"Well, I accept your explanation," rejoined the sick man, after
+a pause. "I have been mistaken, but, because I have been mistaken,
+will that God deny liberty to a people and yet save many who are much
+worse criminals than I am? What is my mistake compared to the crimes
+of our rulers? Why has that God to give more heed to my iniquity than
+to the cries of so many innocents? Why has He not stricken me down
+and then made the people triumph? Why does He let so many worthy and
+just ones suffer and look complacently upon their tortures?"
+
+"The just and the worthy must suffer in order that their ideas may be
+known and extended! You must shake or shatter the vase to spread its
+perfume, you must smite the rock to get the spark! There is something
+providential in the persecutions of tyrants, Se�or Simoun!"
+
+"I knew it," murmured the sick man, "and therefore I encouraged
+the tyranny."
+
+"Yes, my friend, but more corrupt influences than anything else
+were spread. You fostered the social rottenness without sowing an
+idea. From this fermentation of vices loathing alone could spring,
+and if anything were born overnight it would be at best a mushroom,
+for mushrooms only can spring spontaneously from filth. True it
+is that the vices of the government are fatal to it, they cause
+its death, but they kill also the society in whose bosom they are
+developed. An immoral government presupposes a demoralized people,
+a conscienceless administration, greedy and servile citizens in the
+settled parts, outlaws and brigands in the mountains. Like master,
+like slave! Like government, like country!"
+
+A brief pause ensued, broken at length by the sick man's voice. "Then,
+what can be done?"
+
+"Suffer and work!"
+
+"Suffer--work!" echoed the sick man bitterly. "Ah, it's easy to say
+that, when you are not suffering, when the work is rewarded. If your
+God demands such great sacrifices from man, man who can scarcely
+count upon the present and doubts the future, if you had seen what
+I have, the miserable, the wretched, suffering unspeakable tortures
+for crimes they have not committed, murdered to cover up the faults
+and incapacity of others, poor fathers of families torn from their
+homes to work to no purpose upon highways that are destroyed each day
+and seem only to serve for sinking families into want. Ah, to suffer,
+to work, is the will of God! Convince them that their murder is their
+salvation, that their work is the prosperity of the home! To suffer,
+to work! What God is that?"
+
+"A very just God, Se�or Simoun," replied the priest. "A God who
+chastises our lack of faith, our vices, the little esteem in which
+we hold dignity and the civic virtues. We tolerate vice, we make
+ourselves its accomplices, at times we applaud it, and it is just,
+very just that we suffer the consequences, that our children suffer
+them. It is the God of liberty, Se�or Simoun, who obliges us to
+love it, by making the yoke heavy for us--a God of mercy, of equity,
+who while He chastises us, betters us and only grants prosperity to
+him who has merited it through his efforts. The school of suffering
+tempers, the arena of combat strengthens the soul.
+
+"I do not mean to say that our liberty will be secured at the sword's
+point, for the sword plays but little part in modern affairs, but that
+we must secure it by making ourselves worthy of it, by exalting the
+intelligence and the dignity of the individual, by loving justice,
+right, and greatness, even to the extent of dying for them,--and when
+a people reaches that height God will provide a weapon, the idols
+will be shattered, the tyranny will crumble like a house of cards
+and liberty will shine out like the first dawn.
+
+"Our ills we owe to ourselves alone, so let us blame no one. If Spain
+should see that we were less complaisant with tyranny and more disposed
+to struggle and suffer for our rights, Spain would be the first to
+grant us liberty, because when the fruit of the womb reaches maturity
+woe unto the mother who would stifle it! So, while the Filipino people
+has not sufficient energy to proclaim, with head erect and bosom bared,
+its rights to social life, and to guarantee it with its sacrifices,
+with its own blood; while we see our countrymen in private life ashamed
+within themselves, hear the voice of conscience roar in rebellion and
+protest, yet in public life keep silence or even echo the words of
+him who abuses them in order to mock the abused; while we see them
+wrap themselves up in their egotism and with a forced smile praise
+the most iniquitous actions, begging with their eyes a portion of
+the booty--why grant them liberty? With Spain or without Spain they
+would always be the same, and perhaps worse! Why independence, if the
+slaves of today will be the tyrants of tomorrow? And that they will
+be such is not to be doubted, for he who submits to tyranny loves it.
+
+"Se�or Simoun, when our people is unprepared, when it enters the fight
+through fraud and force, without a clear understanding of what it is
+doing, the wisest attempts will fail, and better that they do fail,
+since why commit the wife to the husband if he does not sufficiently
+love her, if he is not ready to die for her?"
+
+Padre Florentino felt the sick man catch and press his hand, so he
+became silent, hoping that the other might speak, but he merely felt
+a stronger pressure of the hand, heard a sigh, and then profound
+silence reigned in the room. Only the sea, whose waves were rippled
+by the night breeze, as though awaking from the heat of the day,
+sent its hoarse roar, its eternal chant, as it rolled against the
+jagged rocks. The moon, now free from the sun's rivalry, peacefully
+commanded the sky, and the trees of the forest bent down toward one
+another, telling their ancient legends in mysterious murmurs borne
+on the wings of the wind.
+
+The sick man said nothing, so Padre Florentino, deeply thoughtful,
+murmured: "Where are the youth who will consecrate their golden hours,
+their illusions, and their enthusiasm to the welfare of their native
+land? Where are the youth who will generously pour out their blood to
+wash away so much shame, so much crime, so much abomination? Pure and
+spotless must the victim be that the sacrifice may be acceptable! Where
+are you, youth, who will embody in yourselves the vigor of life that
+has left our veins, the purity of ideas that has been contaminated
+in our brains, the fire of enthusiasm that has been quenched in our
+hearts? We await you, O youth! Come, for we await you!"
+
+Feeling his eyes moisten he withdrew his hand from that of the sick
+man, arose, and went to the window to gaze out upon the wide surface
+of the sea. He was drawn from his meditation by gentle raps at the
+door. It was the servant asking if he should bring a light.
+
+When the priest returned to the sick man and looked at him in the
+light of the lamp, motionless, his eyes closed, the hand that had
+pressed his lying open and extended along the edge of the bed,
+he thought for a moment that he was sleeping, but noticing that he
+was not breathing touched him gently, and then realized that he was
+dead. His body had already commenced to turn cold. The priest fell
+upon his knees and prayed.
+
+When he arose and contemplated the corpse, in whose features were
+depicted the deepest grief, the tragedy of a whole wasted life which
+he was carrying over there beyond death, the old man shuddered and
+murmured, "God have mercy on those who turned him from the straight
+path!"
+
+While the servants summoned by him fell upon their knees and prayed
+for the dead man, curious and bewildered as they gazed toward the
+bed, reciting requiem after requiem, Padre Florentino took from a
+cabinet the celebrated steel chest that contained Simoun's fabulous
+wealth. He hesitated for a moment, then resolutely descended the
+stairs and made his way to the cliff where Isagani was accustomed to
+sit and gaze into the depths of the sea.
+
+Padre Florentino looked down at his feet. There below he saw the dark
+billows of the Pacific beating into the hollows of the cliff, producing
+sonorous thunder, at the same time that, smitten by the moonbeams,
+the waves and foam glittered like sparks of fire, like handfuls of
+diamonds hurled into the air by some jinnee of the abyss. He gazed
+about him. He was alone. The solitary coast was lost in the distance
+amid the dim cloud that the moonbeams played through, until it mingled
+with the horizon. The forest murmured unintelligible sounds.
+
+Then the old man, with an effort of his herculean arms, hurled the
+chest into space, throwing it toward the sea. It whirled over and over
+several times and descended rapidly in a slight curve, reflecting the
+moonlight on its polished surface. The old man saw the drops of water
+fly and heard a loud splash as the abyss closed over and swallowed up
+the treasure. He waited for a few moments to see if the depths would
+restore anything, but the wave rolled on as mysteriously as before,
+without adding a fold to its rippling surface, as though into the
+immensity of the sea a pebble only had been dropped.
+
+"May Nature guard you in her deep abysses among the pearls and corals
+of her eternal seas," then said the priest, solemnly extending his
+hands. "When for some holy and sublime purpose man may need you, God
+will in his wisdom draw you from the bosom of the waves. Meanwhile,
+there you will not work woe, you will not distort justice, you will
+not foment avarice!"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+GLOSSARY
+
+
+_ab�:_ A Tagalog exclamation of wonder, surprise, etc., often used
+to introduce or emphasize a contradictory statement.
+
+_alcalde:_ Governor of a province or district, with both executive
+and judicial authority.
+
+_Ayuntamiento:_ A city corporation or council, and by extension
+the building in which it has its offices; specifically, in Manila,
+the capitol.
+
+_balete:_ The Philippine banyan, a tree sacred in Malay folk-lore.
+
+_banka:_ A dugout canoe with bamboo supports or outriggers.
+
+_batalan:_ The platform of split bamboo attached to a _nipa_ house.
+
+_batik�lin:_ A variety of easily-turned wood, used in carving.
+
+_bibinka:_ A sweetmeat made of sugar or molasses and rice-flour,
+commonly sold in the small shops.
+
+_buyera:_ A woman who prepares and sells the _buyo_.
+
+_buyo:_ The masticatory prepared by wrapping a piece of areca-nut
+with a little shell-lime in a betel-leaf--the _pan_ of British India.
+
+_cabesang:_ Title of a _cabeza de barangay;_ given by courtesy to
+his wife also.
+
+_cabeza de barangay:_ Headman and tax-collector for a group of about
+fifty families, for whose "tribute" he was personally responsible.
+
+_calesa:_ A two-wheeled chaise with folding top.
+
+_calle:_ Street (Spanish).
+
+_camisa:_ 1. A loose, collarless shirt of transparent material worn
+by men outside the trousers. 2. A thin, transparent waist with flowing
+sleeves, worn by women.
+
+_capitan:_ "Captain," a title used in addressing or referring to a
+gobernadorcillo, or a former occupant of that office.
+
+_carambas:_ A Spanish exclamation denoting surprise or displeasure.
+
+_carbineer:_ Internal-revenue guard.
+
+_carromata:_ A small two-wheeled vehicle with a fixed top.
+
+_casco:_ A flat-bottomed freight barge.
+
+_cayman:_ The Philippine crocodile.
+
+_cedula:_ Certificate of registration and receipt for poll-tax.
+
+_chongka:_ A child's game played with pebbles or cowry-shells.
+
+_cigarrera:_ A woman working in a cigar or cigarette factory.
+
+_Civil Guard:_ Internal quasi-military police force of Spanish officers
+and native soldiers.
+
+_cochero:_ Carriage driver, coachman.
+
+_cuarto:_ A copper coin, one hundred and sixty of which were equal
+in value to a silver peso.
+
+_filibuster:_ A native of the Philippines who was accused of advocating
+their separation from Spain.
+
+_filibusterism:_ See _filibuster_.
+
+_gobernadorcillo:_ "Petty governor," the principal municipal
+official--also, in Manila, the head of a commercial guild.
+
+_gumamela:_ The hibiscus, common as a garden shrub in the Philippines.
+
+_Indian:_ The Spanish designation for the Christianized Malay of the
+Philippines was _indio_ (Indian), a term used rather contemptuously,
+the name _Filipino_ being generally applied in a restricted sense to
+the children of Spaniards born in the Islands.
+
+_kalan:_ The small, portable, open, clay fireplace commonly used
+in cooking.
+
+_kalikut:_ A short section of bamboo for preparing the _buyo_;
+a primitive betel-box.
+
+_kamagon:_ A tree of the ebony family, from which fine cabinet-wood
+is obtained. Its fruit is the _mabolo_, or date-plum.
+
+_lanete:_ A variety of timber used in carving.
+
+_linintikan:_ A Tagalog exclamation of disgust or contempt--"thunder!"
+
+_Malaca�ang:_ The palace of the Captain-General: from the vernacular
+name of the place where it stands, "fishermen's resort."
+
+_Malecon:_ A drive along the bay shore of Manila, opposite the
+Walled City.
+
+_Mestizo:_ A person of mixed Filipino and Spanish blood; sometimes
+applied also to a person of mixed Filipino and Chinese blood.
+
+_nak�:_ A Tagalog exclamation of surprise, wonder, etc.
+
+_narra:_ The Philippine mahogany.
+
+_nipa:_ Swamp palm, with the imbricated leaves of which the roofs
+and sides of the common native houses are constructed.
+
+_novena:_ A devotion consisting of prayers recited for nine consecutive
+days, asking for some special favor; also, a booklet of these prayers.
+
+_panguingui:_ A complicated card-game, generally for small stakes,
+played with a monte deck.
+
+_panguinguera:_ A woman addicted to _panguingui_, this being chiefly
+a feminine diversion in the Philippines.
+
+_pansit:_ A soup made of Chinese vermicelli.
+
+_pansiter�a:_ A shop where _pansit_ is prepared and sold.
+
+_pa�uelo:_ A starched neckerchief folded stiffly over the shoulders,
+fastened in front and falling in a point behind: the most distinctive
+portion of the customary dress of Filipino women.
+
+_peso:_ A silver coin, either the Spanish peso or the Mexican dollar,
+about the size of an American dollar and of approximately half
+its value.
+
+_petate:_ Sleeping-mat woven from palm leaves.
+
+_pi�a:_ Fine cloth made from pineapple-leaf fibers.
+
+_Provincial:_ The head of a religious order in the Philippines.
+
+_pu�ales:_ "Daggers!"
+
+_querida:_ A paramour, mistress: from the Spanish "beloved."
+
+_real:_ One-eighth of a peso, twenty cuartos.
+
+_sala:_ The principal room in the more pretentious Philippine houses.
+
+_salakot:_ Wide hat of palm or bamboo, distinctively Filipino.
+
+_sampaguita:_ The Arabian jasmine: a small, white, very fragrant
+flower, extensively cultivated, and worn in chaplets and rosaries by
+women and girls--the typical Philippine flower.
+
+_sipa_: A game played with a hollow ball of plaited bamboo or rattan,
+by boys standing in a circle, who by kicking it with their heels
+endeavor to keep it from striking the ground.
+
+_soltada_: A bout between fighting-cocks.
+
+_'Susmariosep_: A common exclamation: contraction of the Spanish,
+_Jes�s, Mar�a, y Jos�_, the Holy Family.
+
+_tabi_: The cry used by carriage drivers to warn pedestrians.
+
+_tab�_: A utensil fashioned from half of a coconut shell.
+
+_taj�_: A thick beverage prepared from bean-meal and syrup.
+
+_tampipi_: A telescopic basket of woven palm, bamboo, or rattan.
+
+_Tandang_: A title of respect for an old man: from the Tagalog term
+for "old."
+
+_tapis_: A piece of dark cloth or lace, often richly worked or
+embroidered, worn at the waist somewhat in the fashion of an apron;
+a distinctive portion of the native women's attire, especially among
+the Tagalogs.
+
+_tatakut_: The Tagalog term for "fear."
+
+_teniente-mayor_: "Senior lieutenant," the senior member of the town
+council and substitute for the gobernadorcillo.
+
+_tertiary sister_: A member of a lay society affiliated with a regular
+monastic order.
+
+_tienda_: A shop or stall for the sale of merchandise.
+
+_tikbalang_: An evil spirit, capable of assuming various forms, but
+said to appear usually as a tall black man with disproportionately
+long legs: the "bogey man" of Tagalog children.
+
+_tulisan_: Outlaw, bandit. Under the old r�gime in the Philippines the
+_tulisanes_ were those who, on account of real or fancied grievances
+against the authorities, or from fear of punishment for crime,
+or from an instinctive desire to return to primitive simplicity,
+foreswore life in the towns "under the bell," and made their homes
+in the mountains or other remote places. Gathered in small bands with
+such arms as they could secure, they sustained themselves by highway
+robbery and the levying of black-mail from the country folk.
+
+
+
+
+NOTES
+
+
+[1] The Spanish designation for the Christianized Malay of the
+Philippines was _indio_ (Indian), a term used rather contemptuously,
+the name _filipino_ being generally applied in a restricted sense to
+the children of Spaniards born in the Islands.--Tr.
+
+[2] Now generally known as the Mariquina.--Tr.
+
+[3] This bridge, constructed in Lukban under the supervision of
+a Franciscan friar, was jocularly referred to as the _Puente de
+Capricho,_ being apparently an ignorant blunder in the right direction,
+since it was declared in an official report made by Spanish engineers
+in 1852 to conform to no known principle of scientific construction,
+and yet proved to be strong and durable.--Tr.
+
+[4] Don Custodio's gesture indicates money.--Tr.
+
+[5] Duck eggs, that are allowed to advance well into the duckling
+stage, then boiled and eaten. The se�ora is sneering at a custom
+among some of her own people.--Tr.
+
+[6] The Jesuit College in Manila, established in 1859.--Tr.
+
+[7] Natives of Spain; to distinguish them from the Filipinos, _i.e.,_
+descendants of Spaniards born in the Philippines. See Glossary:
+"Indian."--Tr.
+
+[8] It was a common saying among the old Filipinos that the Spaniards
+(white men) were fire (activity), while they themselves were water
+(passivity).--Tr.
+
+[9] The "liberal" demonstrations in Manila, and the mutiny in the
+Cavite Arsenal, resulting in the garroting of the three native
+priests to whom this work was dedicated: the first of a series of
+fatal mistakes, culminating in the execution of the author, that cost
+Spain the loyalty of the Filipinos.--Tr.
+
+[10] Archbishop of Manila from 1767 to 1787.--Tr.
+
+[11] "Between this island (Talim) and Halahala point extends a strait
+a mile wide and a league long, which the Indians call 'Kinabutasan,'
+a name that in their language means 'place that was cleft open';
+from which it is inferred that in other times the island was joined
+to the mainland and was separated from it by some severe earthquake,
+thus leaving this strait: of this there is an old tradition among
+the Indians."--Fray Martinez de Zu�iga's _Estadismo_ (1803).
+
+[12] The reference is to the novel _Noli Me Tangere_ (_The Social
+Cancer_), the author's first work, of which, the present is in a way
+a continuation.--Tr.
+
+[13] This legend is still current among the Tagalogs. It circulates
+in various forms, the commonest being that the king was so confined
+for defying the lightning; and it takes no great stretch of the
+imagination to fancy in this idea a reference to the firearms used
+by the Spanish conquerors. Quite recently (January 1909), when the
+nearly extinct volcano of Banahao shook itself and scattered a few
+tons of mud over the surrounding landscape, the people thereabout
+recalled this old legend, saying that it was their King Bernardo
+making another effort to get that right foot loose.--Tr.
+
+[14] The reference is to _Noli Me Tangere,_ in which Sinang appears.
+
+[15] The Dominican school of secondary instruction in Manila.--Tr.
+
+[16] "The studies of secondary instruction given in Santo Tomas,
+in the college of San Juan de Letran, and of San Jos�, and in the
+private schools, had the defects inherent in the plan of instruction
+which the friars developed in the Philippines. It suited their plans
+that scientific and literary knowledge should not become general nor
+very extensive, for which reason they took but little interest in the
+study of those subjects or in the quality of the instruction. Their
+educational establishments were places of luxury for the children of
+wealthy and well-to-do families rather than establishments in which
+to perfect and develop the minds of the Filipino youth. It is true
+they were careful to give them a religious education, tending to make
+them respect the omnipotent power (_sic_) of the monastic corporations.
+
+"The intellectual powers were made dormant by devoting a greater
+part of the time to the study of Latin, to which they attached an
+extraordinary importance, for the purpose of discouraging pupils
+from studying the exact and experimental sciences and from gaining
+a knowledge of true literary studies.
+
+"The philosophic system explained was naturally the scholastic one,
+with an exceedingly refined and subtile logic, and with deficient
+ideas upon physics. By the study of Latin, and their philosophic
+systems, they converted their pupils into automatic machines rather
+than into practical men prepared to battle with life."--_Census of
+the Philippine Islands (Washington, 1905), Volume III, pp. 601, 602._
+
+[17] The nature of this booklet, in Tagalog, is made clear in several
+passages. It was issued by the Franciscans, but proved too outspoken
+for even Latin refinement, and was suppressed by the Order itself.--Tr.
+
+[18] The rectory or parish house.
+
+[19] Friends of the author, who suffered in Weyler's expedition,
+mentioned below.--Tr.
+
+[20] The Dominican corporation, at whose instigation Captain-General
+Valeriano Weyler sent a battery of artillery to Kalamba to destroy
+the property of tenants who were contesting in the courts the
+friars' titles to land there. The author's family were the largest
+sufferers.--Tr.
+
+[21] A relative of the author, whose body was dragged from the tomb and
+thrown to the dogs, on the pretext that he had died without receiving
+final absolution.--Tr.
+
+[22] Under the Spanish r�gime the government paid no attention to
+education, the schools (!) being under the control of the religious
+orders and the friar-curates of the towns.--Tr.
+
+[23] The cockpits are farmed out annually by the local governments,
+the terms "contract," and "contractor," having now been softened into
+"license" and "licensee."--Tr.
+
+[24] The "Municipal School for Girls" was founded by the municipality
+of Manila in 1864.... The institution was in charge of the Sisters
+of Charity.--_Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. III, p. 615_.
+
+[25] Now known as Plaza Espa�a.--Tr.
+
+[26] Patroness of the Dominican Order. She was formally and sumptuously
+recrowned a queen of the skies in 1907.--Tr.
+
+[27] A burlesque on an association of students known as the _Milicia
+Angelica_, organized by the Dominicans to strengthen their hold on
+the people. The name used is significant, "carbineers" being the
+local revenue officers, notorious in their later days for graft
+and abuse.--Tr.
+
+[28] "Tinam�an �g lintik!"--a Tagalog exclamation of anger,
+disappointment, or dismay, regarded as a very strong expression,
+equivalent to profanity. Literally, "May the lightning strike
+you!"--Tr.
+
+[29] "To lie about the stars is a safe kind of lying."--Tr.
+
+[30] Throughout this chapter the professor uses the familiar _tu_
+in addressing the students, thus giving his remarks a contemptuous
+tone.--Tr.
+
+[31] The professor speaks these words in vulgar dialect.
+
+[32] To confuse the letters _p_ and _f_ in speaking Spanish was a
+common error among uneducated Filipinos.--Tr.
+
+[33] _No cristianos_, not Christians, _i.e_., savages.--Tr.
+
+[34] The patron saint of Spain, St. James.--Tr.
+
+[35] Houses of bamboo and nipa, such as form the homes of the masses
+of the natives.--Tr.
+
+[36] "In this paragraph Rizal alludes to an incident that had
+very serious results. There was annually celebrated in Binondo a
+certain religious festival, principally at the expense of the Chinese
+mestizos. The latter finally petitioned that their gobernadorcillo be
+given the presidency of it, and this was granted, thanks to the fact
+that the parish priest (the Dominican, Fray Jos� Hevia Campomanes)
+held to the opinion that the presidency belonged to those who paid
+the most. The Tagalogs protested, alleging their better right to it,
+as the genuine sons of the country, not to mention the historical
+precedent, but the friar, who was looking after his own interests,
+did not yield. General Terrero (Governor, 1885-1888), at the advice
+of his liberal councilors, finally had the parish priest removed and
+for the time being decided the affair in favor of the Tagalogs. The
+matter reached the Colonial Office (_Ministerio de Ultramar_) and
+the Minister was not even content merely to settle it in the way the
+friars desired, but made amends to Padre Hevia by appointing him a
+bishop."--_W. E. Retana, who was a journalist in Manila at the time,
+in a note to this chapter._
+
+Childish and ridiculous as this may appear now, it was far from being
+so at the time, especially in view of the supreme contempt with which
+the pugnacious Tagalog looks down upon the meek and complaisant Chinese
+and the mortal antipathy that exists between the two races.--Tr.
+
+[37] It is regrettable that Quiroga's picturesque butchery of Spanish
+and Tagalog--the dialect of the Manila Chinese--cannot be reproduced
+here. Only the thought can be given. There is the same difficulty
+with _r's, d's_, and _l's_ that the Chinese show in English.--Tr.
+
+[38] Up to the outbreak of the insurrection in 1896, the only genuinely
+Spanish troops in the islands were a few hundred artillerymen, the
+rest being natives, with Spanish officers.--Tr.
+
+[39] Abaka is the fiber obtained from the leaves of the _Musa textilis_
+and is known commercially as Manila hemp. As it is exclusively a
+product of the Philippines, it may be taken here to symbolize the
+country.--Tr.
+
+[40] Yet Ben-Zayb was not very much mistaken. The three legs of the
+table have grooves in them in which slide the mirrors hidden below
+the platform and covered by the squares of the carpet. By placing
+the box upon the table a spring is pressed and the mirrors rise
+gently. The cloth is then removed, with care to raise it instead of
+letting it slide off, and then there is the ordinary table of the
+talking heads. The table is connected with the bottom of the box. The
+exhibition ended, the prestidigitator again covers the table, presses
+another spring, and the mirrors descend.--_Author's note._
+
+[41] The Malay method of kissing is quite different from the
+Occidental. The mouth is placed close to the object and a deep breath
+taken, often without actually touching the object, being more of a
+sniff than a kiss.--Tr.
+
+[42] Now Calle Tetuan, Santa Cruz. The other names are still in
+use.--Tr.
+
+[43] The _Sociedad Econ�mica de Amigos del Pa�s_ for the encouragement
+of agricultural and industrial development, was established by Basco
+de Vargas in 1780.--Tr.
+
+[44] Funds managed by the government for making loans and supporting
+charitable enterprises.--Tr.
+
+[45] The names are fictitious burlesques.--Tr.
+
+[46] "Boiled Shrimp"--Tr.
+
+[47] "Uncle Frank."--Tr.
+
+[48] Messageries Maritimes, a French line of steamers in the Oriental
+trade.--Tr.
+
+[49] Referring to the expeditions--_Misi�n Espa�ola Cat�lica_--to the
+Caroline and Pelew Islands from 1886 to 1895, headed by the Capuchin
+Fathers, which brought misery and disaster upon the natives of those
+islands, unprofitable losses and sufferings to the Filipino soldiers
+engaged in them, discredit to Spain, and decorations of merit to a
+number of Spanish officers.--Tr.
+
+[50] Over the possession of the Caroline and Pelew Islands. The
+expeditions referred to in the previous note were largely inspired
+by German activity with regard to those islands, which had always
+been claimed by Spain, who sold her claim to them to Germany after
+the loss of the Philippines.--Tr.
+
+[51] "Where the wind wrinkles the silent waves, that rapidly break,
+    of their own movement, with a gentle murmur on the shore."--Tr.
+
+[52] "Where rapid and winged engines will rush in flight."--Tr.
+
+[53] There is something almost uncanny about the general accuracy of
+the prophecy in these lines, the economic part of which is now so
+well on the way to realization, although the writer of them would
+doubtless have been a very much surprised individual had he also
+foreseen how it would come about. But one of his own expressions was
+"fire and steel to the cancer," and it surely got them.
+
+On the very day that this passage was translated and this note written,
+the first commercial liner was tied up at the new docks, which have
+destroyed the Malecon but raised Manila to the front rank of Oriental
+seaports, and the final revision is made at Baguio, Mountain Province,
+amid the "cooler temperatures on the slopes of the mountains." As for
+the political portion, it is difficult even now to contemplate calmly
+the blundering fatuity of that bigoted medieval brand of "patriotism"
+which led the decrepit Philippine government to play the Ancient
+Mariner and shoot the Albatross that brought this message.--Tr.
+
+[54] These establishments are still a notable feature of native
+life in Manila. Whether the author adopted a title already common or
+popularized one of his own invention, the fact is that they are now
+invariably known by the name used here. The use of _macanista_ was due
+to the presence in Manila of a large number of Chinese from Macao.--Tr.
+
+[55] Originally, Plaza San Gabriel, from the Dominican mission for the
+Chinese established there; later, as it became a commercial center,
+Plaza Vivac; and now known as Plaza Cervantes, being the financial
+center of Manila.--Tr.
+
+[56] "The manager of this restaurant warns the public to leave
+absolutely nothing on any table or chair."--Tr.
+
+[57] "We do not believe in the verisimilitude of this dialogue,
+fabricated by the author in order to refute the arguments of the
+friars, whose pride was so great that it would not permit any
+Isagani to tell them these truths face to face. The _invention_ of
+Padre Fernandez as a Dominican professor is a stroke of generosity
+on Rizal's part, in conceding that there could have existed _any_
+friar capable of talking frankly with an _Indian_."--_W. E. Retana,
+in note to this chapter in the edition published by him at Barcelona
+in 1908_. Retana ought to know of what he is writing, for he was in
+the employ of the friars for several years and later in Spain wrote
+extensively for the journal supported by them to defend their position
+in the Philippines. He has also been charged with having strongly urged
+Rizal's execution in 1896. Since 1898, however, he has doubled about,
+or, perhaps more aptly, performed a journalistic somersault--having
+written a diffuse biography and other works dealing with Rizal. He
+is strong in unassorted facts, but his comments, when not inane and
+wearisome, approach a maudlin wail over "spilt milk," so the above
+is given at its face value only.--Tr.
+
+[58] Quite suggestive of, and perhaps inspired by, the author's own
+experience.--Tr.
+
+[59] The Walled City, the original Manila, is still known to the
+Spaniards and older natives exclusively as such, the other districts
+being referred to by their distinctive names.--Tr.
+
+[60] Nearly all the dialogue in this chapter is in the mongrel
+Spanish-Tagalog "market language," which cannot be reproduced in
+English.--Tr.
+
+[61] Doubtless a reference to the author's first work, _Noli Me
+Tangere_, which was tabooed by the authorities.--Tr.
+
+[62] Such inanities as these are still a feature of Manila
+journalism.--Tr.
+
+[63] "Whether there would be a _talisain_ cock, armed with a sharp
+gaff, whether the blessed Peter's fighting-cock would be a _bulik_--"
+
+_Talisain_ and _bulik_ are distinguishing terms in the vernacular for
+fighting-cocks, _tari_ and _sasabungin_ the Tagalog terms for "gaff"
+and "game-cock," respectively.
+
+The Tagalog terminology of the cockpit and monkish Latin certainly
+make a fearful and wonderful mixture--nor did the author have to
+resort to his imagination to get samples of it.--Tr.
+
+[64] This is Quiroga's pronunciation of _Christo_.--Tr.
+
+[65] The native priests Burgos, Gomez, and Zamora, charged with
+complicity in the uprising of 1872, and executed.--Tr.
+
+[66] This versicle, found in the booklets of prayer, is common on the
+scapularies, which, during the late insurrection, were easily converted
+into the _anting-anting_, or amulets, worn by the fanatics.--Tr.
+
+[67] This practise--secretly compelling suspects to sign a request
+to be transferred to some other island--was by no means a figment of
+the author's imagination, but was extensively practised to anticipate
+any legal difficulties that might arise.--Tr.
+
+[68] "Hawk-Eye."--Tr.
+
+[69] Ultima Raz�n de Reyes: the last argument of
+kings--force. (Expression attributed to Calderon de la Barca, the
+great Spanish dramatist.)--Tr.
+
+[70] Curiously enough, and by what must have been more than a mere
+coincidence, this route through Santa Mesa from San Juan del Monte was
+the one taken by an armed party in their attempt to enter the city at
+the outbreak of the Katipunan rebellion on the morning of August 30,
+1896. (Foreman's _The Philippine Islands_, Chap. XXVI.)
+
+It was also on the bridge connecting these two places that the first
+shot in the insurrection against American sovereignty was fired on
+the night of February 4, 1899.--Tr.
+
+[71] Spanish etiquette requires a host to welcome his guest with the
+conventional phrase: "The house belongs to you."--Tr.
+
+[72] The handwriting on the wall at Belshazzar's feast, foretelling
+the destruction of Babylon. Daniel, v, 25-28.--Tr.
+
+[73] A town in Ciudad Real province, Spain.--Tr.
+
+[74] The italicized words are in English in the original.--Tr.
+
+[75] A Spanish hero, whose chief exploit was the capture of Gibraltar
+from the Moors in 1308.--Tr.
+
+[76] Emilio Castelar (1832-1899), generally regarded as the greatest
+of Spanish orators.--Tr.
+
+[77] In the original the message reads: "Espa�ol escondido casa Padre
+Florentino cojera remitir� vivo muerto." Don Tiburcio understands
+_cojera_ as referring to himself; there is a play upon the Spanish
+words _cojera_, lameness, and _coger�_, a form of the verb _coger_,
+to seize or capture--_j_ and _g_ in these two words having the same
+sound, that of the English _h_.--Tr.
+
+
+
+
+
+
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Reign of Greed, by Jose Rizal
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Reign of Greed
+       Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo'
+
+Author: Jose Rizal
+
+Translator: Charles Derbyshire
+
+Release Date: October 10, 2005 [EBook #10676]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REIGN OF GREED ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jeroen Hellingman and the distributed proofreaders team
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[iii]
+</span><h1 class="docTitle">The Reign of Greed</h1>
+<h2 class="byline">A Complete English Version of El Filibusterismo from the Spanish of<br>
+<span class="docAuthor">Jos&eacute; Rizal</span>
+<br>
+By
+<br>
+Charles Derbyshire
+</h2>
+<h2 class="docImprint">Manila<br>
+Philippine Education Company<br>
+1912
+</h2><span class="pageno">
+[iv]
+</span><p class="div1"></p>
+<p class="aligncenter">Copyright, 1912, by Philippine Education Company.<br>
+Entered at Stationers&#8217; Hall.<br>
+Registrado en las Islas Filipinas.<br>
+<i>All rights reserved</i>.
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[v]
+</span></p>
+<p class="div1"></p>
+<h1>Translator&#8217;s Introduction</h1>
+<p>El Filibusterismo, the second of Jos&eacute; Rizal&#8217;s novels of Philippine life, is a story of the last days of the Spanish r&eacute;gime
+in the Philippines. Under the name of <i>The Reign of Greed</i> it is for the first time translated into English. Written some four or five years after <i>Noli Me Tangere</i>, the book represents Rizal&#8217;s more mature judgment on political and social conditions in the islands, and in its graver and
+less hopeful tone reflects the disappointments and discouragements which he had encountered in his efforts to lead the way
+to reform. Rizal&#8217;s dedication to the first edition is of special interest, as the writing of it was one of the grounds of
+accusation against him when he was condemned to death in 1896. It reads:
+
+
+</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>&#8220;To the memory of the priests, Don Mariano Gomez (85 years old), Don Jos&eacute; Burgos (30 years old), and Don Jacinto Zamora (35
+years old). Executed in Bagumbayan Field on the 28th of February, 1872.
+
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The Church, by refusing to degrade you, has placed in doubt the crime that has been imputed to you; the Government, by surrounding
+your trials with mystery and shadows, causes the belief that there was some error, committed in fatal moments; and all the
+Philippines, by worshiping your memory and calling you martyrs, in no <span class="pageno">
+[vi]
+</span>sense recognizes your culpability. In so far, therefore, as your complicity in the Cavite mutiny is not clearly proved, as
+you may or may not have been patriots, and as you may or may not have cherished sentiments for justice and for liberty, I
+have the right to dedicate my work to you as victims of the evil which I undertake to combat. And while we await expectantly
+upon Spain some day to restore your good name and cease to be answerable for your death, let these pages serve as a tardy
+wreath of dried leaves over your unknown tombs, and let it be understood that every one who without clear proofs attacks your
+memory stains his hands in your blood!
+
+
+</p>
+<p>J. Rizal.&#8221;</p>
+</div><p>
+
+
+</p>
+<p>A brief recapitulation of the story in <i>Noli Me Tangere</i> (The Social Cancer) is essential to an understanding of such plot as there is in the present work, which the author called
+a &#8220;continuation&#8221; of the first story.
+
+</p>
+<p>Juan Crisostomo Ibarra is a young Filipino, who, after studying for seven years in Europe, returns to his native land to find
+that his father, a wealthy landowner, has died in prison as the result of a quarrel with the parish curate, a Franciscan friar
+named Padre Damaso. Ibarra is engaged to a beautiful and accomplished girl, Maria Clara, the supposed daughter and only child
+of the rich Don Santiago de los Santos, commonly known as &#8220;Capitan Tiago,&#8221; a typical Filipino cacique, the predominant character
+fostered by the friar r&eacute;gime.
+<span class="pageno">
+[vii]
+</span></p>
+<p>Ibarra resolves to forego all quarrels and to work for the betterment of his people. To show his good intentions, he seeks
+to establish, at his own expense, a public school in his native town. He meets with ostensible support from all, especially
+Padre Damaso&#8217;s successor, a young and gloomy Franciscan named Padre Salvi, for whom Maria Clara confesses to an instinctive
+dread.
+
+</p>
+<p>At the laying of the corner-stone for the new schoolhouse a suspicious accident, apparently aimed at Ibarra&#8217;s life, occurs,
+but the festivities proceed until the dinner, where Ibarra is grossly and wantonly insulted over the memory of his father
+by Fray Damaso. The young man loses control of himself and is about to kill the friar, who is saved by the intervention of
+Maria Clara.
+
+</p>
+<p>Ibarra is excommunicated, and Capitan Tiago, through his fear of the friars, is forced to break the engagement and agree to
+the marriage of Maria Clara with a young and inoffensive Spaniard provided by Padre Damaso. Obedient to her reputed father&#8217;s
+command and influenced by her mysterious dread of Padre Salvi, Maria Clara consents to this arrangement, but becomes seriously
+ill, only to be saved by medicines sent secretly by Ibarra and clandestinely administered by a girl friend.
+
+</p>
+<p>Ibarra succeeds in having the excommunication removed, but before he can explain matters an uprising against the Civil Guard
+is secretly brought about through agents of Padre Salvi, and the leadership is ascribed to Ibarra to ruin him. He is warned
+by a mysterious friend, an outlaw called Elias, whose life he had accidentally saved; but desiring first to see Maria Clara,
+he refuses to make his escape, and when the outbreak <span class="pageno">
+[viii]
+</span>occurs he is arrested as the instigator of it and thrown into prison in Manila.
+
+</p>
+<p>On the evening when Capitan Tiago gives a ball in his Manila house to celebrate his supposed daughter&#8217;s engagement, Ibarra
+makes his escape from prison and succeeds in seeing Maria Clara alone. He begins to reproach her because it is a letter written
+to her before he went to Europe which forms the basis of the charge against him, but she clears herself of treachery to him.
+The letter had been secured from her by false representations and in exchange for two others written by her mother just before
+her birth, which prove that Padre Damaso is her real father. These letters had been accidentally discovered in the convento
+by Padre Salvi, who made use of them to intimidate the girl and get possession of Ibarra&#8217;s letter, from which he forged others
+to incriminate the young man. She tells him that she will marry the young Spaniard, sacrificing herself thus to save her mother&#8217;s
+name and Capitan Tiago&#8217;s honor and to prevent a public scandal, but that she will always remain true to him.
+
+</p>
+<p>Ibarra&#8217;s escape had been effected by Elias, who conveys him in a banka up the Pasig to the Lake, where they are so closely
+beset by the Civil Guard that Elias leaps into the water and draws the pursuers away from the boat, in which Ibarra lies concealed.
+
+</p>
+<p>On Christmas Eve, at the tomb of the Ibarras in a gloomy wood, Elias appears, wounded and dying, to find there a boy named
+Basilio beside the corpse of his mother, a poor woman who had been driven to insanity by her husband&#8217;s neglect and abuses
+on the part of the Civil Guard, her younger son having <span class="pageno">
+[ix]
+</span>disappeared some time before in the convento, where he was a sacristan. Basilio, who is ignorant of Elias&#8217;s identity, helps
+him to build a funeral pyre, on which his corpse and the madwoman&#8217;s are to be burned.
+
+</p>
+<p>Upon learning of the reported death of Ibarra in the chase on the Lake, Maria Clara becomes disconsolate and begs her supposed
+godfather, Fray Damaso, to put her in a nunnery. Unconscious of her knowledge of their true relationship, the friar breaks
+down and confesses that all the trouble he has stirred up with the Ibarras has been to prevent her from marrying a native,
+which would condemn her and her children to the oppressed and enslaved class. He finally yields to her entreaties and she
+enters the nunnery of St. Clara, to which Padre Salvi is soon assigned in a ministerial capacity.
+<span class="pageno">
+[x]
+</span></p>
+<p class="div1"></p>
+<p class="beforeline"></p>
+<p class="beforeline"></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">O masters, lords, and rulers in all lands,
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Is this the handiwork you give to God,
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">How will you ever straighten up this shape-;
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Touch it again with immortality;
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Give back the upward looking and the light;
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Make right the immemorial infamies,
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?
+</span></p>
+<p class="afterline"></p>
+<p class="beforeline"></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">O masters, lords, and rulers in all lands,
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">How will the future reckon with this man?
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">How answer his brute question in that hour
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">How will it be with kingdoms and with kings&#8212;
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">With those who shaped him to the thing he is&#8212;
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">When this dumb terror shall reply to God,
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">After the silence of the centuries?
+</span></p>
+<p class="afterline"></p>
+<p class="afterline"></p>
+<p>Edwin Markham
+<span class="pageno">
+[xi]
+</span></p>
+<p class="div1"></p>
+<h1>Contents</h1>
+<p></p>
+<table width="100%">
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">I.			</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e528">On the Upper Deck</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">II.			</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e768">On the Lower Deck</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">III.			</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e959">Legends</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">IV.			</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e1070">Cabesang Tales</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">V.			</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e1236">A Cochero&#8217;s Christmas Eve</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">VI.			</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e1339">Basilio</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">VII.			</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e1410">Simoun</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">VIII.		</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e1532">Merry Christmas</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">IX.			</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e1578">Pilates</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">X.			</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e1644">Wealth and Want</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XI.			</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e1847">Los Ba&ntilde;os</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XII.			</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e2190">Placido Penitente</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XIII.		</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e2420">The Class in Physics</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XIV.			</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e2773">In the House of the Students</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XV.			</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e3014">Se&ntilde;or Pasta</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XVI.			</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e3140">The Tribulations of a Chinese</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XVII.		</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e3367">The Quiapo Pair</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XVIII.		</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e3468">Legerdemain</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XIX.			</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e3634">The Fuse</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XX.			</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e3829">The Arbiter</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XXI.			</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e3987">Manila Types</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XXII.		</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e4213">The Performance</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XXIII.		</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e4560">A Corpse</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XXIV.		</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e4675">Dreams</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XXV.			</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e4832">Smiles and Tears</a>
+<span class="pageno">
+[xii]
+</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XXVI. </td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e5066">Pasquinades</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XXVII.		</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e5220">The Friar and the Filipino</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XXVIII.		</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e5431">Tatakut</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XXIX.		</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e5674">Exit Capitan Tiago</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XXX.			</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e5776">Juli</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XXXI.		</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e5956">The High Official</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XXXII.		</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e6051">Effect of the Pasquinades</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XXXIII.		</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e6092">La Ultima Raz&oacute;n</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XXXIV.		</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e6182">The Wedding</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XXXV.		</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e6219">The Fiesta</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XXXVI.		</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e6394">Ben-Zayb&#8217;s Afflictions</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XXXVII.		</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e6490">The Mystery</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XXXVIII.		</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e6629">Fatality</a>
+
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr valign="top">
+<td valign="top">XXXIX.		</td>
+<td valign="top"><a href="#d0e6722">Conclusion</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table><p>
+
+</p><span class="pageno">
+[1]
+</span><p class="div1"><a id="d0e528"></a></p>
+<h1>On the Upper Deck</h1>
+<p></p>
+<div class="blockquote">Sic itur ad astra.</div><p>
+
+
+</p>
+<p>One morning in December the steamer <i>Tabo</i> was laboriously ascending the tortuous course of the Pasig, carrying a large crowd of passengers toward the province of La
+Laguna. She was a heavily built steamer, almost round, like the <i>tab&uacute;</i> from which she derived her name, quite dirty in spite of her pretensions to whiteness, majestic and grave from her leisurely
+motion. Altogether, she was held in great affection in that region, perhaps from her Tagalog name, or from the fact that she
+bore the characteristic impress of things in the country, representing something like a triumph over progress, a steamer that
+was not a steamer at all, an organism, stolid, imperfect yet unimpeachable, which, when it wished to pose as being rankly
+progressive, proudly contented itself with putting on a fresh coat of paint. Indeed, the happy steamer was genuinely Filipino!
+If a person were only reasonably considerate, she might even have been taken for the Ship of State, constructed, as she had
+been, under the inspection of <i>Reverendos</i> and <i>Ilustr&iacute;simos</i>....
+
+</p>
+<p>Bathed in the sunlight of a morning that made the waters of the river sparkle and the breezes rustle in the bending bamboo
+on its banks, there she goes with her white silhouette throwing out great clouds of smoke&#8212;the Ship of State, so the joke runs,
+also has the vice of smoking! The whistle shrieks at every moment, hoarse and commanding like a tyrant who would rule by shouting,
+so that no one on <span class="pageno">
+[2]
+</span>board can hear his own thoughts. She menaces everything she meets: now she looks as though she would grind to bits the <i>salambaw</i>, insecure fishing apparatus which in their movements resemble skeletons of giants saluting an antediluvian tortoise; now
+she speeds straight toward the clumps of bamboo or against the amphibian structures, <i>karihan</i>, or wayside lunch-stands, which, amid <i>gumamelas</i> and other flowers, look like indecisive bathers who with their feet already in the water cannot bring themselves to make
+the final plunge; at times, following a sort of channel marked out in the river by tree-trunks, she moves along with a satisfied
+air, except when a sudden shock disturbs the passengers and throws them off their balance, all the result of a collision with
+a sand-bar which no one dreamed was there.
+
+</p>
+<p>Moreover, if the comparison with the Ship of State is not yet complete, note the arrangement of the passengers. On the lower
+deck appear brown faces and black heads, types of Indians,<a id="d0e564src" href="#d0e564" class="noteref">1</a> Chinese, and mestizos, wedged in between bales of merchandise and boxes, while there on the upper deck, beneath an awning
+that protects them from the sun, are seated in comfortable chairs a few passengers dressed in the fashion of Europeans, friars,
+and government clerks, each with his <i>puro</i> cigar, and gazing at the landscape apparently without heeding the efforts of the captain and the sailors to overcome the
+obstacles in the river.
+
+</p>
+<p>The captain was a man of kindly aspect, well along in years, an old sailor who in his youth had plunged into far vaster seas,
+but who now in his age had to exercise much greater attention, care, and vigilance to avoid dangers of a trivial character.
+And they were the same for each day: the same sand-bars, the same hulk of unwieldy steamer wedged into the same curves, like
+a corpulent dame <span class="pageno">
+[3]
+</span>in a jammed throng. So, at each moment, the good man had to stop, to back up, to go forward at half speed, sending&#8212;now to
+port, now to starboard&#8212;the five sailors equipped with long bamboo poles to give force to the turn the rudder had suggested.
+He was like a veteran who, after leading men through hazardous campaigns, had in his age become the tutor of a capricious,
+disobedient, and lazy boy.
+
+</p>
+<p>Do&ntilde;a Victorina, the only lady seated in the European group, could say whether the <i>Tabo</i> was not lazy, disobedient, and capricious&#8212;Do&ntilde;a Victorina, who, nervous as ever, was hurling invectives against the cascos,
+bankas, rafts of coconuts, the Indians paddling about, and even the washerwomen and bathers, who fretted her with their mirth
+and chatter. Yes, the <i>Tabo</i> would move along very well if there were no Indians in the river, no Indians in the country, yes, if there were not a single
+Indian in the world&#8212;regardless of the fact that the helmsmen were Indians, the sailors Indians, Indians the engineers, Indians
+ninety-nine per cent, of the passengers, and she herself also an Indian if the rouge were scratched off and her pretentious
+gown removed. That morning Do&ntilde;a Victorina was more irritated than usual because the members of the group took very little
+notice of her, reason for which was not lacking; for just consider&#8212;there could be found three friars, convinced that the world
+would move backwards the very day they should take a single step to the right; an indefatigable Don Custodio who was sleeping
+peacefully, satisfied with his projects; a prolific writer like Ben-Zayb (anagram of Iba&ntilde;ez), who believed that the people
+of Manila thought because he, Ben-Zayb, was a thinker; a canon like Padre Irene, who added luster to the clergy with his rubicund
+face, carefully shaven, from which towered a beautiful Jewish nose, and his silken cassock of neat cut and small buttons;
+and a wealthy jeweler like Simoun, who was reputed to be the adviser and inspirer of all the acts of his Excellency, the Captain-General&#8212;<span class="pageno">
+[4]
+</span>just consider the presence there of these pillars <i>sine quibus non</i> of the country, seated there in agreeable discourse, showing little sympathy for a renegade Filipina who dyed her hair red!
+Now wasn&#8217;t this enough to exhaust the patience of a female Job&#8212;a sobriquet Do&ntilde;a Victorina always applied to herself when put
+out with any one!
+
+</p>
+<p>The ill-humor of the se&ntilde;ora increased every time the captain shouted &#8220;Port,&#8221; &#8220;Starboard&#8221; to the sailors, who then hastily
+seized their poles and thrust them against the banks, thus with the strength of their legs and shoulders preventing the steamer
+from shoving its hull ashore at that particular point. Seen under these circumstances the Ship of State might be said to have
+been converted from a tortoise into a crab every time any danger threatened.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But, captain, why don&#8217;t your stupid steersmen go in that direction?&#8221; asked the lady with great indignation.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Because it&#8217;s very shallow in the other, se&ntilde;ora,&#8221; answered the captain, deliberately, slowly winking one eye, a little habit
+which he had cultivated as if to say to his words on their way out, &#8220;Slowly, slowly!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Half speed! Botheration, half speed!&#8221; protested Do&ntilde;a Victorina disdainfully. &#8220;Why not full?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Because we should then be traveling over those ricefields, se&ntilde;ora,&#8221; replied the imperturbable captain, pursing his lips to
+indicate the cultivated fields and indulging in two circumspect winks.
+
+</p>
+<p>This Do&ntilde;a Victorina was well known in the country for her caprices and extravagances. She was often seen in society, where
+she was tolerated whenever she appeared in the company of her niece, Paulita Gomez, a very beautiful and wealthy orphan, to
+whom she was a kind of guardian. At a rather advanced age she had married a poor wretch named Don Tiburcio de Espada&ntilde;a, and
+at the time we now see her, carried upon herself fifteen years of wedded life, false frizzes, and a half-European costume&#8212;for
+her whole ambition had been to Europeanize herself, with the result that from the ill-omened day of her wedding she had gradually,
+<span class="pageno">
+[5]
+</span>thanks to her criminal attempts, succeeded in so transforming herself that at the present time Quatrefages and Virchow together
+could not have told where to classify her among the known races.
+
+</p>
+<p>Her husband, who had borne all her impositions with the resignation of a fakir through so many years of married life, at last
+on one luckless day had had his bad half-hour and administered to her a superb whack with his crutch. The surprise of Madam
+Job at such an inconsistency of character made her insensible to the immediate effects, and only after she had recovered from
+her astonishment and her husband had fled did she take notice of the pain, then remaining in bed for several days, to the
+great delight of Paulita, who was very fond of joking and laughing at her aunt. As for her husband, horrified at the impiety
+of what appeared to him to be a terrific parricide, he took to flight, pursued by the matrimonial furies (two curs and a parrot),
+with all the speed his lameness permitted, climbed into the first carriage he encountered, jumped into the first banka he
+saw on the river, and, a Philippine Ulysses, began to wander from town to town, from province to province, from island to
+island, pursued and persecuted by his bespectacled Calypso, who bored every one that had the misfortune to travel in her company.
+She had received a report of his being in the province of La Laguna, concealed in one of the towns, so thither she was bound
+to seduce him back with her dyed frizzes.
+
+</p>
+<p>Her fellow travelers had taken measures of defense by keeping up among themselves a lively conversation on any topic whatsoever.
+At that moment the windings and turnings of the river led them to talk about straightening the channel and, as a matter of
+course, about the port works. Ben-Zayb, the journalist with the countenance of a friar, was disputing with a young friar who
+in turn had the countenance of an artilleryman. Both were shouting, gesticulating, waving their arms, spreading out their
+hands, <span class="pageno">
+[6]
+</span>stamping their feet, talking of levels, fish-corrals, the San Mateo River,<a id="d0e613src" href="#d0e613" class="noteref">2</a> of cascos, of Indians, and so on, to the great satisfaction of their listeners and the undisguised disgust of an elderly
+Franciscan, remarkably thin and withered, and a handsome Dominican about whose lips flitted constantly a scornful smile.
+
+</p>
+<p>The thin Franciscan, understanding the Dominican&#8217;s smile, decided to intervene and stop the argument. He was undoubtedly respected,
+for with a wave of his hand he cut short the speech of both at the moment when the friar-artilleryman was talking about experience
+and the journalist-friar about scientists.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Scientists, Ben-Zayb&#8212;do you know what they are?&#8221; asked the Franciscan in a hollow voice, scarcely stirring in his seat and
+making only a faint gesture with his skinny hand. &#8220;Here you have in the province a bridge, constructed by a brother of ours,
+which was not completed because the scientists, relying on their theories, condemned it as weak and scarcely safe&#8212;yet look,
+it is the bridge that has withstood all the floods and earthquakes!&#8221;<a id="d0e620src" href="#d0e620" class="noteref">3</a>
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s it, <i>pu&ntilde;ales,</i> that very thing, that was exactly what I was going to say!&#8221; exclaimed the friar-artilleryman, thumping his fists down on
+the arms of his bamboo chair. &#8220;That&#8217;s it, that bridge and the scientists! That was just what I was going to mention, Padre
+Salvi&#8212;<i>pu&ntilde;ales!</i>&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Ben-Zayb remained silent, half smiling, either out of respect or because he really did not know what to reply, and yet his
+was the only thinking head in the Philippines! Padre Irene nodded his approval as he rubbed his long nose.
+
+</p>
+<p>Padre Salvi, the thin and withered cleric, appeared to be satisfied with such submissiveness and went on in the <span class="pageno">
+[7]
+</span>midst of the silence: &#8220;But this does not mean that you may not be as near right as Padre Camorra&#8221; (the friar-artilleryman).
+&#8220;The trouble is in the lake&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The fact is there isn&#8217;t a single decent lake in this country,&#8221; interrupted Do&ntilde;a Victorina, highly indignant, and getting
+ready for a return to the assault upon the citadel.
+
+</p>
+<p>The besieged gazed at one another in terror, but with the promptitude of a general, the jeweler Simoun rushed in to the rescue.
+&#8220;The remedy is very simple,&#8221; he said in a strange accent, a mixture of English and South American. &#8220;And I really don&#8217;t understand
+why it hasn&#8217;t occurred to somebody.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>All turned to give him careful attention, even the Dominican. The jeweler was a tall, meager, nervous man, very dark, dressed
+in the English fashion and wearing a pith helmet. Remarkable about him was his long white hair contrasted with a sparse black
+beard, indicating a mestizo origin. To avoid the glare of the sun he wore constantly a pair of enormous blue goggles, which
+completely hid his eyes and a portion of his cheeks, thus giving him the aspect of a blind or weak-sighted person. He was
+standing with his legs apart as if to maintain his balance, with his hands thrust into the pockets of his coat.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The remedy is very simple,&#8221; he repeated, &#8220;and wouldn&#8217;t cost a cuarto.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The attention now redoubled, for it was whispered in Manila that this man controlled the Captain-General, and all saw the
+remedy in process of execution. Even Don Custodio himself turned to listen.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Dig a canal straight from the source to the mouth of the river, passing through Manila; that is, make a new river-channel
+and fill up the old Pasig. That would save land, shorten communication, and prevent the formation of sandbars.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The project left all his hearers astounded, accustomed as they were to palliative measures.
+<span class="pageno">
+[8]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s a Yankee plan!&#8221; observed Ben-Zayb, to ingratiate himself with Simoun, who had spent a long time in North America.
+
+</p>
+<p>All considered the plan wonderful and so indicated by the movements of their heads. Only Don Custodio, the liberal Don Custodio,
+owing to his independent position and his high offices, thought it his duty to attack a project that did not emanate from
+himself&#8212;that was a usurpation! He coughed, stroked the ends of his mustache, and with a voice as important as though he were
+at a formal session of the Ayuntamiento, said, &#8220;Excuse me, Se&ntilde;or Simoun, my respected friend, if I should say that I am not
+of your opinion. It would cost a great deal of money and might perhaps destroy some towns.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Then destroy them!&#8221; rejoined Simoun coldly.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;And the money to pay the laborers?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t pay them! Use the prisoners and convicts!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But there aren&#8217;t enough, Se&ntilde;or Simoun!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Then, if there aren&#8217;t enough, let all the villagers, the old men, the youths, the boys, work. Instead of the fifteen days
+of obligatory service, let them work three, four, five months for the State, with the additional obligation that each one
+provide his own food and tools.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The startled Don Custodio turned his head to see if there was any Indian within ear-shot, but fortunately those nearby were
+rustics, and the two helmsmen seemed to be very much occupied with the windings of the river.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But, Se&ntilde;or Simoun&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t fool yourself, Don Custodio,&#8221; continued Simoun dryly, &#8220;only in this way are great enterprises carried out with small
+means. Thus were constructed the Pyramids, Lake Moeris, and the Colosseum in Rome. Entire provinces came in from the desert,
+bringing their tubers to feed on. Old men, youths, and boys labored in transporting stones, hewing them, and carrying them
+on their shoulders under the direction of the official lash, and afterwards, the survivors returned to their homes or perished
+<span class="pageno">
+[9]
+</span>in the sands of the desert. Then came other provinces, then others, succeeding one another in the work during years. Thus
+the task was finished, and now we admire them, we travel, we go to Egypt and to Home, we extol the Pharaohs and the Antonines.
+Don&#8217;t fool yourself&#8212;the dead remain dead, and might only is considered right by posterity.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But, Se&ntilde;or Simoun, such measures might provoke uprisings,&#8221; objected Don Custodio, rather uneasy over the turn the affair
+had taken.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Uprisings, ha, ha! Did the Egyptian people ever rebel, I wonder? Did the Jewish prisoners rebel against the pious Titus?
+Man, I thought you were better informed in history!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Clearly Simoun was either very presumptuous or disregarded conventionalities! To say to Don Custodio&#8217;s face that he did not
+know history! It was enough to make any one lose his temper! So it seemed, for Don Custodio forgot himself and retorted, &#8220;But
+the fact is that you&#8217;re not among Egyptians or Jews!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;And these people have rebelled more than once,&#8221; added the Dominican, somewhat timidly. &#8220;In the times when they were forced
+to transport heavy timbers for the construction of ships, if it hadn&#8217;t been for the clerics&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Those times are far away,&#8221; answered Simoun, with a laugh even drier than usual. &#8220;These islands will never again rebel, no
+matter how much work and taxes they have. Haven&#8217;t you lauded to me, Padre Salvi,&#8221; he added, turning to the Franciscan, &#8220;the
+house and hospital at Los Ba&ntilde;os, where his Excellency is at present?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Padre Salvi gave a nod and looked up, evading the question.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Well, didn&#8217;t you tell me that both buildings were constructed by forcing the people to work on them under the whip of a lay-brother?
+Perhaps that wonderful bridge was built in the same way. Now tell me, did these people rebel?&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[10]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;The fact is&#8212;they have rebelled before,&#8221; replied the Dominican, &#8220;and <i>ab actu ad posse valet illatio!</i>&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No, no, nothing of the kind,&#8221; continued Simoun, starting down a hatchway to the cabin. &#8220;What&#8217;s said, is said! And you, Padre
+Sibyla, don&#8217;t talk either Latin or nonsense. What are you friars good for if the people can rebel?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Taking no notice of the replies and protests, Simoun descended the small companionway that led below, repeating disdainfully,
+&#8220;Bosh, bosh!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Padre Sibyla turned pale; this was the first time that he, Vice-Rector of the University, had ever been credited with nonsense.
+Don Custodio turned green; at no meeting in which he had ever found himself had he encountered such an adversary.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;An American mulatto!&#8221; he fumed.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;A British Indian,&#8221; observed Ben-Zayb in a low tone.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;An American, I tell you, and shouldn&#8217;t I know?&#8221; retorted Don Custodio in ill-humor. &#8220;His Excellency has told me so. He&#8217;s
+a jeweler whom the latter knew in Havana, and, as I suspect, the one who got him advancement by lending him money. So to repay
+him he has had him come here to let him have a chance and increase his fortune by selling diamonds&#8212;imitations, who knows?
+And he so ungrateful, that, after getting money from the Indians, he wishes&#8212;huh!&#8221; The sentence was concluded by a significant
+wave of the hand.
+
+</p>
+<p>No one dared to join in this diatribe. Don Custodio could discredit himself with his Excellency, if he wished, but neither
+Ben-Zayb, nor Padre Irene, nor Padre Salvi, nor the offended Padre Sibyla had any confidence in the discretion of the others.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The fact is that this man, being an American, thinks no doubt that we are dealing with the redskins. To talk of these matters
+on a steamer! Compel, force the people! And he&#8217;s the very person who advised the expedition to <span class="pageno">
+[11]
+</span>the Carolines and the campaign in Mindanao, which is going to bring us to disgraceful ruin. He&#8217;s the one who has offered to
+superintend the building of the cruiser, and I say, what does a jeweler, no matter how rich and learned he may be, know about
+naval construction?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>All this was spoken by Don Custodio in a guttural tone to his neighbor Ben-Zayb, while he gesticulated, shrugged his shoulders,
+and from time to time with his looks consulted the others, who were nodding their heads ambiguously. The Canon Irene indulged
+in a rather equivocal smile, which he half hid with his hand as he rubbed his nose.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I tell you, Ben-Zayb,&#8221; continued Don Custodio, slapping the journalist on the arm, &#8220;all the trouble comes from not consulting the old-timers here. A project in fine words, and especially
+with a big appropriation, with an appropriation in round numbers, dazzles, meets with acceptance at once, for this!&#8221; Here,
+in further explanation, he rubbed the tip of his thumb against his middle and forefinger.<a id="d0e722src" href="#d0e722" class="noteref">4</a>
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s something in that, there&#8217;s something in that,&#8221; Ben-Zayb thought it his duty to remark, since in his capacity of journalist
+he had to be informed about everything.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Now look here, before the port works I presented a project, original, simple, useful, economical, and practicable, for clearing
+away the bar in the lake, and it hasn&#8217;t been accepted because there wasn&#8217;t any of that in it.&#8221; He repeated the movement of
+his fingers, shrugged his shoulders, and gazed at the others as though to say, &#8220;Have you ever heard of such a misfortune?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;May we know what it was?&#8221; asked several, drawing nearer and giving him their attention. The projects of Don Custodio were
+as renowned as quacks&#8217; specifics.
+
+</p>
+<p>Don Custodio was on the point of refusing to explain it from resentment at not having found any supporters in his diatribe
+against Simoun. &#8220;When there&#8217;s no danger, <span class="pageno">
+[12]
+</span>you want me to talk, eh? And when there is, you keep quiet!&#8221; he was going to say, but that would cause the loss of a good
+opportunity, and his project, now that it could not be carried out, might at least be known and admired.
+
+</p>
+<p>After blowing out two or three puffs of smoke, coughing, and spitting through a scupper, he slapped Ben-Zayb on the thigh
+and asked, &#8220;You&#8217;ve seen ducks?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I rather think so&#8212;we&#8217;ve hunted them on the lake,&#8221; answered the surprised journalist.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No, I&#8217;m not talking about wild ducks, I&#8217;m talking of the domestic ones, of those that are raised in Pateros and Pasig. Do
+you know what they feed on?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Ben-Zayb, the only thinking head, did not know&#8212;he was not engaged in that business.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;On snails, man, on snails!&#8221; exclaimed Padre Camorra. &#8220;One doesn&#8217;t have to be an Indian to know that; it&#8217;s sufficient to have
+eyes!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Exactly so, on snails!&#8221; repeated Don Custodio, flourishing his forefinger. &#8220;And do you know where they get them?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Again the thinking head did not know.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Well, if you had been in the country as many years as I have, you would know that they fish them out of the bar itself, where
+they abound, mixed with the sand.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Then your project?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Well, I&#8217;m coming to that. My idea was to compel all the towns round about, near the bar, to raise ducks, and you&#8217;ll see how
+they, all by themselves, will deepen the channel by fishing for the snails&#8212;no more and no less, no more and no less!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Here Don Custodio extended his arms and gazed triumphantly at the stupefaction of his hearers&#8212;to none of them had occurred
+such an original idea.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Will you allow me to write an article about that?&#8221; asked Ben-Zayb. &#8220;In this country there is so little thinking done&#8212;&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[13]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;But, Don Custodio,&#8221; exclaimed Do&ntilde;a Victorina with smirks and grimaces, &#8220;if everybody takes to raising ducks the <i>balot</i><a id="d0e764src" href="#d0e764" class="noteref">5</a> eggs will become abundant. Ugh, how nasty! Rather, let the bar close up entirely!&#8221;
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[14]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e564" href="#d0e564src" class="noteref">1</a> The Spanish designation for the Christianized Malay of the Philippines was <i>indio</i> (Indian), a term used rather contemptuously, the name <i>filipino</i> being generally applied in a restricted sense to the children of Spaniards born in the Islands.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e613" href="#d0e613src" class="noteref">2</a> Now generally known as the Mariquina.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e620" href="#d0e620src" class="noteref">3</a> This bridge, constructed in Lukban under the supervision of a Franciscan friar, was jocularly referred to as the <i>Puente de Capricho,</i> being apparently an ignorant blunder in the right direction, since it was declared in an official report made by Spanish
+engineers in 1852 to conform to no known principle of scientific construction, and yet proved to be strong and durable.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e722" href="#d0e722src" class="noteref">4</a> Don Custodio&#8217;s gesture indicates money.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e764" href="#d0e764src" class="noteref">5</a> Duck eggs, that are allowed to advance well into the duckling stage, then boiled and eaten. The se&ntilde;ora is sneering at a custom
+among some of her own people.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e768"></a></p>
+<h1>On the Lower Deck</h1>
+<p>There, below, other scenes were being enacted. Seated on benches or small wooden stools among valises, boxes, and baskets,
+a few feet from the engines, in the heat of the boilers, amid the human smells and the pestilential odor of oil, were to be
+seen the great majority of the passengers. Some were silently gazing at the changing scenes along the banks, others were playing
+cards or conversing in the midst of the scraping of shovels, the roar of the engine, the hiss of escaping steam, the swash
+of disturbed waters, and the shrieks of the whistle. In one corner, heaped up like corpses, slept, or tried to sleep, a number
+of Chinese pedlers, seasick, pale, frothing through half-opened lips, and bathed in their copious perspiration. Only a few
+youths, students for the most part, easily recognizable from their white garments and their confident bearing, made bold to
+move about from stern to bow, leaping over baskets and boxes, happy in the prospect of the approaching vacation. Now they
+commented on the movements of the engines, endeavoring to recall forgotten notions of physics, now they surrounded the young
+schoolgirl or the red-lipped <i>buyera</i> with her collar of <i>sampaguitas,</i> whispering into their ears words that made them smile and cover their faces with their fans.
+
+</p>
+<p>Nevertheless, two of them, instead of engaging in these fleeting gallantries, stood in the bow talking with a man, advanced
+in years, but still vigorous and erect. Both these youths seemed to be well known and respected, to judge from the deference
+shown them by their fellow passengers. The elder, who was dressed in complete black, was the medical <span class="pageno">
+[15]
+</span>student, Basilio, famous for his successful cures and extraordinary treatments, while the other, taller and more robust, although
+much younger, was Isagani, one of the poets, or at least rimesters, who that year came from the Ateneo,<a id="d0e783src" href="#d0e783" class="noteref">1</a> a curious character, ordinarily quite taciturn and uncommunicative. The man talking with them was the rich Capitan Basilio,
+who was returning from a business trip to Manila.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Capitan Tiago is getting along about the same as usual, yes, sir,&#8221; said the student Basilio, shaking his head. &#8220;He won&#8217;t
+submit to any treatment. At the advice of <i>a certain person</i> he is sending me to San Diego under the pretext of looking after his property, but in reality so that he may be left to smoke
+his opium with complete liberty.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>When the student said <i>a certain person</i>, he really meant Padre Irene, a great friend and adviser of Capitan Tiago in his last days.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Opium is one of the plagues of modern times,&#8221; replied the capitan with the disdain and indignation of a Roman senator. &#8220;The
+ancients knew about it but never abused it. While the addiction to classical studies lasted&#8212;mark this well, young men&#8212;opium
+was used solely as a medicine; and besides, tell me who smoke it the most?&#8212;Chinamen, Chinamen who don&#8217;t understand a word
+of Latin! Ah, if Capitan Tiago had only devoted himself to Cicero&#8212;&#8221; Here the most classical disgust painted itself on his
+carefully-shaven Epicurean face. Isagani regarded him with attention: that gentleman was suffering from nostalgia for antiquity.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But to get back to this academy of Castilian,&#8221; Capitan Basilio continued, &#8220;I assure you, gentlemen, that you won&#8217;t materialize
+it.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes, sir, from day to day we&#8217;re expecting the permit,&#8221; replied Isagani. &#8220;Padre Irene, whom you may have noticed above, and
+to whom we&#8217;ve presented a team of bays, has promised it to us. He&#8217;s on his way now to confer with the General.&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[16]
+</span>
+&#8220;That doesn&#8217;t matter. Padre Sibyla is opposed to it.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Let him oppose it! That&#8217;s why he&#8217;s here on the steamer, in order to&#8212;at Los Ba&ntilde;os before the General.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>And the student Basilio filled out his meaning by going through the pantomime of striking his fists together.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s understood,&#8221; observed Capitan Basilio, smiling. &#8220;But even though you get the permit, where&#8217;ll you get the funds?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;We have them, sir. Each student has contributed a real.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But what about the professors?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;We have them: half Filipinos and half Peninsulars.&#8221;<a id="d0e816src" href="#d0e816" class="noteref">2</a>
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;And the house?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Makaraig, the wealthy Makaraig, has offered one of his.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Capitan Basilio had to give in; these young men had everything arranged.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;For the rest,&#8221; he said with a shrug of his shoulders, &#8220;it&#8217;s not altogether bad, it&#8217;s not a bad idea, and now that you can&#8217;t
+know Latin at least you may know Castilian. Here you have another instance, namesake, of how we are going backwards. In our
+times we learned Latin because our books were in Latin; now you study Latin a little but have no Latin books. On the other
+hand, your books are in Castilian and that language is not taught&#8212;<i>aetas parentum pejor avis tulit nos nequiores!</i> as Horace said.&#8221; With this quotation he moved away majestically, like a Roman emperor.
+
+</p>
+<p>The youths smiled at each other. &#8220;These men of the past,&#8221; remarked Isagani, &#8220;find obstacles for everything. Propose a thing
+to them and instead of seeing its advantages they only fix their attention on the difficulties. They want everything to come
+smooth and round as a billiard ball.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;He&#8217;s right at home with your uncle,&#8221; observed Basilio.
+<span class="pageno">
+[17]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;They talk of past times. But listen&#8212;speaking of uncles, what does yours say about Paulita?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Isagani blushed. &#8220;He preached me a sermon about the choosing of a wife. I answered him that there wasn&#8217;t in Manila another
+like her&#8212;beautiful, well-bred, an orphan&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Very wealthy, elegant, charming, with no defect other than a ridiculous aunt,&#8221; added Basilio, at which both smiled.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;In regard to the aunt, do you know that she has charged me to look for her husband?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Do&ntilde;a Victorina? And you&#8217;ve promised, in order to keep your sweetheart.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Naturally! But the fact is that her husband is actually hidden&#8212;in my uncle&#8217;s house!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Both burst into a laugh at this, while Isagani continued: &#8220;That&#8217;s why my uncle, being a conscientious man, won&#8217;t go on the
+upper deck, fearful that Do&ntilde;a Victorina will ask him about Don Tiburcio. Just imagine, when Do&ntilde;a Victorina learned that I
+was a steerage passenger she gazed at me with a disdain that&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>At that moment Simoun came down and, catching sight of the two young men, greeted Basilio in a patronizing tone: &#8220;Hello, Don
+Basilio, you&#8217;re off for the vacation? Is the gentleman a townsman of yours?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio introduced Isagani with the remark that he was not a townsman, but that their homes were not very far apart. Isagani
+lived on the seashore of the opposite coast. Simoun examined him with such marked attention that he was annoyed, turned squarely
+around, and faced the jeweler with a provoking stare.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Well, what is the province like?&#8221; the latter asked, turning again to Basilio.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Why, aren&#8217;t you familiar with it?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;How the devil am I to know it when I&#8217;ve never set foot in it? I&#8217;ve been told that it&#8217;s very poor and doesn&#8217;t buy jewels.&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[18]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;We don&#8217;t buy jewels, because we don&#8217;t need them,&#8221; rejoined Isagani dryly, piqued in his provincial pride.
+
+</p>
+<p>A smile played over Simoun&#8217;s pallid lips. &#8220;Don&#8217;t be offended, young man,&#8221; he replied. &#8220;I had no bad intentions, but as I&#8217;ve
+been assured that nearly all the money is in the hands of the native priests, I said to myself: the friars are dying for curacies
+and the Franciscans are satisfied with the poorest, so when they give them up to the native priests the truth must be that
+the king&#8217;s profile is unknown there. But enough of that! Come and have a beer with me and we&#8217;ll drink to the prosperity of
+your province.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The youths thanked him, but declined the offer.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You do wrong,&#8221; Simoun said to them, visibly taken aback. &#8220;Beer is a good thing, and I heard Padre Camorra say this morning
+that the lack of energy noticeable in this country is due to the great amount of water the inhabitants drink.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Isagani was almost as tall as the jeweler, and at this he drew himself up.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Then tell Padre Camorra,&#8221; Basilio hastened to say, while he nudged Isagani slyly, &#8220;tell him that if he would drink water
+instead of wine or beer, perhaps we might all be the gainers and he would not give rise to so much talk.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;And tell him, also,&#8221; added Isagani, paying no attention to his friend&#8217;s nudges, &#8220;that water is very mild and can be drunk,
+but that it drowns out the wine and beer and puts out the fire, that heated it becomes steam, and that ruffled it is the ocean,
+that it once destroyed mankind and made the earth tremble to its foundations!&#8221;<a id="d0e877src" href="#d0e877" class="noteref">3</a>
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun raised his head. Although his looks could not be read through the blue goggles, on the rest of his face surprise might
+be seen. &#8220;Rather a good answer,&#8221; he said. &#8220;But I fear that he might get facetious and ask me when the <span class="pageno">
+[19]
+</span>water will be converted into steam and when into an ocean. Padre Camorra is rather incredulous and is a great wag.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;When the fire heats it, when the rivulets that are now scattered through the steep valleys, forced by fatality, rush together
+in the abyss that men are digging,&#8221; replied Isagani.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No, Se&ntilde;or Simoun,&#8221; interposed Basilio, changing to a jesting tone, &#8220;rather keep in mind the verses of my friend Isagani himself:
+
+</p>
+<p class="beforeline"></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">&#8216;Fire you, you say, and water we,
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Then as you wish, so let it be;
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">But let us live in peace and right,
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Nor shall the fire e&#8217;er see us fight;
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">So joined by wisdom&#8217;s glowing flame,
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">That without anger, hate, or blame,
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">We form the steam, the fifth element,
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Progress and light, life and movement.&#8217;&#8221;</span></p>
+<p class="afterline"></p>
+<p>&#8220;Utopia, Utopia!&#8221; responded Simoun dryly. &#8220;The engine is about to meet&#8212;in the meantime, I&#8217;ll drink my beer.&#8221; So, without any
+word of excuse, he left the two friends.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But what&#8217;s the matter with you today that you&#8217;re so quarrelsome?&#8221; asked Basilio.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Nothing. I don&#8217;t know why, but that man fills me with horror, fear almost.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I was nudging you with my elbow. Don&#8217;t you know that he&#8217;s called the Brown Cardinal?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The Brown Cardinal?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Or Black Eminence, as you wish.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t understand.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Richelieu had a Capuchin adviser who was called the Gray Eminence; well, that&#8217;s what this man is to the General.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Really?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s what I&#8217;ve heard from <i>a certain person,</i>&#8212;who always speaks ill of him behind his back and flatters him to his face.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Does he also visit Capitan Tiago?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;From the first day after his arrival, and I&#8217;m sure that <span class="pageno">
+[20]
+</span><i>a certain person</i> looks upon him as a rival&#8212;in the inheritance. I believe that he&#8217;s going to see the General about the question of instruction
+in Castilian.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>At that moment Isagani was called away by a servant to his uncle.
+
+</p>
+<p>On one of the benches at the stern, huddled in among the other passengers, sat a native priest gazing at the landscapes that
+were successively unfolded to his view. His neighbors made room for him, the men on passing taking off their hats, and the
+gamblers not daring to set their table near where he was. He said little, but neither smoked nor assumed arrogant airs, nor
+did he disdain to mingle with the other men, returning the salutes with courtesy and affability as if he felt much honored
+and very grateful. Although advanced in years, with hair almost completely gray, he appeared to be in vigorous health, and
+even when seated held his body straight and his head erect, but without pride or arrogance. He differed from the ordinary
+native priests, few enough indeed, who at that period served merely as coadjutors or administered some curacies temporarily,
+in a certain self-possession and gravity, like one who was conscious of his personal dignity and the sacredness of his office.
+A superficial examination of his appearance, if not his white hair, revealed at once that he belonged to another epoch, another
+generation, when the better young men were not afraid to risk their dignity by becoming priests, when the native clergy looked
+any friar at all in the face, and when their class, not yet degraded and vilified, called for free men and not slaves, superior
+intelligences and not servile wills. In his sad and serious features was to be read the serenity of a soul fortified by study
+and meditation, perhaps tried out by deep moral suffering. This priest was Padre Florentino, Isagani&#8217;s uncle, and his story
+is easily told.
+
+</p>
+<p>Scion of a wealthy and influential family of Manila, of agreeable appearance and cheerful disposition, suited to shine in
+the world, he had never felt any call to the sacerdotal <span class="pageno">
+[21]
+</span>profession, but by reason of some promises or vows, his mother, after not a few struggles and violent disputes, compelled
+him to enter the seminary. She was a great friend of the Archbishop, had a will of iron, and was as inexorable as is every
+devout woman who believes that she is interpreting the will of God. Vainly the young Florentine offered resistance, vainly
+he begged, vainly he pleaded his love affairs, even provoking scandals: priest he had to become at twenty-five years of age,
+and priest he became. The Archbishop ordained him, his first mass was celebrated with great pomp, three days were given over
+to feasting, and his mother died happy and content, leaving him all her fortune.
+
+</p>
+<p>But in that struggle Florentine received a wound from which he never recovered. Weeks before his first mass the woman he loved,
+in desperation, married a nobody&#8212;a blow the rudest he had ever experienced. He lost his moral energy, life became dull and
+insupportable. If not his virtue and the respect for his office, that unfortunate love affair saved him from the depths into
+which the regular orders and secular clergymen both fall in the Philippines. He devoted himself to his parishioners as a duty,
+and by inclination to the natural sciences.
+
+</p>
+<p>When the events of seventy-two occurred,<a id="d0e948src" href="#d0e948" class="noteref">4</a> he feared that the large income his curacy yielded him would attract attention to him, so, desiring peace above everything,
+he sought and secured his release, living thereafter as a private individual on his patrimonial estate situated on the Pacific
+coast. He there adopted his nephew, Isagani, who was reported by the malicious to be his own son by his old sweetheart when
+she became a widow, and by the more serious and better informed, the natural child of a cousin, a lady in Manila.
+<span class="pageno">
+[22]
+</span></p>
+<p>The captain of the steamer caught sight of the old priest and insisted that he go to the upper deck, saying, &#8220;If you don&#8217;t
+do so, the friars will think that you don&#8217;t want to associate with them.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Padre Florentino had no recourse but to accept, so he summoned his nephew in order to let him know where he was going, and
+to charge him not to come near the upper deck while he was there. &#8220;If the captain notices you, he&#8217;ll invite you also, and
+we should then be abusing his kindness.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;My uncle&#8217;s way!&#8221; thought Isagani. &#8220;All so that I won&#8217;t have any reason for talking with Do&ntilde;a Victorina.&#8221;
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[23]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e783" href="#d0e783src" class="noteref">1</a> The Jesuit College in Manila, established in 1859.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e816" href="#d0e816src" class="noteref">2</a> Natives of Spain; to distinguish them from the Filipinos, <i>i.e.,</i> descendants of Spaniards born in the Philippines. See Glossary: &#8220;Indian.&#8221;&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e877" href="#d0e877src" class="noteref">3</a> It was a common saying among the old Filipinos that the Spaniards (white men) were fire (activity), while they themselves
+were water (passivity).&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e948" href="#d0e948src" class="noteref">4</a> The &#8220;liberal&#8221; demonstrations in Manila, and the mutiny in the Cavite Arsenal, resulting in the garroting of the three native
+priests to whom this work was dedicated: the first of a series of fatal mistakes, culminating in the execution of the author,
+that cost Spain the loyalty of the Filipinos.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e959"></a></p>
+<h1>Legends</h1>
+<p></p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>Ich weiss nicht was soil es bedeuten
+<br>Dass ich so traurig bin!
+</p>
+</div><p>
+
+
+</p>
+<p>When Padre Florentino joined the group above, the bad humor provoked by the previous discussion had entirely disappeared.
+Perhaps their spirits had been raised by the attractive houses of the town of Pasig, or the glasses of sherry they had drunk
+in preparation for the coming meal, or the prospect of a good breakfast. Whatever the cause, the fact was that they were all
+laughing and joking, even including the lean Franciscan, although he made little noise and his smiles looked like death-grins.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Evil times, evil times!&#8221; said Padre Sibyla with a laugh.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Get out, don&#8217;t say that, Vice-Rector!&#8221; responded the Canon Irene, giving the other&#8217;s chair a shove. &#8220;In Hongkong you&#8217;re doing
+a fine business, putting up every building that&#8212;ha, ha!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Tut, tut!&#8221; was the reply; &#8220;you don&#8217;t see our expenses, and the tenants on our estates are beginning to complain&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Here, enough of complaints, <i>pu&ntilde;ales,</i> else I&#8217;ll fall to weeping!&#8221; cried Padre Camorra gleefully. &#8220;We&#8217;re not complaining, and we haven&#8217;t either estates or banking-houses.
+You know that my Indians are beginning to haggle over the fees and to flash schedules on me! Just look how they cite schedules
+to me now, and none other than those of the Archbishop Basilio Sancho,<a id="d0e982src" href="#d0e982" class="noteref">1</a> as if from his time <span class="pageno">
+[24]
+</span>up to now prices had not risen. Ha, ha, ha! Why should a baptism cost less than a chicken? But I play the deaf man, collect
+what I can, and never complain. We&#8217;re not avaricious, are we, Padre Salvi?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>At that moment Simoun&#8217;s head appeared above the hatchway.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Well, where&#8217;ve you been keeping yourself?&#8221; Don Custodio called to him, having forgotten all about their dispute. &#8220;You&#8217;re
+missing the prettiest part of the trip!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Pshaw!&#8221; retorted Simoun, as he ascended, &#8220;I&#8217;ve seen so many rivers and landscapes that I&#8217;m only interested in those that
+call up legends.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;As for legends, the Pasig has a few,&#8221; observed the captain, who did not relish any depreciation of the river where he navigated
+and earned his livelihood. &#8220;Here you have that of <i>Malapad-na-bato,</i> a rock sacred before the coming of the Spaniards as the abode of spirits. Afterwards, when the superstition had been dissipated
+and the rock profaned, it was converted into a nest of tulisanes, since from its crest they easily captured the luckless bankas,
+which had to contend against both the currents and men. Later, in our time, in spite of human interference, there are still
+told stories about wrecked bankas, and if on rounding it I didn&#8217;t steer with my six senses, I&#8217;d be smashed against its sides.
+Then you have another legend, that of Do&ntilde;a Jeronima&#8217;s cave, which Padre Florentino can relate to you.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Everybody knows that,&#8221; remarked Padre Sibyla disdainfully.
+
+</p>
+<p>But neither Simoun, nor Ben-Zayb, nor Padre Irene, nor Padre Camorra knew it, so they begged for the story, some in jest and
+others from genuine curiosity. The priest, adopting the tone of burlesque with which some had made their request, began like
+an old tutor relating a story to children.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Once upon a time there was a student who had made a promise of marriage to a young woman in his country, <span class="pageno">
+[25]
+</span>but it seems that he failed to remember her. She waited for him faithfully year after year, her youth passed, she grew into
+middle age, and then one day she heard a report that her old sweetheart was the Archbishop of Manila. Disguising herself as
+a man, she came round the Cape and presented herself before his grace, demanding the fulfilment of his promise. What she asked
+was of course impossible, so the Archbishop ordered the preparation of the cave that you may have noticed with its entrance
+covered and decorated with a curtain of vines. There she lived and died and there she is buried. The legend states that Do&ntilde;a
+Jeronima was so fat that she had to turn sidewise to get into it. Her fame as an enchantress sprung from her custom of throwing
+into the river the silver dishes which she used in the sumptuous banquets that were attended by crowds of gentlemen. A net
+was spread under the water to hold the dishes and thus they were cleaned. It hasn&#8217;t been twenty years since the river washed
+the very entrance of the cave, but it has gradually been receding, just as the memory of her is dying out among the people.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;A beautiful legend!&#8221; exclaimed Ben-Zayb. &#8220;I&#8217;m going to write an article about it. It&#8217;s sentimental!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Do&ntilde;a Victorina thought of dwelling in such a cave and was about to say so, when Simoun took the floor instead.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But what&#8217;s your opinion about that, Padre Salvi?&#8221; he asked the Franciscan, who seemed to be absorbed in thought. &#8220;Doesn&#8217;t
+it seem to you as though his Grace, instead of giving her a cave, ought to have placed her in a nunnery&#8212;in St. Clara&#8217;s, for
+example? What do you say?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>There was a start of surprise on Padre Sibyla&#8217;s part to notice that Padre Salvi shuddered and looked askance at Simoun.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Because it&#8217;s not a very gallant act,&#8221; continued Simoun quite naturally, &#8220;to give a rocky cliff as a home to one with whose
+hopes we have trifled. It&#8217;s hardly religious to expose her thus to temptation, in a cave on the banks of a river&#8212;it smacks
+of nymphs and dryads. It would <span class="pageno">
+[26]
+</span>have been more gallant, more pious, more romantic, more in keeping with the customs of this country, to shut her up in St.
+Clara&#8217;s, like a new Eloise, in order to visit and console her from time to time.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I neither can nor should pass judgment upon the conduct of archbishops,&#8221; replied the Franciscan sourly.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But you, who are the ecclesiastical governor, acting in the place of our Archbishop, what would you do if such a case should
+arise?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Padre Salvi shrugged his shoulders and calmly responded, &#8220;It&#8217;s not worth while thinking about what can&#8217;t happen. But speaking
+of legends, don&#8217;t overlook the most beautiful, since it is the truest: that of the miracle of St. Nicholas, the ruins of whose
+church you may have noticed. I&#8217;m going to relate it to Se&ntilde;or Simoun, as he probably hasn&#8217;t heard it. It seems that formerly
+the river, as well as the lake, was infested with caymans, so huge and voracious that they attacked bankas and upset them
+with a slap of the tail. Our chronicles relate that one day an infidel Chinaman, who up to that time had refused to be converted,
+was passing in front of the church, when suddenly the devil presented himself to him in the form of a cayman and upset the
+banka, in order to devour him and carry him off to hell. Inspired by God, the Chinaman at that moment called upon St. Nicholas
+and instantly the cayman was changed into a stone. The old people say that in their time the monster could easily be recognized
+in the pieces of stone that were left, and, for my part, I can assure you that I have clearly made out the head, to judge
+from which the monster must have been enormously large.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Marvelous, a marvelous legend!&#8221; exclaimed Ben-Zayb. &#8220;It&#8217;s good for an article&#8212;the description of the monster, the terror
+of the Chinaman, the waters of the river, the bamboo brakes. Also, it&#8217;ll do for a study of comparative religions; because,
+look you, an infidel Chinaman in great distress invoked exactly the saint that he must know only by hearsay and in whom he
+did not believe. Here there&#8217;s <span class="pageno">
+[27]
+</span>no room for the proverb that &#8216;a known evil is preferable to an unknown good.&#8217; If I should find myself in China and get caught
+in such a difficulty, I would invoke the obscurest saint in the calendar before Confucius or Buddha. Whether this is due to
+the manifest superiority of Catholicism or to the inconsequential and illogical inconsistency in the brains of the yellow
+race, a profound study of anthropology alone will be able to elucidate.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Ben-Zayb had adopted the tone of a lecturer and was describing circles in the air with his forefinger, priding himself on
+his imagination, which from the most insignificant facts could deduce so many applications and inferences. But noticing that
+Simoun was preoccupied and thinking that he was pondering over what he, Ben-Zayb, had just said, he inquired what the jeweler
+was meditating about.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;About two very important questions,&#8221; answered Simoun; &#8220;two questions that you might add to your article. First, what may
+have become of the devil on seeing himself suddenly confined within a stone? Did he escape? Did he stay there? Was he crushed?
+Second, if the petrified animals that I have seen in various European museums may not have been the victims of some antediluvian
+saint?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The tone in which the jeweler spoke was so serious, while he rested his forehead on the tip of his forefinger in an attitude
+of deep meditation, that Padre Camorra responded very gravely, &#8220;Who knows, who knows?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Since we&#8217;re busy with legends and are now entering the lake,&#8221; remarked Padre Sibyla, &#8220;the captain must know many&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>At that moment the steamer crossed the bar and the panorama spread out before their eyes was so truly magnificent that all
+were impressed. In front extended the beautiful lake bordered by green shores and blue mountains, like a huge mirror, framed
+in emeralds and sapphires, reflecting the sky in its glass. On the right were spread out the low shores, forming bays with
+graceful curves, and dim there in the distance the crags of Sungay, while in the <span class="pageno">
+[28]
+</span>background rose Makiling, imposing and majestic, crowned with fleecy clouds. On the left lay Talim Island with its curious
+sweep of hills. A fresh breeze rippled over the wide plain of water.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;By the way, captain,&#8221; said Ben-Zayb, turning around, &#8220;do you know in what part of the lake a certain Guevara, Navarra, or
+Ibarra, was killed?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The group looked toward the captain, with the exception of Simoun, who had turned away his head as though to look for something
+on the shore.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ah, yes!&#8221; exclaimed Do&ntilde;a Victorina. &#8220;Where, captain? Did he leave any tracks in the water?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The good captain winked several times, an indication that he was annoyed, but reading the request in the eyes of all, took
+a few steps toward the bow and scanned the shore.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Look over there,&#8221; he said in a scarcely audible voice, after making sure that no strangers were near. &#8220;According to the officer
+who conducted the pursuit, Ibarra, upon finding himself surrounded, jumped out of his banka there near the Kinabutasan<a id="d0e1050src" href="#d0e1050" class="noteref">2</a> and, swimming under water, covered all that distance of more than two miles, saluted by bullets every time that he raised
+his head to breathe. Over yonder is where they lost track of him, and a little farther on near the shore they discovered something
+like the color of blood. And now I think of it, it&#8217;s just thirteen years, day for day, since this happened.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;So that his corpse&#8212;&#8221; began Ben-Zayb.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Went to join his father&#8217;s,&#8221; replied Padre Sibyla. &#8220;Wasn&#8217;t he also another filibuster, Padre Salvi?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s what might be called cheap funerals, Padre Camorra, eh?&#8221; remarked Ben-Zayb.
+<span class="pageno">
+[29]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve always said that those who won&#8217;t pay for expensive funerals are filibusters,&#8221; rejoined the person addressed, with a
+merry laugh.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But what&#8217;s the matter with you, Se&ntilde;or Simoun?&#8221; inquired Ben-Zayb, seeing that the jeweler was motionless and thoughtful.
+&#8220;Are you seasick&#8212;an old traveler like you? On such a drop of water as this!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I want to tell you,&#8221; broke in the captain, who had come to hold all those places in great affection, &#8220;that you can&#8217;t call
+this a drop of water. It&#8217;s larger than any lake in Switzerland and all those in Spain put together. I&#8217;ve seen old sailors
+who got seasick here.&#8221;
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[30]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e982" href="#d0e982src" class="noteref">1</a> Archbishop of Manila from 1767 to 1787.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e1050" href="#d0e1050src" class="noteref">2</a> &#8220;Between this island (Talim) and Halahala point extends a strait a mile wide and a league long, which the Indians call &#8216;Kinabutasan,&#8217;
+a name that in their language means &#8216;place that was cleft open&#8217;; from which it is inferred that in other times the island
+was joined to the mainland and was separated from it by some severe earthquake, thus leaving this strait: of this there is
+an old tradition among the Indians.&#8221;&#8212;Fray Martinez de Zu&ntilde;iga&#8217;s <i>Estadismo</i> (1803).
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e1070"></a></p>
+<h1>Cabesang Tales</h1>
+<p>Those who have read the first part of this story will perhaps remember an old wood-cutter who lived in the depths of the forest.<a id="d0e1075src" href="#d0e1075" class="noteref">1</a> Tandang Selo is still alive, and though his hair has turned completely white, he yet preserves his good health. He no longer
+hunts or cuts firewood, for his fortunes have improved and he works only at making brooms.
+
+</p>
+<p>His son Tales (abbreviation of Telesforo) had worked at first on shares on the lands of a capitalist, but later, having become
+the owner of two carabaos and several hundred pesos, determined to work on his own account, aided by his father, his wife,
+and his three children. So they cut down and cleared away some thick woods which were situated on the borders of the town
+and which they believed belonged to no one. During the labors of cleaning and cultivating the new land, the whole family fell
+ill with malaria and the mother died, along with the eldest daughter, Lucia, in the flower of her age. This, which was the
+natural consequence of breaking up new soil infested with various kinds of bacteria, they attributed to the anger of the woodland
+spirit, so they were resigned and went on with their labor, believing him pacified.
+
+</p>
+<p>But when they began to harvest their first crop a religious corporation, which owned land in the neighboring town, laid claim
+to the fields, alleging that they fell within their boundaries, and to prove it they at once started to set up <span class="pageno">
+[31]
+</span>their marks. However, the administrator of the religious order left to them, for humanity&#8217;s sake, the usufruct of the land
+on condition that they pay a small sum annually&#8212;a mere bagatelle, twenty or thirty pesos. Tales, as peaceful a man as could
+be found, was as much opposed to lawsuits as any one and more submissive to the friars than most people; so, in order not
+to smash a <i>palyok</i> against a <i>kawali</i> (as he said, for to him the friars were iron pots and he a clay jar), he had the weakness to yield to their claim, remembering
+that he did not know Spanish and had no money to pay lawyers.
+
+</p>
+<p>Besides, Tandang Selo said to him, &#8220;Patience! You would spend more in one year of litigation than in ten years of paying what
+the white padres demand. And perhaps they&#8217;ll pay you back in masses! Pretend that those thirty pesos had been lost in gambling
+or had fallen into the water and been swallowed by a cayman.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The harvest was abundant and sold well, so Tales planned to build a wooden house in the barrio of Sagpang, of the town of
+Tiani, which adjoined San Diego.
+
+</p>
+<p>Another year passed, bringing another good crop, and for this reason the friars raised the rent to fifty pesos, which Tales
+paid in order not to quarrel and because he expected to sell his sugar at a good price.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Patience! Pretend that the cayman has grown some,&#8221; old Selo consoled him.
+
+</p>
+<p>That year he at last saw his dream realized: to live in the barrio of Sagpang in a wooden house. The father and grandfather
+then thought of providing some education for the two children, especially the daughter Juliana, or Juli, as they called her,
+for she gave promise of being accomplished and beautiful. A boy who was a friend of the family, Basilio, was studying in Manila,
+and he was of as lowly origin as they.
+
+</p>
+<p>But this dream seemed destined not to be realized. The first care the community took when they saw the family prospering was
+to appoint as cabeza de barangay its most <span class="pageno">
+[32]
+</span>industrious member, which left only Tano, the son, who was only fourteen years old. The father was therefore called <i>Cabesang</i> Tales and had to order a sack coat, buy a felt hat, and prepare to spend his money. In order to avoid any quarrel with the
+curate or the government, he settled from his own pocket the shortages in the tax-lists, paying for those who had died or
+moved away, and he lost considerable time in making the collections and on his trips to the capital.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Patience! Pretend that the cayman&#8217;s relatives have joined him,&#8221; advised Tandang Selo, smiling placidly.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Next year you&#8217;ll put on a long skirt and go to Manila to study like the young ladies of the town,&#8221; Cabesang Tales told his
+daughter every time he heard her talking of Basilio&#8217;s progress.
+
+</p>
+<p>But that next year did not come, and in its stead there was another increase in the rent. Cabesang Tales became serious and
+scratched his head. The clay jar was giving up all its rice to the iron pot.
+
+</p>
+<p>When the rent had risen to two hundred pesos, Tales was not content with scratching his head and sighing; he murmured and
+protested. The friar-administrator then told him that if he could not pay, some one else would be assigned to cultivate that
+land&#8212;many who desired it had offered themselves.
+
+</p>
+<p>He thought at first that the friar was joking, but the friar was talking seriously, and indicated a servant of his to take
+possession of the land. Poor Tales turned pale, he felt a buzzing in his ears, he saw in the red mist that rose before his
+eyes his wife and daughter, pallid, emaciated, dying, victims of the intermittent fevers&#8212;then he saw the thick forest converted
+into productive fields, he saw the stream of sweat watering its furrows, he saw himself plowing under the hot sun, bruising
+his feet against the stones and roots, while this friar had been driving about in his carriage with the wretch who was to
+get the land following like a slave behind his master. No, a thousand <span class="pageno">
+[33]
+</span>times, no! First let the fields sink into the depths of the earth and bury them all! Who was this intruder that he should
+have any right to his land? Had he brought from his own country a single handful of that soil? Had he crooked a single one
+of his fingers to pull up the roots that ran through it?
+
+</p>
+<p>Exasperated by the threats of the friar, who tried to uphold his authority at any cost in the presence of the other tenants,
+Cabesang Tales rebelled and refused to pay a single cuarto, having ever before himself that red mist, saying that he would
+give up his fields to the first man who could irrigate it with blood drawn from his own veins.
+
+</p>
+<p>Old Selo, on looking at his son&#8217;s face, did not dare to mention the cayman, but tried to calm him by talking of clay jars,
+reminding him that the winner in a lawsuit was left without a shirt to his back.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;We shall all be turned to clay, father, and without shirts we were born,&#8221; was the reply.
+
+</p>
+<p>So he resolutely refused to pay or to give up a single span of his land unless the friars should first prove the legality
+of their claim by exhibiting a title-deed of some kind. As they had none, a lawsuit followed, and Cabesang Tales entered into
+it, confiding that some at least, if not all, were lovers of justice and respecters of the law.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I serve and have been serving the King with my money and my services,&#8221; he said to those who remonstrated with him. &#8220;I&#8217;m asking
+for justice and he is obliged to give it to me.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Drawn on by fatality, and as if he had put into play in the lawsuit the whole future of himself and his children, he went
+on spending his savings to pay lawyers, notaries, and solicitors, not to mention the officials and clerks who exploited his
+ignorance and his needs. He moved to and fro between the village and the capital, passed his days without eating and his nights
+without sleeping, while his talk was always about briefs, exhibits, and appeals. There was then seen a struggle such as was
+never before carried on under the skies of the Philippines: that of a poor Indian, <span class="pageno">
+[34]
+</span>ignorant and friendless, confiding in the justness and righteousness of his cause, fighting against a powerful corporation
+before which Justice bowed her head, while the judges let fall the scales and surrendered the sword. He fought as tenaciously
+as the ant which bites when it knows that it is going to be crushed, as does the fly which looks into space only through a
+pane of glass. Yet the clay jar defying the iron pot and smashing itself into a thousand pieces bad in it something impressive&#8212;it
+had the sublimeness of desperation!
+
+</p>
+<p>On the days when his journeys left him free he patrolled his fields armed with a shotgun, saying that the tulisanes were hovering
+around and he had need of defending himself in order not to fall into their hands and thus lose his lawsuit. As if to improve
+his marksmanship, he shot at birds and fruits, even the butterflies, with such accurate aim that the friar-administrator did
+not dare to go to Sagpang without an escort of civil-guards, while the friar&#8217;s hireling, who gazed from afar at the threatening
+figure of Tales wandering over the fields like a sentinel upon the walls, was terror stricken and refused to take the property
+away from him.
+
+</p>
+<p>But the local judges and those at the capital, warned by the experience of one of their number who had been summarily dismissed,
+dared not give him the decision, fearing their own dismissal. Yet they were not really bad men, those judges, they were upright
+and conscientious, good citizens, excellent fathers, dutiful sons&#8212;and they were able to appreciate poor Tales&#8217; situation better
+than Tales himself could. Many of them were versed in the scientific and historical basis of property, they knew that the
+friars by their own statutes could not own property, but they also knew that to come from far across the sea with an appointment
+secured with great difficulty, to undertake the duties of the position with the best intentions, and now to lose it because
+an Indian fancied that justice had to be done on earth as in heaven&#8212;that surely was an idea! They had their <span class="pageno">
+[35]
+</span>families and greater needs surely than that Indian: one had a mother to provide for, and what duty is more sacred than that
+of caring for a mother? Another had sisters, all of marriageable age; that other there had many little children who expected
+their daily bread and who, like fledglings in a nest, would surely die of hunger the day he was out of a job; even the very
+least of them had there, far away, a wife who would be in distress if the monthly remittance failed. All these moral and conscientious
+judges tried everything in their power in the way of counsel, advising Cabesang Tales to pay the rent demanded. But Tales,
+like all simple souls, once he had seen what was just, went straight toward it. He demanded proofs, documents, papers, title-deeds,
+but the friars had none of these, resting their case on his concessions in the past.
+
+</p>
+<p>Cabesang Tales&#8217; constant reply was: &#8220;If every day I give alms to a beggar to escape annoyance, who will oblige me to continue
+my gifts if he abuses my generosity?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>From this stand no one could draw him, nor were there any threats that could intimidate him. In vain Governor M&#8212;&#8212; made a trip
+expressly to talk to him and frighten him. His reply to it all was: &#8220;You may do what you like, Mr. Governor, I&#8217;m ignorant
+and powerless. But I&#8217;ve cultivated those fields, my wife and daughter died while helping me clear them, and I won&#8217;t give them
+up to any one but him who can do more with them than I&#8217;ve done. Let him first irrigate them with his blood and bury in them
+his wife and daughter!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The upshot of this obstinacy was that the honorable judges gave the decision to the friars, and everybody laughed at him,
+saying that lawsuits are not won by justice. But Cabesang Tales appealed, loaded his shotgun, and patrolled his fields with
+deliberation.
+
+</p>
+<p>During this period his life seemed to be a wild dream. His son, Tano, a youth as tall as his father and as good as his sister,
+was conscripted, but he let the boy go rather than purchase a substitute.
+<span class="pageno">
+[36]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;I have to pay the lawyers,&#8221; he told his weeping daughter. &#8220;If I win the case I&#8217;ll find a way to get him back, and if I lose
+it I won&#8217;t have any need for sons.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>So the son went away and nothing more was heard of him except that his hair had been cropped and that he slept under a cart.
+Six months later it was rumored that he had been seen embarking for the Carolines; another report was that he had been seen
+in the uniform of the Civil Guard.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Tano in the Civil Guard! <i>&#8217;Susmariosep</i>!&#8221; exclaimed several, clasping their hands. &#8220;Tano, who was so good and so honest! <i>Requimternam!</i>&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The grandfather went many days without speaking to the father, Juli fell sick, but Cabesang Tales did not shed a single tear,
+although for two days he never left the house, as if he feared the looks of reproach from the whole village or that he would
+be called the executioner of his son. But on the third day he again sallied forth with his shotgun.
+
+</p>
+<p>Murderous intentions were attributed to him, and there were well-meaning persons who whispered about that he had been heard
+to threaten that he would bury the friar-administrator in the furrows of his fields, whereat the friar was frightened at him
+in earnest. As a result of this, there came a decree from the Captain-General forbidding the use of firearms and ordering
+that they be taken up. Cabesang Tales had to hand over his shotgun but he continued his rounds armed with a long bolo.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What are you going to do with that bolo when the tulisanes have firearms?&#8221; old Selo asked him.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I must watch my crops,&#8221; was the answer. &#8220;Every stalk of cane growing there is one of my wife&#8217;s bones.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The bolo was taken up on the pretext that it was too long. He then took his father&#8217;s old ax and with it on his shoulder continued
+his sullen rounds.
+
+</p>
+<p>Every time he left the house Tandang Selo and Juli trembled for his life. The latter would get up from her loom, go to the
+window, pray, make vows to the saints, and <span class="pageno">
+[37]
+</span>recite novenas. The grandfather was at times unable to finish the handle of a broom and talked of returning to the forest&#8212;life
+in that house was unbearable.
+
+</p>
+<p>At last their fears were realized. As the fields were some distance from the village, Cabesang Tales, in spite of his ax,
+fell into the hands of tulisanes who had revolvers and rifles. They told him that since he had money to pay judges and lawyers
+he must have some also for the outcasts and the hunted. They therefore demanded a ransom of five hundred pesos through the
+medium of a rustic, with the warning that if anything happened to their messenger, the captive would pay for it with his life.
+Two days of grace were allowed.
+
+</p>
+<p>This news threw the poor family into the wildest terror, which was augmented when they learned that the Civil Guard was going
+out in pursuit of the bandits. In case of an encounter, the first victim would be the captive&#8212;this they all knew. The old
+man was paralyzed, while the pale and frightened daughter tried often to talk but could not. Still, another thought more terrible,
+an idea more cruel, roused them from their stupor. The rustic sent by the tulisanes said that the band would probably have
+to move on, and if they were slow in sending the ransom the two days would elapse and Cabesang Tales would have his throat
+cut.
+
+</p>
+<p>This drove those two beings to madness, weak and powerless as they were. Tandang Selo got up, sat down, went outside, came
+back again, knowing not where to go, where to seek aid. Juli appealed to her images, counted and recounted her money, but
+her two hundred pesos did not increase or multiply. Soon she dressed herself, gathered together all her jewels, and asked
+the advice of her grandfather, if she should go to see the gobernadorcillo, the judge, the notary, the lieutenant of the Civil
+Guard. The old man said yes to everything, or when she said no, he too said no. At length came the neighbors, their relatives
+and friends, some poorer than others, in their simplicity magnifying <span class="pageno">
+[38]
+</span>the fears. The most active of all was Sister Bali, a great <i>panguinguera,</i> who had been to Manila to practise religious exercises in the nunnery of the Sodality.
+
+</p>
+<p>Juli was willing to sell all her jewels, except a locket set with diamonds and emeralds which Basilio had given her, for this
+locket had a history: a nun, the daughter of Capitan Tiago, had given it to a leper, who, in return for professional treatment,
+had made a present of it to Basilio. So she could not sell it without first consulting him.
+
+</p>
+<p>Quickly the shell-combs and earrings were sold, as well as Juli&#8217;s rosary, to their richest neighbor, and thus fifty pesos
+were added, but two hundred and fifty were still lacking. The locket might be pawned, but Juli shook her head. A neighbor
+suggested that the house be sold and Tandang Selo approved the idea, satisfied to return to the forest and cut firewood as
+of old, but Sister Bali observed that this could not be done because the owner was not present.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The judge&#8217;s wife once sold me her <i>tapis</i> for a peso, but her husband said that the sale did not hold because it hadn&#8217;t received his approval. <i>Ab&aacute;!</i> He took back the <i>tapis</i> and she hasn&#8217;t returned the peso yet, but I don&#8217;t pay her when she wins at <i>panguingui, ab&aacute;!</i> In that way I&#8217;ve collected twelve cuartos, and for that alone I&#8217;m going to play with her. I can&#8217;t bear to have people fail
+to pay what they owe me, <i>ab&aacute;!</i>&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Another neighbor was going to ask Sister Bali why then did not she settle a little account with her, but the quick <i>panguinguera</i> suspected this and added at once: &#8220;Do you know, Juli, what you can do? Borrow two hundred and fifty pesos on the house, payable
+when the lawsuit is won.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>This seemed to be the best proposition, so they decided to act upon it that same day. Sister Bali offered to accompany her,
+and together they visited the houses of all the rich folks in Tiani, but no one would accept the proposal. The case, they
+said, was already lost, and to show favors to an enemy of the friars was to expose themselves to their <span class="pageno">
+[39]
+</span>vengeance. At last a pious woman took pity on the girl and lent the money on condition that Juli should remain with her as
+a servant until the debt was paid. Juli would not have so very much to do: sew, pray, accompany her to mass, and fast for
+her now and then. The girl accepted with tears in her eyes, received the money, and promised to enter her service on the following
+day, Christmas.
+
+</p>
+<p>When the grandfather heard of that sale he fell to weeping like a child. What, that granddaughter whom he had not allowed
+to walk in the sun lest her skin should be burned, Juli, she of the delicate fingers and rosy feet! What, that girl, the prettiest
+in the village and perhaps in the whole town, before whose window many gallants had vainly passed the night playing and singing!
+What, his only granddaughter, the sole joy of his fading eyes, she whom he had dreamed of seeing dressed in a long skirt,
+talking Spanish, and holding herself erect waving a painted fan like the daughters of the wealthy&#8212;she to become a servant,
+to be scolded and reprimanded, to ruin her fingers, to sleep anywhere, to rise in any manner whatsoever!
+
+</p>
+<p>So the old grandfather wept and talked of hanging or starving himself to death. &#8220;If you go,&#8221; he declared, &#8220;I&#8217;m going back
+to the forest and will never set foot in the town.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Juli soothed him by saying that it was necessary for her father to return, that the suit would be won, and they could then
+ransom her from her servitude.
+
+</p>
+<p>The night was a sad one. Neither of the two could taste a bite and the old man refused to lie down, passing the whole night
+seated in a corner, silent and motionless. Juli on her part tried to sleep, but for a long time could not close her eyes.
+Somewhat relieved about her father&#8217;s fate, she now thought of herself and fell to weeping, but stifled her sobs so that the
+old man might not hear them. The next day she would be a servant, and it was the very day Basilio was accustomed to come from
+Manila with presents for her. Henceforward she would have to give up that love; Basilio, who was going to be a doctor, couldn&#8217;t
+marry a <span class="pageno">
+[40]
+</span>pauper. In fancy she saw him going to the church in company with the prettiest and richest girl in the town, both well-dressed,
+happy and smiling, while she, Juli, followed her mistress, carrying novenas, buyos, and the cuspidor. Here the girl felt a
+lump rise in her throat, a sinking at her heart, and begged the Virgin to let her die first.
+
+</p>
+<p>But&#8212;said her conscience&#8212;he will at least know that I preferred to pawn myself rather than the locket he gave me.
+
+</p>
+<p>This thought consoled her a little and brought on empty dreams. Who knows but that a miracle might happen? She might find
+the two hundred and fifty pesos under the image of the Virgin&#8212;she had read of many similar miracles. The sun might not rise
+nor morning come, and meanwhile the suit would be won. Her father might return, or Basilio put in his appearance, she might
+find a bag of gold in the garden, the tulisanes would send the bag of gold, the curate, Padre Camorra, who was always teasing
+her, would come with the tulisanes. So her ideas became more and more confused, until at length, worn out by fatigue and sorrow,
+she went to sleep with dreams of her childhood in the depths of the forest: she was bathing in the torrent along with her
+two brothers, there were little fishes of all colors that let themselves be caught like fools, and she became impatient because
+she found no pleasure in catchnig such foolish little fishes! Basilio was under the water, but Basilio for some reason had
+the face of her brother Tano. Her new mistress was watching them from the bank.
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[41]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e1075" href="#d0e1075src" class="noteref">1</a> The reference is to the novel <i>Noli Me Tangere</i> (<i>The Social Cancer</i>), the author&#8217;s first work, of which, the present is in a way a continuation.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e1236"></a></p>
+<h1>A Cochero&#8217;s Christmas Eve</h1>
+<p>Basilio reached San Diego just as the Christmas Eve procession was passing through the streets. He had been delayed on the
+road for several hours because the cochero, having forgotten his cedula, was held up by the Civil Guard, had his memory jogged
+by a few blows from a rifle-butt, and afterwards was taken before the commandant. Now the carromata was again detained to
+let the procession pass, while the abused cochero took off his hat reverently and recited a paternoster to the first image
+that came along, which seemed to be that of a great saint. It was the figure of an old man with an exceptionally long beard,
+seated at the edge of a grave under a tree filled with all kinds of stuffed birds. A <i>kalan</i> with a clay jar, a mortar, and a <i>kalikut</i> for mashing buyo were his only utensils, as if to indicate that he lived on the border of the tomb and was doing his cooking
+there. This was the Methuselah of the religious iconography of the Philippines; his colleague and perhaps contemporary is
+called in Europe Santa Claus, and is still more smiling and agreeable.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;In the time of the saints,&#8221; thought the cochero, &#8220;surely there were no civil-guards, because one can&#8217;t live long on blows
+from rifle-butts.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Behind the great old man came the three Magian Kings on ponies that were capering about, especially that of the negro Melchior,
+which seemed to be about to trample its companions.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No, there couldn&#8217;t have been any civil-guards,&#8221; decided the cochero, secretly envying those fortunate times, &#8220;because if
+there had been, that negro who is cutting up <span class="pageno">
+[42]
+</span>such capers beside those two Spaniards&#8221;&#8212;Gaspar and Bathazar&#8212;&#8220;would have gone to jail.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Then, observing that the negro wore a crown and was a king, like the other two, the Spaniards, his thoughts naturally turned
+to the king of the Indians, and he sighed. &#8220;Do you know, sir,&#8221; he asked Basilio respectfully, &#8220;if his right foot is loose
+yet?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio had him repeat the question. &#8220;Whose right foot?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The King&#8217;s!&#8221; whispered the cochero mysteriously.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What King&#8217;s?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Our King&#8217;s, the King of the Indians.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio smiled and shrugged his shoulders, while the cochero again sighed. The Indians in the country places preserve the
+legend that their king, imprisoned and chained in the cave of San Mateo, will come some day to free them. Every hundredth
+year he breaks one of his chains, so that he now has his hands and his left foot loose&#8212;only the right foot remains bound.
+This king causes the earthquakes when he struggles or stirs himself, and he is so strong that in shaking hands with him it
+is necessary to extend to him a bone, which he crushes in his grasp. For some unexplainable reason the Indians call him King
+Bernardo, perhaps by confusing him with Bernardo del Carpio.<a id="d0e1267src" href="#d0e1267" class="noteref">1</a>
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;When he gets his right foot loose,&#8221; muttered the cochero, stifling another sigh, &#8220;I&#8217;ll give him my horses, and offer him
+my services even to death, for he&#8217;ll free us from the Civil Guard.&#8221; With a melancholy gaze he watched the Three Kings move
+on.
+<span class="pageno">
+[43]
+</span></p>
+<p>The boys came behind in two files, sad and serious as though they were there under compulsion. They lighted their way, some
+with torches, others with tapers, and others with paper lanterns on bamboo poles, while they recited the rosary at the top
+of their voices, as though quarreling with somebody. Afterwards came St. Joseph on a modest float, with a look of sadness
+and resignation on his face, carrying his stalk of lilies, as he moved along between two civil-guards as though he were a
+prisoner. This enabled the cochero to understand the expression on the saint&#8217;s face, but whether the sight of the guards troubled
+him or he had no great respect for a saint who would travel in such company, he did not recite a single requiem.
+
+</p>
+<p>Behind St. Joseph came the girls bearing lights, their heads covered with handkerchiefs knotted under their chins, also reciting
+the rosary, but with less wrath than the boys. In their midst were to be seen several lads dragging along little rabbits made
+of Japanese paper, lighted by red candles, with their short paper tails erect. The lads brought those toys into the procession
+to enliven the birth of the Messiah. The little animals, fat and round as eggs, seemed to be so pleased that at times they
+would take a leap, lose their balance, fall, and catch fire. The owner would then hasten to extinguish such burning enthusiasm,
+puffing and blowing until he finally beat out the fire, and then, seeing his toy destroyed, would fall to weeping. The cochero
+observed with sadness that the race of little paper animals disappeared each year, as if they had been attacked by the pest
+like the living animals. He, the abused Sinong, remembered his two magnificent horses, which, at the advice of the curate,
+he had caused to be blessed to save them from plague, spending therefor ten pesos&#8212;for neither the government nor the curates
+have found any better remedy for the epizootic&#8212;and they had died after all. Yet he consoled himself by remembering also that
+after the shower of holy water, the Latin phrases of the padre, and the ceremonies, the horses had become so vain and self-important
+that <span class="pageno">
+[44]
+</span>they would not even allow him, Sinong, a good Christian, to put them in harness, and he had not dared to whip them, because
+a tertiary sister had said that they were <i>sanctified</i>.
+
+</p>
+<p>The procession was closed by the Virgin dressed as the Divine Shepherd, with a pilgrim&#8217;s hat of wide brim and long plumes
+to indicate the journey to Jerusalem. That the birth might be made more explicable, the curate had ordered her figure to be
+stuffed with rags and cotton under her skirt, so that no one could be in any doubt as to her condition. It was a very beautiful
+image, with the same sad expression of all the images that the Filipinos make, and a mien somewhat ashamed, doubtless at the
+way in which the curate had arranged her. In front came several singers and behind, some musicians with the usual civil-guards.
+The curate, as was to be expected after what he had done, was not in his place, for that year he was greatly displeased at
+having to use all his diplomacy and shrewdness to convince the townspeople that they should pay thirty pesos for each Christmas
+mass instead of the usual twenty. &#8220;You&#8217;re turning filibusters!&#8221; he had said to them.
+
+</p>
+<p>The cochero must have been greatly preoccupied with the sights of the procession, for when it had passed and Basilio ordered
+him to go on, he did not notice that the lamp on his carromata had gone out. Neither did Basilio notice it, his attention
+being devoted to gazing at the houses, which were illuminated inside and out with little paper lanterns of fantastic shapes
+and colors, stars surrounded by hoops with long streamers which produced a pleasant murmur when shaken by the wind, and fishes
+of movable heads and tails, having a glass of oil inside, suspended from the eaves of the windows in the delightful fashion
+of a happy and homelike fiesta. But he also noticed that the lights were flickering, that the stars were being eclipsed, that
+this year had fewer ornaments and hangings than the former, which in turn had had even fewer than the year preceding it. There
+was scarcely any music in the streets, while the agreeable noises of the kitchen were not to be heard in all <span class="pageno">
+[45]
+</span>the houses, which the youth ascribed to the fact that for some time things had been going badly, the sugar did not bring a
+good price, the rice crops had failed, over half the live stock had died, but the taxes rose and increased for some inexplicable
+reason, while the abuses of the Civil Guard became more frequent to kill off the happiness of the people in the towns.
+
+</p>
+<p>He was just pondering over this when an energetic &#8220;Halt!&#8221; resounded. They were passing in front of the barracks and one of
+the guards had noticed the extinguished lamp of the carromata, which could not go on without it. A hail of insults fell about
+the poor cochero, who vainly excused himself with the length of the procession. He would be arrested for violating the ordinances
+and afterwards advertised in the newspapers, so the peaceful and prudent Basilio left the carromata and went his way on foot,
+carrying his valise. This was San Diego, his native town, where he had not a single relative.
+
+</p>
+<p>The only, house wherein there seemed to be any mirth was Capitan Basilio&#8217;s. Hens and chickens cackled their death chant to
+the accompaniment of dry and repeated strokes, as of meat pounded on a chopping-block, and the sizzling of grease in the frying-pans.
+A feast was going on in the house, and even into the street there passed a certain draught of air, saturated with the succulent
+odors of stews and confections. In the entresol Basilio saw Sinang, as small as when our readers knew her before,<a id="d0e1292src" href="#d0e1292" class="noteref">2</a> although a little rounder and plumper since her marriage. Then to his great surprise he made out, further in at the back
+of the room, chatting with Capitan Basilio, the curate, and the alferez of the Civil Guard, no less than the jeweler Simoun,
+as ever with his blue goggles and his nonchalant air.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s understood, Se&ntilde;or Simoun,&#8221; Capitan Basilio was saying, &#8220;that we&#8217;ll go to Tiani to see your jewels.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I would also go,&#8221; remarked the alferez, &#8220;because I <span class="pageno">
+[46]
+</span>need a watch-chain, but I&#8217;m so busy&#8212;if Capitan Basilio would undertake&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Capitan Basilio would do so with the greatest pleasure, and as he wished to propitiate the soldier in order that he might
+not be molested in the persons of his laborers, he refused to accept the money which the alferez was trying to get out of
+his pocket.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s my Christmas gift!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I can&#8217;t allow you, Capitan, I can&#8217;t permit it!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;All right! We&#8217;ll settle up afterwards,&#8221; replied Capitan Basilio with a lordly gesture.
+
+</p>
+<p>Also, the curate wanted a pair of lady&#8217;s earrings and requested the capitan to buy them for him. &#8220;I want them first class.
+Later we&#8217;ll fix up the account.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t worry about that, Padre,&#8221; said the good man, who wished to be at peace with the Church also. An unfavorable report
+on the curate&#8217;s part could do him great damage and cause him double the expense, for those earrings were a forced present.
+Simoun in the meantime was praising his jewels.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;That fellow is fierce!&#8221; mused the student. &#8220;He does business everywhere. And if I can believe <i>a certain person,</i> he buys from some gentlemen for a half of their value the same jewels that he himself has sold for presents. Everybody in
+this country prospers but us!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>He made his way to his house, or rather Capitan Tiago&#8217;s, now occupied by a trustworthy man who had held him in great esteem
+since the day when he had seen him perform a surgical operation with the same coolness that he would cut up a chicken. This
+man was now waiting to give him the news. Two of the laborers were prisoners, one was to be deported, and a number of carabaos
+had died.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The same old story,&#8221; exclaimed Basilio, in a bad humor. &#8220;You always receive me with the same complaints.&#8221; The youth was not
+overbearing, but as he was at times scolded by Capitan Tiago, he liked in his turn to chide those under his orders.
+<span class="pageno">
+[47]
+</span></p>
+<p>The old man cast about for something new. &#8220;One of our tenants has died, the old fellow who took care of the woods, and the
+curate refused to bury him as a pauper, saying that his master is a rich man.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What did he die of?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Of old age.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Get out! To die of old age! It must at least have been some disease.&#8221; Basilio in his zeal for making autopsies wanted diseases.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Haven&#8217;t you anything new to tell me? You take away my appetite relating the same old things. Do you know anything of Sagpang?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The old man then told him about the kidnapping of Cabesang Tales. Basilio became thoughtful and said nothing more&#8212;his appetite
+had completely left him.
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[48]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e1267" href="#d0e1267src" class="noteref">1</a> This legend is still current among the Tagalogs. It circulates in various forms, the commonest being that the king was so
+confined for defying the lightning; and it takes no great stretch of the imagination to fancy in this idea a reference to
+the firearms used by the Spanish conquerors. Quite recently (January 1909), when the nearly extinct volcano of Banahao shook
+itself and scattered a few tons of mud over the surrounding landscape, the people thereabout recalled this old legend, saying
+that it was their King Bernardo making another effort to get that right foot loose.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e1292" href="#d0e1292src" class="noteref">2</a> The reference is to <i>Noli Me Tangere,</i> in which Sinang appears.
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e1339"></a></p>
+<h1>Basilio</h1>
+<p>When the bells began their chimes for the midnight mass and those who preferred a good sleep to fiestas and ceremonies arose
+grumbling at the noise and movement, Basilio cautiously left the house, took two or three turns through the streets to see
+that he was not watched or followed, and then made his way by unfrequented paths to the road that led to the ancient wood
+of the Ibarras, which had been acquired by Capitan Tiago when their property was confiscated and sold. As Christmas fell under
+the waning moon that year, the place was wrapped in darkness. The chimes had ceased, and only the tolling sounded through
+the darkness of the night amid the murmur of the breeze-stirred branches and the measured roar of the waves on the neighboring
+lake, like the deep respiration of nature sunk in profound sleep.
+
+</p>
+<p>Awed by the time and place, the youth moved along with his head down, as if endeavoring to see through the darkness. But from
+time to time he raised it to gaze at the stars through the open spaces between the treetops and went forward parting the bushes
+or tearing away the lianas that obstructed his path. At times he retraced his steps, his foot would get caught among the plants,
+he stumbled over a projecting root or a fallen log. At the end of a half-hour he reached a small brook on the opposite side
+of which arose a hillock, a black and shapeless mass that in the darkness took on the proportions of a mountain. Basilio crossed
+the brook on the stones that showed black against the shining surface of the water, ascended the hill, and made his way to
+a small space enclosed by old and <span class="pageno">
+[49]
+</span>crumbling walls. He approached the balete tree that rose in the center, huge, mysterious, venerable, formed of roots that
+extended up and down among the confusedly-interlaced trunks.
+
+</p>
+<p>Pausing before a heap of stones he took off his hat and seemed to be praying. There his mother was buried, and every time
+he came to the town his first visit was to that neglected and unknown grave. Since he must visit Cabesang Tales&#8217; family the
+next day, he had taken advantage of the night to perform this duty. Seated on a stone, he seemed to fall into deep thought.
+His past rose before him like a long black film, rosy at first, then shadowy with spots of blood, then black, black, gray,
+and then light, ever lighter. The end could not be seen, hidden as it was by a cloud through which shone lights and the hues
+of dawn.
+
+</p>
+<p>Thirteen years before to the day, almost to the hour, his mother had died there in the deepest distress, on a glorious night
+when the moon shone brightly and the Christians of the world were engaged in rejoicing. Wounded and limping, he had reached
+there in pursuit of her&#8212;she mad and terrified, fleeing from her son as from a ghost. There she had died, and there had come
+a stranger who had commanded him to build a funeral pyre. He had obeyed mechanically and when he returned he found a second
+stranger by the side of the other&#8217;s corpse. What a night and what a morning those were! The stranger helped him raise the
+pyre, whereon they burned the corpse of the first, dug the grave in which they buried his mother, and then after giving him
+some pieces of money told him to leave the place. It was the first time that he had seen that man&#8212;tall, with blood-shot eyes,
+pale lips, and a sharp nose.
+
+</p>
+<p>Entirely alone in the world, without parents or brothers and sisters, he left the town whose authorities inspired in him such
+great fear and went to Manila to work in some rich house and study at the same time, as many do. His journey was an Odyssey
+of sleeplessness and startling surprises, in which hunger counted for little, for he ate the <span class="pageno">
+[50]
+</span>fruits in the woods, whither he retreated whenever he made out from afar the uniform of the Civil Guard, a sight that recalled
+the origin of all his misfortunes. Once in Manila, ragged and sick, he went from door to door offering his services. A boy
+from the provinces who knew not a single word of Spanish, and sickly besides! Discouraged, hungry, and miserable, he wandered
+about the streets, attracting attention by the wretchedness of his clothing. How often was he tempted to throw himself under
+the feet of the horses that flashed by, drawing carriages shining with silver and varnish, thus to end his misery at once!
+Fortunately, he saw Capitan Tiago, accompanied by Aunt Isabel. He had known them since the days in San Diego, and in his joy
+believed that in them he saw almost fellow-townsfolk. He followed the carriage until he lost sight of it, and then made inquiries
+for the house. As it was the very day that Maria Clara entered the nunnery and Capitan Tiago was accordingly depressed, he
+was admitted as a servant, without pay, but instead with leave to study, if he so wished, in San Juan de Letran.<a id="d0e1356src" href="#d0e1356" class="noteref">1</a>
+
+</p>
+<p>Dirty, poorly dressed, with only a pair of clogs for footwear, at the end of several months&#8217; stay in Manila, he entered the
+first year of Latin. On seeing his clothes, his classmates drew away from him, and the professor, a handsome Dominican, never
+asked him a question, but frowned every time he looked at him. In the eight months that the class continued, the only words
+that passed between them were his name read from the roll and the daily <i>adsum</i> with which the student responded. With what bitterness he left the class each day, and, guessing the reason for the treatment
+accorded him, what tears sprang into his eyes and what complaints were stifled in his heart! How he had wept and sobbed over
+the grave of his mother, relating to her his hidden sorrows, humiliations, and affronts, when at the approach of Christmas
+Capitan Tiago had taken him back to San Diego! Yet he memorized the lessons without <span class="pageno">
+[51]
+</span>omitting a comma, although he understood scarcely any part of them. But at length he became resigned, noticing that among
+the three or four hundred in his class only about forty merited the honor of being questioned, because they attracted the
+professor&#8217;s attention by their appearance, some prank, comicality, or other cause. The greater part of the students congratulated
+themselves that they thus escaped the work of thinking and understanding the subject. &#8220;One goes to college, not to learn and
+study, but to gain credit for the course, so if the book can be memorized, what more can be asked&#8212;the year is thus gained.&#8221;<a id="d0e1366src" href="#d0e1366" class="noteref">2</a>
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio passed the examinations by answering the solitary question asked him, like a machine, without stopping or breathing,
+and in the amusement of the examiners won the passing certificate. His nine companions&#8212;they were examined in batches of ten
+in order to save time&#8212;did not have such good luck, but were condemned to repeat the year of brutalization.
+
+</p>
+<p>In the second year the game-cock that he tended won a <span class="pageno">
+[52]
+</span>large sum and he received from Capitan Tiago a big tip, which he immediately invested in the purchase of shoes and a felt
+hat. With these and the clothes given him by his employer, which he made over to fit his person, his appearance became more
+decent, but did not get beyond that. In such a large class a great deal was needed to attract the professor&#8217;s attention, and
+the student who in the first year did not make himself known by some special quality, or did not capture the good-will of
+the professors, could with difficulty make himself known in the rest of his school-days. But Basilio kept on, for perseverance
+was his chief trait.
+
+</p>
+<p>His fortune seemed to change somewhat when he entered the third year. His professor happened to be a very jolly fellow, fond
+of jokes and of making the students laugh, complacent enough in that he almost always had his favorites recite the lessons&#8212;in
+fact, he was satisfied with anything. At this time Basilio now wore shoes and a clean and well-ironed camisa. As his professor
+noticed that he laughed very little at the jokes and that his large eyes seemed to be asking something like an eternal question,
+he took him for a fool, and one day decided to make him conspicuous by calling on him for the lesson. Basilio recited it from
+beginning to end, without hesitating over a single letter, so the professor called him a parrot and told a story to make the
+class laugh. Then to increase the hilarity and justify the epithet he asked several questions, at the same time winking to
+his favorites, as if to say to them, &#8220;You&#8217;ll see how we&#8217;re going to amuse ourselves.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio now understood Spanish and answered the questions with the plain intention of making no one laugh. This disgusted
+everybody, the expected absurdity did not materialize, no one could laugh, and the good friar never pardoned him for having
+defrauded the hopes of the class and disappointed his own prophecies. But who would expect anything worth while to come from
+a head so badly combed and placed on an Indian poorly shod, classified until recently among the arboreal animals? As in other
+<span class="pageno">
+[53]
+</span>centers of learning, where the teachers are honestly desirous that the students should learn, such discoveries usually delight
+the instructors, so in a college managed by men convinced that for the most part knowledge is an evil, at least for the students,
+the episode of Basilio produced a bad impression and he was not questioned again during the year. Why should he be, when he
+made no one laugh?
+
+</p>
+<p>Quite discouraged and thinking of abandoning his studies, he passed to the fourth year of Latin. Why study at all, why not
+sleep like the others and trust to luck?
+
+</p>
+<p>One of the two professors was very popular, beloved by all, passing for a sage, a great poet, and a man of advanced ideas.
+One day when he accompanied the collegians on their walk, he had a dispute with some cadets, which resulted in a skirmish
+and a challenge. No doubt recalling his brilliant youth, the professor preached a crusade and promised good marks to all who
+during the promenade on the following Sunday would take part in the fray. The week was a lively one&#8212;there were occasional
+encounters in which canes and sabers were crossed, and in one of these Basilio distinguished himself. Borne in triumph by
+the students and presented to the professor, he thus became known to him and came to be his favorite. Partly for this reason
+and partly from his diligence, that year he received the highest marks, medals included, in view of which Capitan Tiago, who,
+since his daughter had become a nun, exhibited some aversion to the friars, in a fit of good humor induced him to transfer
+to the Ateneo Municipal, the fame of which was then in its apogee.
+
+</p>
+<p>Here a new world opened before his eyes&#8212;a system of instruction that he had never dreamed of. Except for a few superfluities
+and some childish things, he was filled with admiration for the methods there used and with gratitude for the zeal of the
+instructors. His eyes at times filled with tears when he thought of the four previous years during which, from lack of means,
+he had been unable to study at that center. He had to make extraordinary efforts to get <span class="pageno">
+[54]
+</span>himself to the level of those who had had a good preparatory course, and it might be said that in that one year he learned
+the whole five of the secondary curricula. He received his bachelor&#8217;s degree, to the great satisfaction of his instructors,
+who in the examinations showed themselves to be proud of him before the Dominican examiners sent there to inspect the school.
+One of these, as if to dampen such great enthusiasm a little, asked him where he had studied the first years of Latin.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;In San Juan de Letran, Padre,&#8221; answered Basilio.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Aha! Of course! He&#8217;s not bad,&#8212;in Latin,&#8221; the Dominican then remarked with a slight smile.
+
+</p>
+<p>From choice and temperament he selected the course in medicine. Capitan Tiago preferred the law, in order that he might have
+a lawyer free, but knowledge of the laws is not sufficient to secure clientage in the Philippines&#8212;it is necessary to win the
+cases, and for this friendships are required, influence in certain spheres, a good deal of astuteness. Capitan Tiago finally
+gave in, remembering that medical students get on intimate terms with corpses, and for some time he had been seeking a poison
+to put on the gaffs of his game-cocks, the best he had been able to secure thus far being the blood of a Chinaman who had
+died of syphilis.
+
+</p>
+<p>With equal diligence, or more if possible, the young man continued this course, and after the third year began to render medical
+services with such great success that he was not only preparing a brilliant future for himself but also earning enough to
+dress well and save some money. This was the last year of the course and in two months he would be a physician; he would come
+back to the town, he would marry Juliana, and they would be happy. The granting of his licentiateship was not only assured,
+but he expected it to be the crowning act of his school-days, for he had been designated to deliver the valedictory at the
+graduation, and already he saw himself in the rostrum, before the whole faculty, the object of public attention. All <span class="pageno">
+[55]
+</span>those heads, leaders of Manila science, half-hidden in their colored capes; all the women who came there out of curiosity
+and who years before had gazed at him, if not with disdain, at least with indifference; all those men whose carriages had
+once been about to crush him down in the mud like a dog: they would listen attentively, and he was going to say something
+to them that would not be trivial, something that had never before resounded in that place, he was going to forget himself
+in order to aid the poor students of the future&#8212;and he would make his entrance on his work in the world with that speech.
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[56]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e1356" href="#d0e1356src" class="noteref">1</a> The Dominican school of secondary instruction in Manila.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e1366" href="#d0e1366src" class="noteref">2</a> &#8220;The studies of secondary instruction given in Santo Tomas, in the college of San Juan de Letran, and of San Jos&eacute;, and in
+the private schools, had the defects inherent in the plan of instruction which the friars developed in the Philippines. It
+suited their plans that scientific and literary knowledge should not become general nor very extensive, for which reason they
+took but little interest in the study of those subjects or in the quality of the instruction. Their educational establishments
+were places of luxury for the children of wealthy and well-to-do families rather than establishments in which to perfect and
+develop the minds of the Filipino youth. It is true they were careful to give them a religious education, tending to make
+them respect the omnipotent power (<i>sic</i>) of the monastic corporations.
+
+</p>
+<p class="notetext">&#8220;The intellectual powers were made dormant by devoting a greater part of the time to the study of Latin, to which they attached
+an extraordinary importance, for the purpose of discouraging pupils from studying the exact and experimental sciences and
+from gaining a knowledge of true literary studies.
+
+</p>
+<p class="notetext">&#8220;The philosophic system explained was naturally the scholastic one, with an exceedingly refined and subtile logic, and with
+deficient ideas upon physics. By the study of Latin, and their philosophic systems, they converted their pupils into automatic
+machines rather than into practical men prepared to battle with life.&#8221;&#8212;<i>Census of the Philippine Islands (Washington, 1905), Volume III, pp. 601, 602.</i></p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e1410"></a></p>
+<h1>Simoun</h1>
+<p>Over these matters Basilio was pondering as he visited his mother&#8217;s grave. He was about to start back to the town when he
+thought he saw a light flickering among the trees and heard the snapping of twigs, the sound of feet, and rustling of leaves.
+The light disappeared but the noises became more distinct, coming directly toward where he was. Basilio was not naturally
+superstitious, especially after having carved up so many corpses and watched beside so many death-beds, but the old legends
+about that ghostly spot, the hour, the darkness, the melancholy sighing of the wind, and certain tales heard in his childhood,
+asserted their influence over his mind and made his heart beat violently.
+
+</p>
+<p>The figure stopped on the other side of the balete, but the youth could see it through an open space between two roots that
+had grown in the course of time to the proportions of tree-trunks. It produced from under its coat a lantern with a powerful
+reflecting lens, which it placed on the ground, thereby lighting up a pair of riding-boots, the rest of the figure remaining
+concealed in the darkness. The figure seemed to search its pockets and then bent over to fix a shovel-blade on the end of
+a stout cane. To his great surprise Basilio thought he could make out some of the features of the jeweler Simoun, who indeed
+it was.
+
+</p>
+<p>The jeweler dug in the ground and from time to time the lantern illuminated his face, on which were not now the blue goggles
+that so completely disguised him. Basilio shuddered: that was the same stranger who thirteen years before had dug his mother&#8217;s
+grave there, only now he had aged somewhat, his hair had turned white, he wore a beard <span class="pageno">
+[57]
+</span>and a mustache, but yet his look was the same, the bitter expression, the same cloud on his brow, the same muscular arms,
+though somewhat thinner now, the same violent energy. Old impressions were stirred in the boy: he seemed to feel the heat
+of the fire, the hunger, the weariness of that time, the smell of freshly turned earth. Yet his discovery terrified him&#8212;that
+jeweler Simoun, who passed for a British Indian, a Portuguese, an American, a mulatto, the Brown Cardinal, his Black Eminence,
+the evil genius of the Captain-General as many called him, was no other than the mysterious stranger whose appearance and
+disappearance coincided with the death of the heir to that land! But of the two strangers who had appeared, which was Ibarra,
+the living or the dead?
+
+</p>
+<p>This question, which he had often asked himself whenever Ibarra&#8217;s death was mentioned, again came into his mind in the presence
+of the human enigma he now saw before him. The dead man had had two wounds, which must have been made by firearms, as he knew
+from what he had since studied, and which would be the result of the chase on the lake. Then the dead man must have been Ibarra,
+who had come to die at the tomb of his forefathers, his desire to be cremated being explained by his residence in Europe,
+where cremation is practised. Then who was the other, the living, this jeweler Simoun, at that time with such an appearance
+of poverty and wretchedness, but who had now returned loaded with gold and a friend of the authorities? There was the mystery,
+and the student, with his characteristic cold-bloodedness, determined to clear it up at the first opportunity.
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun dug away for some time, but Basilio noticed that his old vigor had declined&#8212;he panted and had to rest every few moments.
+Fearing that he might be discovered, the boy made a sudden resolution. Rising from his seat and issuing from his hiding-place,
+he asked in the most matter-of-fact tone, &#8220;Can I help you, sir?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun straightened up with the spring of a tiger <span class="pageno">
+[58]
+</span>attacked at his prey, thrust his hand in his coat pocket, and stared at the student with a pale and lowering gaze.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Thirteen years ago you rendered me a great service, sir,&#8221; went on Basilio unmoved, &#8220;in this very place, by burying my mother,
+and I should consider myself happy if I could serve you now.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Without taking his eyes off the youth Simoun drew a revolver from his pocket and the click of a hammer being cocked was heard.
+&#8220;For whom do you take me?&#8221; he asked, retreating a few paces.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;For a person who is sacred to me,&#8221; replied Basilio with some emotion, for he thought his last moment had come. &#8220;For a person
+whom all, except me, believe to be dead, and whose misfortunes I have always lamented.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>An impressive silence followed these words, a silence that to the youth seemed to suggest eternity. But Simoun, after some
+hesitation, approached him and placing a hand on his shoulder said in a moving tone: &#8220;Basilio, you possess a secret that can
+ruin me and now you have just surprised me in another, which puts me completely in your hands, the divulging of which would
+upset all my plans. For my own security and for the good of the cause in which I labor, I ought to seal your lips forever,
+for what is the life of one man compared to the end I seek? The occasion is fitting; no one knows that I have come here; I
+am armed; you are defenceless; your death would be attributed to the outlaws, if not to more supernatural causes&#8212;yet I&#8217;ll
+let you live and trust that I shall not regret it. You have toiled, you have struggled with energetic perseverance, and like
+myself, you have your scores to settle with society. Your brother was murdered, your mother driven to insanity, and society
+has prosecuted neither the assassin nor the executioner. You and I are the dregs of justice and instead of destroying we ought
+to aid each other.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun paused with a repressed sigh, and then slowly resumed, while his gaze wandered about: &#8220;Yes, I am he who came here thirteen
+years ago, sick and wretched, to pay <span class="pageno">
+[59]
+</span>the last tribute to a great and noble soul that was willing to die for me. The victim of a vicious system, I have wandered
+over the world, working night and day to amass a fortune and carry out my plan. Now I have returned to destroy that system,
+to precipitate its downfall, to hurl it into the abyss toward which it is senselessly rushing, even though I may have to shed
+oceans of tears and blood. It has condemned itself, it stands condemned, and I don&#8217;t want to die before I have seen it in
+fragments at the foot of the precipice!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun extended both his arms toward the earth, as if with that gesture he would like to hold there the broken remains. His
+voice took on a sinister, even lugubrious tone, which made the student shudder.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Called by the vices of the rulers, I have returned to these islands, and under the cloak of a merchant have visited the towns.
+My gold has opened a way for me and wheresoever I have beheld greed in the most execrable forms, sometimes hypocritical, sometimes
+shameless, sometimes cruel, fatten on the dead organism, like a vulture on a corpse, I have asked myself&#8212;why was there not,
+festering in its vitals, the corruption, the ptomaine, the poison of the tombs, to kill the foul bird? The corpse was letting
+itself be consumed, the vulture was gorging itself with meat, and because it was not possible for me to give it life so that
+it might turn against its destroyer, and because the corruption developed slowly, I have stimulated greed, I have abetted
+it. The cases of injustice and the abuses multiplied themselves; I have instigated crime and acts of cruelty, so that the
+people might become accustomed to the idea of death. I have stirred up trouble so that to escape from it some remedy might
+be found; I have placed obstacles in the way of trade so that the country, impoverished and reduced to misery, might no longer
+be afraid of anything; I have excited desires to plunder the treasury, and as this has not been enough to bring about a popular
+uprising, I have wounded the people in their most sensitive fiber; I have <span class="pageno">
+[60]
+</span>made the vulture itself insult the very corpse that it feeds upon and hasten the corruption.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Now, when I was about to get the supreme rottenness, the supreme filth, the mixture of such foul products brewing poison,
+when the greed was beginning to irritate, in its folly hastening to seize whatever came to hand, like an old woman caught
+in a conflagration, here you come with your cries of Hispanism, with chants of confidence in the government, in what cannot
+come to pass, here you have a body palpitating with heat and life, young, pure, vigorous, throbbing with blood, with enthusiasm,
+suddenly come forth to offer itself again as fresh food!
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ah, youth is ever inexperienced and dreamy, always running after the butterflies and flowers! You have united, so that by
+your efforts you may bind your fatherland to Spain with garlands of roses when in reality you are forging upon it chains harder
+than the diamond! You ask for equal rights, the Hispanization of your customs, and you don&#8217;t see that what you are begging
+for is suicide, the destruction of your nationality, the annihilation of your fatherland, the consecration of tyranny! What
+will you be in the future? A people without character, a nation without liberty&#8212;everything you have will be borrowed, even
+your very defects! You beg for Hispanization, and do not pale with shame when they deny it you! And even if they should grant
+it to you, what then&#8212;what have you gained? At best, a country of pronunciamentos, a land of civil wars, a republic of the
+greedy and the malcontents, like some of the republics of South America! To what are you tending now, with your instruction
+in Castilian, a pretension that would be ridiculous were it not for its deplorable consequences! You wish to add one more
+language to the forty odd that are spoken in the islands, so that you may understand one another less and less.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;On the contrary,&#8221; replied Basilio, &#8220;if the knowledge of Castilian may bind us to the government, in exchange it may also
+unite the islands among themselves.&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[61]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;A gross error!&#8221; rejoined Simoun. &#8220;You are letting yourselves be deceived by big words and never go to the bottom of things
+to examine the results in their final analysis. Spanish will never be the general language of the country, the people will
+never talk it, because the conceptions of their brains and the feelings of their hearts cannot be expressed in that language&#8212;each
+people has its own tongue, as it has its own way of thinking! What are you going to do with Castilian, the few of you who
+will speak it? Kill off your own originality, subordinate your thoughts to other brains, and instead of freeing yourselves,
+make yourselves slaves indeed! Nine-tenths of those of you who pretend to be enlightened are renegades to your country! He
+among you who talks that language neglects his own in such a way that he neither writes nor understands it, and how many have
+I not seen who pretended not to know a single word of it! But fortunately, you have an imbecile government! While Russia enslaves
+Poland by forcing the Russian language upon it, while Germany prohibits French in the conquered provinces, your government
+strives to preserve yours, and you in return, a remarkable people under an incredible government, you are trying to despoil
+yourselves of your own nationality! One and all you forget that while a people preserves its language, it preserves the marks
+of its liberty, as a man preserves his independence while he holds to his own way of thinking. Language is the thought of
+the peoples. Luckily, your independence is assured; human passions are looking out for that!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun paused and rubbed his hand over his forehead. The waning moon was rising and sent its faint light down through the
+branches of the trees, and with his white locks and severe features, illuminated from below by the lantern, the jeweler appeared
+to be the fateful spirit of the wood planning some evil.
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio was silent before such bitter reproaches and listened with bowed head, while Simoun resumed: &#8220;I saw this movement
+started and have passed whole nights of <span class="pageno">
+[62]
+</span>anguish, because I understood that among those youths there were exceptional minds and hearts, sacrificing themselves for
+what they thought to be a good cause, when in reality they were working against their own country. How many times have I wished
+to speak to you young men, to reveal myself and undeceive you! But in view of the reputation I enjoy, my words would have
+been wrongly interpreted and would perhaps have had a counter effect. How many times have I not longed to approach your Makaraig,
+your Isagani! Sometimes I thought of their death, I wished to destroy them&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun checked himself.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Here&#8217;s why I let you live, Basilio, and by such imprudence I expose myself to the risk of being some day betrayed by you.
+But you know who I am, you know how much I must have suffered&#8212;then believe in me! You are not of the common crowd, which sees
+in the jeweler Simoun the trader who incites the authorities to commit abuses in order that the abused may buy jewels. I am
+the Judge who wishes to castigate this system by making use of its own defects, to make war on it by flattering it. I need
+your help, your influence among the youth, to combat these senseless desires for Hispanization, for assimilation, for equal
+rights. By that road you will become only a poor copy, and the people should look higher. It is madness to attempt to influence
+the thoughts of the rulers&#8212;they have their plan outlined, the bandage covers their eyes, and besides losing time uselessly,
+you are deceiving the people with vain hopes and are helping to bend their necks before the tyrant. What you should do is
+to take advantage of their prejudices to serve your needs. Are they unwilling that you be assimilated with the Spanish people?
+Good enough! Distinguish yourselves then by revealing yourselves in your own character, try to lay the foundations of the
+Philippine fatherland! Do they deny you hope? Good! Don&#8217;t depend on them, depend upon yourselves and work! Do they deny you
+representation <span class="pageno">
+[63]
+</span>in their Cortes? So much the better! Even should you succeed in sending representatives of your own choice, what are you going
+to accomplish there except to be overwhelmed among so many voices, and sanction with your presence the abuses and wrongs that
+are afterwards perpetrated? The fewer rights they allow you, the more reason you will have later to throw off the yoke, and
+return evil for evil. If they are unwilling to teach you their language, cultivate your own, extend it, preserve to the people
+their own way of thinking, and instead of aspiring to be a province, aspire to be a nation! Instead of subordinate thoughts,
+think independently, to the end that neither by right, nor custom, nor language, the Spaniard can be considered the master
+here, nor even be looked upon as a part of the country, but ever as an invader, a foreigner, and sooner or later you will
+have your liberty! Here&#8217;s why I let you live!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio breathed freely, as though a great weight had been lifted from him, and after a brief pause, replied: &#8220;Sir, the honor
+you do me in confiding your plans to me is too great for me not to be frank with you, and tell you that what you ask of me
+is beyond my power. I am no politician, and if I have signed the petition for instruction in Castilian it has been because
+I saw in it an advantage to our studies and nothing more. My destiny is different; my aspiration reduces itself to alleviating
+the physical sufferings of my fellow men.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The jeweler smiled. &#8220;What are physical sufferings compared to moral tortures? What is the death of a man in the presence of
+the death of a society? Some day you will perhaps be a great physician, if they let you go your way in peace, but greater
+yet will be he who can inject a new idea into this anemic people! You, what are you doing for the land that gave you existence,
+that supports your life, that affords you knowledge? Don&#8217;t you realize that that is a useless life which is not consecrated
+to a great idea? It is a stone wasted in the fields without becoming a part of any edifice.&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[64]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;No, no, sir!&#8221; replied Basilio modestly, &#8220;I&#8217;m not folding my arms, I&#8217;m working like all the rest to raise up from the ruins
+of the past a people whose units will be bound together&#8212;that each one may feel in himself the conscience and the life of the
+whole. But however enthusiastic our generation may be, we understand that in this great social fabric there must be a division
+of labor. I have chosen my task and will devote myself to science.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Science is not the end of man,&#8221; declared Simoun.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The most civilized nations are tending toward it.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes, but only as a means of seeking their welfare.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Science is more eternal, it&#8217;s more human, it&#8217;s more universal!&#8221; exclaimed the youth in a transport of enthusiasm. &#8220;Within
+a few centuries, when humanity has become redeemed and enlightened, when there are no races, when all peoples are free, when
+there are neither tyrants nor slaves, colonies nor mother countries, when justice rules and man is a citizen of the world,
+the pursuit of science alone will remain, the word patriotism will be equivalent to fanaticism, and he who prides himself
+on patriotic ideas will doubtless be isolated as a dangerous disease, as a menace to the social order.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun smiled sadly. &#8220;Yes, yes,&#8221; he said with a shake of his head, &#8220;yet to reach that condition it is necessary that there
+be no tyrannical and no enslaved peoples, it is necessary that man go about freely, that he know how to respect the rights
+of others in their own individuality, and for this there is yet much blood to be shed, the struggle forces itself forward.
+To overcome the ancient fanaticism that bound consciences it was necessary that many should perish in the holocausts, so that
+the social conscience in horror declared the individual conscience free. It is also necessary that all answer the question
+which with each day the fatherland asks them, with its fettered hands extended! Patriotism can only be a crime in a tyrannical
+people, because then it is rapine under a beautiful name, but however <span class="pageno">
+[65]
+</span>perfect humanity may become, patriotism will always be a virtue among oppressed peoples, because it will at all times mean
+love of justice, of liberty, of personal dignity&#8212;nothing of chimerical dreams, of effeminate idyls! The greatness of a man
+is not in living before his time, a thing almost impossible, but in understanding its desires, in responding to its needs,
+and in guiding it on its forward way. The geniuses that are commonly believed to have existed before their time, only appear
+so because those who judge them see from a great distance, or take as representative of the age the line of stragglers!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun fell silent. Seeing that he could awake no enthusiasm in that unresponsive mind, he turned to another subject and asked
+with a change of tone: &#8220;And what are you doing for the memory of your mother and your brother? Is it enough that you come
+here every year, to weep like a woman over a grave?&#8221; And he smiled sarcastically.
+
+</p>
+<p>The shot hit the mark. Basilio changed color and advanced a step.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What do you want me to do?&#8221; he asked angrily.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Without means, without social position, how may I bring their murderers to justice? I would merely be another victim, shattered
+like a piece of glass hurled against a rock. Ah, you do ill to recall this to me, since it is wantonly reopening a wound!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But what if I should offer you my aid?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio shook his head and remained pensive. &#8220;All the tardy vindications of justice, all the revenge in the world, will not
+restore a single hair of my mother&#8217;s head, or recall a smile to my brother&#8217;s lips. Let them rest in peace&#8212;what should I gain
+now by avenging them?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Prevent others from suffering what you have suffered, that in the future there be no brothers murdered or mothers driven
+to madness. Resignation is not always a virtue; it is a crime when it encourages tyrants: there are no despots where there
+are no slaves! Man is in his own nature so wicked that he always abuses complaisance. I thought as <span class="pageno">
+[66]
+</span>you do, and you know what my fate was. Those who caused your misfortunes are watching you day and night, they suspect that
+you are only biding your time, they take your eagerness to learn, your love of study, your very complaisance, for burning
+desires for revenge. The day they can get rid of you they will do with you as they did with me, and they will not let you
+grow to manhood, because they fear and hate you!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Hate me? Still hate me after the wrong they have done me?&#8221; asked the youth in surprise.
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun burst into a laugh. &#8220;&#8216;It is natural for man to hate those whom he has wronged,&#8217; said Tacitus, confirming the <i>quos laeserunt et oderunt</i> of Seneca. When you wish to gauge the evil or the good that one people has done to another, you have only to observe whether
+it hates or loves. Thus is explained the reason why many who have enriched themselves here in the high offices they have filled,
+on their return to the Peninsula relieve themselves by slanders and insults against those who have been their victims. <i>Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quern laeseris!&#8221;</i>
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But if the world is large, if one leaves them to the peaceful enjoyment of power, if I ask only to be allowed to work, to
+live&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;And to rear meek-natured sons to send them afterwards to submit to the yoke,&#8221; continued Simoun, cruelly mimicking Basilio&#8217;s
+tone. &#8220;A fine future you prepare for them, and they have to thank you for a life of humiliation and suffering! Good enough,
+young man! When a body is inert, it is useless to galvanize it. Twenty years of continuous slavery, of systematic humiliation,
+of constant prostration, finally create in the mind a twist that cannot be straightened by the labor of a day. Good and evil
+instincts are inherited and transmitted from father to son. Then let your idylic ideas live, your dreams of a slave who asks
+only for a bandage to wrap the chain so that it may rattle less and not ulcerate his skin! You hope for a little home and
+some ease, a wife and a handful of rice&#8212;here is your <span class="pageno">
+[67]
+</span>ideal man of the Philippines! Well, if they give it to you, consider yourself fortunate.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio, accustomed to obey and bear with the caprices and humors of Capitan Tiago. was now dominated by Simoun, who appeared
+to him terrible and sinister on a background bathed in tears and blood. He tried to explain himself by saying that he did
+not consider himself fit to mix in politics, that he had no political opinions because he had never studied the question,
+but that he was always ready to lend his services the day they might be needed, that for the moment he saw only one need,
+the enlightenment of the people.
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun stopped him with a gesture, and, as the dawn was coming, said to him: &#8220;Young man, I am not warning you to keep my secret,
+because I know that discretion is one of your good qualities, and even though you might wish to sell me, the jeweler Simoun,
+the friend of the authorities and of the religious corporations, will always be given more credit than the student Basilio,
+already suspected of filibusterism, and, being a native, so much the more marked and watched, and because in the profession
+you are entering upon you will encounter powerful rivals. After all, even though you have not corresponded to my hopes, the
+day on which you change your mind, look me up at my house in the Escolta, and I&#8217;ll be glad to help you.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio thanked him briefly and went away.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Have I really made a mistake?&#8221; mused Simoun, when he found himself alone. &#8220;Is it that he doubts me and meditates his plan
+of revenge so secretly that he fears to tell it even in the solitude of the night? Or can it be that the years of servitude
+have extinguished in his heart every human sentiment and there remain only the animal desires to live and reproduce? In that
+case the type is deformed and will have to be cast over again. Then the hecatomb is preparing: let the unfit perish and only
+the strongest survive!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Then he added sadly, as if apostrophizing some one: <span class="pageno">
+[68]
+</span>&#8220;Have patience, you who left me a name and a home, have patience! I have lost all&#8212;country, future, prosperity, your very tomb,
+but have patience! And thou, noble spirit, great soul, generous heart, who didst live with only one thought and didst sacrifice
+thy life without asking the gratitude or applause of any one, have patience, have patience! The methods that I use may perhaps
+not be thine, but they are the most direct. The day is coming, and when it brightens I myself will come to announce it to
+you who are now indifferent. Have patience!&#8221;
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[69]
+</span></p>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e1532"></a></p>
+<h1>Merry Christmas!</h1>
+<p>When Juli opened her sorrowing eyes, she saw that the house was still dark, but the cocks were crowing. Her first thought
+was that perhaps the Virgin had performed the miracle and the sun was not going to rise, in spite of the invocations of the
+cocks. She rose, crossed herself, recited her morning prayers with great devotion, and with as little noise as possible went
+out on the <i>batalan.</i>
+
+</p>
+<p>There was no miracle&#8212;the sun was rising and promised a magnificent morning, the breeze was delightfully cool, the stars were
+paling in the east, and the cocks were crowing as if to see who could crow best and loudest. That had been too much to ask&#8212;it
+were much easier to request the Virgin to send the two hundred and fifty pesos. What would it cost the Mother of the Lord
+to give them? But underneath the image she found only the letter of her father asking for the ransom of five hundred pesos.
+There was nothing to do but go, so, seeing that her grandfather was not stirring, she thought him asleep and began to prepare
+breakfast. Strange, she was calm, she even had a desire to laugh! What had she had last night to afflict her so? She was not
+going very far, she could come every second day to visit the house, her grandfather could see her, and as for Basilio, he
+had known for some time the bad turn her father&#8217;s affairs had taken, since he had often said to her, &#8220;When I&#8217;m a physician
+and we are married, your father won&#8217;t need his fields.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What a fool I was to cry so much,&#8221; she said to herself as she packed her <i>tampipi.</i> Her fingers struck against the locket and she pressed it to her lips, but immediately <span class="pageno">
+[70]
+</span>wiped them from fear of contagion, for that locket set with diamonds and emeralds had come from a leper. Ah, then, if she
+should catch that disease she could not get married.
+
+</p>
+<p>As it became lighter, she could see her grandfather seated in a corner, following all her movements with his eyes, so she
+caught up her <i>tampipi</i> of clothes and approached him smilingly to kiss his hand. The old man blessed her silently, while she tried to appear merry.
+&#8220;When father comes back, tell him that I have at last gone to college&#8212;my mistress talks Spanish. It&#8217;s the cheapest college
+I could find.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Seeing the old man&#8217;s eyes fill with tears, she placed the <i>tampipi</i> on her head and hastily went downstairs, her slippers slapping merrily on the wooden steps. But when she turned her head
+to look again at the house, the house wherein had faded her childhood dreams and her maiden illusions, when she saw it sad,
+lonely, deserted, with the windows half closed, vacant and dark like a dead man&#8217;s eyes, when she heard the low rustling of
+the bamboos, and saw them nodding in the fresh morning breeze as though bidding her farewell, then her vivacity disappeared;
+she stopped, her eyes filled with tears, and letting herself fall in a sitting posture on a log by the wayside she broke out
+into disconsolate tears.
+
+</p>
+<p>Juli had been gone several hours and the sun was quite high overhead when Tandang Selo gazed from the window at the people
+in their festival garments going to the town to attend the high mass. Nearly all led by the hand or carried in their arms
+a little boy or girl decked out as if for a fiesta.
+
+</p>
+<p>Christmas day in the Philippines is, according to the elders, a fiesta for the children, who are perhaps not of the same opinion
+and who, it may be supposed, have for it an instinctive dread. They are roused early, washed, dressed, and decked out with
+everything new, dear, and precious that they possess&#8212;high silk shoes, big hats, woolen or velvet suits, without overlooking
+four or five <span class="pageno">
+[71]
+</span>scapularies, which contain texts from St. John, and thus burdened they are carried to the high mass, where for almost an hour
+they are subjected to the heat and the human smells from so many crowding, perspiring people, and if they are not made to
+recite the rosary they must remain quiet, bored, or asleep. At each movement or antic that may soil their clothing they are
+pinched and scolded, so the fact is that they do not laugh or feel happy, while in their round eyes can be read a protest
+against so much embroidery and a longing for the old shirt of week-days.
+
+</p>
+<p>Afterwards, they are dragged from house to house to kiss their relatives&#8217; hands. There they have to dance, sing, and recite
+all the amusing things they know, whether in the humor or not, whether comfortable or not in their fine clothes, with the
+eternal pinchings and scoldings if they play any of their tricks. Their relatives give them cuartos which their parents seize
+upon and of which they hear nothing more. The only positive results they are accustomed to get from the fiesta are the marks
+of the aforesaid pinchings, the vexations, and at best an attack of indigestion from gorging themselves with candy and cake
+in the houses of kind relatives. But such is the custom, and Filipino children enter the world through these ordeals, which
+afterwards prove the least sad, the least hard, of their lives.
+
+</p>
+<p>Adult persons who live independently also share in this fiesta, by visiting their parents and their parents&#8217; relatives, crooking
+their knees, and wishing them a merry Christmas. Their Christmas gift consists of a sweetmeat, some fruit, a glass of water,
+or some insignificant present.
+
+</p>
+<p>Tandang Selo saw all his friends pass and thought sadly that this year he had no Christmas gift for anybody, while his granddaughter
+had gone without hers, without wishing him a merry Christinas. Was it delicacy on Juli&#8217;s part or pure forgetfulness?
+
+</p>
+<p>When he tried to greet the relatives who called on him, bringing their children, he found to his great surprise that he could
+not articulate a word. Vainly he tried, but no <span class="pageno">
+[72]
+</span>sound could he utter. He placed his hands on his throat, shook his head, but without effect. When he tried to laugh, his lips
+trembled convulsively and the only noise produced was a hoarse wheeze like the blowing of bellows.
+
+</p>
+<p>The women gazed at him in consternation. &#8220;He&#8217;s dumb, he&#8217;s dumb!&#8221; they cried in astonishment, raising at once a literal pandemonium.
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[73]
+</span></p>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e1578"></a></p>
+<h1>Pilates</h1>
+<p>When the news of this misfortune became known in the town, some lamented it and others shrugged their shoulders. No one was
+to blame, and no one need lay it on his conscience.
+
+</p>
+<p>The lieutenant of the Civil Guard gave no sign: he had received an order to take up all the arms and he had performed his
+duty. He had chased the tulisanes whenever he could, and when they captured Cabesang Tales he had organized an expedition
+and brought into the town, with their arms bound behind them, five or six rustics who looked suspicious, so if Cabesang Tales
+did not show up it was because he was not in the pockets or under the skins of the prisoners, who were thoroughly shaken out.
+
+</p>
+<p>The friar-administrator shrugged his shoulders: he had nothing to do with it, it was a matter of tulisanes and he had merely
+done his duty. True it was that if he had not entered the complaint, perhaps the arms would not have been taken up, and poor
+Tales would not have been captured; but he, Fray Clemente, had to look after his own safety, and that Tales had a way of staring
+at him as if picking out a good target in some part of his body. Self-defense is natural. If there are tulisanes, the fault
+is not his, it is not his duty to run them down&#8212;that belongs to the Civil Guard. If Cabesang Tales, instead of wandering about
+his fields, had stayed at home, he would not have been captured. In short, that was a punishment from heaven upon those who
+resisted the demands of his corporation.
+
+</p>
+<p>When Sister Penchang, the pious old woman in whose <span class="pageno">
+[74]
+</span>service Juli had entered, learned of it, she ejaculated several <i>&#8217;Susmarioseps</i>, crossed herself, and remarked, &#8220;Often God sends these trials because we are sinners or have sinning relatives, to whom we
+should have taught piety and we haven&#8217;t done so.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Those <i>sinning relatives</i> referred to Juliana, for to this pious woman Juli was a great sinner. &#8220;Think of a girl of marriageable age who doesn&#8217;t yet
+know how to pray! <i>Jes&uacute;s</i>, how scandalous! If the wretch doesn&#8217;t say the <i>Di&oacute;s te salve Mar&iacute;a</i> without stopping at <i>es contigo</i>, and the <i>Santa Mar&iacute;a</i> without a pause after <i>pecadores</i>, as every good Christian who fears God ought to do! She doesn&#8217;t know the <i>oremus gratiam</i>, and says <i>ment&iacute;bus</i> for <i>m&eacute;ntibus</i>. Anybody hearing her would think she was talking about something else. <i>&#8217;Susmariosep!</i>&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Greatly scandalized, she made the sign of the cross and thanked God, who had permitted the capture of the father in order
+that the daughter might be snatched from sin and learn the virtues which, according to the curates, should adorn every Christian
+woman. She therefore kept the girl constantly at work, not allowing her to return to the village to look after her grandfather.
+Juli had to learn how to pray, to read the books distributed by the friars, and to work until the two hundred and fifty pesos
+should be paid.
+
+</p>
+<p>When she learned that Basilio had gone to Manila to get his savings and ransom Juli from her servitude, the good woman believed
+that the girl was forever lost and that the devil had presented himself in the guise of the student. Dreadful as it all was,
+how true was that little book the curate had given her! Youths who go to Manila to study are ruined and then ruin the others.
+Thinking to rescue Juli, she made her read and re-read the book called <i>Tandang Basio Macunat</i>,<a id="d0e1633src" href="#d0e1633" class="noteref">1</a> charging her always to go and see the <span class="pageno">
+[75]
+</span>curate in the convento,<a id="d0e1638src" href="#d0e1638" class="noteref">2</a> as did the heroine, who is so praised by the author, a friar.
+
+</p>
+<p>Meanwhile, the friars had gained their point. They had certainly won the suit, so they took advantage of Cabesang Tales&#8217; captivity
+to turn the fields over to the one who had asked for them, without the least thought of honor or the faintest twinge of shame.
+When the former owner returned and learned what had happened, when he saw his fields in another&#8217;s possession,&#8212;those fields
+that had cost the lives of his wife and daughter,&#8212;when he saw his father dumb and his daughter working as a servant, and when
+he himself received an order from the town council, transmitted through the headman of the village, to move out of the house
+within three days, he said nothing; he sat down at his father&#8217;s side and spoke scarcely once during the whole day.
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[76]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e1633" href="#d0e1633src" class="noteref">1</a> The nature of this booklet, in Tagalog, is made clear in several passages. It was issued by the Franciscans, but proved too
+outspoken for even Latin refinement, and was suppressed by the Order itself.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e1638" href="#d0e1638src" class="noteref">2</a> The rectory or parish house.
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e1644"></a></p>
+<h1>Wealth and Want</h1>
+<p>On the following day, to the great surprise of the village, the jeweler Simoun, followed by two servants, each carrying a
+canvas-covered chest, requested the hospitality of Cabesang Tales, who even in the midst of his wretchedness did not forget
+the good Filipino customs&#8212;rather, he was troubled to think that he had no way of properly entertaining the stranger. But Simoun
+brought everything with him, servants and provisions, and merely wished to spend the day and night in the house because it
+was the largest in the village and was situated between San Diego and Tiani, towns where he hoped to find many customers.
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun secured information about the condition of the roads and asked Cabesang Tales if his revolver was a sufficient protection
+against the tulisanes.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;They have rifles that shoot a long way,&#8221; was the rather absent-minded reply.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;This revolver does no less,&#8221; remarked Simoun, firing at an areca-palm some two hundred paces away.
+
+</p>
+<p>Cabesang Tales noticed that some nuts fell, but remained silent and thoughtful.
+
+</p>
+<p>Gradually the families, drawn by the fame of the jeweler&#8217;s wares, began to collect. They wished one another merry Christmas,
+they talked of masses, saints, poor crops, but still were there to spend their savings for jewels and trinkets brought from
+Europe. It was known that the jeweler was the friend of the Captain-General, so it wasn&#8217;t lost labor to get on good terms
+with him, and thus be prepared for contingencies.
+
+</p>
+<p>Capitan Basilio came with his wife, daughter, and son-in-law, <span class="pageno">
+[77]
+</span>prepared to spend at least three thousand pesos. Sister Penchang was there to buy a diamond ring she had promised to the Virgin
+of Antipolo. She had left Juli at home memorizing a booklet the curate had sold her for four cuartos, with forty days of indulgence
+granted by the Archbishop to every one who read it or listened to it read.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Jes&uacute;s!</i>&#8221; said the pious woman to Capitana Tika, &#8220;that poor girl has grown up like a mushroom planted by the <i>tikbalang.</i> I&#8217;ve made her read the book at the top of her voice at least fifty times and she doesn&#8217;t remember a single word of it. She
+has a head like a sieve&#8212;full when it&#8217;s in the water. All of us hearing her, even the dogs and cats, have won at least twenty
+years of indulgence.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun arranged his two chests on the table, one being somewhat larger than the other. &#8220;You don&#8217;t want plated jewelry or imitation
+gems. This lady,&#8221; turning to Sinang, &#8220;wants real diamonds.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s it, yes, sir, diamonds, old diamonds, antique stones, you know,&#8221; she responded. &#8220;Papa will pay for them, because he
+likes antique things, antique stones.&#8221; Sinang was accustomed to joke about the great deal of Latin her father understood and
+the little her husband knew.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It just happens that I have some antique jewels,&#8221; replied Simoun, taking the canvas cover from the smaller chest, a polished
+steel case with bronze trimmings and stout locks. &#8220;I have necklaces of Cleopatra&#8217;s, real and genuine, discovered in the Pyramids;
+rings of Roman senators and knights, found in the ruins of Carthage.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Probably those that Hannibal sent back after the battle of Cannae!&#8221; exclaimed Capitan Basilio seriously, while he trembled
+with pleasure. The good man, thought he had read much about the ancients, had never, by reason of the lack of museums in Filipinas,
+seen any of the objects of those times.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I have brought besides costly earrings of Roman ladies, <span class="pageno">
+[78]
+</span>discovered in the villa of Annius Mucius Papilinus in Pompeii.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Capitan Easilio nodded to show that he understood and was eager to see such precious relics. The women remarked that they
+also wanted things from Rome, such as rosaries blessed by the Pope, holy relics that would take away sins without the need
+of confessions, and so on.
+
+</p>
+<p>When the chest was opened and the cotton packing removed, there was exposed a tray filled with rings, reliquaries, lockets,
+crucifixes, brooches, and such like. The diamonds set in among variously colored stones flashed out brightly and shimmered
+among golden flowers of varied hues, with petals of enamel, all of peculiar designs and rare Arabesque workmanship.
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun lifted the tray and exhibited another filled with quaint jewels that would have satisfied the imaginations of seven
+d&eacute;butantes on the eves of the balls in their honor. Designs, one more fantastic than the other, combinations of precious stones
+and pearls worked into the figures of insects with azure backs and transparent forewings, sapphires, emeralds, rubies, turquoises,
+diamonds, joined to form dragon-flies, wasps, bees, butterflies, beetles, serpents, lizards, fishes, sprays of flowers. There
+were diadems, necklaces of pearls and diamonds, so that some of the girls could not withhold a <i>nak&uacute;</i> of admiration, and Sinang gave a cluck with her tongue, whereupon her mother pinched her to prevent her from encouraging
+the jeweler to raise his prices, for Capitana Tika still pinched her daughter even after the latter was married.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Here you have some old diamonds,&#8221; explained the jeweler. &#8220;This ring belonged to the Princess Lamballe and those earrings
+to one of Marie Antoinette&#8217;s ladies.&#8221; They consisted of some beautiful solitaire diamonds, as large as grains of corn, with
+somewhat bluish lights, and pervaded with a severe elegance, as though they still reflected in their sparkles the shuddering
+of the Reign of Terror.
+<span class="pageno">
+[79]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;Those two earrings!&#8221; exclaimed Sinang, looking at her father and instinctively covering the arm next to her mother.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Something more ancient yet, something Roman,&#8221; said Capitan Basilio with a wink.
+
+</p>
+<p>The pious Sister Penchang thought that with such a gift the Virgin of Antipolo would be softened and grant her her most vehement
+desire: for some time she had begged for a wonderful miracle to which her name would be attached, so that her name might be
+immortalized on earth and she then ascend into heaven, like the Capitana Ines of the curates. She inquired the price and Simoun
+asked three thousand pesos, which made the good woman cross herself&#8212;<i>&#8217;Susmariosep!</i>
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun now exposed the third tray, which was filled with watches, cigar- and match-cases decorated with the rarest enamels,
+reliquaries set with diamonds and containing the most elegant miniatures.
+
+</p>
+<p>The fourth tray, containing loose gems, stirred a murmur of admiration. Sinang again clucked with her tongue, her mother again
+pinched her, although at the same time herself emitting a <i>&#8217;Susmar&iacute;a</i> of wonder.
+
+</p>
+<p>No one there had ever before seen so much wealth. In that chest lined with dark-blue velvet, arranged in trays, were the wonders
+of the <i>Arabian Nights,</i> the dreams of Oriental fantasies. Diamonds as large as peas glittered there, throwing out attractive rays as if they were
+about to melt or burn with all the hues of the spectrum; emeralds from Peru, of varied forms and shapes; rubies from India,
+red as drops of blood; sapphires from Ceylon, blue and white; turquoises from Persia; Oriental pearls, some rosy, some lead-colored,
+others black. Those who have at night seen a great rocket burst in the azure darkness of the sky into thousands of colored
+lights, so bright that they make the eternal stars look dim, can imagine the aspect the tray presented.
+
+</p>
+<p>As if to increase the admiration of the beholders, Simoun <span class="pageno">
+[80]
+</span>took the stones out with his tapering brown fingers, gloating over their crystalline hardness, their luminous stream, as they
+poured from his hands like drops of water reflecting the tints of the rainbow. The reflections from so many facets, the thought
+of their great value, fascinated the gaze of every one.
+
+</p>
+<p>Cabesang Tales, who had approached out of curiosity, closed his eyes and drew back hurriedly, as if to drive away an evil
+thought. Such great riches were an insult to his misfortunes; that man had come there to make an exhibition of his immense
+wealth on the very day that he, Tales, for lack of money, for lack of protectors, had to abandon the house raised by his own
+hands.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Here you have two black diamonds, among the largest in existence,&#8221; explained the jeweler. &#8220;They&#8217;re very difficult to cut
+because they&#8217;re the very hardest. This somewhat rosy stone is also a diamond, as is this green one that many take for an emerald.
+Quiroga the Chinaman offered me six thousand pesos for it in order to present it to a very influential lady, and yet it is
+not the green ones that are the most valuable, but these blue ones.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>He selected three stones of no great size, but thick and well-cut, of a delicate azure tint.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;For all that they are smaller than the green,&#8221; he continued, &#8220;they cost twice as much. Look at this one, the smallest of
+all, weighing not more than two carats, which cost me twenty thousand pesos and which I won&#8217;t sell for less than thirty. I
+had to make a special trip to buy it. This other one, from the mines of Golconda, weighs three and a half carats and is worth
+over seventy thousand. The Viceroy of India, in a letter I received the day before yesterday, offers me twelve thousand pounds
+sterling for it.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Before such great wealth, all under the power of that man who talked so unaffectedly, the spectators felt a kind of awe mingled
+with dread. Sinang clucked several times and her mother did not pinch her, perhaps because she too was overcome, or perhaps
+because she reflected that a <span class="pageno">
+[81]
+</span>jeweler like Simoun was not going to try to gain five pesos more or less as a result of an exclamation more or less indiscreet.
+All gazed at the gems, but no one showed any desire to handle them, they were so awe-inspiring. Curiosity was blunted by wonder.
+Cabesang Tales stared out into the field, thinking that with a single diamond, perhaps the very smallest there, he could recover
+his daughter, keep his house, and perhaps rent another farm. Could it be that those gems were worth more than a man&#8217;s home,
+the safety of a maiden, the peace of an old man in his declining days?
+
+</p>
+<p>As if he guessed the thought, Simoun remarked to those about him: &#8220;Look here&#8212;with one of these little blue stones, which appear
+so innocent and inoffensive, pure as sparks scattered over the arch of heaven, with one of these, seasonably presented, a
+man was able to have his enemy deported, the father of a family, as a disturber of the peace; and with this other little one
+like it, red as one&#8217;s heart-blood, as the feeling of revenge, and bright as an orphan&#8217;s tears, he was restored to liberty,
+the man was returned to his home, the father to his children, the husband to the wife, and a whole family saved from a wretched
+future.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>He slapped the chest and went on in a loud tone in bad Tagalog: &#8220;Here I have, as in a medicine-chest, life and death, poison
+and balm, and with this handful I can drive to tears all the inhabitants of the Philippines!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The listeners gazed at him awe-struck, knowing him to be right. In his voice there could be detected a strange ring, while
+sinister flashes seemed to issue from behind the blue goggles.
+
+</p>
+<p>Then as if to relieve the strain of the impression made by the gems on such simple folk, he lifted up the tray and exposed
+at the bottom the <i>sanctum sanctorum</i>. Cases of Russian leather, separated by layers of cotton, covered a bottom lined with gray velvet. All expected wonders,
+and Sinang&#8217;s husband thought he saw carbuncles, gems that <span class="pageno">
+[82]
+</span>flashed fire and shone in the midst of the shadows. Capitan Basilio was on the threshold of immortality: he was going to behold
+something real, something beyond his dreams.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;This was a necklace of Cleopatra&#8217;s,&#8221; said Simoun, taking out carefully a flat case in the shape of a half-moon. &#8220;It&#8217;s a jewel
+that can&#8217;t be appraised, an object for a museum, only for a rich government.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>It was a necklace fashioned of bits of gold representing little idols among green and blue beetles, with a vulture&#8217;s head
+made from a single piece of rare jasper at the center between two extended wings&#8212;the symbol and decoration of Egyptian queens.
+
+</p>
+<p>Sinang turned up her nose and made a grimace of childish depreciation, while Capitan Basilio, with all his love for antiquity,
+could not restrain an exclamation of disappointment.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s a magnificent jewel, well-preserved, almost two thousand years old.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Pshaw!&#8221; Sinang made haste to exclaim, to prevent her father&#8217;s falling into temptation.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Fool!&#8221; he chided her, after overcoming his first disappointment. &#8220;How do you know but that to this necklace is due the present
+condition of the world? With this Cleopatra may have captivated Caesar, Mark Antony! This has heard the burning declarations
+of love from the greatest warriors of their time, it has listened to speeches in the purest and most elegant Latin, and yet
+you would want to wear it!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I? I wouldn&#8217;t give three pesos for it.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You could give twenty, silly,&#8221; said Capitana Tika in a judicial tone. &#8220;The gold is good and melted down would serve for other
+jewelry.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;This is a ring that must have belonged to Sulla,&#8221; continued Simoun, exhibiting a heavy ring of solid gold with a seal on
+it.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;With that he must have signed the death-wrarrants during his dictatorship!&#8221; exclaimed Capitan Basilio, pale <span class="pageno">
+[83]
+</span>with emotion. He examined it and tried to decipher the seal, but though he turned it over and over he did not understand paleography,
+so he could not read it.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What a finger Sulla had!&#8221; he observed finally. &#8220;This would fit two of ours&#8212;as I&#8217;ve said, we&#8217;re degenerating!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I still have many other jewels&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;If they&#8217;re all that kind, never mind!&#8221; interrupted Sinang. &#8220;I think I prefer the modern.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Each one selected some piece of jewelry, one a ring, another a watch, another a locket. Capitana Tika bought a reliquary that
+contained a fragment of the stone on which Our Saviour rested at his third fall; Sinang a pair of earrings; and Capitan Basilio
+the watch-chain for the alferez, the lady&#8217;s earrings for the curate, and other gifts. The families from the town of Tiani,
+not to be outdone by those of San Diego, in like manner emptied their purses.
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun bought or exchanged old jewelry, brought there by economical mothers, to whom it was no longer of use.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You, haven&#8217;t you something to sell?&#8221; he asked Cabesang Tales, noticing the latter watching the sales and exchanges with covetous
+eyes, but the reply was that all his daughter&#8217;s jewels had been sold, nothing of value remained.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What about Maria Clara&#8217;s locket?&#8221; inquired Sinang.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;True!&#8221; the man exclaimed, and his eyes blazed for a moment.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s a locket set with diamonds and emeralds,&#8221; Sinang told the jeweler. &#8220;My old friend wore it before she became a nun.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun said nothing, but anxiously watched Cabesang Tales, who, after opening several boxes, found the locket. He examined
+it carefully, opening and shutting it repeatedly. It was the same locket that Maria Clara had worn during the fiesta in San
+Diego and which she had in a moment of compassion given to a leper.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I like the design,&#8221; said Simoun. &#8220;How much do you want for it?&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[84]
+</span></p>
+<p>Cabesang Tales scratched his head in perplexity, then his ear, then looked at the women.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve taken a fancy to this locket,&#8221; Simoun went on. &#8220;Will you take a hundred, five hundred pesos? Do you want to exchange
+it for something else? Take your choice here!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Tales stared foolishly at Simoun, as if in doubt of what he heard. &#8220;Five hundred pesos?&#8221; he murmured.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Five hundred,&#8221; repeated the jeweler in a voice shaking with emotion.
+
+</p>
+<p>Cabesang Tales took the locket and made several turns about the room, with his heart beating violently and his hands trembling.
+Dared he ask more? That locket could save him, this was an excellent opportunity, such as might not again present itself.
+
+</p>
+<p>The women winked at him to encourage him to make the sale, excepting Penchang, who, fearing that Juli would be ransomed, observed
+piously: &#8220;I would keep it as a relic. Those who have seen Maria Clara in the nunnery say she has got so thin and weak that
+she can scarcely talk and it&#8217;s thought that she&#8217;ll die a saint. Padre Salvi speaks very highly of her and he&#8217;s her confessor.
+That&#8217;s why Juli didn&#8217;t want ito give it up, but rather preferred to pawn herself.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>This speech had its effect&#8212;the thought of his daughter restrained Tales. &#8220;If you will allow me,&#8221; he said, &#8220;I&#8217;ll go to the
+town to consult my daughter. I&#8217;ll be back before night.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>This was agreed upon and Tales set out at once. But when he found himself outside of the village, he made out at a distance,
+on a path, that entered the woods, the friar-administrator and a man whom he recognized as the usurper of his land. A husband
+seeing his wife enter a private room with another man could not feel more wrath or jealousy than Cabesang Tales experienced
+when he saw them moving over his fields, the fields cleared by him, which he had thought to leave to his children. It seemed
+to him that <span class="pageno">
+[85]
+</span>they were mocking him, laughing at his powerlessness. There flashed into his memory what he had said about never giving up
+his fields except to him who irrigated them with his own blood and buried in them his wife and daughter.
+
+</p>
+<p>He stopped, rubbed his hand over his forehead, and shut his eyes. When he again opened them, he saw that the man had turned
+to laugh and that the friar had caught his sides as though to save himself from bursting with merriment, then he saw them
+point toward his house and laugh again.
+
+</p>
+<p>A buzz sounded in his ears, he felt the crack of a whip around his chest, the red mist reappeared before his eyes, he again
+saw the corpses of his wife and daughter, and beside them the usurper with the friar laughing and holding his sides. Forgetting
+everything else, he turned aside into the path they had taken, the one leading to his fields.
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun waited in vain for Cabesang Tales to return that night. But the next morning when he arose he noticed that the leather
+holster of his revolver was empty. Opening it he found inside a scrap of paper wrapped around the locket set with emeralds
+and diamonds, with these few lines written on it in Tagalog:
+
+
+</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>&#8220;Pardon, sir, that in my own house I relieve you of what belongs to you, but necessity drives me to it. In exchange for your
+revolver I leave the locket you desired so much. I need the weapon, for I am going out to join the tulisanes.
+
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I advise you not to keep on your present road, because if you fall into our power, not then being my guest, we will require
+of you a large ransom.
+
+
+</p>
+<p>Telesforo Juan de Dios.&#8221;</p>
+</div><p>
+
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;At last I&#8217;ve found my man!&#8221; muttered Simoun with a deep breath. &#8220;He&#8217;s somewhat scrupulous, but so much the better&#8212;he&#8217;ll keep
+his promises.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>He then ordered a servant to go by boat over the lake to Los Ba&ntilde;os with the larger chest and await him there. He would go
+on overland, taking the smaller chest, the one <span class="pageno">
+[86]
+</span>containing his famous jewels. The arrival of four civil-guards completed his good humor. They came to arrest Cabesang Tales
+and not finding him took Tandang Selo away instead.
+
+</p>
+<p>Three murders had been committed during the night. The friar-administrator and the new tenant of Cabesang Tales&#8217; land had
+been found dead, with their heads split open and their mouths full of earth, on the border of the fields. In the town the
+wife of the usurper was found dead at dawn, her mouth also filled with earth and her throat cut, with a fragment of paper
+beside her, on which was the name <i>Tales</i>, written in blood as though traced by a finger.
+
+</p>
+<p>Calm yourselves, peaceful inhabitants of Kalamba! None of you are named Tales, none of you have committed any crime! You are
+called Luis Haba&ntilde;a, Mat&iacute;as Belarmino, Nicasio Eigasani, Cayetano de Jes&uacute;s, Mateo Elejorde, Leandro Lopez, Antonino Lopez,
+Silvestre Ubaldo, Manuel Hidalgo, Paciano Mercado, your name is the whole village of Kalamba.<a id="d0e1835src" href="#d0e1835" class="noteref">1</a> You cleared your fields, on them you have spent the labor of your whole lives, your savings, your vigils and privations,
+and you have been despoiled of them, driven from your homes, with the rest forbidden to show you hospitality! Not content
+with outraging justice, they<a id="d0e1838src" href="#d0e1838" class="noteref">2</a> have trampled upon the sacred traditions of your country! You have served Spain and the King, and when in their name you
+have asked for justice, you were banished without trial, torn from your wives&#8217; arms and your children&#8217;s caresses! Any one
+of you has suffered more than Cabesang Tales, and yet none, not one of you, has received justice! Neither pity nor humanity
+has been shown you&#8212;you have been persecuted beyond <span class="pageno">
+[87]
+</span>the tomb, as was Mariano Herbosa!<a id="d0e1843src" href="#d0e1843" class="noteref">3</a> Weep or laugh, there in those lonely isles where you wander vaguely, uncertain of the future! Spain, the generous Spain,
+is watching over you, and sooner or later you will have justice!
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[88]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e1835" href="#d0e1835src" class="noteref">1</a> Friends of the author, who suffered in Weyler&#8217;s expedition, mentioned below.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e1838" href="#d0e1838src" class="noteref">2</a> The Dominican corporation, at whose instigation Captain-General Valeriano Weyler sent a battery of artillery to Kalamba to
+destroy the property of tenants who were contesting in the courts the friars&#8217; titles to land there. The author&#8217;s family were
+the largest sufferers.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e1843" href="#d0e1843src" class="noteref">3</a> A relative of the author, whose body was dragged from the tomb and thrown to the dogs, on the pretext that he had died without
+receiving final absolution.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e1847"></a></p>
+<h1>Los Ba&ntilde;os</h1>
+<p>His Excellency, the Captain-General and Governor of the Philippine Islands, had been hunting in Bosoboso. But as he had to
+be accompanied by a band of music,&#8212;since such an exalted personage was not to be esteemed less than the wooden images carried
+in the processions,&#8212;and as devotion to the divine art of St. Cecilia has not yet been popularized among the deer and wild
+boars of Bosoboso, his Excellency, with the band of music and train of friars, soldiers, and clerks, had not been able to
+catch a single rat or a solitary bird.
+
+</p>
+<p>The provincial authorities foresaw dismissals and transfers, the poor gobernadorcillos and cabezas de barangay were restless
+and sleepless, fearing that the mighty hunter in his wrath might have a notion to make up with their persons for the lack
+of submissiveness on the part of the beasts of the forest, as had been done years before by an alcalde who had traveled on
+the shoulders of impressed porters because he found no horses gentle enough to guarantee his safety. There was not lacking
+an evil rumor that his Excellency had decided to take some action, since in this he saw the first symptoms of a rebellion
+which should be strangled in its infancy, that a fruitless hunt hurt the prestige of the Spanish name, that he already had
+his eye on a wretch to be dressed up as a deer, when his Excellency, with clemency that Ben-Zayb lacked words to extol sufficiently,
+dispelled all the fears by declaring that it pained him to sacrifice to his pleasure the beasts of the forest.
+
+</p>
+<p>But to tell the truth, his Excellency was secretly very well satisfied, for what would have happened had he missed <span class="pageno">
+[89]
+</span>a shot at a deer, one of those not familiar with political etiquette? What would the prestige of the sovereign power have
+come to then? A Captain-General of the Philippines missing a shot, like a raw hunter? What would have been said by the Indians,
+among whom there were some fair huntsmen? The integrity of the fatherland would have been endangered.
+
+</p>
+<p>So it was that his Excellency, with a sheepish smile, and posing as a disappointed hunter, ordered an immediate return to
+Los Ba&ntilde;os. During the journey he related with an indifferent air his hunting exploits in this or that forest of the Peninsula,
+adopting a tone somewhat depreciative, as suited the case, toward hunting in Filipinas. The bath in Dampalit, the hot springs
+on the shore of the lake, card-games in the palace, with an occasional excursion to some neighboring waterfall, or the lake
+infested with caymans, offered more attractions and fewer risks to the integrity of the fatherland.
+
+</p>
+<p>Thus on one of the last days of December, his Excellency found himself in the sala, taking a hand at cards while he awaited
+the breakfast hour. He had come from the bath, with the usual glass of coconut-milk and its soft meat, so he was in the best
+of humors for granting favors and privileges. His good humor was increased by his winning a good many hands, for Padre Irene
+and Padre Sibyla, with whom he was playing, were exercising all their skill in secretly trying to lose, to the great irritation
+of Padre Camorra, who on account of his late arrival only that morning was not informed as to the game they were playing on
+the General. The friar-artilleryman was playing in good faith and with great care, so he turned red and bit his lip every
+time Padre Sibyla seemed inattentive or blundered, but he dared not say a word by reason of the respect he felt for the Dominican.
+In exchange he took his revenge out on Padre Irene, whom he looked upon as a base fawner and despised for his coarseness.
+Padre Sibyla let him scold, while the humbler Padre Irene tried to excuse himself <span class="pageno">
+[90]
+</span>by rubbing his long nose. His Excellency was enjoying it and took advantage, like the good tactician that the Canon hinted
+he was, of all the mistakes of his opponents. Padre Camorra was ignorant of the fact that across the table they were playing
+for the intellectual development of the Filipinos, the instruction in Castilian, but had he known it he would doubtless have
+joyfully entered into that <i>game</i>.
+
+</p>
+<p>The open balcony admitted the fresh, pure breeze and revealed the lake, whose waters murmured sweetly around the base of the
+edifice, as if rendering homage. On the right, at a distance, appeared Talim Island, a deep blue in the midst of the lake,
+while almost in front lay the green and deserted islet of Kalamba, in the shape of a half-moon. To the left the picturesque
+shores were fringed with clumps of bamboo, then a hill overlooking the lake, with wide ricefields beyond, then red roofs amid
+the deep green of the trees,&#8212;the town of Kalamba,&#8212;and beyond the shore-line fading into the distance, with the horizon at
+the back closing down over the water, giving the lake the appearance of a sea and justifying the name the Indians give it
+of <i>dagat na tabang</i>, or fresh-water sea.
+
+</p>
+<p>At the end of the sala, seated before a table covered with documents, was the secretary. His Excellency was a great worker
+and did not like to lose time, so he attended to business in the intervals of the game or while dealing the cards. Meanwhile,
+the bored secretary yawned and despaired. That morning he had worked, as usual, over transfers, suspensions of employees,
+deportations, pardons, and the like, but had not yet touched the great question that had stirred so much interest&#8212;the petition
+of the students requesting permission to establish an academy of Castilian. Pacing from one end of the room to the other and
+conversing animatedly but in low tones were to be seen Don Custodio, a high official, and a friar named Padre Fernandez, who
+hung his head with an air either of meditation or annoyance. From an adjoining room issued the <span class="pageno">
+[91]
+</span>click of balls striking together and bursts of laughter, amid which might be heard the sharp, dry voice of Simoun, who was
+playing billiards with Ben-Zayb.
+
+</p>
+<p>Suddenly Padre Camorra arose. &#8220;The devil with this game, <i>pu&ntilde;ales!</i>&#8221; he exclaimed, throwing his cards at Padre Irene&#8217;s head. &#8220;<i>Pu&ntilde;ales</i>, that trick, if not all the others, was assured and we lost by default! <i>Pu&ntilde;ales!</i> The devil with this game!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>He explained the situation angrily to all the occupants of the sala, addressing himself especially to the three walking about,
+as if he had selected them for judges. The general played thus, he replied with such a card, Padre Irene had a certain card;
+he led, and then that fool of a Padre Irene didn&#8217;t play his card! Padre Irene was giving the game away! It was a devil of
+a way to play! His mother&#8217;s son had not come here to rack his brains for nothing and lose his money!
+
+</p>
+<p>Then he added, turning very red, &#8220;If the booby thinks my money grows on every bush!... On top of the fact that my Indians
+are beginning to haggle over payments!&#8221; Fuming, and disregarding the excuses of Padre Irene, who tried to explain while he
+rubbed the tip of his beak in order to conceal his sly smile, he went into the billiardroom.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Padre Fernandez, would you like to take a hand?&#8221; asked Fray Sibyla.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m a very poor player,&#8221; replied the friar with a grimace.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Then get Simoun,&#8221; said the General. &#8220;Eh, Simoun! Eh, Mister, won&#8217;t you try a hand?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What is your disposition concerning the arms for sporting purposes?&#8221; asked the secretary, taking advantage of the pause.
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun thrust his head through the doorway.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t you want to take Padre Camorra&#8217;s place, Se&ntilde;or Sindbad?&#8221; inquired Padre Irene. &#8220;You can bet diamonds instead of chips.&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[92]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t care if I do,&#8221; replied Simoun, advancing while he brushed the chalk from his hands. &#8220;What will you bet?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What should we bet?&#8221; returned Padre Sibyla. &#8220;The General can bet what he likes, but we priests, clerics&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Bah!&#8221; interrupted Simoun ironically. &#8220;You and Padre Irene can pay with deeds of charity, prayers, and virtues, eh?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You know that the virtues a person may possess,&#8221; gravely argued Padre Sibyla, &#8220;are not like the diamonds that may pass from
+hand to hand, to be sold and resold. They are inherent in the being, they are essential attributes of the subject&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ll be satisfied then if you pay me with promises,&#8221; replied Simoun jestingly. &#8220;You, Padre Sibyla, instead of paying me five
+something or other in money, will say, for example: for five days I renounce poverty, humility, and obedience. You, Padre
+Irene: I renounce chastity, liberality, and so on. Those are small matters, and I&#8217;m putting up my diamonds.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What a peculiar man this Simoun is, what notions he has!&#8221; exclaimed Padre Irene with a smile.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;And <i>he</i>,&#8221; continued Simoun, slapping his Excellency familiarly on the shoulder, &#8220;he will pay me with an order for five days in prison,
+or five months, or an order of deportation made out in blank, or let us say a summary execution by the Civil Guard while my
+man is being conducted from one town to another.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>This was a strange proposition, so the three who had been pacing about gathered around.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But, Se&ntilde;or Simoun,&#8221; asked the high official, &#8220;what good will you get out of winning promises of virtues, or lives and deportations
+and summary executions?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;A great deal! I&#8217;m tired of hearing virtues talked about and would like to have the whole of them, all there are in the world,
+tied up in a sack, in order to throw them into the sea, even though I had to use my diamonds for sinkers.&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[93]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;What an idea!&#8221; exclaimed Padre Irene with another smile. &#8220;And the deportations and executions, what of them?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Well, to clean the country and destroy every evil seed.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Get out! You&#8217;re still sore at the tulisanes. But you were lucky that they didn&#8217;t demand a larger ransom or keep all your
+jewels. Man, don&#8217;t be ungrateful!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun proceeded to relate how he had been intercepted by a band of tulisanes, who, after entertaining him for a day, had
+let him go on his way without exacting other ransom than his two fine revolvers and the two boxes of cartridges he carried
+with him. He added that the tulisanes had charged him with many kind regards for his Excellency, the Captain-General.
+
+</p>
+<p>As a result of this, and as Simoun reported that the tulisanes were well provided with shotguns, rifles, and revolvers, and
+against such persons one man alone, no matter how well armed, could not defend himself, his Excellency, to prevent the tulisanes
+from getting weapons in the future, was about to dictate a new decree forbidding the introduction of sporting arms.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;On the contrary, on the contrary!&#8221; protested Simoun, &#8220;for me the tulisanes are the most respectable men in the country, they&#8217;re
+the only ones who earn their living honestly. Suppose I had fallen into the hands&#8212;well, of you yourselves, for example, would
+you have let me escape without taking half of my jewels, at least?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Don Custodio was on the point of protesting; that Simoun was really a rude American mulatto taking advantage of his friendship
+with the Captain-General to insult Padre Irene, although it may be true also that Padre Irene would hardly have set him free
+for so little.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The evil is not,&#8221; went on Simoun, &#8220;in that there are tulisanes in the mountains and uninhabited parts&#8212;the evil lies in the
+tulisanes in the towns and cities.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Like yourself,&#8221; put in the Canon with a smile.
+<span class="pageno">
+[94]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes, like myself, like all of us! Let&#8217;s be frank, for no Indian is listening to us here,&#8221; continued the jeweler. &#8220;The evil
+is that we&#8217;re not all openly declared tulisanes. When that happens and we all take to the woods, on that day the country will
+be saved, on that day will rise a new social order which will take care of itself, and his Excellency will be able to play
+his game in peace, without the necessity of having his attention diverted by his secretary.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The person mentioned at that moment yawned, extending his folded arms above his head and stretching his crossed legs under
+the table as far as possible, upon noticing which all laughed. His Excellency wished to change the course of the conversation,
+so, throwing down the cards he had been shuffling, he said half seriously: &#8220;Come, come, enough of jokes and cards! Let&#8217;s get
+to work, to work in earnest, since we still have a half-hour before breakfast. Are there many matters to be got through with?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>All now gave their attention. That was the day for joining battle over the question of instruction in Castilian, for which
+purpose Padre Sibyla and Padre Irene had been there several days. It was known that the former, as Vice-Rector, was opposed
+to the project and that the latter supported it, and his activity was in turn supported by the Countess.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What is there, what is there?&#8221; asked his Excellency impatiently.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The petition about sporting arms,&#8221; replied the secretary with a stifled yawn.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Forbidden!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Pardon, General,&#8221; said the high official gravely, &#8220;your Excellency will permit me to invite your attention to the fact that
+the use of sporting arms is permitted in all the countries of the world.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The General shrugged his shoulders and remarked dryly, &#8220;We are not imitating any nation in the world.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Between his Excellency and the high official there was always a difference of opinion, so it was sufficient that <span class="pageno">
+[95]
+</span>the latter offer any suggestion whatsoever to have the former remain stubborn.
+
+</p>
+<p>The high official tried another tack. &#8220;Sporting arms can harm only rats and chickens. They&#8217;ll say&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But are we chickens?&#8221; interrupted the General, again shrugging his shoulders. &#8220;Am I? I&#8217;ve demonstrated that I&#8217;m not.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But there&#8217;s another thing,&#8221; observed the secretary. &#8220;Four months ago, when the possession of arms was prohibited, the foreign
+importers were assured that sporting arms would be admitted.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>His Excellency knitted his brows.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;That can be arranged,&#8221; suggested Simoun.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;How?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Very simply. Sporting arms nearly all have a caliber of six millimeters, at least those now in the market. Authorize only
+the sale of those that haven&#8217;t these six millimeters.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>All approved this idea of Simoun&#8217;s, except the high official, who muttered into Padre Fernandez&#8217;s ear that this was not dignified,
+nor was it the way to govern.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The schoolmaster of Tiani,&#8221; proceeded the secretary, shuffling some papers about, &#8220;asks for a better location for&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What better location can he want than the storehouse that he has all to himself?&#8221; interrupted Padre Camorra, who had returned,
+having forgotten about the card-game.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;He says that it&#8217;s roofless,&#8221; replied the secretary, &#8220;and that having purchased out of his own pocket some maps and pictures,
+he doesn&#8217;t want to expose them to the weather.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But I haven&#8217;t anything to do with that,&#8221; muttered his Excellency. &#8220;He should address the head secretary,<a id="d0e1991src" href="#d0e1991" class="noteref">1</a> the governor of the province, or the nuncio.&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[96]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;I want to tell you,&#8221; declared Padre Camorra, &#8220;that this little schoolmaster is a discontented filibuster. Just imagine&#8212;the
+heretic teaches that corpses rot just the same, whether buried with great pomp or without any! Some day I&#8217;m going to punch
+him!&#8221; Here he doubled up his fists.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;To tell the truth,&#8221; observed Padre Sibyla, as if speaking only to Padre Irene, &#8220;he who wishes to teach, teaches everywhere,
+in the open air. Socrates taught in the public streets, Plato in the gardens of the Academy, even Christ among the mountains
+and lakes.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve heard several complaints against this schoolmaster,&#8221; said his Excellency, exchanging a glance with Simoun. &#8220;I think
+the best thing would be to suspend him.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Suspended!&#8221; repeated the secretary.
+
+</p>
+<p>The luck of that unfortunate, who had asked for help and received his dismissal, pained the high official and he tried to
+do something for him.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s certain,&#8221; he insinuated rather timidly, &#8220;that education is not at all well provided for&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve already decreed large sums for the purchase of supplies,&#8221; exclaimed his Excellency haughtily, as if to say, &#8220;I&#8217;ve done
+more than I ought to have done.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But since suitable locations are lacking, the supplies purchased get ruined.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Everything can&#8217;t be done at once,&#8221; said his Excellency dryly. &#8220;The schoolmasters here are doing wrong in asking for buildings
+when those in Spain starve to death. It&#8217;s great presumption to be better off here than in the mother country itself!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Filibusterism&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Before everything the fatherland! Before everything else we are Spaniards!&#8221; added Ben-Zayb, his eyes glowing with patriotism,
+but he blushed somewhat when he noticed that he was speaking alone.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;In the future,&#8221; decided the General, &#8220;all who complain will be suspended.&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[97]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;If my project were accepted&#8212;&#8221; Don Custodio ventured to remark, as if talking to himself.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;For the construction of schoolhouses?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s simple, practical, economical, and, like all my projects, derived from long experience and knowledge of the country.
+The towns would have schools without costing the government a cuarto.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s easy,&#8221; observed the secretary sarcastically. &#8220;Compel the towns to construct them at their own expense,&#8221; whereupon
+all laughed.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No, sir! No, sir!&#8221; cried the exasperated Don Custodio, turning very red. &#8220;The buildings are already constructed and only
+wait to be utilized. Hygienic, unsurpassable, spacious&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The friars looked at one another uneasily. Would Don Custodio propose that the churches and conventos be converted into schoolhouses?
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Let&#8217;s hear it,&#8221; said the General with a frown.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Well, General, it&#8217;s very simple,&#8221; replied Don Custodio, drawing himself up and assuming his hollow voice of ceremony. &#8220;The
+schools are open only on week-days and the cockpits on holidays. Then convert these into schoolhouses, at least during the
+week.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Man, man, man!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What a lovely idea!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s the matter with you, Don Custodio?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s a grand suggestion!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;That beats them all!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But, gentlemen,&#8221; cried Don Custodio, in answer to so many exclamations, &#8220;let&#8217;s be practical&#8212;what places are more suitable
+than the cockpits? They&#8217;re large, well constructed, and under a curse for the use to which they are put during the week-days.
+From a moral standpoint my project would be acceptable, by serving as a kind of expiation and weekly purification of the temple
+of chance, as we might say.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But the fact remains that sometimes there are cockfights <span class="pageno">
+[98]
+</span>during the week,&#8221; objected Padre Camorra, &#8220;and it wouldn&#8217;t be right when the contractors of the cockpits pay the government&#8212;&#8221;<a id="d0e2052src" href="#d0e2052" class="noteref">2</a>
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Well, on those days close the school!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Man, man!&#8221; exclaimed the scandalized Captain-General. &#8220;Such an outrage shall never be perpetrated while I govern! To close
+the schools in order to gamble! Man, man, I&#8217;ll resign first!&#8221; His Excellency was really horrified.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But, General, it&#8217;s better to close them for a few days than for months.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It would be immoral,&#8221; observed Padre Irene, more indignant even than his Excellency.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s more immoral that vice has good buildings and learning none. Let&#8217;s be practical, gentlemen, and not be carried away
+by sentiment. In politics there&#8217;s nothing worse than sentiment. While from humane considerations we forbid the cultivation
+of opium in our colonies, we tolerate the smoking of it, and the result is that we do not combat the vice but impoverish ourselves.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But remember that it yields to the government, without any effort, more than four hundred and fifty thousand pesos,&#8221; objected
+Padre Irene, who was getting more and more on the governmental side.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Enough, enough, enough!&#8221; exclaimed his Excellency, to end the discussion. &#8220;I have my own plans in this regard and will devote
+special attention to the matter of public instruction. Is there anything else?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The secretary looked uneasily toward Padre Sibyla and Padre Irene. The cat was about to come out of the bag. Both prepared
+themselves.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The petition of the students requesting authorization to open an academy of Castilian,&#8221; answered the secretary.
+
+</p>
+<p>A general movement was noted among those in the room. After glancing at one another they fixed their eyes on the <span class="pageno">
+[99]
+</span>General to learn what his disposition would be. For six months the petition had lain there awaiting a decision and had become
+converted into a kind of <i>casus belli</i> in certain circles. His Excellency had lowered his eyes, as if to keep his thoughts from being read.
+
+</p>
+<p>The silence became embarrassing, as the General understood, so he asked the high official, &#8220;What do you think?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What should I think, General?&#8221; responded the person addressed, with a shrug of his shoulders and a bitter smile. &#8220;What should
+I think but that the petition is just, very just, and that I am surprised that six months should have been taken to consider
+it.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The fact is that it involves other considerations,&#8221; said Padre Sibyla coldly, as he half closed his eyes.
+
+</p>
+<p>The high official again shrugged his shoulders, like one who did not comprehend what those considerations could be.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Besides the intemperateness of the demand,&#8221; went on the Dominican, &#8220;besides the fact that it is in the nature of an infringement
+on our prerogatives&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Padre Sibyla dared not go on, but looked at Simoun.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The petition has a somewhat suspicious character,&#8221; corroborated that individual, exchanging a look with the Dominican, who
+winked several times.
+
+</p>
+<p>Padre Irene noticed these things and realized that his cause was almost lost&#8212;Simoun was against him.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s a peaceful rebellion, a revolution on stamped paper,&#8221; added Padre Sibyla.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Revolution? Rebellion?&#8221; inquired the high official, staring from one to the other as if he did not understand what they could
+mean.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s headed by some young men charged with being too radical and too much interested in reforms, not to use stronger terms,&#8221;
+remarked the secretary, with a look at the Dominican. &#8220;Among them is a certain Isagani, a poorly balanced head, nephew of
+a native priest&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;He&#8217;s a pupil of mine,&#8221; put in Padre Fernandez, &#8220;and I&#8217;m much pleased with him.&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[100]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Pu&ntilde;ales,</i> I like your taste!&#8221; exclaimed Padre Camorra. &#8220;On the steamer we nearly had a fight. He&#8217;s so insolent that when I gave him
+a shove aside he returned it.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s also one Makaragui or Makarai&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Makaraig,&#8221; Padre Irene joined in. &#8220;A very pleasant and agreeable young man.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Then he murmured into the General&#8217;s ear, &#8220;He&#8217;s the one I&#8217;ve talked to you about, he&#8217;s very rich. The Countess recommends him
+strongly.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ah!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;A medical student, one Basilio&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Of that Basilio, I&#8217;ll say nothing,&#8221; observed Padre Irene, raising his hands and opening them, as if to say <i>Dominus vobiscum</i>. &#8220;He&#8217;s too deep for me. I&#8217;ve never succeeded in fathoming what he wants or what he is thinking about. It&#8217;s a pity that Padre
+Salvi isn&#8217;t present to tell us something about his antecedents. I believe that I&#8217;ve heard that when a boy he got into trouble
+with the Civil Guard. His father was killed in&#8212;I don&#8217;t remember what disturbance.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun smiled faintly, silently, showing his sharp white teeth.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Aha! Aha!&#8221; said his Excellency nodding. &#8220;That&#8217;s the kind we have! Make a note of that name.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But, General,&#8221; objected the high official, seeing that the matter was taking a bad turn, &#8220;up to now nothing positive is known
+against these young men. Their position is a very just one, and we have no right to deny it on the ground of mere conjectures.
+My opinion is that the government, by exhibiting confidence in the people and in its own stability, should grant what is asked,
+then it could freely revoke the permission when it saw that its kindness was being abused&#8212;reasons and pretexts would not be
+wanting, we can watch them. Why cause disaffection among some young men, who later on may feel resentment, when what they
+ask is commanded by royal decrees?&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[101]
+</span></p>
+<p>Padre Irene, Don Custodio, and Padre Fernandez nodded in agreement.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But the Indians must not understand Castilian, you know,&#8221; cried Padre Camorra. &#8220;They mustn&#8217;t learn it, for then they&#8217;ll enter
+into arguments with us, and the Indians must not argue, but obey and pay. They mustn&#8217;t try to interpret the meaning of the
+laws and the books, they&#8217;re so tricky and pettifogish! Just as soon as they learn Castilian they become enemies of God and
+of Spain. Just read the <i>Tandang Basio Macunat</i>&#8212;that&#8217;s a book! It tells truths like this!&#8221; And he held up his clenched fists.
+
+</p>
+<p>Padre Sibyla rubbed his hand over his tonsure in sign of impatience. &#8220;One word,&#8221; he began in the most conciliatory tone, though
+fuming with irritation, &#8220;here we&#8217;re not dealing with the instruction in Castilian alone. Here there is an underhand fight
+between the students and the University of Santo Tomas. If the students win this, our prestige will be trampled in the dirt,
+they will say that they&#8217;ve beaten us and will exult accordingly. Then, good-by to moral strength, good-by to everything! The
+first dike broken down, who will restrain this youth? With our fall we do no more than signal your own. After us, the government!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Pu&ntilde;ales</i>, that&#8217;s not so!&#8221; exclaimed Padre Camorra. &#8220;We&#8217;ll see first who has the biggest fists!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>At this point Padre Fernandez, who thus far in the discussion had merely contented himself with smiling, began to talk. All
+gave him their attention, for they knew him to be a thoughtful man.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t take it ill of me, Padre Sibyla, if I differ from your view of the affair, but it&#8217;s my peculiar fate to be almost always
+in opposition to my brethren. I say, then, that we ought not to be so pessimistic. The instruction in Castilian can be allowed
+without any risk whatever, and in order that it may not appear to be a defeat of the University, we Dominicans ought to put
+forth our efforts and <span class="pageno">
+[102]
+</span>be the first to rejoice over it&#8212;that should be our policy. To what end are we to be engaged in an everlasting struggle with
+the people, when after all we are the few and they are the many, when we need them and they do not need us? Wait, Padre Camorra,
+wait! Admit that now the people may be weak and ignorant&#8212;I also believe that&#8212;but it will not be true tomorrow or the day after.
+Tomorrow and the next day they will be the stronger, they will know what is good for them, and we cannot keep it from them,
+just as it is not possible to keep from children the knowledge of many things when they reach a certain age. I say, then,
+why should we not take advantage of this condition of ignorance to change our policy completely, to place it upon a basis
+solid and enduring&#8212;on the basis of justice, for example, instead of on the basis of ignorance? There&#8217;s nothing like being
+just; that I&#8217;ve always said to my brethren, but they won&#8217;t believe me. The Indian idolizes justice, like every race in its
+youth; he asks for punishment when he has done wrong, just as he is exasperated when he has not deserved it. Is theirs a just
+desire? Then grant it! Let&#8217;s give them all the schools they want, until they are tired of them. Youth is lazy, and what urges
+them to activity is our opposition. Our bond of prestige, Padre Sibyla, is about worn out, so let&#8217;s prepare another, the bond
+of gratitude, for example. Let&#8217;s not be fools, let&#8217;s do as the crafty Jesuits&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Padre Fernandez!&#8221; Anything could be tolerated by Padre Sibyla except to propose the Jesuits to him as a model. Pale and trembling,
+he broke out into bitter recrimination. &#8220;A Franciscan first! Anything before a Jesuit!&#8221; He was beside himself.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Oh, oh!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Eh, Padre&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>A general discussion broke out, regardless of the Captain-General. All talked at once, they yelled, they misunderstood and
+contradicted one another. Ben-Zayb and Padre Camorra shook their fists in each other&#8217;s faces, one talking <span class="pageno">
+[103]
+</span>of simpletons and the other of ink-slingers, Padre Sibyla kept harping on the <i>Capitulum</i>, and Padre Fernandez on the <i>Summa</i> of St. Thomas, until the curate of Los Ba&ntilde;os entered to announce that breakfast was served.
+
+</p>
+<p>His Excellency arose and so ended the discussion. &#8220;Well, gentlemen,&#8221; he said, &#8220;we&#8217;ve worked like niggers and yet we&#8217;re on
+a vacation. Some one has said that grave matters should he considered at dessert. I&#8217;m entirely of that opinion.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;We might get indigestion,&#8221; remarked the secretary, alluding to the heat of the discussion.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Then we&#8217;ll lay it aside until tomorrow.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>As they rose the high official whispered to the General, &#8220;Your Excellency, the daughter of Cabesang Tales has been here again
+begging for the release of her sick grandfather, who was arrested in place of her father.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>His Excellency looked at him with an expression of impatience and rubbed his hand across his broad forehead. &#8220;<i>Carambas</i>! Can&#8217;t one be left to eat his breakfast in peace?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;This is the third day she has come. She&#8217;s a poor girl&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Oh, the devil!&#8221; exclaimed Padre Camorra. &#8220;I&#8217;ve just thought of it. I have something to say to the General about that&#8212;that&#8217;s
+what I came over for&#8212;to support that girl&#8217;s petition.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The General scratched the back of his ear and said, &#8220;Oh, go along! Have the secretary make out an order to the lieutenant
+of the Civil Guard for the old man&#8217;s release. They sha&#8217;n&#8217;t say that we&#8217;re not clement and merciful.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>He looked at Ben-Zayb. The journalist winked.
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[104]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e1991" href="#d0e1991src" class="noteref">1</a> Under the Spanish r&eacute;gime the government paid no attention to education, the schools (!) being under the control of the religious
+orders and the friar-curates of the towns.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e2052" href="#d0e2052src" class="noteref">2</a> The cockpits are farmed out annually by the local governments, the terms &#8220;contract,&#8221; and &#8220;contractor,&#8221; having now been softened
+into &#8220;license&#8221; and &#8220;licensee.&#8221;&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e2190"></a></p>
+<h1>Placido Penitente</h1>
+<p>Reluctantly, and almost with tearful eyes, Placido Penitente was going along the Escolta on his way to the University of Santo
+Tomas. It had hardly been a week since he had come from his town, yet he had already written to his mother twice, reiterating
+his desire to abandon his studies and go back there to work. His mother answered that he should have patience, that at the
+least he must be graduated as a bachelor of arts, since it would be unwise to desert his books after four years of expense
+and sacrifices on both their parts.
+
+</p>
+<p>Whence came to Penitente this aversion to study, when he had been one of the most diligent in the famous college conducted
+by Padre Valerio in Tanawan? There Penitente had been considered one of the best Latinists and the subtlest disputants, one
+who could tangle or untangle the simplest as well as the most abstruse questions. His townspeople considered him very clever,
+and his curate, influenced by that opinion, already classified him as a filibuster&#8212;a sure proof that he was neither foolish
+nor incapable. His friends could not explain those desires for abandoning his studies and returning: he had no sweethearts,
+was not a gambler, hardly knew anything about <i>hunk&iacute;an</i> and rarely tried his luck at the more familiar <i>revesino</i>. He did not believe in the advice of the curates, laughed at <i>Tandang Basio Macunat</i>, had plenty of money and good clothes, yet he went to school reluctantly and looked with repugnance on his books.
+
+</p>
+<p>On the Bridge of Spain, a bridge whose name alone came from Spain, since even its ironwork came from foreign <span class="pageno">
+[105]
+</span>countries, he fell in with the long procession of young men on their way to the Walled City to their respective schools. Some
+were dressed in the European fashion and walked rapidly, carrying books and notes, absorbed in thoughts of their lessons and
+essays&#8212;these were the students of the Ateneo. Those from San Juan de Letran were nearly all dressed in the Filipino costume,
+but were more numerous and carried fewer books. Those from the University are dressed more carefully and elegantly and saunter
+along carrying canes instead of books. The collegians of the Philippines are not very noisy or turbulent. They move along
+in a preoccupied manner, such that upon seeing them one would say that before their eyes shone no hope, no smiling future.
+Even though here and there the line is brightened by the attractive appearance of the schoolgirls of the <i>Escuela Municipal</i>,<a id="d0e2213src" href="#d0e2213" class="noteref">1</a> with their sashes across their shoulders and their books in their hands, followed by their servants, yet scarcely a laugh
+resounds or a joke can be heard&#8212;nothing of song or jest, at best a few heavy jokes or scuffles among the smaller boys. The
+older ones nearly always proceed seriously and composedly, like the German students.
+
+</p>
+<p>Placido was proceeding along the Paseo de Magallanes toward the breach&#8212;formerly the gate&#8212;of Santo Domingo, when he suddenly
+felt a slap on the shoulder, which made him turn quickly in ill humor.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Hello, Penitente! Hello, Penitente!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>It was his schoolmate Juanito Pelaez, the <i>barbero</i> or pet of the professors, as big a rascal as he could be, with a roguish look and a clownish smile. The son of a Spanish
+mestizo&#8212;a rich merchant in one of the suburbs, who based all his hopes and joys on the boy&#8217;s talent&#8212;he promised well with
+his roguery, and, thanks to his custom of playing tricks on every one and then hiding behind his companions, <span class="pageno">
+[106]
+</span>he had acquired a peculiar hump, which grew larger whenever he was laughing over his deviltry.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What kind of time did you have, Penitente?&#8221; was his question as he again slapped him on the shoulder.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;So, so,&#8221; answered Placido, rather bored. &#8220;And you?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Well, it was great! Just imagine&#8212;the curate of Tiani invited me to spend the vacation in his town, and I went. Old man, you
+know Padre Camorra, I suppose? Well, he&#8217;s a liberal curate, very jolly, frank, very frank, one of those like Padre Paco. As
+there were pretty girls, we serenaded them all, he with his guitar and songs and I with my violin. I tell you, old man, we
+had a great time&#8212;there wasn&#8217;t a house we didn&#8217;t try!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>He whispered a few words in Placido&#8217;s ear and then broke out into laughter. As the latter exhibited some surprise, he resumed:
+&#8220;I&#8217;ll swear to it! They can&#8217;t help themselves, because with a governmental order you get rid of the father, husband, or brother,
+and then&#8212;merry Christmas! However, we did run up against a little fool, the sweetheart, I believe, of Basilio, you know? Look,
+what a fool this Basilio is! To have a sweetheart who doesn&#8217;t know a word of Spanish, who hasn&#8217;t any money, and who has been
+a servant! She&#8217;s as shy as she can be, but pretty. Padre Camorra one night started to club two fellows who were serenading
+her and I don&#8217;t know how it was he didn&#8217;t kill them, yet with all that she was just as shy as ever. But it&#8217;ll result for her
+as it does with all the women, all of them!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Juanito Pelaez laughed with a full mouth, as though he thought this a glorious thing, while Placido stared at him in disgust.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Listen, what did the professor explain yesterday?&#8221; asked Juanito, changing the conversation.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yesterday there was no class.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Oho, and the day before yesterday?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Man, it was Thursday!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Right! What an ass I am! Don&#8217;t you know, Placido, <span class="pageno">
+[107]
+</span>that I&#8217;m getting to be a regular ass? What about Wednesday?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Wednesday? Wait&#8212;Wednesday, it was a little wet.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Fine! What about Tuesday, old man?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Tuesday was the professor&#8217;s nameday and we went to entertain him with an orchestra, present him flowers and some gifts.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ah, <i>carambas!</i>&#8221; exclaimed Juanito, &#8220;that I should have forgotten about it! What an ass I am! Listen, did he ask for me?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Penitente shrugged his shoulders. &#8220;I don&#8217;t know, but they gave him a list of his entertainers.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Carambas!</i> Listen&#8212;Monday, what happened?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;As it was the first school-day, he called the roll and assigned the lesson&#8212;about mirrors. Look, from here to here, by memory,
+word for word. We jump all this section, we take that.&#8221; He was pointing out with his finger in the &#8220;Physics&#8221; the portions
+that were to be learned, when suddenly the book flew through the air, as a result of the slap Juanito gave it from below.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Thunder, let the lessons go! Let&#8217;s have a <i>dia pichido!</i>&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The students in Manila call <i>dia pichido</i> a school-day that falls between two holidays and is consequently suppressed, as though forced out by their wish.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Do you know that you really are an ass?&#8221; exclaimed Placido, picking up his book and papers.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Let&#8217;s have a <i>dia pichido!</i>&#8221; repeated Juanito.
+
+</p>
+<p>Placido was unwilling, since for only two the authorities were hardly going to suspend a class of more than a hundred and
+fifty. He recalled the struggles and privations his mother was suffering in order to keep him in Manila, while she went without
+even the necessities of life.
+
+</p>
+<p>They were just passing through the breach of Santo Domingo, and Juanito, gazing across the little plaza<a id="d0e2293src" href="#d0e2293" class="noteref">2</a> in <span class="pageno">
+[108]
+</span>front of the old Customs building, exclaimed, &#8220;Now I think of it, I&#8217;m appointed to take up the collection.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What collection?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;For the monument.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What monument?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Get out! For Padre Balthazar, you know.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;And who was Padre Balthazar?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Fool! A Dominican, of course&#8212;that&#8217;s why the padres call on the students. Come on now, loosen up with three or four pesos,
+so that they may see we are sports. Don&#8217;t let them say afterwards that in order to erect a statue they had to dig down into
+their own pockets. Do, Placido, it&#8217;s not money thrown away.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>He accompanied these words with a significant wink. Placido recalled the case of a student who had passed through the entire
+course by presenting canary-birds, so he subscribed three pesos.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Look now, I&#8217;ll write your name plainly so that the professor will read it, you see&#8212;Placido Penitente, three pesos. Ah, listen!
+In a couple of weeks comes the nameday of the professor of natural history. You know that he&#8217;s a good fellow, never marks
+absences or asks about the lesson. Man, we must show our appreciation!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s right!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Then don&#8217;t you think that we ought to give him a celebration? The orchestra must not be smaller than the one you had for
+the professor of physics.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s right!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What do you think about making the contribution two pesos? Come, Placido, you start it, so you&#8217;ll be at the head of the list.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Then, seeing that Placido gave the two pesos without hesitation, he added, &#8220;Listen, put up four, and afterwards I&#8217;ll return
+you two. They&#8217;ll serve as a decoy.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Well, if you&#8217;re going to return them to me, why give them to you? It&#8217;ll be sufficient, for you to write four.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ah, that&#8217;s right! What an ass I am! Do you know, <span class="pageno">
+[109]
+</span>I&#8217;m getting to be a regular ass! But let me have them anyhow, so that I can show them.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Placido, in order not to give the lie to the priest who christened him, gave what was asked, just as they reached the University.
+
+</p>
+<p>In the entrance and along the walks on each side of it were gathered the students, awaiting the appearance of the professors.
+Students of the preparatory year of law, of the fifth of the secondary course, of the preparatory in medicine, formed lively
+groups. The latter were easily distinguished by their clothing and by a certain air that was lacking in the others, since
+the greater part of them came from the Ateneo Municipal. Among them could be seen the poet Isagani, explaining to a companion
+the theory of the refraction of light. In another group they were talking, disputing, citing the statements of the professor,
+the text-books, and scholastic principles; in yet another they were gesticulating and waving their books in the air or making
+demonstrations with their canes by drawing diagrams on the ground; farther on, they were entertaining themselves in watching
+the pious women go into the neighboring church, all the students making facetious remarks. An old woman leaning on a young
+girl limped piously, while the girl moved along writh downcast eyes, timid and abashed to pass before so many curious eyes.
+The old lady, catching up her coffee-colored skirt, of the Sisterhood of St. Rita, to reveal her big feet and white stockings,
+scolded her companion and shot furious glances at the staring bystanders.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The rascals!&#8221; she grunted. &#8220;Don&#8217;t look at them, keep your eyes down.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Everything was noticed; everything called forth jokes and comments. Now it was a magnificent victoria which stopped at the
+door to set down a family of votaries on their way to visit the Virgin of the Rosary<a id="d0e2338src" href="#d0e2338" class="noteref">3</a> on her favorite <span class="pageno">
+[110]
+</span>day, while the inquisitive sharpened their eyes to get a glimpse of the shape and size of the young ladies&#8217; feet as they got
+out of the carriages; now it was a student who came out of the door with devotion still shining in his eyes, for he had passed
+through the church to beg the Virgin&#8217;s help in understanding his lesson and to see if his sweetheart was there, to exchange
+a few glances with her and go on to his class with the recollection of her loving eyes.
+
+</p>
+<p>Soon there was noticed some movement in the groups, a certain air of expectancy, while Isagani paused and turned pale. A carriage
+drawn by a pair of well-known white horses had stopped at the door. It was that of Paulita Gomez, and she had already jumped
+down, light as a bird, without giving the rascals time to see her foot. With a bewitching whirl of her body and a sweep of
+her hand she arranged the folds of her skirt, shot a rapid and apparently careless glance toward Isagani, spoke to him and
+smiled. Do&ntilde;a Victorina descended in her turn, gazed over her spectacles, saw Juanito Pelaez, smiled, and bowed to him affably.
+
+</p>
+<p>Isagani, flushed with excitement, returned a timid salute, while Juanito bowed profoundly, took off his hat, and made the
+same gesture as the celebrated clown and caricaturist Panza when he received applause.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Heavens, what a girl!&#8221; exclaimed one of the students, starting forward. &#8220;Tell the professor that I&#8217;m seriously ill.&#8221; So Tadeo,
+as this invalid youth was known, entered the church to follow the girl.
+
+</p>
+<p>Tadeo went to the University every day to ask if the classes would be held and each time seemed to be more and more astonished
+that they would. He had a fixed idea of a latent and eternal <i>holiday</i>, and expected it to come any day. So each morning, after vainly proposing that they play truant, he would go away alleging
+important business, an appointment, or illness, just at the very moment when his companions were going to their classes. But
+by some occult, thaumaturgic art Tadeo passed the examinations, was beloved <span class="pageno">
+[111]
+</span>by the professors, and had before him a promising future.
+
+</p>
+<p>Meanwhile, the groups began to move inside, for the professor of physics and chemistry had put in his appearance. The students
+appeared to be cheated in their hopes and went toward the interior of the building with exclamations of discontent. Placido
+went along with the crowd.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Penitente, Penitente!&#8221; called a student with a certain mysterious air. &#8220;Sign this!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What is it?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Never mind&#8212;sign it!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>It seemed to Placido that some one was twitching his ears. He recalled the story of a cabeza de barangay in his town who,
+for having signed a document that he did not understand, was kept a prisoner for months and months, and came near to deportation.
+An uncle of Placido&#8217;s, in order to fix the lesson in his memory, had given him a severe ear-pulling, so that always whenever
+he heard signatures spoken of, his ears reproduced the sensation.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Excuse me, but I can&#8217;t sign anything without first understanding what it&#8217;s about.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What a fool you are! If two <i>celestial carbineers</i> have signed it, what have you to fear?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The name of <i>celestial carbineers</i> inspired confidence, being, as it was, a sacred company created to aid God in the warfare against the evil spirit and to
+prevent the smuggling of heretical contraband into the markets of the New Zion.<a id="d0e2378src" href="#d0e2378" class="noteref">4</a>
+
+</p>
+<p>Placido was about to sign to make an end of it, because he was in a hurry,&#8212;already his classmates were reciting the <i>O Thoma</i>,&#8212;but again his ears twitched, so he said, &#8220;After the class! I want to read it first.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s very long, don&#8217;t you see? It concerns the presentation of a counter-petition, or rather, a protest. Don&#8217;t <span class="pageno">
+[112]
+</span>you understand? Makaraig and some others have asked that an academy of Castilian be opened, which is a piece of genuine foolishness&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;All right, all right, after awhile. They&#8217;re already beginning,&#8221; answered Placido, trying to get away.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But your professor may not call the roll&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes, yes; but he calls it sometimes. Later on, later on! Besides, I don&#8217;t want to put myself in opposition to Makaraig.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But it&#8217;s not putting yourself in opposition, it&#8217;s only&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Placido heard no more, for he was already far away, hurrying to his class. He heard the different voices&#8212;<i>adsum, adsum</i>&#8212;the roll was being called! Hastening his steps he got to the door just as the letter Q was reached.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Tinam&aacute;an &ntilde;g&#8212;!</i>&#8221;<a id="d0e2411src" href="#d0e2411" class="noteref">5</a> he muttered, biting his lips.
+
+</p>
+<p>He hesitated about entering, for the mark was already down against him and was not to be erased. One did not go to the class
+to learn but in order not to get this absence mark, for the class was reduced to reciting the lesson from memory, reading
+the book, and at the most answering a few abstract, profound, captious, enigmatic questions. True, the usual preachment was
+never lacking&#8212;the same as ever, about humility, submission, and respect to the clerics, and he, Placido, was humble, submissive,
+and respectful. So he was about to turn away when he remembered that the examinations were approaching and his professor had
+not yet asked him a question nor appeared to notice him&#8212;this would be a good opportunity to attract his attention and become
+known! To be known was to gain a year, for if it cost nothing to suspend one who was not known, it required a hard heart not
+to be touched by the sight of a youth who by his daily presence was a reproach over a year of his life wasted.
+<span class="pageno">
+[113]
+</span></p>
+<p>So Placido went in, not on tiptoe as was his custom, but noisily on his heels, and only too well did he succeed in his intent!
+The professor stared at him, knitted his brows, and shook his head, as though to say, &#8220;Ah, little impudence, you&#8217;ll pay for
+that!&#8221;
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[114]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e2213" href="#d0e2213src" class="noteref">1</a> The &#8220;Municipal School for Girls&#8221; was founded by the municipality of Manila in 1864.... The institution was in charge of the
+Sisters of Charity.&#8212;<i>Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. III, p. 615</i>.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e2293" href="#d0e2293src" class="noteref">2</a> Now known as Plaza Espa&ntilde;a.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e2338" href="#d0e2338src" class="noteref">3</a> Patroness of the Dominican Order. She was formally and sumptuously recrowned a queen of the skies in 1907.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e2378" href="#d0e2378src" class="noteref">4</a> A burlesque on an association of students known as the <i>Milicia Angelica</i>, organized by the Dominicans to strengthen their hold on the people. The name used is significant, &#8220;carbineers&#8221; being the
+local revenue officers, notorious in their later days for graft and abuse.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e2411" href="#d0e2411src" class="noteref">5</a> &#8220;Tinam&aacute;an &ntilde;g lintik!&#8221;&#8212;a Tagalog exclamation of anger, disappointment, or dismay, regarded as a very strong expression, equivalent
+to profanity. Literally, &#8220;May the lightning strike you!&#8221;&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e2420"></a></p>
+<h1>The Class in Physics</h1>
+<p>The classroom was a spacious rectangular hall with large grated windows that admitted an abundance of light and air. Along
+the two sides extended three wide tiers of stone covered with wood, filled with students arranged in alphabetical order. At
+the end opposite the entrance, under a print of St. Thomas Aquinas, rose the professor&#8217;s chair on an elevated platform with
+a little stairway on each side. With the exception of a beautiful blackboard in a narra frame, scarcely ever used, since there
+was still written on it the <i>viva</i> that had appeared on the opening day, no furniture, either useful or useless, was to be seen. The walls, painted white and
+covered with glazed tiles to prevent scratches, were entirely bare, having neither a drawing nor a picture, nor even an outline
+of any physical apparatus. The students had no need of any, no one missed the practical instruction in an extremely experimental
+science; for years and years it has been so taught and the country has not been upset, but continues just as ever. Now and
+then some little instrument descended from heaven and was exhibited to the class from a distance, like the monstrance to the
+prostrate worshipers&#8212;look, but touch not! From time to time, when some complacent professor appeared, one day in the year
+was set aside for visiting the mysterious laboratory and gazing from without at the puzzling apparatus arranged in glass cases.
+No one could complain, for on that day there were to be seen quantities of brass and glassware, tubes, disks, wheels, bells,
+and the like&#8212;the exhibition did not get beyond that, and the country was not upset.
+<span class="pageno">
+[115]
+</span></p>
+<p>Besides, the students were convinced that those instruments had not been purchased for them&#8212;the friars would be fools! The
+laboratory was intended to be shown to the visitors and the high officials who came from the Peninsula, so that upon seeing
+it they would nod their heads with satisfaction, while their guide would smile, as if to say, &#8220;Eh, you thought you were going
+to find some backward monks! Well, we&#8217;re right up with the times&#8212;we have a laboratory!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The visitors and high officials, after being handsomely entertained, would then write in their <i>Travels</i> or <i>Memoirs</i>: &#8220;The Royal and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas of Manila, in charge of the enlightened Dominican Order, possesses a
+magnificent physical laboratory for the instruction of youth. Some two hundred and fifty students annually study this subject,
+but whether from apathy, indolence, the limited capacity of the Indian, or some other ethnological or incomprehensible reason,
+up to now there has not developed a Lavoisier, a Secchi, or a Tyndall, not even in miniature, in the Malay-Filipino race.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Yet, to be exact, we will say that in this laboratory are held the classes of thirty or forty <i>advanced</i> students, under the direction of an instructor who performs his duties well enough, but as the greater part of these students
+come from the Ateneo of the Jesuits, where science is taught practically in the laboratory itself, its utility does not come
+to be so great as it would be if it could be utilized by the two hundred and fifty who pay their matriculation fees, buy their
+books, memorize them, and waste a year to know nothing afterwards. As a result, with the exception of some rare usher or janitor
+who has had charge of the museum for years, no one has ever been known to get any advantage from the lessons memorized with
+so great effort.
+
+</p>
+<p>But let us return to the class. The professor was a young Dominican, who had filled several chairs in San Juan de Letran with
+zeal and good repute. He had the reputation of being a great logician as well as a profound <span class="pageno">
+[116]
+</span>philosopher, and was one of the most promising in his clique. His elders treated him with consideration, while the younger
+men envied him, for there were also cliques among them. This was the third year of his professorship and, although the first
+in which he had taught physics and chemistry, he already passed for a sage, not only with the complaisant students but also
+among the other nomadic professors. Padre Millon did not belong to the common crowd who each year change their subject in
+order to acquire scientific knowledge, students among other students, with the difference only that they follow a single course,
+that they quiz instead of being quizzed, that they have a better knowledge of Castilian, and that they are not examined at
+the completion of the course. Padre Millon went deeply into science, knew the physics of Aristotle and Padre Amat, read carefully
+his &#8220;Ramos,&#8221; and sometimes glanced at &#8220;Ganot.&#8221; With all that, he would often shake his head with an air of doubt, as he smiled
+and murmured: &#8220;<i>transeat</i>.&#8221; In regard to chemistry, no common knowledge was attributed to him after he had taken as a premise the statement of St.
+Thomas that water is a mixture and proved plainly that the Angelic Doctor had long forestalled Berzelius, Gay-Lussac, Bunsen,
+and other more or less presumptuous materialists. Moreover, in spite of having been an instructor in geography, he still entertained
+certain doubts as to the rotundity of the earth and smiled maliciously when its rotation and revolution around the sun were
+mentioned, as he recited the verses
+
+</p>
+<p class="beforeline"></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">&#8220;El mentir de las estrellas
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Es un c&oacute;modo mentir.&#8221;<a id="d0e2456src" href="#d0e2456" class="noteref">1</a></span></p>
+<p class="afterline"></p>
+<p>He also smiled maliciously in the presence of certain physical theories and considered visionary, if not actually insane,
+the Jesuit Secchi, to whom he imputed the making of triangulations on the host as a result of his astronomical mania, for
+which reason it was said that he had been forbidden <span class="pageno">
+[117]
+</span>to celebrate mass. Many persons also noticed in him some aversion to the sciences that he taught, but these vagaries were
+trifles, scholarly and religious prejudices that were easily explained, not only by the fact that the physical sciences were
+eminently practical, of pure observation and deduction, while his forte was philosophy, purely speculative, of abstraction
+and induction, but also because, like any good Dominican, jealous of the fame of his order, he could hardly feel any affection
+for a science in which none of his brethren had excelled&#8212;he was the first who did not accept the chemistry of St. Thomas Aquinas&#8212;and
+in which so much renown had been acquired by hostile, or rather, let us say, rival orders.
+
+</p>
+<p>This was the professor who that morning called the roll and directed many of the students to recite the lesson from memory,
+word for word. The phonographs got into operation, some well, some ill, some stammering, and received their grades. He who
+recited without an error earned a good mark and he who made more than three mistakes a bad mark.
+
+</p>
+<p>A fat boy with a sleepy face and hair as stiff and hard as the bristles of a brush yawned until he seemed to be about to dislocate
+his jaws, and stretched himself with his arms extended as though he were in his bed. The professor saw this and wished to
+startle him.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Eh, there, sleepy-head! What&#8217;s this? Lazy, too, so it&#8217;s sure you<a id="d0e2468src" href="#d0e2468" class="noteref">2</a> don&#8217;t know the lesson, ha?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Padre Millon not only used the depreciative <i>tu</i> with the students, like a good friar, but he also addressed them in the slang of the markets, a practise that he had acquired
+from the professor of canonical law: whether that reverend gentleman wished to humble the students or the sacred decrees of
+the councils is a question not yet settled, in spite of the great attention that has been given to it.
+<span class="pageno">
+[118]
+</span></p>
+<p>This question, instead of offending the class, amused them, and many laughed&#8212;it was a daily occurrence. But the sleeper did
+not laugh; he arose with a bound, rubbed his eyes, and, as though a steam-engine were turning the phonograph, began to recite.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The name of mirror is applied to all polished surfaces intended to produce by the reflection of light the images of the objects
+placed before said surfaces. From the substances that form these surfaces, they are divided into metallic mirrors and glass
+mirrors&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Stop, stop, stop!&#8221; interrupted the professor. &#8220;Heavens, what a rattle! We are at the point where the mirrors are divided
+into metallic and glass, eh? Now if I should present to you a block of wood, a piece of kamagon for instance, well polished
+and varnished, or a slab of black marble well burnished, or a square of jet, which would reflect the images of objects placed
+before them, how would you classify those mirrors?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Whether he did not know what to answer or did not understand the question, the student tried to get out of the difficulty
+by demonstrating that he knew the lesson, so he rushed on like a torrent.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The first are composed of brass or an alloy of different metals and the second of a sheet of glass, with its two sides well
+polished, one of which has an amalgam of tin adhering to it.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Tut, tut, tut! That&#8217;s not it! I say to you &#8216;<i>Dominus vobiscum</i>,&#8217; and you answer me with &#8216;<i>Requiescat in pace!</i>&#8217;&#8201;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The worthy professor then repeated the question in the vernacular of the markets, interspersed with <i>cosas</i> and <i>ab&aacute;s</i> at every moment.
+
+</p>
+<p>The poor youth did not know how to get out of the quandary: he doubted whether to include the kamagon with the metals, or
+the marble with glasses, and leave the jet as a neutral substance, until Juanito Pelaez maliciously prompted him:
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The mirror of kamagon among the wooden mirrors.&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[119]
+</span></p>
+<p>The incautious youth repeated this aloud and half the class was convulsed with laughter.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;A good sample of wood you are yourself!&#8221; exclaimed the professor, laughing in spite of himself. &#8220;Let&#8217;s see from what you
+would define a mirror&#8212;from a surface <i>per se, in quantum est superficies</i>, or from a substance that forms the surface, or from the substance upon which the surface rests, the raw material, modified
+by the attribute &#8216;surface,&#8217; since it is clear that, surface being an accidental property of bodies, it cannot exist without
+substance. Let&#8217;s see now&#8212;what do you say?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I? Nothing!&#8221; the wretched boy was about to reply, for he did not understand what it was all about, confused as he was by
+so many surfaces and so many accidents that smote cruelly on his ears, but a sense of shame restrained him. Filled with anguish
+and breaking into a cold perspiration, he began to repeat between his teeth: &#8220;The name of mirror is applied to all polished
+surfaces&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Ergo, per te</i>, the mirror is the surface,&#8221; angled the professor. &#8220;Well, then, clear up this difficulty. If the surface is the mirror, it
+must be of no consequence to the &#8216;essence&#8217; of the mirror what may be found behind this surface, since what is behind it does
+not affect the &#8216;essence&#8217; that is before it, <i>id est</i>, the surface, <i>quae super faciem est, quia vocatur superficies, facies ea quae supra videtur</i>. Do you admit that or do you not admit it?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The poor youth&#8217;s hair stood up straighter than ever, as though acted upon by some magnetic force.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Do you admit it or do you not admit it?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Anything! Whatever you wish, Padre,&#8221; was his thought, but he did not dare to express it from fear of ridicule. That was a
+dilemma indeed, and he had never been in a worse one. He had a vague idea that the most innocent thing could not be admitted
+to the friars but that they, or rather their estates and curacies, would get out of it all the results and advantages imaginable.
+So his good angel prompted him to deny everything with all the energy <span class="pageno">
+[120]
+</span>of his soul and refractoriness of his hair, and he was about to shout a proud <i>nego</i>, for the reason that he who denies everything does not compromise himself in anything, as a certain lawyer had once told
+him; but the evil habit of disregarding the dictates of one&#8217;s own conscience, of having little faith in legal folk, and of
+seeking aid from others where one is sufficient unto himself, was his undoing. His companions, especially Juanito Pelaez,
+were making signs to him to admit it, so he let himself be carried away by his evil destiny and exclaimed, &#8220;<i>Concedo</i>, Padre,&#8221; in a voice as faltering as though he were saying, &#8220;<i>In manus tuas commendo spiritum meum.</i>&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Concedo antecedentum</i>,&#8221; echoed the professor, smiling maliciously. &#8220;<i>Ergo</i>, I can scratch the mercury off a looking-glass, put in its place a piece of <i>bibinka</i>, and we shall still have a mirror, eh? Now what shall we have?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The youth gazed at his prompters, but seeing them surprised and speechless, contracted his features into an expression of
+bitterest reproach. &#8220;<i>Deus meus, Deus meus, quare dereliquiste me,</i>&#8221; said his troubled eyes, while his lips muttered &#8220;<i>Linintikan!</i>&#8221; Vainly he coughed, fumbled at his shirt-bosom, stood first on one foot and then on the other, but found no answer.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Come now, what have we?&#8221; urged the professor, enjoying the effect of his reasoning.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Bibinka!</i>&#8221; whispered Juanito Pelaez. &#8220;<i>Bibinka!</i>&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Shut up, you fool!&#8221; cried the desperate youth, hoping to get out of the difficulty by turning it into a complaint.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Let&#8217;s see, Juanito, if you can answer the question for me,&#8221; the professor then said to Pelaez, who was one of his pets.
+
+</p>
+<p>The latter rose slowly, not without first giving Penitente, who followed him on the roll, a nudge that meant, &#8220;Don&#8217;t forget
+to prompt me.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Nego consequentiam</i>, Padre,&#8221; he replied resolutely.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Aha, then <i>probo consequentiam! Per te</i>, the polished surface constitutes the &#8216;essence&#8217; of the mirror&#8212;&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[121]
+</span></p>
+<p><i>&#8220;Nego suppositum!&#8221;</i> interrupted Juanito, as he felt Placido pulling at his coat.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;How? <i>Per te</i>&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Nego!</i>&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Ergo,</i> you believe that what is behind affects what is in front?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p><i>&#8220;Nego!&#8221;</i> the student cried with still more ardor, feeling another jerk at his coat.
+
+</p>
+<p>Juanito, or rather Placido, who was prompting him, was unconsciously adopting Chinese tactics: not to admit the most inoffensive
+foreigner in order not to be invaded.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Then where are we?&#8221; asked the professor, somewhat disconcerted, and looking uneasily at the refractory student. &#8220;Does the
+substance behind affect, or does it not affect, the surface?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>To this precise and categorical question, a kind of ultimatum, Juanito did not know what to reply and his coat offered no
+suggestions. In vain he made signs to Placido, but Placido himself was in doubt. Juanito then took advantage of a moment in
+which the professor was staring at a student who was cautiously and secretly taking off the shoes that hurt his feet, to step
+heavily on Placido&#8217;s toes and whisper, &#8220;Tell me, hurry up, tell me!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I distinguish&#8212;Get out! What an ass you are!&#8221; yelled Placido unreservedly, as he stared with angry eyes and rubbed his hand
+over his patent-leather shoe.
+
+</p>
+<p>The professor heard the cry, stared at the pair, and guessed what had happened.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Listen, you meddler,&#8221; he addressed Placido, &#8220;I wasn&#8217;t questioning you, but since you think you can save others, let&#8217;s see
+if you can save yourself, <i>salva te ipsum,</i> and decide this question.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Juanito sat down in content, and as a mark of gratitude stuck out his tongue at his prompter, who had arisen blushing with
+shame and muttering incoherent excuses.
+
+</p>
+<p>For a moment Padre Millon regarded him as one gloating over a favorite dish. What a good thing it would be <span class="pageno">
+[122]
+</span>to humiliate and hold up to ridicule that dudish boy, always smartly dressed, with head erect and serene look! It would be
+a deed of charity, so the charitable professor applied himself to it with all his heart, slowly repeating the question.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The book says that the metallic mirrors are made of brass and an alloy of different metals&#8212;is that true or is it not true?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;So the book says, Padre.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Liber dixit, ergo ita est</i>. Don&#8217;t pretend that you know more than the book does. It then adds that the glass mirrors are made of a sheet of glass whose
+two surfaces are well polished, one of them having applied to it an amalgam of tin, <i>nota bene</i>, an amalgam of tin! Is that true?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;If the book says so, Padre.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Is tin a metal?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It seems so, Padre. The book says so.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It is, it is, and the word amalgam means that it is compounded with mercury, which is also a metal. <i>Ergo</i>, a glass mirror is a metallic mirror; <i>ergo</i>, the terms of the distinction are confused; <i>ergo</i>, the classification is imperfect&#8212;how do you explain that, meddler?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>He emphasized the <i>ergos</i> and the familiar &#8220;you&#8217;s&#8221; with indescribable relish, at the same time winking, as though to say, &#8220;You&#8217;re done for.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It means that, it means that&#8212;&#8221; stammered Placido.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It means that you haven&#8217;t learned the lesson, you petty meddler, you don&#8217;t understand it yourself, and yet you prompt your
+neighbor!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The class took no offense, but on the contrary many thought the epithet funny and laughed. Placido bit his lips.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s your name?&#8221; the professor asked him.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Placido,&#8221; was the curt reply.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Aha! Placido Penitente, although you look more like Placido the Prompter&#8212;or the Prompted. But, <i>Penitent</i>, I&#8217;m going to impose some <i>penance</i> on you for your promptings.&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[123]
+</span></p>
+<p>Pleased with his play on words, he ordered the youth to recite the lesson, and the latter, in the state of mind to which he
+was reduced, made more than three mistakes. Shaking his head up and down, the professor slowly opened the register and slowly
+scanned it while he called off the names in a low voice.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Palencia&#8212;Palomo&#8212;Panganiban&#8212;Pedraza&#8212;Pelado&#8212;Pelaez&#8212;Penitents, aha! Placido Penitente, fifteen unexcused absences&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Placido started up. &#8220;Fifteen absences, Padre?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Fifteen unexcused absences,&#8221; continued the professor, &#8220;so that you only lack one to be dropped from the roll.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Fifteen absences, fifteen absences,&#8221; repeated Placido in amazement. &#8220;I&#8217;ve never been absent more than four times, and with
+today, perhaps five.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Jesso, jesso, monseer,&#8221;<a id="d0e2703src" href="#d0e2703" class="noteref">3</a> replied the professor, examining the youth over his gold eye-glasses. &#8220;You confess that you have missed five times, and God
+knows if you may have missed oftener. <i>Atqui</i>, as I rarely call the roll, every time I catch any one I put five marks against him; <i>ergo</i>, how many are five times five? Have you forgotten the multiplication table? Five times five?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Twenty-five.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Correct, correct! Thus you&#8217;ve still got away with ten, because I have caught you only three times. Huh, if I had caught you
+every time&#8212;Now, how many are three times five?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Fifteen.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Fifteen, right you are!&#8221; concluded the professor, closing the register. &#8220;If you miss once more&#8212;out of doors with you, get
+out! Ah, now a mark for the failure in the daily lesson.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>He again opened the register, sought out the name, and entered the mark. &#8220;Come, only one mark,&#8221; he said, &#8220;since you hadn&#8217;t
+any before.&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[124]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;But, Padre,&#8221; exclaimed Placido, restraining himself, &#8220;if your Reverence puts a mark against me for failing in the lesson,
+your Reverence owes it to me to erase the one for absence that you have put against me for today.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>His Reverence made no answer. First he slowly entered the mark, then contemplated it with his head on one side,&#8212;the mark must
+be artistic,&#8212;closed the register, and asked with great sarcasm, &#8220;<i>Ab&aacute;</i>, and why so, sir?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Because I can&#8217;t conceive, Padre, how one can be absent from the class and at the same time recite the lesson in it. Your
+Reverence is saying that to be is not to be.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Nak&uacute;</i>, a metaphysician, but a rather premature one! So you can&#8217;t conceive of it, eh? <i>Sed patet experientia</i> and <i>contra experientiam negantem, fusilibus est arguendum</i>, do you understand? And can&#8217;t you conceive, with your philosophical head, that one can be absent from the class and not know
+the lesson at the same time? Is it a fact that absence necessarily implies knowledge? What do you say to that, philosophaster?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>This last epithet was the drop of water that made the full cup overflow. Placido enjoyed among his friends the reputation
+of being a philosopher, so he lost his patience, threw down his book, arose, and faced the professor.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Enough, Padre, enough! Your Reverence can put all the marks against me that you wish, but you haven&#8217;t the right to insult
+me. Your Reverence may stay with the class, I can&#8217;t stand any more.&#8221; Without further farewell, he stalked away.
+
+</p>
+<p>The class was astounded; such an assumption of dignity had scarcely ever been seen, and who would have thought it of Placido
+Penitente? The surprised professor bit his lips and shook his head threateningly as he watched him depart. Then in a trembling
+voice he began his preachment on the same old theme, delivered however with more energy and more eloquence. It dealt with
+the growing arrogance, the innate ingratitude, the presumption, the lack of respect for superiors, the pride that the spirit
+of darkness infused in the <span class="pageno">
+[125]
+</span>young, the lack of manners, the absence of courtesy, and so on. From this he passed to coarse jests and sarcasm over the presumption
+which some good-for-nothing &#8220;prompters&#8221; had of teaching their teachers by establishing an academy for instruction in Castilian.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Aha, aha!&#8221; he moralized, &#8220;those who the day before yesterday scarcely knew how to say, &#8216;Yes, Padre,&#8217; &#8216;No, Padre,&#8217; now want
+to know more than those who have grown gray teaching them. He who wishes to learn, will learn, academies or no academies!
+Undoubtedly that fellow who has just gone out is one of those in the project. Castilian is in good hands with such guardians!
+When are you going to get the time to attend the academy if you have scarcely enough to fulfill your duties in the regular
+classes? We wish that you may all know Spanish and that you pronounce it well, so that you won&#8217;t split our ear-drums with
+your twist of expression and your &#8216;p&#8217;s&#8217;;<a id="d0e2753src" href="#d0e2753" class="noteref">4</a> but first business and then pleasure: finish your studies first, and afterwards learn Castilian, and all become clerks, if
+you so wish.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>So he went on with his harangue until the bell rang and the class was over. The two hundred and thirty-four students, after
+reciting their prayers, went out as ignorant as when they went in, but breathing more freely, as if a great weight had been
+lifted from them. Each youth had lost another hour of his life and with it a portion of his dignity and self-respect, and
+in exchange there was an increase of discontent, of aversion to study, of resentment in their hearts. After all this ask for
+knowledge, dignity, gratitude!
+
+</p>
+<p><i>De nobis, post haec, tristis sententia fertur</i>!
+
+</p>
+<p>Just as the two hundred and thirty-four spent their class hours, so the thousands of students who preceded them have spent
+theirs, and, if matters do not mend, so will those yet to come spend theirs, and be brutalized, while wounded dignity and
+youthful enthusiasm will be converted into <span class="pageno">
+[126]
+</span>hatred and sloth, like the waves that become polluted along one part of the shore and roll on one after another, each in succession
+depositing a larger sediment of filth. But yet He who from eternity watches the consequences of a deed develop like a thread
+through the loom of the centuries, He who weighs the value of a second and has ordained for His creatures as an elemental
+law progress and development, He, if He is just, will demand a strict accounting from those who must render it, of the millions
+of intelligences darkened and blinded, of human dignity trampled upon in millions of His creatures, and of the incalculable
+time lost and effort wasted! And if the teachings of the Gospel are based on truth, so also will these have to answer&#8212;the
+millions and millions who do not know how to preserve the light of their intelligences and their dignity of mind, as the master
+demanded an accounting from the cowardly servant for the talent that he let be taken from him.
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[127]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e2456" href="#d0e2456src" class="noteref">1</a> &#8220;To lie about the stars is a safe kind of lying.&#8221;&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e2468" href="#d0e2468src" class="noteref">2</a> Throughout this chapter the professor uses the familiar <i>tu</i> in addressing the students, thus giving his remarks a contemptuous tone.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e2703" href="#d0e2703src" class="noteref">3</a> The professor speaks these words in vulgar dialect.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e2753" href="#d0e2753src" class="noteref">4</a> To confuse the letters <i>p</i> and <i>f</i> in speaking Spanish was a common error among uneducated Filipinos.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e2773"></a></p>
+<h1>In the House of the Students</h1>
+<p>The house where Makaraig lived was worth visiting. Large and spacious, with two entresols provided with elegant gratings,
+it seemed to be a school during the first hours of the morning and pandemonium from ten o&#8217;clock on. During the boarders&#8217; recreation
+hours, from the lower hallway of the spacious entrance up to the main floor, there was a bubbling of laughter, shouts, and
+movement. Boys in scanty clothing played <i>sipa</i> or practised gymnastic exercises on improvised trapezes, while on the staircase a fight was in progress between eight or
+nine armed with canes, sticks, and ropes, but neither attackers nor attacked did any great damage, their blows generally falling
+sidewise upon the shoulders of the Chinese pedler who was there selling his outlandish mixtures and indigestible pastries.
+Crowds of boys surrounded him, pulled at his already disordered queue, snatched pies from him, haggled over the prices, and
+committed a thousand deviltries. The Chinese yelled, swore, forswore, in all the languages he could jabber, not omitting his
+own; he whimpered, laughed, pleaded, put on a smiling face when an ugly one would not serve, or the reverse.
+
+</p>
+<p>He cursed them as devils, savages, <i>no kilistanos</i><a id="d0e2785src" href="#d0e2785" class="noteref">1</a> but that mattered nothing. A whack would bring his face around smiling, and if the blow fell only upon his shoulders he would
+calmly continue his business transactions, contenting himself with crying out to them that he was not in the game, but if
+it struck the flat basket on which were placed his wares, then he would swear never to come again, as he <span class="pageno">
+[128]
+</span>poured out upon them all the imprecations and anathemas imaginable. Then the boys would redouble their efforts to make him
+rage the more, and when at last his vocabulary was exhausted and they were satiated with his fearful mixtures, they paid him
+religiously, and sent him away happy, winking, chuckling to himself, and receiving as caresses the light blows from their
+canes that the students gave him as tokens of farewell.
+
+</p>
+<p>Concerts on the piano and violin, the guitar, and the accordion, alternated with the continual clashing of blades from the
+fencing lessons. Around a long, wide table the students of the Ateneo prepared their compositions or solved their problems
+by the side of others writing to their sweethearts on pink perforated note-paper covered with drawings. Here one was composing
+a melodrama at the side of another practising on the flute, from which he drew wheezy notes. Over there, the older boys, students
+in professional courses, who affected silk socks and embroidered slippers, amused themselves in teasing the smaller boys by
+pulling their ears, already red from repeated fillips, while two or three held down a little fellow who yelled and cried,
+defending himself with his feet against being reduced to the condition in which he was born, kicking and howling. In one room,
+around a small table, four were playing <i>revesino</i> with laughter and jokes, to the great annoyance of another who pretended to be studying his lesson but who was in reality
+waiting his turn to play.
+
+</p>
+<p>Still another came in with exaggerated wonder, scandalized as he approached the table. &#8220;How wicked you are! So early in the
+morning and already gambling! Let&#8217;s see, let&#8217;s see! You fool, take it with the three of spades!&#8221; Closing his book, he too
+joined in the game.
+
+</p>
+<p>Cries and blows were heard. Two boys were fighting in the adjoining room&#8212;a lame student who was very sensitive about his infirmity
+and an unhappy newcomer from the provinces who was just commencing his studies. He was working over a treatise on philosophy
+and reading innocently <span class="pageno">
+[129]
+</span>in a loud voice, with a wrong accent, the Cartesian principle: &#8220;<i>Cogito, ergo sum!</i>&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The little lame boy (<i>el cojito</i>) took this as an insult and the others intervened to restore peace, but in reality only to sow discord and come to blows
+themselves.
+
+</p>
+<p>In the dining-room a young man with a can of sardines, a bottle of wine, and the provisions that he had just brought from
+his town, was making heroic efforts to the end that his friends might participate in his lunch, while they were offering in
+their turn heroic resistance to his invitation. Others were bathing on the azotea, playing firemen with the water from the
+well, and joining in combats with pails of water, to the great delight of the spectators.
+
+</p>
+<p>But the noise and shouts gradually died away with the coming of leading students, summoned by Makaraig to report to them the
+progress of the academy of Castilian. Isagani was cordially greeted, as was also the Peninsular, Sandoval, who had come to
+Manila as a government employee and was finishing his studies, and who had completely identified himself with the cause of
+the Filipino students. The barriers that politics had established between the races had disappeared in the schoolroom as though
+dissolved by the zeal of science and youth.
+
+</p>
+<p>From lack of lyceums and scientific, literary, or political centers, Sandoval took advantage of all the meetings to cultivate
+his great oratorical gifts, delivering speeches and arguing on any subject, to draw forth applause from his friends and listeners.
+At that moment the subject of conversation was the instruction in Castilian, but as Makaraig had not yet arrived conjecture
+was still the order of the day.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What can have happened?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What has the General decided?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Has he refused the permit?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Has Padre Irene or Padre Sibyla won?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Such were the questions they asked one another, questions that could be answered only by Makaraig.
+<span class="pageno">
+[130]
+</span></p>
+<p>Among the young men gathered together there were optimists like Isagani and Sandoval, who saw the thing already accomplished
+and talked of congratulations and praise from the government for the patriotism of the students&#8212;outbursts of optimism that
+led Juanito Pelaez to claim for himself a large part of the glory of founding the society.
+
+</p>
+<p>All this was answered by the pessimist Pecson, a chubby youth with a wide, clownish grin, who spoke of outside influences,
+whether the Bishop A., the Padre B., or the Provincial C., had been consulted or not, whether or not they had advised that
+the whole association should be put in jail&#8212;a suggestion that made Juanito Pelaez so uneasy that he stammered out, &#8220;<i>Carambas</i>, don&#8217;t you drag me into&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Sandoval, as a Peninsular and a liberal, became furious at this. &#8220;But pshaw!&#8221; he exclaimed, &#8220;that is holding a bad opinion
+of his Excellency! I know that he&#8217;s quite a friar-lover, but in such a matter as this he won&#8217;t let the friars interfere. Will
+you tell me, Pecson, on what you base your belief that the General has no judgment of his own?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I didn&#8217;t say that, Sandoval,&#8221; replied Pecson, grinning until he exposed his wisdom-tooth. &#8220;For me the General has <i>his own</i> judgment, that is, the judgment of all those within his reach. That&#8217;s plain!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;re dodging&#8212;cite me a fact, cite me a fact!&#8221; cried Sandoval. &#8220;Let&#8217;s get away from hollow arguments, from empty phrases,
+and get on the solid ground of facts,&#8221;&#8212;this with an elegant gesture. &#8220;Facts, gentlemen, facts! The rest is prejudice&#8212;I won&#8217;t
+call it filibusterism.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Pecson smiled like one of the blessed as he retorted, &#8220;There comes the filibusterism. But can&#8217;t we enter into a discussion
+without resorting to accusations?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Sandoval protested in a little extemporaneous speech, again demanding facts.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Well, not long ago there was a dispute between some private persons and certain friars, and the acting Governor <span class="pageno">
+[131]
+</span>rendered a decision that it should be settled by the Provincial of the Order concerned,&#8221; replied Pecson, again breaking out
+into a laugh, as though he were dealing with an insignificant matter, he cited names and dates, and promised documents that
+would prove how justice was dispensed.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But, on what ground, tell me this, on what ground can they refuse permission for what plainly appears to be extremely useful
+and necessary?&#8221; asked Sandoval.
+
+</p>
+<p>Pecson shrugged his shoulders. &#8220;It&#8217;s that it endangers the integrity of the fatherland,&#8221; he replied in the tone of a notary
+reading an allegation.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s pretty good! What has the integrity of the fatherland to do with the rules of syntax?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The Holy Mother Church has learned doctors&#8212;what do I know? Perhaps it is feared that we may come to understand the laws so
+that we can obey them. What will become of the Philippines on the day when we understand one another?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Sandoval did not relish the dialectic and jesting turn of the conversation; along that path could rise no speech worth the
+while. &#8220;Don&#8217;t make a joke of things!&#8221; he exclaimed. &#8220;This is a serious matter.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The Lord deliver me from joking when there are friars concerned!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But, on what do you base&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;On the fact that, the hours for the classes having to come at night,&#8221; continued Pecson in the same tone, as if he were quoting
+known and recognized formulas, &#8220;there may be invoked as an obstacle the immorality of the thing, as was done in the case of
+the school at Malolos.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Another! But don&#8217;t the classes of the Academy of Drawing, and the novenaries and the processions, cover themselves with the
+mantle of night?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The scheme affects the dignity of the University,&#8221; went on the chubby youth, taking no notice of the question.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Affects nothing! The University has to accommodate <span class="pageno">
+[132]
+</span>itself to the needs of the students. And granting that, what is a university then? Is it an institution to discourage study?
+Have a few men banded themselves together in the name of learning and instruction in order to prevent others from becoming
+enlightened?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The fact is that movements initiated from below are regarded as discontent&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What about projects that come from above?&#8221; interpolated one of the students. &#8220;There&#8217;s the School of Arts and Trades!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Slowly, slowly, gentlemen,&#8221; protested Sandoval. &#8220;I&#8217;m not a friar-lover, my liberal views being well known, but render unto
+Caesar that which is Caesar&#8217;s. Of that School of Arts and Trades, of which I have been the most enthusiastic supporter and
+the realization of which I shall greet as the first streak of dawn for these fortunate islands, of that School of Arts and
+Trades the friars have taken charge&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Or the cat of the canary, which amounts to the same thing,&#8221; added Pecson, in his turn interrupting the speech.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Get out!&#8221; cried Sandoval, enraged at the interruption, which had caused him to lose the thread of his long, well-rounded
+sentence. &#8220;As long as we hear nothing bad, let&#8217;s not be pessimists, let&#8217;s not be unjust, doubting the liberty and independence
+of the government.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Here he entered upon a defense in beautiful phraseology of the government and its good intentions, a subject that Pecson dared
+not break in upon.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The Spanish government,&#8221; he said among other things, &#8220;has given you everything, it has denied you nothing! We had absolutism
+in Spain and you had absolutism here; the friars covered our soil with conventos, and conventos occupy a third part of Manila;
+in Spain the garrote prevails and here the garrote is the extreme punishment; we are Catholics and we have made you Catholics;
+we were scholastics and scholasticism sheds its light in your college halls; in short, gentlemen, we weep when you weep, we
+suffer when <span class="pageno">
+[133]
+</span>you suffer, we have the same altars, the same courts, the same punishments, and it is only just that we should give you our
+rights and our joys.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>As no one interrupted him, he became more and more enthusiastic, until he came to speak of the future of the Philippines.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;As I have said, gentlemen, the dawn is not far distant. Spain is now breaking the eastern sky for her beloved Philippines,
+and the times are changing, as I positively know, faster than we imagine. This government, which, according to you, is vacillating
+and weak, should be strengthened by our confidence, that we may make it see that it is the custodian of our hopes. Let us
+remind it by our conduct (should it ever forget itself, which I do not believe can happen) that we have faith in its good
+intentions and that it should be guided by no other standard than justice and the welfare of all the governed. No, gentlemen,&#8221;
+he went on in a tone more and more declamatory, &#8220;we must not admit at all in this matter the possibility of a consultation
+with other more or less hostile entities, as such a supposition would imply our resignation to the fact. Your conduct up to
+the present has been frank, loyal, without vacillation, above suspicion; you have addressed it simply and directly; the reasons
+you have presented could not be more sound; your aim is to lighten the labor of the teachers in the first years and to facilitate
+study among the hundreds of students who fill the college halls and for whom one solitary professor cannot suffice. If up
+to the present the petition has not been granted, it has been for the reason, as I feel sure, that there has been a great
+deal of material accumulated, but I predict that the campaign is won, that the summons of Makaraig is to announce to us the
+victory, and tomorrow we shall see our efforts crowned with the applause and appreciation of the country, and who knows, gentlemen,
+but that the government may confer upon you some handsome decoration of merit, benefactors as you are of the fatherland!&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[134]
+</span></p>
+<p>Enthusiastic applause resounded. All immediately believed in the triumph, and many in the decoration.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Let it be remembered, gentlemen,&#8221; observed Juanito, &#8220;that I was one of the first to propose it.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The pessimist Pecson was not so enthusiastic. &#8220;Just so we don&#8217;t get that decoration on our ankles,&#8221; he remarked, but fortunately
+for Pelaez this comment was not heard in the midst of the applause.
+
+</p>
+<p>When they had quieted down a little, Pecson replied, &#8220;Good, good, very good, but one supposition: if in spite of all that,
+the General consults and consults and consults, and afterwards refuses the permit?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>This question fell like a dash of cold water. All turned to Sandoval, who was taken aback. &#8220;Then&#8212;&#8221; he stammered.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Then?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Then,&#8221; he exclaimed in a burst of enthusiasm, still excited by the applause, &#8220;seeing that in writing and in printing it boasts
+of desiring your enlightenment, and yet hinders and denies it when called upon to make it a reality&#8212;then, gentlemen, your
+efforts will not have been in vain, you will have accomplished what no one else has been able to do. Make them drop the mask
+and fling down the gauntlet to you!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Bravo, bravo!&#8221; cried several enthusiastically.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Good for Sandoval! Hurrah for the gauntlet!&#8221; added others.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Let them fling down the gauntlet to us!&#8221; repeated Pecson disdainfully. &#8220;But afterwards?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Sandoval seemed to be cut short in his triumph, but with the vivacity peculiar to his race and his oratorical temperament
+he had an immediate reply.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Afterwards?&#8221; he asked. &#8220;Afterwards, if none of the Filipinos dare to accept the challenge, then I, Sandoval, in the name
+of Spain, will take up the gauntlet, because such a policy would give the lie to the good intentions that she has always cherished
+toward her provinces, and because <span class="pageno">
+[135]
+</span>he who is thus faithless to the trust reposed in him and abuses his unlimited authority deserves neither the protection of
+the fatherland nor the support of any Spanish citizen!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The enthusiasm of his hearers broke all bounds. Isagani embraced him, the others following his example. They talked of the
+fatherland, of union, of fraternity, of fidelity. The Filipinos declared that if there were only Sandovals in Spain all would
+be Sandovals in the Philippines. His eyes glistened, and it might well be believed that if at that moment any kind of gauntlet
+had been flung at him he would have leaped upon any kind of horse to ride to death for the Philippines.
+
+</p>
+<p>The &#8220;cold water&#8221; alone replied: &#8220;Good, that&#8217;s very good, Sandoval. I could also say the same if I were a Peninsular, but not
+being one, if I should say one half of what you have, you yourself would take me for a filibuster.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Sandoval began a speech in protest, but was interrupted.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Rejoice, friends, rejoice! Victory!&#8221; cried a youth who entered at that moment and began to embrace everybody.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Rejoice, friends! Long live the Castilian tongue!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>An outburst of applause greeted this announcement. They fell to embracing one another and their eyes filled with tears. Pecson
+alone preserved his skeptical smile.
+
+</p>
+<p>The bearer of such good news was Makaraig, the young man at the head of the movement. This student occupied in that house,
+by himself, two rooms, luxuriously furnished, and had his servant and a cochero to look after his carriage and horses. He
+was of robust carriage, of refined manners, fastidiously dressed, and very rich. Although studying law only that he might
+have an academic degree, he enjoyed a reputation for diligence, and as a logician in the scholastic way had no cause to envy
+the most frenzied quibblers of the University faculty. Nevertheless he was not very far behind in regard to modern ideas and
+progress, for his fortune enabled him to have all the books and magazines that <span class="pageno">
+[136]
+</span>a watchful censor was unable to keep out. With these qualifications and his reputation for courage, his fortunate associations
+in his earlier years, and his refined and delicate courtesy, it was not strange that he should exercise such great influence
+over his associates and that he should have been chosen to carry out such a difficult undertaking as that of the instruction
+in Castilian.
+
+</p>
+<p>After the first outburst of enthusiasm, which in youth always takes hold in such exaggerated forms, since youth finds everything
+beautiful, they wanted to be informed how the affair had been managed.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I saw Padre Irene this morning,&#8221; said Makaraig with a certain air of mystery.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Hurrah for Padre Irene!&#8221; cried an enthusiastic student.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Padre Irene,&#8221; continued Makaraig, &#8220;has told me about everything that took place at Los Ba&ntilde;os. It seems that they disputed
+for at least a week, he supporting and defending our case against all of them, against Padre Sibyla, Padre Fernandez, Padre
+Salvi, the General, the jeweler Simoun&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The jeweler Simoun!&#8221; interrupted one of his listeners. &#8220;What has that Jew to do with the affairs of our country? We enrich
+him by buying&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Keep quiet!&#8221; admonished another impatiently, anxious to learn how Padre Irene had been able to overcome such formidable opponents.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;There were even high officials who were opposed to our project, the Head Secretary, the Civil Governor, Quiroga the Chinaman&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Quiroga the Chinaman! The pimp of the&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Shut up!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;At last,&#8221; resumed Makaraig, &#8220;they were going to pigeonhole the petition and let it sleep for months and months, when Padre
+Irene remembered the Superior Commission of Primary Instruction and proposed, since the matter concerned the teaching of the
+Castilian tongue, that <span class="pageno">
+[137]
+</span>the petition be referred to that body for a report upon it.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But that Commission hasn&#8217;t been in operation for a long time,&#8221; observed Pecson.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s exactly what they replied to Padre Irene, and he answered that this was a good opportunity to revive it, and availing
+himself of the presence of Don Custodio, one of its members, he proposed on the spot that a committee should be appointed.
+Don Custodio&#8217;s activity being known and recognized, he was named as arbiter and the petition is now in his hands. He promised
+that he would settle it this month.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Hurrah for Don Custodio!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But suppose Don Custodio should report unfavorably upon it?&#8221; inquired the pessimist Pecson.
+
+</p>
+<p>Upon this they had not reckoned, being intoxicated with the thought that the matter would not be pigeonholed, so they all
+turned to Makaraig to learn how it could be arranged.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The same objection I presented to Padre Irene, but with his sly smile he said to me: &#8216;We&#8217;ve won a great deal, we have succeeded
+in getting the matter on the road to a decision, the opposition sees itself forced to join battle.&#8217; If we can bring some influence
+to bear upon Don Custodio so that he, in accordance with his liberal tendencies, may report favorably, all is won, for the
+General showed himself to be absolutely neutral.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Makaraig paused, and an impatient listener asked, &#8220;How can we influence him?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Padre Irene pointed out to me two ways&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Quiroga,&#8221; some one suggested.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Pshaw, great use Quiroga&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;A fine present.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No, that won&#8217;t do, for he prides himself upon being incorruptible.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ah, yes, I know!&#8221; exclaimed Pecson with a laugh. &#8220;Pepay the dancing girl.&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[138]
+</span>
+&#8220;Ah, yes, Pepay the dancing girl,&#8221; echoed several.
+
+</p>
+<p>This Pepay was a showy girl, supposed to be a great friend of Don Custodio. To her resorted the contractors, the employees,
+the intriguers, when they wanted to get something from the celebrated councilor. Juanito Pelaez, who was also a great friend
+of the dancing girl, offered to look after the matter, but Isagani shook his head, saying that it was sufficient that they
+had made use of Padre Irene and that it would be going too far to avail themselves of Pepay in such an affair.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Show us the other way.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The other way is to apply to his attorney and adviser, Se&ntilde;or Pasta, the oracle before whom Don Custodio bows.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I prefer that,&#8221; said Isagani. &#8220;Se&ntilde;or Pasta is a Filipino, and was a schoolmate of my uncle&#8217;s. But how can we interest him?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s the <i>quid</i>,&#8221; replied Makaraig, looking earnestly at Isagani. &#8220;Se&ntilde;or Pasta has a dancing girl&#8212;I mean, a seamstress.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Isagani again shook his head.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t be such a puritan,&#8221; Juanito Pelaez said to him. &#8220;The end justifies the means! I know the seamstress, Matea, for she
+has a shop where a lot of girls work.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No, gentlemen,&#8221; declared Isagani, &#8220;let&#8217;s first employ decent methods. I&#8217;ll go to Se&ntilde;or Pasta and, if I don&#8217;t accomplish anything,
+then you can do what you wish with the dancing girls and seamstresses.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>They had to accept this proposition, agreeing that Isagani should talk to Se&ntilde;or Pasta that very day, and in the afternoon
+report to his associates at the University the result of the interview.
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[139]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e2785" href="#d0e2785src" class="noteref">1</a> <i>No cristianos</i>, not Christians, <i>i.e</i>., savages.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e3014"></a></p>
+<h1>Se&ntilde;or Pasta</h1>
+<p>Isagani presented himself in the house of the lawyer, one of the most talented minds in Manila, whom the friars consulted
+in their great difficulties. The youth had to wait some time on account of the numerous clients, but at last his turn came
+and he entered the office, or <i>bufete</i>, as it is generally called in the Philippines. The lawyer received him with a slight cough, looking down furtively at his
+feet, but he did not rise or offer a seat, as he went on writing. This gave Isagani an opportunity for observation and careful
+study of the lawyer, who had aged greatly. His hair was gray and his baldness extended over nearly the whole crown of his
+head. His countenance was sour and austere.
+
+</p>
+<p>There was complete silence in the study, except for the whispers of the clerks and understudies who were at work in an adjoining
+room. Their pens scratched as though quarreling with the paper.
+
+</p>
+<p>At length the lawyer finished what he was writing, laid down his pen, raised his head, and, recognizing the youth, let his
+face light up with a smile as he extended his hand affectionately.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Welcome, young man! But sit down, and excuse me, for I didn&#8217;t know that it was you. How is your uncle?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Isagani took courage, believing that his case would get on well. He related briefly what had been done, the while studying
+the effect of his words. Se&ntilde;or Pasta listened impassively at first and, although he was informed of the efforts of the students,
+pretended ignorance, as if to show that he had nothing to do with such childish matters, but when he began to suspect what
+was wanted of him and <span class="pageno">
+[140]
+</span>heard mention of the Vice-Rector, friars, the Captain-General, a project, and so on, his face slowly darkened and he finally
+exclaimed, &#8220;This is the land of projects! But go on, go on!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Isagani was not yet discouraged. He spoke of the manner in which a decision was to be reached and concluded with an expression
+of the confidence which the young men entertained that he, Se&ntilde;or Pasta, would <i>intercede</i> in their behalf in case Don Custodio should consult him, as was to be expected. He did not dare to say would <i>advise</i>, deterred by the wry face the lawyer put on.
+
+</p>
+<p>But Se&ntilde;or Pasta had already formed his resolution, and it was not to mix at all in the affair, either as consulter or consulted.
+He was familiar with what had occurred at Los Ba&ntilde;os, he knew that there existed two factions, and that Padre Irene was not
+the only champion on the side of the students, nor had he been the one who proposed submitting the petition to the Commission
+of Primary Instruction, but quite the contrary. Padre Irene, Padre Fernandez, the Countess, a merchant who expected to sell
+the materials for the new academy, and the high official who had been citing royal decree after royal decree, were about to
+triumph, when Padre Sibyla, wishing to gain time, had thought of the Commission. All these facts the great lawyer had present
+in his mind, so that when Isagani had finished speaking, he determined to confuse him with evasions, tangle the matter up,
+and lead the conversation to other subjects.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes,&#8221; he said, pursing his lips and scratching his head, &#8220;there is no one who surpasses me in love for the country and in
+aspirations toward progress, but&#8212;I can&#8217;t compromise myself, I don&#8217;t know whether you clearly understand my position, a position
+that is very delicate, I have so many interests, I have to labor within the limits of strict prudence, it&#8217;s a risk&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The lawyer sought to bewilder the youth with an exuberance of words, so he went on speaking of laws and <span class="pageno">
+[141]
+</span>decrees, and talked so much that instead of confusing the youth, he came very near to entangling himself in a labyrinth of
+citations.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;In no way do we wish to compromise you,&#8221; replied Isagani with great calmness. &#8220;God deliver us from injuring in the least
+the persons whose lives are so useful to the rest of the Filipinos! But, as little versed as I may be in the laws, royal decrees,
+writs, and resolutions that obtain in this country, I can&#8217;t believe that there can be any harm in furthering the high purposes
+of the government, in trying to secure a proper interpretation of these purposes. We are seeking the same end and differ only
+about the means.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The lawyer smiled, for the youth had allowed himself to wander away from the subject, and there where the former was going
+to entangle him he had already entangled himself.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s exactly the <i>quid</i>, as is vulgarly said. It&#8217;s clear that it is laudable to aid the government, when one aids it submissively, following out
+its desires and the true spirit of the laws in agreement with the just beliefs of the governing powers, and when not in contradiction
+to the fundamental and general way of thinking of the persons to whom is intrusted the common welfare of the individuals that
+form a social organism. Therefore, it is criminal, it is punishable, because it is offensive to the high principle of authority,
+to attempt any action contrary to its initiative, even supposing it to be better than the governmental proposition, because
+such action would injure its prestige, which is the elementary basis upon which all colonial edifices rest.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Confident that this broadside had at least stunned Isagani, the old lawyer fell back in his armchair, outwardly very serious,
+but laughing to himself.
+
+</p>
+<p>Isagani, however, ventured to reply. &#8220;I should think that governments, the more they are threatened, would be all the more
+careful to seek bases that are impregnable. The basis of prestige for colonial governments is the weakest <span class="pageno">
+[142]
+</span>of all, since it does not depend upon themselves but upon the consent of the governed, while the latter are willing to recognize
+it. The basis of justice or reason would seem to be the most durable.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The lawyer raised his head. How was this&#8212;did that youth dare to reply and argue with him, <i>him</i>, Se&ntilde;or Pasta? Was he not yet bewildered with his big words?
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Young man, you must put those considerations aside, for they are dangerous,&#8221; he declared with a wave of his hand. &#8220;What I
+advise is that you let the government attend to its own business.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Governments are established for the welfare of the peoples, and in order to accomplish this purpose properly they have to
+follow the suggestions of the citizens, who are the ones best qualified to understand their own needs.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Those who constitute the government are also citizens, and among the most enlightened.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But, being men, they are fallible, and ought not to disregard the opinions of others.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;They must be trusted, they have to attend to everything.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;There is a Spanish proverb which says, &#8216;No tears, no milk,&#8217; in other words, &#8216;To him who does not ask, nothing is given.&#8217;&#8201;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Quite the reverse,&#8221; replied the lawyer with a sarcastic smile; &#8220;with the government exactly the reverse occurs&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>But he suddenly checked himself, as if he had said too much and wished to correct his imprudence. &#8220;The government has given
+us things that we have not asked for, and that we could not ask for, because to ask&#8212;to ask, presupposes that it is in some
+way incompetent and consequently is not performing its functions. To suggest to it a course of action, to try to guide it,
+when not really antagonizing it, is to presuppose that it is capable of erring, and as I have already said to you such suppositions
+are menaces to the existence of colonial governments. The common crowd overlooks this and the young men who set to work thoughtlessly
+<span class="pageno">
+[143]
+</span>do not know, do not comprehend, do not try to comprehend the counter-effect of asking, the menace to order there is in that
+idea&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Pardon me,&#8221; interrupted Isagani, offended by the arguments the jurist was using with him, &#8220;but when by legal methods people
+ask a government for something, it is because they think it good and disposed to grant a blessing, and such action, instead
+of irritating it, should flatter it &#8212;to the mother one appeals, never to the stepmother. The government, in my humble opinion,
+is not an omniscient being that can see and anticipate everything, and even if it could, it ought not to feel offended, for
+here you have the church itself doing nothing but asking and begging of God, who sees and knows everything, and you yourself
+ask and demand many things in the courts of this same government, yet neither God nor the courts have yet taken offense. Every
+one realizes that the government, being the human institution that it is, needs the support of all the people, it needs to
+be made to see and feel the reality of things. You yourself are not convinced of the truth of your objection, you yourself
+know that it is a tyrannical and despotic government which, in order to make a display of force and independence, denies everything
+through fear or distrust, and that the tyrannized and enslaved peoples are the only ones whose duty it is never to ask for
+anything. A people that hates its government ought to ask for nothing but that it abdicate its power.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The old lawyer grimaced and shook his head from side to side, in sign of discontent, while he rubbed his hand over his bald
+pate and said in a tone of condescending pity: &#8220;Ahem! those are bad doctrines, bad theories, ahem! How plain it is that you
+are young and inexperienced in life. Look what is happening with the inexperienced young men who in Madrid are asking for
+so many reforms. They are accused of filibusterism, many of them don&#8217;t dare return here, and yet, what are they asking for?
+Things holy, ancient, and recognized as quite harmless. But there <span class="pageno">
+[144]
+</span>are matters that can&#8217;t be explained, they&#8217;re so delicate. Let&#8217;s see&#8212;I confess to you that there are other reasons besides
+those expressed that might lead a sensible government to deny systematically the wishes of the people&#8212;no&#8212;but it may happen
+that we find ourselves under rulers so fatuous and ridiculous&#8212;but there are always other reasons, even though what is asked
+be quite just&#8212;different governments encounter different conditions&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The old man hesitated, stared fixedly at Isagani, and then with a sudden resolution made a sign with his hand as though he
+would dispel some idea.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I can guess what you mean,&#8221; said Isagani, smiling sadly. &#8220;You mean that a colonial government, for the very reason that it
+is imperfectly constituted and that it is based on premises&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No, no, not that, no!&#8221; quickly interrupted the old lawyer, as he sought for something among his papers. &#8220;No, I meant&#8212;but
+where are my spectacles?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;There they are,&#8221; replied Isagani.
+
+</p>
+<p>The old man put them on and pretended to look over some papers, but seeing that the youth was waiting, he mumbled, &#8220;I wanted
+to tell you something, I wanted to say&#8212;but it has slipped from my mind. You interrupted me in your eagerness&#8212;but it was an
+insignificant matter. If you only knew what a whirl my head is in, I have so much to do!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Isagani understood that he was being dismissed. &#8220;So,&#8221; he said, rising, &#8220;we&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ah, you will do well to leave the matter in the hands of the government, which will settle it as it sees fit. You say that
+the Vice-Rector is opposed to the teaching of Castilian. Perhaps he may be, not as to the fact but as to the form. It is said
+that the Rector who is on his way will bring a project for reform in education. Wait a while, give time a chance, apply yourself
+to your studies as the examinations are near, and&#8212;<i>carambas!</i>&#8212;you who already speak Castilian and express yourself easily, what <span class="pageno">
+[145]
+</span>are you bothering yourself about? What interest have you in seeing it specially taught? Surely Padre Florentino thinks as
+I do! Give him my regards.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;My uncle,&#8221; replied Isagani, &#8220;has always admonished me to think of others as much as of myself. I didn&#8217;t come for myself,
+I came in the name of those who are in worse condition.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What the devil! Let them do as you have done, let them singe their eyebrows studying and come to be bald like myself, stuffing
+whole paragraphs into their memories! I believe that if you talk Spanish it is because you have studied it&#8212;you&#8217;re not of Manila
+or of Spanish parents! Then let them learn it as you have, and do as I have done: I&#8217;ve been a servant to all the friars, I&#8217;ve
+prepared their chocolate, and while with my right hand I stirred it, with the left I held a grammar, I learned, and, thank
+God! have never needed other teachers or academies or permits from the government. Believe me, he who wishes to learn, learns
+and becomes wise!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But how many among those who wish to learn come to be what you are? One in ten thousand, and more!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Pish! Why any more?&#8221; retorted the old man, shrugging his shoulders. &#8220;There are too many lawyers now, many of them become
+mere clerks. Doctors? They insult and abuse one another, and even kill each other in competition for a patient. Laborers,
+sir, laborers, are what we need, for agriculture!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Isagani realized that he was losing time, but still could not forbear replying: &#8220;Undoubtedly, there are many doctors and lawyers,
+but I won&#8217;t say there are too many, since we have towns that lack them entirely, and if they do abound in quantity, perhaps
+they are deficient in quality. Since the young men can&#8217;t be prevented from studying, and no other professions are open to
+us, why let them waste their time and effort? And if the instruction, deficient as it is, does not keep many from becoming
+lawyers and doctors, if we must finally have them, why not have good <span class="pageno">
+[146]
+</span>ones? After all, even if the sole wish is to make the country a country of farmers and laborers, and condemn in it all intellectual
+activity, I don&#8217;t see any evil in enlightening those same farmers and laborers, in giving them at least an education that
+will aid them in perfecting themselves and in perfecting their work, in placing them in a condition to understand many things
+of which they are at present ignorant.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Bah, bah, bah!&#8221; exclaimed the lawyer, drawing circles in the air with his hand to dispel the ideas suggested. &#8220;To be a good
+farmer no great amount of rhetoric is needed. Dreams, illusions, fancies! Eh, will you take a piece of advice?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>He arose and placed his hand affectionately on the youth&#8217;s shoulder, as he continued: &#8220;I&#8217;m going to give you one, and a very
+good one, because I see that you are intelligent and the advice will not be wasted. You&#8217;re going to study medicine? Well,
+confine yourself to learning how to put on plasters and apply leeches, and don&#8217;t ever try to improve or impair the condition
+of your kind. When you become a licentiate, marry a rich and devout girl, try to make cures and charge well, shun everything
+that has any relation to the general state of the country, attend mass, confession, and communion when the rest do, and you
+will see afterwards how you will thank me, and I shall see it, if I am still alive. Always remember that charity begins at
+home, for man ought not to seek on earth more than the greatest amount of happiness for himself, as Bentham says. If you involve
+yourself in quixotisms you will have no career, nor will you get married, nor will you ever amount to anything. All will abandon
+you, your own countrymen will be the first to laugh at your simplicity. Believe me, you will remember me and see that I am
+right, when you have gray hairs like myself, gray hairs such as these!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Here the old lawyer stroked his scanty white hair, as he smiled sadly and shook his head.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;When I have gray hairs like those, sir,&#8221; replied Isagani <span class="pageno">
+[147]
+</span>with equal sadness, &#8220;and turn my gaze back over my past and see that I have worked only for myself, without having done what
+I plainly could and should have done for the country that has given me everything, for the citizens that have helped me to
+live&#8212;then, sir, every gray hair will be a thorn, and instead of rejoicing, they will shame me!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>So saying, he took his leave with a profound bow. The lawyer remained motionless in his place, with an amazed look on his
+face. He listened to the footfalls that gradually died away, then resumed his seat.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Poor boy!&#8221; he murmured, &#8220;similar thoughts also crossed my mind once! What more could any one desire than to be able to say:
+&#8216;I have done this for the good of the fatherland, I have consecrated my life to the welfare of others!&#8217; A crown of laurel,
+steeped in aloes, dry leaves that cover thorns and worms! That is not life, that does not get us our daily bread, nor does
+it bring us honors&#8212; the laurel would hardly serve for a salad, nor produce ease, nor aid us in winning lawsuits, but quite
+the reverse! Every country has its code of ethics, as it has its climate and its diseases, different from the climate and
+the diseases of other countries.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>After a pause, he added: &#8220;Poor boy! If all should think and act as he does, I don&#8217;t say but that&#8212;Poor boy! Poor Florentino!&#8221;
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[148]
+</span></p>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e3140"></a></p>
+<h1>The Tribulations of a Chinese</h1>
+<p>In the evening of that same Saturday, Quiroga, the Chinese, who aspired to the creation of a consulate for his nation, gave
+a dinner in the rooms over his bazaar, located in the Escolta. His feast was well attended: friars, government employees,
+soldiers, merchants, all of them his customers, partners or patrons, were to be seen there, for his store supplied the curates
+and the conventos with all their necessities, he accepted the chits of all the employees, and he had servants who were discreet,
+prompt, and complaisant. The friars themselves did not disdain to pass whole hours in his store, sometimes in view of the
+public, sometimes in the chambers with agreeable company.
+
+</p>
+<p>That night, then, the sala presented a curious aspect, being filled with friars and clerks seated on Vienna chairs, stools
+of black wood, and marble benches of Cantonese origin, before little square tables, playing cards or conversing among themselves,
+under the brilliant glare of the gilt chandeliers or the subdued light of the Chinese lanterns, which were brilliantly decorated
+with long silken tassels. On the walls there was a lamentable medley of landscapes in dim and gaudy colors, painted in Canton
+or Hongkong, mingled with tawdry chromos of odalisks, half-nude women, effeminate lithographs of Christ, the deaths of the
+just and of the sinners&#8212;made by Jewish houses in Germany to be sold in the Catholic countries. Nor were there lacking the
+Chinese prints on red paper representing a man seated, of venerable aspect, with a calm, smiling face, behind whom stood a
+servant, ugly, horrible, diabolical, threatening, armed with a lance having a wide, <span class="pageno">
+[149]
+</span>keen blade. Among the Indians some call this figure Mohammed, others Santiago,<a id="d0e3149src" href="#d0e3149" class="noteref">1</a> we do not know why, nor do the Chinese themselves give a very clear explanation of this popular pair. The pop of champagne
+corks, the rattle of glasses, laughter, cigar smoke, and that odor peculiar to a Chinese habitation&#8212;a mixture of punk, opium,
+and dried fruits&#8212;completed the collection.
+
+</p>
+<p>Dressed as a Chinese mandarin in a blue-tasseled cap, Quiroga moved from room to room, stiff and straight, but casting watchful
+glances here and there as though to assure himself that nothing was being stolen. Yet in spite of this natural distrust, he
+exchanged handshakes with each guest, greeted some with a smile sagacious and humble, others with a patronizing air, and still
+others with a certain shrewd look that seemed to say, &#8220;I know! You didn&#8217;t come on my account, you came for the dinner!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>And Quiroga was right! That fat gentleman who is now praising him and speaking of the advisability of a Chinese consulate
+in Manila, intimating that to manage it there could be no one but Quiroga, is the Se&ntilde;or Gonzalez who hides behind the pseudonym
+<i>Pitil&iacute;</i> when he attacks Chinese immigration through the columns of the newspapers. That other, an elderly man who closely examines
+the lamps, pictures, and other furnishings with grimaces and ejaculations of disdain, is Don Timoteo Pelaez, Juanito&#8217;s father,
+a merchant who inveighs against the Chinese competition that is ruining his business. The one over there, that thin, brown
+individual with a sharp look and a pale smile, is the celebrated originator of the dispute over Mexican pesos, which so troubled
+one of Quiroga&#8217;s prot&eacute;ges: that government clerk is regarded in Manila as very clever. That one farther on, he of the frowning
+look and unkempt mustache, is a government official who passes for a most meritorious fellow because he has the courage to
+speak ill of the business in lottery tickets carried on between Quiroga <span class="pageno">
+[150]
+</span>and an exalted dame in Manila society. The fact is that two thirds of the tickets go to China and the few that are left in
+Manila are sold at a premium of a half-real. The honorable gentleman entertains the conviction that some day he will draw
+the first prize, and is in a rage at finding himself confronted with such tricks.
+
+</p>
+<p>The dinner, meanwhile, was drawing to an end. From the dining-room floated into the sala snatches of toasts, interruptions,
+bursts and ripples of laughter. The name of Quiroga was often heard mingled with the words &#8220;consul,&#8221; &#8220;equality,&#8221; &#8220;justice.&#8221;
+The amphitryon himself did not eat European dishes, so he contented himself with drinking a glass of wine with his guests
+from time to time, promising to dine with those who were not seated at the first table.
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun, who was present, having already dined, was in the sala talking with some merchants, who were complaining of business
+conditions: everything was going wrong, trade was paralyzed, the European exchanges were exorbitantly high. They sought information
+from the jeweler or insinuated to him a few ideas, with the hope that these would be communicated to the Captain-General.
+To all the remedies suggested Simoun responded with a sarcastic and unfeeling exclamation about nonsense, until one of them
+in exasperation asked him for his opinion.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;My opinion?&#8221; he retorted. &#8220;Study how other nations prosper, and then do as they do.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;And why do they prosper, Se&ntilde;or Simoun?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun replied with a shrug of his shoulders.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The port works, which weigh so heavily upon commerce, and the port not yet completed!&#8221; sighed Don Timoteo Pelaez. &#8220;A Penelope&#8217;s
+web, as my son says, that is spun and unspun. The taxes&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You complaining!&#8221; exclaimed another. &#8220;Just as the General has decreed the destruction of houses of light materials!<a id="d0e3175src" href="#d0e3175" class="noteref">2</a> And you with a shipment of galvanized iron!&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[151]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes,&#8221; rejoined Don Timoteo, &#8220;but look what that decree cost me! Then, the destruction will not be carried out for a month,
+not until Lent begins, and other shipments may arrive. I would have wished them destroyed right away, but&#8212;Besides, what are
+the owners of those houses going to buy from me if they are all poor, all equally beggars?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You can always buy up their shacks for a trifle.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;And afterwards have the decree revoked and sell them back at double the price&#8212;that&#8217;s business!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun smiled his frigid smile. Seeing Quiroga approach, he left the querulous merchants to greet the future consul, who on
+catching sight of him lost his satisfied expression and assigned a countenance like those of the merchants, while he bent
+almost double.
+
+</p>
+<p>Quiroga respected the jeweler greatly, not only because he knew him to be very wealthy, but also on account of his rumored
+influence with the Captain-General. It was reported that Simoun favored Quiroga&#8217;s ambitions, that he was an advocate for the
+consulate, and a certain newspaper hostile to the Chinese had alluded to him in many paraphrases, veiled allusions, and suspension
+points, in the celebrated controversy with another sheet that was favorable to the queued folk. Some prudent persons added
+with winks and half-uttered words that his Black Eminence was advising the General to avail himself of the Chinese in order
+to humble the tenacious pride of the natives.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;To hold the people in subjection,&#8221; he was reported to have said, &#8220;there&#8217;s nothing like humiliating them and humbling them
+in their own eyes.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>To this end an opportunity had soon presented itself. The guilds of mestizos and natives were continually watching one another,
+venting their bellicose spirits and their activities in jealousy and distrust. At mass one day the gobernadorcillo of the
+natives was seated on a bench to the right, and, being extremely thin, happened to cross one of his legs over the other, thus
+adopting a nonchalant <span class="pageno">
+[152]
+</span>attitude, in order to expose his thighs more and display his pretty shoes. The gobernadorcillo of the guild of mestizos, who
+was seated on the opposite bench, as he had bunions, and could not cross his legs on account of his obesity, spread his legs
+wide apart to expose a plain waistcoat adorned with a beautiful gold chain set with diamonds. The two cliques comprehended
+these maneuvers and joined battle. On the following Sunday all the mestizos, even the thinnest, had large paunches and spread
+their legs wide apart as though on horseback, while the natives placed one leg over the other, even the fattest, there being
+one cabeza de barangay who turned a somersault. Seeing these movements, the Chinese all adopted their own peculiar attitude,
+that of sitting as they do in their shops, with one leg drawn back and upward, the other swinging loose. There resulted protests
+and petitions, the police rushed to arms ready to start a civil war, the curates rejoiced, the Spaniards were amused and made
+money out of everybody, until the General settled the quarrel by ordering that every one should sit as the Chinese did, since
+they were the heaviest contributors, even though they were not the best Catholics. The difficulty for the mestizos and natives
+then was that their trousers were too tight to permit of their imitating the Chinese. But to make the intention of humiliating
+them the more evident, the measure was carried out with great pomp and ceremony, the church being surrounded by a troop of
+cavalry, while all those within were sweating. The matter was carried to the Cortes, but it was repeated that the Chinese,
+as the ones who paid, should have their way in the religious ceremonies, even though they apostatized and laughed at Christianity
+immediately after. The natives and the mestizos had to be content, learning thus not to waste time over such fatuity.<a id="d0e3195src" href="#d0e3195" class="noteref">3</a>
+<span class="pageno">
+[153]
+</span></p>
+<p>Quiroga, with his smooth tongue and humble smile, was lavishly and flatteringly attentive to Simoun. His voice was caressing
+and his bows numerous, but the jeweler cut his blandishments short by asking brusquely:
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Did the bracelets suit her?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>At this question all Quiroga&#8217;s liveliness vanished like a dream. His caressing voice became plaintive; he bowed lower, gave
+the Chinese salutation of raising his clasped hands to the height of his face, and groaned: &#8220;Ah, Se&ntilde;or Simoun! I&#8217;m lost, I&#8217;m
+ruined!&#8221;<a id="d0e3216src" href="#d0e3216" class="noteref">4</a>
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;How, Quiroga, lost and ruined when you have so many bottles of champagne and so many guests?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Quiroga closed his eyes and made a grimace. Yes, the affair of that afternoon, that affair of the bracelets, had ruined him.
+Simoun smiled, for when a Chinese merchant complains it is because all is going well, and when he makes a show that things
+are booming it is quite certain that he is planning an assignment or flight to his own country.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You didn&#8217;t know that I&#8217;m lost, I&#8217;m ruined? Ah, Se&ntilde;or Simoun, I&#8217;m <i>busted!</i>&#8221; To make his condition <span class="pageno">
+[154]
+</span>plainer, he illustrated the word by making a movement as though he were falling in collapse.
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun wanted to laugh, but restrained himself and said that he knew nothing, nothing at all, as Quiroga led him to a room
+and closed the door. He then explained the cause of his misfortune.
+
+</p>
+<p>Three diamond bracelets that he had secured from Simoun on pretense of showing them to his wife were not for her, a poor native
+shut up in her room like a Chinese woman, but for a beautiful and charming lady, the friend of a powerful man, whose influence
+was needed by him in a certain deal in which he could clear some six thousand pesos. As he did not understand feminine tastes
+and wished to be gallant, the Chinese had asked for the three finest bracelets the jeweler had, each priced at three to four
+thousand pesos. With affected simplicity and his most caressing smile, Quiroga had begged the lady to select the one she liked
+best, and the lady, more simple and caressing still, had declared that she liked all three, and had kept them.
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun burst out into laughter.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ah, sir, I&#8217;m lost, I&#8217;m ruined!&#8221; cried the Chinese, slapping himself lightly with his delicate hands; but the jeweler continued
+his laughter.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ugh, bad people, surely not a real lady,&#8221; went on the Chinaman, shaking his head in disgust. &#8220;What! She has no decency, while
+me, a Chinaman, me always polite! Ah, surely she not a real lady&#8212;a <i>cigarrera</i> has more decency!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;They&#8217;ve caught you, they&#8217;ve caught you!&#8221; exclaimed Simoun, poking him in the chest.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;And everybody&#8217;s asking for loans and never pays&#8212;what about that? Clerks, officials, lieutenants, soldiers&#8212;&#8221; he checked them
+off on his long-nailed fingers&#8212;&#8220;ah, Se&ntilde;or Simoun, I&#8217;m lost, I&#8217;m <i>busted</i>!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Get out with your complaints,&#8221; said Simoun. &#8220;I&#8217;ve saved you from many officials that wanted money from you. I&#8217;ve lent it
+to them so that they wouldn&#8217;t bother you, even when I knew that they couldn&#8217;t pay.&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[155]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;But, Se&ntilde;or Simoun, you lend to officials; I lend to women, sailors, everybody.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I bet you get your money back.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Me, money back? Ah, surely you don&#8217;t understand! When it&#8217;s lost in gambling they never pay. Besides, you have a consul, you
+can force them, but I haven&#8217;t.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun became thoughtful. &#8220;Listen, Quiroga,&#8221; he said, somewhat abstractedly, &#8220;I&#8217;ll undertake to collect what the officers
+and sailors owe you. Give me their notes.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Quiroga again fell to whining: they had never given him any notes.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;When they come to you asking for money, send them to me. I want to help you.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The grateful Quiroga thanked him, but soon fell to lamenting again about the bracelets. &#8220;A <i>cigarrera</i> wouldn&#8217;t be so shameless!&#8221; he repeated.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The devil!&#8221; exclaimed Simoun, looking askance at the Chinese, as though studying him. &#8220;Exactly when I need the money and
+thought that you could pay me! But it can all be arranged, as I don&#8217;t want you to fail for such a small amount. Come, a favor,
+and I&#8217;ll reduce to seven the nine thousand pesos you owe me. You can get anything you wish through the Customs&#8212;boxes of lamps,
+iron, copper, glassware, Mexican pesos&#8212;you furnish arms to the conventos, don&#8217;t you?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The Chinese nodded affirmation, but remarked that he had to do a good deal of bribing. &#8220;I furnish the padres everything!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Well, then,&#8221; added Simoun in a low voice, &#8220;I need you to get in for me some boxes of rifles that arrived this evening. I
+want you to keep them in your warehouse; there isn&#8217;t room for all of them in my house.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Quiroga began to show symptoms of fright.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t get scared, you don&#8217;t run any risk. These rifles are to be concealed, a few at a time, in various dwellings, then a
+search will be instituted, and many people will be <span class="pageno">
+[156]
+</span>sent to prison. You and I can make a haul getting them set free. Understand me?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Quiroga wavered, for he was afraid of firearms. In his desk he had an empty revolver that he never touched without turning
+his head away and closing his eyes.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;If you can&#8217;t do it, I&#8217;ll have to apply to some one else, but then I&#8217;ll need the nine thousand pesos to cross their palms
+and shut their eyes.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;All right, all right!&#8221; Quiroga finally agreed. &#8220;But many people will be arrested? There&#8217;ll be a search, eh?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>When Quiroga and Simoun returned to the sala they found there, in animated conversation, those who had finished their dinner,
+for the champagne had loosened their tongues and stirred their brains. They were talking rather freely.
+
+</p>
+<p>In a group where there were a number of government clerks, some ladies, and Don Custodio, the topic was a commission sent
+to India to make certain investigations about footwear for the soldiers.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Who compose it?&#8221; asked an elderly lady.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;A colonel, two other officers, and his Excellency&#8217;s nephew.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Four?&#8221; rejoined a clerk. &#8220;What a commission! Suppose they disagree&#8212;are they competent?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s what I asked,&#8221; replied a clerk. &#8220;It&#8217;s said that one civilian ought to go, one who has no military prejudices&#8212;a shoemaker,
+for instance.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s right,&#8221; added an importer of shoes, &#8220;but it wouldn&#8217;t do to send an Indian or a Chinaman, and the only Peninsular shoemaker
+demanded such large fees&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But why do they have to make any investigations about footwear?&#8221; inquired the elderly lady. &#8220;It isn&#8217;t for the Peninsular
+artillerymen. The Indian soldiers can go barefoot, as they do in their towns.&#8221;<a id="d0e3310src" href="#d0e3310" class="noteref">5</a>
+<span class="pageno">
+[157]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;Exactly so, and the treasury would save more,&#8221; corroborated another lady, a widow who was not satisfied with her pension.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But you must remember,&#8221; remarked another in the group, a friend of the officers on the commission, &#8220;that while it&#8217;s true
+they go barefoot in the towns, it&#8217;s not the same as moving about under orders in the service. They can&#8217;t choose the hour,
+nor the road, nor rest when they wish. Remember, madam, that, with the noonday sun overhead and the earth below baking like
+an oven, they have to march over sandy stretches, where there are stones, the sun above and fire below, bullets in front&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s only a question of getting used to it!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Like the donkey that got used to not eating! In our present campaign the greater part of our losses have been due to wounds
+on the soles of the feet. Remember the donkey, madam, remember the donkey!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But, my dear sir,&#8221; retorted the lady, &#8220;look how much money is wasted on shoe-leather. There&#8217;s enough to pension many widows
+and orphans in order to maintain our prestige. Don&#8217;t smile, for I&#8217;m not talking about myself, and I have my pension, even
+though a very small one, insignificant considering the services my husband rendered, but I&#8217;m talking of others who are dragging
+out miserable lives! It&#8217;s not right that after so much persuasion to come and so many hardships in crossing the sea they should
+end here by dying of hunger. What you say about the soldiers may be true, but the fact is that I&#8217;ve been in the country more
+than three years, and I haven&#8217;t seen any soldier limping.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;In that I agree with the lady,&#8221; said her neighbor. &#8220;Why issue them shoes when they were born without them?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;And why shirts?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;And why trousers?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Just calculate what we should economize on soldiers clothed only in their skins!&#8221; concluded he who was defending the army.
+<span class="pageno">
+[158]
+</span></p>
+<p>In another group the conversation was more heated. Ben-Zayb was talking and declaiming, while Padre Camorra, as usual, was
+constantly interrupting him. The friar-journalist, in spite of his respect for the cowled gentry, was always at loggerheads
+with Padre Camorra, whom he regarded as a silly half-friar, thus giving himself the appearance of being independent and refuting
+the accusations of those who called him Fray Iba&ntilde;ez. Padre Camorra liked his adversary, as the latter was the only person
+who would take seriously what he styled his arguments. They were discussing magnetism, spiritualism, magic, and the like.
+Their words flew through the air like the knives and balls of jugglers, tossed back and forth from one to the other.
+
+</p>
+<p>That year great attention had been attracted in the Quiapo fair by a head, wrongly called a sphinx, exhibited by Mr. Leeds,
+an American. Glaring advertisements covered the walls of the houses, mysterious and funereal, to excite the curiosity of the
+public. Neither Ben-Zayb nor any of the padres had yet seen it; Juanito Pelaez was the only one who had, and he was describing
+his wonderment to the party.
+
+</p>
+<p>Ben-Zayb, as a journalist, looked for a natural explanation. Padre Camorra talked of the devil, Padre Irene smiled, Padre
+Salvi remained grave.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But, Padre, the devil doesn&#8217;t need to come&#8212;we are sufficient to damn ourselves&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It can&#8217;t be explained any other way.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;If science&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Get out with science, <i>pu&ntilde;ales</i>!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But, listen to me and I&#8217;ll convince you. It&#8217;s all a question of optics. I haven&#8217;t yet seen the head nor do I know how it
+looks, but this gentleman&#8221;&#8212;indicating Juanito Pelaez&#8212;&#8220;tells us that it does not look like the talking heads that are usually
+exhibited. So be it! But the principle is the same&#8212;it&#8217;s all a question of optics. Wait! A mirror is placed thus, another mirror
+behind it, <span class="pageno">
+[159]
+</span>the image is reflected&#8212;I say, it is purely a problem in physics.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Taking down from the walls several mirrors, he arranged them, turned them round and round, but, not getting the desired result,
+concluded: &#8220;As I say, it&#8217;s nothing more or less than a question of optics.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But what do you want mirrors for, if Juanito tells us that the head is inside a box placed on the table? I see in it spiritualism,
+because the spiritualists always make use of tables, and I think that Padre Salvi, as the ecclesiastical governor, ought to
+prohibit the exhibition.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Padre Salvi remained silent, saying neither yes nor no.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;In order to learn if there are devils or mirrors inside it,&#8221; suggested Simoun, &#8220;the best thing would be for you to go and
+see the famous sphinx.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The proposal was a good one, so it was accepted, although Padre Salvi and Don Custodio showed some repugnance. They at a fair,
+to rub shoulders with the public, to see sphinxes and talking heads! What would the natives say? These might take them for
+mere men, endowed with the same passions and weaknesses as others. But Ben-Zayb, with his journalistic ingenuity, promised
+to request Mr. Leeds not to admit the public while they were inside. They would be honoring him sufficiently by the visit
+not to admit of his refusal, and besides he would not charge any admission fee. To give a show of probability to this, he
+concluded: &#8220;Because, remember, if I should expose the trick of the mirrors to the public, it would ruin the poor American&#8217;s
+business.&#8221; Ben-Zayb was a conscientious individual.
+
+</p>
+<p>About a dozen set out, among them our acquaintances, Padres Salvi, Camorra, and Irene, Don Custodio, Ben-Zayb, and Juanito
+Pelaez. Their carriages set them down at the entrance to the Quiapo Plaza.
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[160]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e3149" href="#d0e3149src" class="noteref">1</a> The patron saint of Spain, St. James.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e3175" href="#d0e3175src" class="noteref">2</a> Houses of bamboo and nipa, such as form the homes of the masses of the natives.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e3195" href="#d0e3195src" class="noteref">3</a> &#8220;In this paragraph Rizal alludes to an incident that had very serious results. There was annually celebrated in Binondo a
+certain religious festival, principally at the expense of the Chinese mestizos. The latter finally petitioned that their gobernadorcillo
+be given the presidency <span class="pageno">
+[153n]
+</span>of it, and this was granted, thanks to the fact that the parish priest (the Dominican, Fray Jos&eacute; Hevia Campomanes) held to
+the opinion that the presidency belonged to those who paid the most. The Tagalogs protested, alleging their better right to
+it, as the genuine sons of the country, not to mention the historical precedent, but the friar, who was looking after his
+own interests, did not yield. General Terrero (Governor, 1885&#8211;1888), at the advice of his liberal councilors, finally had
+the parish priest removed and for the time being decided the affair in favor of the Tagalogs. The matter reached the Colonial
+Office (<i>Ministerio de Ultramar</i>) and the Minister was not even content merely to settle it in the way the friars desired, but made amends to Padre Hevia
+by appointing him a bishop.&#8221;&#8212;<i>W. E. Retana, who was a journalist in Manila at the time, in a note to this chapter.</i>
+
+</p>
+<p class="notetext">Childish and ridiculous as this may appear now, it was far from being so at the time, especially in view of the supreme contempt
+with which the pugnacious Tagalog looks down upon the meek and complaisant Chinese and the mortal antipathy that exists between
+the two races.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e3216" href="#d0e3216src" class="noteref">4</a> It is regrettable that Quiroga&#8217;s picturesque butchery of Spanish and Tagalog&#8212;the dialect of the Manila Chinese&#8212;cannot be reproduced
+here. Only the thought can be given. There is the same difficulty with <i>r&#8217;s, d&#8217;s</i>, and <i>l&#8217;s</i> that the Chinese show in English.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e3310" href="#d0e3310src" class="noteref">5</a> Up to the outbreak of the insurrection in 1896, the only genuinely Spanish troops in the islands were a few hundred artillerymen,
+the rest being natives, with Spanish officers.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e3367"></a></p>
+<h1>The Quiapo Fair</h1>
+<p>It was a beautiful night and the plaza presented a most animated aspect. Taking advantage of the freshness of the breeze and
+the splendor of the January moon, the people filled the fair to see, be seen, and amuse themselves. The music of the cosmoramas
+and the lights of the lanterns gave life and merriment to every one. Long rows of booths, brilliant with tinsel and gauds,
+exposed to view clusters of balls, masks strung by the eyes, tin toys, trains, carts, mechanical horses, carriages, steam-engines
+with diminutive boilers, Lilliputian tableware of porcelain, pine Nativities, dolls both foreign and domestic, the former
+red and smiling, the latter sad and pensive like little ladies beside gigantic children. The beating of drums, the roar of
+tin horns, the wheezy music of the accordions and the hand-organs, all mingled in a carnival concert, amid the coming and
+going of the crowd, pushing, stumbling over one another, with their faces turned toward the booths, so that the collisions
+were frequent and often amusing. The carriages were forced to move slowly, with the <i>tab&iacute;</i> of the cocheros repeated every moment. Met and mingled government clerks, soldiers, friars, students, Chinese, girls with
+their mammas or aunts, all greeting, signaling, calling to one another merrily.
+
+</p>
+<p>Padre Camorra was in the seventh heaven at the sight of so many pretty girls. He stopped, looked back, nudged Ben-Zayb, chuckled
+and swore, saying, &#8220;And that one, and that one, my ink-slinger? And that one over there, what say you?&#8221; In his contentment
+he even fell to using the familiar <i>tu</i> toward his friend and adversary. Padre <span class="pageno">
+[161]
+</span>Salvi stared at him from time to time, but he took little note of Padre Salvi. On the contrary, he pretended to stumble so
+that he might brush against the girls, he winked and made eyes at them.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Pu&ntilde;ales!</i>&#8221; he kept saying to himself. &#8220;When shall I be the curate of Quiapo?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Suddenly Ben-Zayb let go an oath, jumped aside, and slapped his hand on his arm; Padre Camorra in his excess of enthusiasm
+had pinched him. They were approaching a dazzling se&ntilde;orita who was attracting the attention of the whole plaza, and Padre
+Camorra, unable to restrain his delight, had taken Ben-Zayb&#8217;s arm as a substitute for the girl&#8217;s.
+
+</p>
+<p>It was Paulita Gomez, the prettiest of the pretty, in company with Isagani, followed by Do&ntilde;a Victorina. The young woman was
+resplendent in her beauty: all stopped and craned their necks, while they ceased their conversation and followed her with
+their eyes&#8212;even Do&ntilde;a Victorina was respectfully saluted.
+
+</p>
+<p>Paulita was arrayed in a rich camisa and pa&ntilde;uelo of embroidered pi&ntilde;a, different from those she had worn that morning to the
+church. The gauzy texture of the pi&ntilde;a set off her shapely head, and the Indians who saw her compared her to the moon surrounded
+by fleecy clouds. A silk rose-colored skirt, caught up in rich and graceful folds by her little hand, gave majesty to her
+erect figure, the movement of which, harmonizing with her curving neck, displayed all the triumphs of vanity and satisfied
+coquetry. Isagani appeared to be rather disgusted, for so many curious eyes fixed upon the beauty of his sweetheart annoyed
+him. The stares seemed to him robbery and the girl&#8217;s smiles faithlessness.
+
+</p>
+<p>Juanito saw her and his hump increased when he spoke to her. Paulita replied negligently, while Do&ntilde;a Victorina called to him,
+for Juanito was her favorite, she preferring him to Isagani.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What a girl, what a girl!&#8221; muttered the entranced Padre Camorra.
+<span class="pageno">
+[162]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;Come, Padre, pinch yourself and let me alone,&#8221; said Ben-Zayb fretfully.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What a girl, what a girl!&#8221; repeated the friar. &#8220;And she has for a sweetheart a pupil of mine, the boy I had the quarrel with.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Just my luck that she&#8217;s not of my town,&#8221; he added, after turning his head several times to follow her with his looks. He
+was even tempted to leave his companions to follow the girl, and Ben-Zayb had difficulty in dissuading him. Paulita&#8217;s beautiful
+figure moved on, her graceful little head nodding with inborn coquetry.
+
+</p>
+<p>Our promenaders kept on their way, not without sighs on the part of the friar-artilleryman, until they reached a booth surrounded
+by sightseers, who quickly made way for them. It was a shop of little wooden figures, of local manufacture, representing in
+all shapes and sizes the costumes, races, and occupations of the country: Indians, Spaniards, Chinese, mestizos, friars, clergymen,
+government clerks, gobernadorcillos, students, soldiers, and so on.
+
+</p>
+<p>Whether the artists had more affection for the priests, the folds of whose habits were better suited to their esthetic purposes,
+or whether the friars, holding such an important place in Philippine life, engaged the attention of the sculptor more, the
+fact was that, for one cause or another, images of them abounded, well-turned and finished, representing them in the sublimest
+moments of their lives&#8212;the opposite of what is done in Europe, where they are pictured as sleeping on casks of wine, playing
+cards, emptying tankards, rousing themselves to gaiety, or patting the cheeks of a buxom girl. No, the friars of the Philippines
+were different: elegant, handsome, well-dressed, their tonsures neatly shaven, their features symmetrical and serene, their
+gaze meditative, their expression saintly, somewhat rosy-cheeked, cane in hand and patent-leather shoes on their feet, inviting
+adoration and a place in a glass case. Instead of the symbols of gluttony and incontinence of their brethren in <span class="pageno">
+[163]
+</span>Europe, those of Manila carried the book, the crucifix, and the palm of martyrdom; instead of kissing the simple country lasses,
+those of Manila gravely extended the hand to be kissed by children and grown men doubled over almost to kneeling; instead
+of the full refectory and dining-hall, their stage in Europe, in Manila they had the oratory, the study-table; instead of
+the mendicant friar who goes from door to door with his donkey and sack, begging alms, the friars of the Philippines scattered
+gold from full hands among the miserable Indians.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Look, here&#8217;s Padre Camorra!&#8221; exclaimed Ben-Zayb, upon whom the effect of the champagne still lingered. He pointed to a picture
+of a lean friar of thoughtful mien who was seated at a table with his head resting on the palm of his hand, apparently writing
+a sermon by the light of a lamp. The contrast suggested drew laughter from the crowd.
+
+</p>
+<p>Padre Camorra, who had already forgotten about Paulita, saw what was meant and laughing his clownish laugh, asked in turn,
+&#8220;Whom does this other figure resemble, Ben-Zayb?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>It was an old woman with one eye, with disheveled hair, seated on the ground like an Indian idol, ironing clothes. The sad-iron
+was carefully imitated, being of copper with coals of red tinsel and smoke-wreaths of dirty twisted cotton.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Eh, Ben-Zayb, it wasn&#8217;t a fool who designed that&#8221; asked Padre Camorra with a laugh.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Well, I don&#8217;t see the point,&#8221; replied the journalist.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But, <i>pu&ntilde;ales</i>, don&#8217;t you see the title, <i>The Philippine Press</i>? That utensil with which the old woman is ironing is here called the press!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>All laughed at this, Ben-Zayb himself joining in good-naturedly.
+
+</p>
+<p>Two soldiers of the Civil Guard, appropriately labeled, were placed behind a man who was tightly bound and had his face covered
+by his hat. It was entitled <i>The Country of <span class="pageno">
+[164]
+</span>Abaka</i>,<a id="d0e3437src" href="#d0e3437" class="noteref">1</a> and from appearances they were going to shoot him.
+
+</p>
+<p>Many of our visitors were displeased with the exhibition. They talked of rules of art, they sought proportion&#8212;one said that
+this figure did not have seven heads, that the face lacked a nose, having only three, all of which made Padre Camorra somewhat
+thoughtful, for he did not comprehend how a figure, to be correct, need have four noses and seven heads. Others said, if they
+were muscular, that they could not be Indians; still others remarked that it was not sculpture, but mere carpentry. Each added
+his spoonful of criticism, until Padre Camorra, not to be outdone, ventured to ask for at least thirty legs for each doll,
+because, if the others wanted noses, couldn&#8217;t he require feet? So they fell to discussing whether the Indian had or had not
+any aptitude for sculpture, and whether it would be advisable to encourage that art, until there arose a general dispute,
+which was cut short by Don Custodio&#8217;s declaration that the Indians had the aptitude, but that they should devote themselves
+exclusively to the manufacture of saints.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;One would say,&#8221; observed Ben-Zayb, who was full of bright ideas that night, &#8220;that this Chinaman is Quiroga, but on close
+examination it looks like Padre Irene. And what do you say about that British Indian? He looks like Simoun!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Fresh peals of laughter resounded, while Padre Irene rubbed his nose.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s right!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s the very image of him!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But where is Simoun? Simoun should buy it.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>But the jeweler had disappeared, unnoticed by any one.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Pu&ntilde;ales!</i>&#8221; exclaimed Padre Camorra, &#8220;how stingy the American is! He&#8217;s afraid we would make him pay the admission for all of us into
+Mr. Leeds&#8217; show.&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[165]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;No!&#8221; rejoined Ben-Zayb, &#8220;what he&#8217;s afraid of is that he&#8217;ll compromise himself. He may have foreseen the joke in store for
+his friend Mr. Leeds and has got out of the way.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Thus, without purchasing the least trifle, they continued on their way to see the famous sphinx. Ben-Zayb offered to manage
+the affair, for the American would not rebuff a journalist who could take revenge in an unfavorable article. &#8220;You&#8217;ll see that
+it&#8217;s all a question of mirrors,&#8221; he said, &#8220;because, you see&#8212;&#8221; Again he plunged into a long demonstration, and as he had no
+mirrors at hand to discredit his theory he tangled himself up in all kinds of blunders and wound up by not knowing himself
+what he was saying. &#8220;In short, you&#8217;ll see how it&#8217;s all a question of optics.&#8221;
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[166]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e3437" href="#d0e3437src" class="noteref">1</a> Abaka is the fiber obtained from the leaves of the <i>Musa textilis</i> and is known commercially as Manila hemp. As it is exclusively a product of the Philippines, it may be taken here to symbolize
+the country.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e3468"></a></p>
+<h1>Legerdemain</h1>
+<p>Mr. Leeds, a genuine Yankee, dressed completely in black, received his visitors with great deference. He spoke Spanish well,
+from having been for many years in South America, and offered no objection to their request, saying that they might examine
+everything, both before and after the exhibition, but begged that they remain quiet while it was in progress. Ben-Zayb smiled
+in pleasant anticipation of the vexation he had prepared for the American.
+
+</p>
+<p>The room, hung entirely in black, was lighted by ancient lamps burning alcohol. A rail wrapped in black velvet divided it
+into two almost equal parts, one of which was filled with seats for the spectators and the other occupied by a platform covered
+with a checkered carpet. In the center of this platform was placed a table, over which was spread a piece of black cloth adorned
+with skulls and cabalistic signs. The <i>mise en sc&egrave;ne</i> was therefore lugubrious and had its effect upon the merry visitors. The jokes died away, they spoke in whispers, and however
+much some tried to appear indifferent, their lips framed no smiles. All felt as if they had entered a house where there was
+a corpse, an illusion accentuated by an odor of wax and incense. Don Custodio and Padre Salvi consulted in whispers over the
+expediency of prohibiting such shows.
+
+</p>
+<p>Ben-Zayb, in order to cheer the dispirited group and embarrass Mr. Leeds, said to him in a familiar tone: &#8220;Eh, Mister, since
+there are none but ourselves here and we aren&#8217;t Indians who can be fooled, won&#8217;t you let us see <span class="pageno">
+[167]
+</span>the trick? We know of course that it&#8217;s purely a question of optics, but as Padre Camorra won&#8217;t be convinced&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Here he started to jump over the rail, instead of going through the proper opening, while Padre Camorra broke out into protests,
+fearing that Ben-Zayb might be right.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;And why not, sir?&#8221; rejoined the American. &#8220;But don&#8217;t break anything, will you?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The journalist was already on the platform. &#8220;You will allow me, then?&#8221; he asked, and without waiting for the permission, fearing
+that it might not be granted, raised the cloth to look for the mirrors that he expected should be between the legs of the
+table. Ben-Zayb uttered an exclamation and stepped back, again placed both hands under the table and waved them about; he
+encountered only empty space. The table had three thin iron legs, sunk into the floor.
+
+</p>
+<p>The journalist looked all about as though seeking something.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Where are the mirrors?&#8221; asked Padre Camorra.
+
+</p>
+<p>Ben-Zayb looked and looked, felt the table with his fingers, raised the cloth again, and rubbed his hand over his forehead
+from time to time, as if trying to remember something.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Have you lost anything?&#8221; inquired Mr. Leeds.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The mirrors, Mister, where are the mirrors?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t know where yours are&#8212;mine are at the hotel. Do you want to look at yourself? You&#8217;re somewhat pale and excited.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Many laughed, in spite of their weird impressions, on seeing the jesting coolness of the American, while Ben-Zayb retired,
+quite abashed, to his seat, muttering, &#8220;It can&#8217;t be. You&#8217;ll see that he doesn&#8217;t do it without mirrors. The table will have
+to be changed later.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Mr. Leeds placed the cloth on the table again and turning toward his illustrious audience, asked them, &#8220;Are you satisfied?
+May we begin?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Hurry up! How cold-blooded he is!&#8221; said the widow.
+<span class="pageno">
+[168]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;Then, ladies and gentlemen, take your seats and get your questions ready.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Mr. Leeds disappeared through a doorway and in a few moments returned with a black box of worm-eaten wood, covered with inscriptions
+in the form of birds, beasts, and human heads.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ladies and gentlemen,&#8221; he began solemnly, &#8220;once having had occasion to visit the great pyramid of Khufu, a Pharaoh of the
+fourth dynasty, I chanced upon a sarcophagus of red granite in a forgotten chamber. My joy was great, for I thought that I
+had found a royal mummy, but what was my disappointment on opening the coffin, at the cost of infinite labor, to find nothing
+more than this box, which you may examine.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>He handed the box to those in the front row. Padre Camorra drew back in loathing, Padre Salvi looked at it closely as if he
+enjoyed sepulchral things, Padre Irene smiled a knowing smile, Don Custodio affected gravity and disdain, while Ben-Zayb hunted
+for his mirrors&#8212;there they must be, for it was a question of mirrors.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It smells like a corpse,&#8221; observed one lady, fanning herself furiously. &#8220;Ugh!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It smells of forty centuries,&#8221; remarked some one with emphasis.
+
+</p>
+<p>Ben-Zayb forgot about his mirrors to discover who had made this remark. It was a military official who had read the history
+of Napoleon.
+
+</p>
+<p>Ben-Zayb felt jealous and to utter another epigram that might annoy Padre Camorra a little said, &#8220;It smells of the Church.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;This box, ladies and gentlemen,&#8221; continued the American, &#8220;contained a handful of ashes and a piece of papyrus on which were
+written some words. Examine them yourselves, but I beg of you not to breathe heavily, because if any of the dust is lost my
+sphinx will appear in a mutilated condition.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The humbug, described with such seriousness and conviction, <span class="pageno">
+[169]
+</span>was gradually having its effect, so much so that when the box was passed around, no one dared to breathe. Padre Camorra, who
+had so often depicted from the pulpit of Tiani the torments and sufferings of hell, while he laughed in his sleeves at the
+terrified looks of the sinners, held his nose, and Padre Salvi&#8212;the same Padre Salvi who had on All Souls&#8217; Day prepared a phantasmagoria
+of the souls in purgatory with flames and transparencies illuminated with alcohol lamps and covered with tinsel, on the high
+altar of the church in a suburb, in order to get alms and orders for masses&#8212;the lean and taciturn Padre Salvi held his breath
+and gazed suspiciously at that handful of ashes.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Memento, homo, quia pulvis es</i>!&#8221; muttered Padre Irene with a smile.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Pish!&#8221; sneered Ben-Zayb&#8212;the same thought had occurred to him, and the Canon had taken the words out of his mouth.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Not knowing what to do,&#8221; resumed Mr. Leeds, closing the box carefully, &#8220;I examined the papyrus and discovered two words whose
+meaning was unknown to me. I deciphered them, and tried to pronounce them aloud. Scarcely had I uttered the first word when
+I felt the box slipping from my hands, as if pressed down by an enormous weight, and it glided along the floor, whence I vainly
+endeavored to remove it. But my surprise was converted into terror when it opened and I found within a human head that stared
+at me fixedly. Paralyzed with fright and uncertain what to do in the presence of such a phenomenon, I remained for a time
+stupefied, trembling like a person poisoned with mercury, but after a while recovered myself and, thinking that it was a vain
+illusion, tried to divert my attention by reading the second word. Hardly had I pronounced it when the box closed, the head
+disappeared, and in its place I again found the handful of ashes. Without suspecting it I had discovered the two most potent
+words in nature, the words of creation and destruction, of life and of death!&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[170]
+</span></p>
+<p>He paused for a few moments to note the effect of his story, then with grave and measured steps approached the table and placed
+the mysterious box upon it.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The cloth, Mister!&#8221; exclaimed the incorrigible Ben-Zayb.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Why not?&#8221; rejoined Mr. Leeds, very complaisantly.
+
+</p>
+<p>Lifting the box with his right hand, he caught up the cloth with his left, completely exposing the table sustained by its
+three legs. Again he placed the box upon the center and with great gravity turned to his audience.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Here&#8217;s what I want to see,&#8221; said Ben-Zayb to his neighbor. &#8220;You notice how he makes some excuse.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Great attention was depicted on all countenances and silence reigned. The noise and roar of the street could be distinctly
+heard, but all were so affected that a snatch of dialogue which reached them produced no effect.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Why can&#8217;t we go in?&#8221; asked a woman&#8217;s voice.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Ab&aacute;</i>, there&#8217;s a lot of friars and clerks in there,&#8221; answered a man. &#8220;The sphinx is for them only.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The friars are inquisitive too,&#8221; said the woman&#8217;s voice, drawing away. &#8220;They don&#8217;t want us to know how they&#8217;re being fooled.
+Why, is the head a friar&#8217;s <i>querida</i>?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>In the midst of a profound silence the American announced in a tone of emotion: &#8220;Ladies and gentlemen, with a word I am now
+going to reanimate the handful of ashes, and you will talk with a being that knows the past, the present, and much of the
+future!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Here the prestidigitator uttered a soft cry, first mournful, then lively, a medley of sharp sounds like imprecations and hoarse
+notes like threats, which made Ben-Zayb&#8217;s hair stand on end.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Deremof</i>!&#8221; cried the American.
+
+</p>
+<p>The curtains on the wall rustled, the lamps burned low, the table creaked. A feeble groan responded from the interior of the
+box. Pale and uneasy, all stared at one another, while one terrified se&ntilde;ora caught hold of Padre Salvi.
+<span class="pageno">
+[171]
+</span></p>
+<p>The box then opened of its own accord and presented to the eyes of the audience a head of cadaverous aspect, surrounded by
+long and abundant black hair. It slowly opened its eyes and looked around the whole audience. Those eyes had a vivid radiance,
+accentuated by their cavernous sockets, and, as if deep were calling unto deep, fixed themselves upon the profound, sunken
+eyes of the trembling Padre Salvi, who was staring unnaturally, as though he saw a ghost.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Sphinx,&#8221; commanded Mr. Leeds, &#8220;tell the audience who you are.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>A deep silence prevailed, while a chill wind blew through the room and made the blue flames of the sepulchral lamps flicker.
+The most skeptical shivered.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I am Imuthis,&#8221; declared the head in a funereal, but strangely menacing, voice. &#8220;I was born in the time of Amasis and died
+under the Persian domination, when Cambyses was returning from his disastrous expedition into the interior of Libya. I had
+come to complete my education after extensive travels through Greece, Assyria, and Persia, and had returned to my native laud
+to dwell in it until Thoth should call me before his terrible tribunal. But to my undoing, on passing through Babylonia, I
+discovered an awful secret&#8212;the secret of the false Smerdis who usurped the throne, the bold Magian Gaumata who governed as
+an impostor. Fearing that I would betray him to Cambyses, he determined upon my ruin through the instrumentality of the Egyptian
+priests, who at that time ruled my native country. They were the owners of two-thirds of the land, the monopolizers of learning,
+they held the people down in ignorance and tyranny, they brutalized them, thus making them fit to pass without resistance
+from one domination to another. The invaders availed themselves of them, and knowing their usefulness, protected and enriched
+them. The rulers not only depended on their will, but some were reduced to mere instruments of theirs. The Egyptian priests
+hastened to execute Gaumata&#8217;s orders, with greater <span class="pageno">
+[172]
+</span>zeal from their fear of me, because they were afraid that I would reveal their impostures to the people. To accomplish their
+purpose, they made use of a young priest of Abydos, who passed for a saint.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>A painful silence followed these words. That head was talking of priestly intrigues and impostures, and although referring
+to another age and other creeds, all the friars present were annoyed, possibly because they could see in the general trend
+of the speech some analogy to the existing situation. Padre Salvi was in the grip of convulsive shivering; he worked his lips
+and with bulging eyes followed the gaze of the head as though fascinated. Beads of sweat began to break out on his emaciated
+face, but no one noticed this, so deeply absorbed and affected were they.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What was the plot concocted by the priests of your country against you?&#8221; asked Mr. Leeds.
+
+</p>
+<p>The head uttered a sorrowful groan, which seemed to come from the bottom of the heart, and the spectators saw its eyes, those
+fiery eyes, clouded and filled with tears. Many shuddered and felt their hair rise. No, that was not an illusion, it was not
+a trick: the head was the victim and what it told was its own story.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ay!&#8221; it moaned, shaking with affliction, &#8220;I loved a maiden, the daughter of a priest, pure as light, like the freshly opened
+lotus! The young priest of Abydos also desired her and planned a rebellion, using my name and some papyri that he had secured
+from my beloved. The rebellion broke out at the time when Cambyses was returning in rage over the disasters of his unfortunate
+campaign. I was accused of being a rebel, was made a prisoner, and having effected my escape was killed in the chase on Lake
+Moeris. From out of eternity I saw the imposture triumph. I saw the priest of Abydos night and day persecuting the maiden,
+who had taken refuge in a temple of Isis on the island of Philae. I saw him persecute and harass her, even in the subterranean
+chambers, I saw him drive her mad with terror and suffering, like a huge bat pursuing a white dove. <span class="pageno">
+[173]
+</span>Ah, priest, priest of Abydos, I have returned to life to expose your infamy, and after so many years of silence, I name thee
+murderer, hypocrite, liar!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>A dry, hollow laugh accompanied these words, while a choked voice responded, &#8220;No! Mercy!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>It was Padre Salvi, who had been overcome with terror and with arms extended was slipping in collapse to the floor.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s the matter with your Reverence? Are you ill?&#8221; asked Padre Irene.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The heat of the room&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;This odor of corpses we&#8217;re breathing here&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Murderer, slanderer, hypocrite!&#8221; repeated the head. &#8220;I accuse you&#8212;murderer, murderer, murderer!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Again the dry laugh, sepulchral and menacing, resounded, as though that head were so absorbed in contemplation of its wrongs
+that it did not see the tumult that prevailed in the room.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Mercy! She still lives!&#8221; groaned Padre Salvi, and then lost consciousness. He was as pallid as a corpse. Some of the ladies
+thought it their duty to faint also, and proceeded to do so.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;He is out of his head! Padre Salvi!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I told him not to eat that bird&#8217;s-nest soup,&#8221; said Padre Irene. &#8220;It has made him sick.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But he didn&#8217;t eat anything,&#8221; rejoined Don Custodio shivering. &#8220;As the head has been staring at him fixedly, it has mesmerized
+him.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>So disorder prevailed, the room seemed to be a hospital or a battlefield. Padre Salvi looked like a corpse, and the ladies,
+seeing that no one was paying them any attention, made the best of it by recovering.
+
+</p>
+<p>Meanwhile, the head had been reduced to ashes, and Mr. Leeds, having replaced the cloth on the table, bowed his audience out.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;This show must be prohibited,&#8221; said Don Custodio on leaving. &#8220;It&#8217;s wicked and highly immoral.&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[174]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;And above all, because it doesn&#8217;t use mirrors,&#8221; added Ben-Zayb, who before going out of the room tried to assure himself
+finally, so he leaped over the rail, went up to the table, and raised the cloth: nothing, absolutely nothing!<a id="d0e3626src" href="#d0e3626" class="noteref">1</a> On the following day he wrote an article in which he spoke of occult sciences, spiritualism, and the like.
+
+</p>
+<p>An order came immediately from the ecclesiastical governor prohibiting the show, but Mr. Leeds had already disappeared, carrying
+his secret with him to Hongkong.
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[175]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e3626" href="#d0e3626src" class="noteref">1</a> Yet Ben-Zayb was not very much mistaken. The three legs of the table have grooves in them in which slide the mirrors hidden
+below the platform and covered by the squares of the carpet. By placing the box upon the table a spring is pressed and the
+mirrors rise gently. The cloth is then removed, with care to raise it instead of letting it slide off, and then there is the
+ordinary table of the talking heads. The table is connected with the bottom of the box. The exhibition ended, the prestidigitator
+again covers the table, presses another spring, and the mirrors descend.&#8212;<i>Author&#8217;s note.</i></p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e3634"></a></p>
+<h1>The Fuse</h1>
+<p>Placido Penitente left the class with his heart overflowing with bitterness and sullen gloom in his looks. He was worthy of
+his name when not driven from his usual course, but once irritated he was a veritable torrent, a wild beast that could only
+be stopped by the death of himself or his foe. So many affronts, so many pinpricks, day after day, had made his heart quiver,
+lodging in it to sleep the sleep of lethargic vipers, and they now were awaking to shake and hiss with fury. The hisses resounded
+in his ears with the jesting epithets of the professor, the phrases in the slang of the markets, and he seemed to hear blows
+and laughter. A thousand schemes for revenge rushed into his brain, crowding one another, only to fade immediately like phantoms
+in a dream. His vanity cried out to him with desperate tenacity that he must do something.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Placido Penitente,&#8221; said the voice, &#8220;show these youths that you have dignity, that you are the son of a valiant and noble
+province, where wrongs are washed out with blood. You&#8217;re a Batangan, Placido Penitente! Avenge yourself, Placido Penitente!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The youth groaned and gnashed his teeth, stumbling against every one in the street and on the Bridge of Spain, as if he were
+seeking a quarrel. In the latter place he saw a carriage in which was the Vice-Rector, Padre Sibyla, accompanied by Don Custodio,
+and he had a great mind to seize the friar and throw him into the river.
+
+</p>
+<p>He proceeded along the Escolta and was tempted to assault two Augustinians who were seated in the doorway <span class="pageno">
+[176]
+</span>of Quiroga&#8217;s bazaar, laughing and joking with other friars who must have been inside in joyous conversation, for their merry
+voices and sonorous laughter could be heard. Somewhat farther on, two cadets blocked up the sidewalk, talking with the clerk
+of a warehouse, who was in his shirtsleeves. Penitents moved toward them to force a passage and they, perceiving his dark
+intention, good-humoredly made way for him. Placido was by this time under the influence of the <i>amok</i>, as the Malayists say.
+
+</p>
+<p>As he approached his home&#8212;the house of a silversmith where he lived as a boarder&#8212;he tried to collect his thoughts and make
+a plan&#8212;to return to his town and avenge himself by showing the friars that they could not with impunity insult a youth or
+make a joke of him. He decided to write a letter immediately to his mother, Cabesang Andang, to inform her of what had happened
+and to tell her that the schoolroom had closed forever for him. Although there was the Ateneo of the Jesuits, where he might
+study that year, yet it was not very likely that the Dominicans would grant him the transfer, and, even though he should secure
+it, in the following year he would have to return to the University.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;They say that we don&#8217;t know how to avenge ourselves!&#8221; he muttered. &#8220;Let the lightning strike and we&#8217;ll see!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>But Placido was not reckoning upon what awaited him in the house of the silversmith. Cabesang Andang had just arrived from
+Batangas, having come to do some shopping, to visit her son, and to bring him money, jerked venison, and silk handkerchiefs.
+
+</p>
+<p>The first greetings over, the poor woman, who had at once noticed her son&#8217;s gloomy look, could no longer restrain her curiosity
+and began to ask questions. His first explanations Cabesang Andang regarded as some subterfuge, so she smiled and soothed
+her son, reminding him of their sacrifices and privations. She spoke of Capitana Simona&#8217;s son, who, having entered the seminary,
+now carried himself in the town like a bishop, and Capitana Simona already <span class="pageno">
+[177]
+</span>considered herself a Mother of God, clearly so, for her son was going to be another Christ.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;If the son becomes a priest,&#8221; said she, &#8220;the mother won&#8217;t have to pay us what she owes us. Who will collect from her then?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>But on seeing that Placido was speaking seriously and reading in his eyes the storm that raged within him, she realized that
+what he was telling her was unfortunately the strict truth. She remained silent for a while and then broke out into lamentations.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ay!&#8221; she exclaimed. &#8220;I promised your father that I would care for you, educate you, and make a lawyer of you! I&#8217;ve deprived
+myself of everything so that you might go to school! Instead of joining the <i>panguingui</i> where the stake is a half peso, I Ve gone only where it&#8217;s a half real, enduring the bad smells and the dirty cards. Look
+at my patched camisa; for instead of buying new ones I&#8217;ve spent the money in masses and presents to St. Sebastian, even though
+I don&#8217;t have great confidence in his power, because the curate recites the masses fast and hurriedly, he&#8217;s an entirely new
+saint and doesn&#8217;t yet know how to perform miracles, and isn&#8217;t made of <i>batikulin</i> but of <i>lanete.</i> Ay, what will your father say to me when I die and see him again!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>So the poor woman lamented and wept, while Placido became gloomier and let stifled sighs escape from his breast.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What would I get out of being a lawyer?&#8221; was his response.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What will become of you?&#8221; asked his mother, clasping her hands. &#8220;They&#8217;ll call you a filibuster and garrote you. I&#8217;ve told
+you that you must have patience, that you must be humble. I don&#8217;t tell you that you must kiss the hands of the curates, for
+I know that you have a delicate sense of smell, like your father, who couldn&#8217;t endure European cheese.<a id="d0e3681src" href="#d0e3681" class="noteref">1</a> But we have to suffer, to be silent, to say yes <span class="pageno">
+[178]
+</span>to everything. What are we going to do? The friars own everything, and if they are unwilling, no one will become a lawyer
+or a doctor. Have patience, my son, have patience!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But I&#8217;ve had a great deal, mother, I&#8217;ve suffered for months and months.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Cabesang Andang then resumed her lamentations. She did not ask that he declare himself a partizan of the friars, she was not
+one herself&#8212;it was enough to know that for one good friar there were ten bad, who took the money from the poor and deported
+the rich. But one must be silent, suffer, and endure&#8212;there was no other course. She cited this man and that one, who by being
+<i>patient</i> and humble, even though in the bottom of his heart he hated his masters, had risen from servant of the friars to high office;
+and such another who was rich and could commit abuses, secure of having patrons who would protect him from the law, yet who
+had been nothing more than a poor sacristan, humble and obedient, and who had married a pretty girl whose son had the curate
+for a godfather. So Cabesang Andang continued her litany of humble and <i>patient</i> Filipinos, as she called them, and was about to cite others who by not being so had found themselves persecuted and exiled,
+when Placido on some trifling pretext left the house to wander about the streets.
+
+</p>
+<p>He passed through Sibakong,<a id="d0e3700src" href="#d0e3700" class="noteref">2</a> Tondo, San Nicolas, and Santo Cristo, absorbed in his ill-humor, without taking note of the sun or the hour, and only when
+he began to feel hungry and discovered that he had no money, having given it all for celebrations and contributions, did he
+return to the house. He had expected that he would not meet his mother there, as she was in the habit, when in Manila, of
+going out at that hour to a neighboring house where <span class="pageno">
+[179]
+</span><i>panguingui</i> was played, but Cabesang Andang was waiting to propose her plan. She would avail herself of the procurator of the Augustinians
+to restore her son to the good graces of the Dominicans.
+
+</p>
+<p>Placido stopped her with a gesture. &#8220;I&#8217;ll throw myself into the sea first,&#8221; he declared. &#8220;I&#8217;ll become a tulisan before I&#8217;ll
+go back to the University.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Again his mother began her preachment about patience and humility, so he went away again without having eaten anything, directing
+his steps toward the quay where the steamers tied up. The sight of a steamer weighing anchor for Hongkong inspired him with
+an idea&#8212;to go to Hongkong, to run away, get rich there, and make war on the friars.
+
+</p>
+<p>The thought of Hongkong awoke in his mind the recollection of a story about frontals, cirials, and candelabra of pure silver,
+which the piety of the faithful had led them to present to a certain church. The friars, so the silversmith told, had sent
+to Hongkong to have duplicate frontals, cirials, and candelabra made of German silver, which they substituted for the genuine
+ones, these being melted down and coined into Mexican pesos. Such was the story he had heard, and though it was no more than
+a rumor or a story, his resentment gave it the color of truth and reminded him of other tricks of theirs in that same style.
+The desire to live free, and certain half-formed plans, led him to decide upon Hongkong. If the corporations sent all their
+money there, commerce must be flourishing and he could enrich himself.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I want to be free, to live free!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Night surprised him wandering along San Fernando, but not meeting any sailor he knew, he decided to return home. As the night
+was beautiful, with a brilliant moon transforming the squalid city into a fantastic fairy kingdom, he went to the fair. There
+he wandered back and forth, passing booths without taking any notice of the articles in them, ever with the thought of Hongkong,
+of living free, of enriching himself.
+<span class="pageno">
+[180]
+</span></p>
+<p>He was about to leave the fair when he thought he recognized the jeweler Simoun bidding good-by to a foreigner, both of them
+speaking in English. To Placido every language spoken in the Philippines by Europeans, when not Spanish, had to be English,
+and besides, he caught the name Hongkong. If only the jeweler would recommend him to that foreigner, who must be setting out
+for Hongkong!
+
+</p>
+<p>Placido paused. He was acquainted with the jeweler, as the latter had been in his town peddling his wares, and he had accompanied
+him on one of his trips, when Simoun had made himself very amiable indeed, telling him of the life in the universities of
+the free countries&#8212;what a difference!
+
+</p>
+<p>So he followed the jeweler. &#8220;Se&ntilde;or Simoun, Se&ntilde;or Simoun!&#8221; he called.
+
+</p>
+<p>The jeweler was at that moment entering his carriage. Recognizing Placido, he checked himself.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I want to ask a favor of you, to say a few words to you.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun made a sign of impatience which Placido in his perturbation did not observe. In a few words the youth related what
+had happened and made known his desire to go to Hongkong.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Why?&#8221; asked Simoun, staring fixedly at Placido through his blue goggles.
+
+</p>
+<p>Placido did not answer, so Simoun threw back his head, smiled his cold, silent smile and said, &#8220;All right! Come with me. To
+Calle Iris!&#8221; he directed the cochero.
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun remained silent throughout the whole drive, apparently absorbed in meditation of a very important nature. Placido kept
+quiet, waiting for him to speak first, and entertained himself in watching the promenaders who were enjoying the clear moonlight:
+pairs of infatuated lovers, followed by watchful mammas or aunts; groups of students in white clothes that the moonlight made
+whiter still; half-drunken soldiers in a carriage, six together, on their way to visit some nipa temple dedicated to Cytherea;
+<span class="pageno">
+[181]
+</span>children playing their games and Chinese selling sugar-cane. All these filled the streets, taking on in the brilliant moonlight
+fantastic forms and ideal outlines. In one house an orchestra was playing waltzes, and couples might be seen dancing under
+the bright lamps and chandeliers&#8212;what a sordid spectacle they presented in comparison with the sight the streets afforded!
+Thinking of Hongkong, he asked himself if the moonlit nights in that island were so poetical and sweetly melancholy as those
+of the Philippines, and a deep sadness settled down over his heart.
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun ordered the carriage to stop and both alighted, just at the moment when Isagani and Paulita Gomez passed them murmuring
+sweet inanities. Behind them came Do&ntilde;a Victorina with Juanito Pelaez, who was talking in a loud voice, busily gesticulating,
+and appearing to have a larger hump than ever. In his preoccupation Pelaez did not notice his former schoolmate.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s a fellow who&#8217;s happy!&#8221; muttered Placido with a sigh, as he gazed toward the group, which became converted into vaporous
+silhouettes, with Juanito&#8217;s arms plainly visible, rising and falling like the arms of a windmill.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s all he&#8217;s good for,&#8221; observed Simoun. &#8220;It&#8217;s fine to be young!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>To whom did Placido and Simoun each allude?
+
+</p>
+<p>The jeweler made a sign to the young man, and they left the street to pick their way through a labyrinth of paths and passageways
+among various houses, at times leaping upon stones to avoid the mudholes or stepping aside from the sidewalks that were badly
+constructed and still more badly tended. Placido was surprised to see the rich jeweler move through such places as if he were
+familiar with them. They at length reached an open lot where a wretched hut stood off by itself surrounded by banana-plants
+and areca-palms. Some bamboo frames and sections of the same material led Placido to suspect that they were approaching the
+house of a pyrotechnist.
+<span class="pageno">
+[182]
+</span></p>
+<p>Simoun rapped on the window and a man&#8217;s face appeared.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ah, sir!&#8221; he exclaimed, and immediately came outside.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Is the powder here?&#8221; asked Simoun.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;In sacks. I&#8217;m waiting for the shells.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;And the bombs?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Are all ready.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;All right, then. This very night you must go and inform the lieutenant and the corporal. Then keep on your way, and in Lamayan
+you will find a man in a banka. You will say <i>Cabesa</i> and he will answer <i>Tales</i>. It&#8217;s necessary that he be here tomorrow. There&#8217;s no time to be lost.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Saying this, he gave him some gold coins.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;How&#8217;s this, sir?&#8221; the man inquired in very good Spanish. &#8220;Is there any news?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes, it&#8217;ll be done within the coming week.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The coming week!&#8221; exclaimed the unknown, stepping backward. &#8220;The suburbs are not yet ready, they hope that the General will
+withdraw the decree. I thought it was postponed until the beginning of Lent.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun shook his head. &#8220;We won&#8217;t need the suburbs,&#8221; he said. &#8220;With Cabesang Tales&#8217; people, the ex-carbineers, and a regiment,
+we&#8217;ll have enough. Later, Maria Clara may be dead. Start at once!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The man disappeared. Placido, who had stood by and heard all of this brief interview, felt his hair rise and stared with startled
+eyes at Simoun, who smiled.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;re surprised,&#8221; he said with his icy smile, &#8220;that this Indian, so poorly dressed, speaks Spanish well? He was a schoolmaster
+who persisted in teaching Spanish to the children and did not stop until he had lost his position and had been deported as
+a disturber of the public peace, and for having been a friend of the unfortunate Ibarra. I got him back from his deportation,
+where he had been working as a pruner of coconut-palms, and have made him a pyrotechnist.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>They returned to the street and set out for Trozo. Before <span class="pageno">
+[183]
+</span>a wooden house of pleasant and well-kept appearance was a Spaniard on crutches, enjoying the moonlight. When Simoun accosted
+him, his attempt to rise was accompanied by a stifled groan.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;re ready?&#8221; Simoun inquired of him.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I always am!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The coming week?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;So soon?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;At the first cannon-shot!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>He moved away, followed by Placido, who was beginning to ask himself if he were not dreaming.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Does it surprise you,&#8221; Simoun asked him, &#8220;to see a Spaniard so young and so afflicted with disease? Two years ago he was
+as robust as you are, but his enemies succeeded in sending him to Balabak to work in a penal settlement, and there he caught
+the rheumatism and fever that are dragging him into the grave. The poor devil had married a very beautiful woman.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>As an empty carriage was passing, Simoun hailed it and with Placido directed it to his house in the Escolta, just at the moment
+when the clocks were striking half-past ten.
+
+</p>
+<p>Two hours later Placido left the jeweler&#8217;s house and walked gravely and thoughtfully along the Escolta, then almost deserted,
+in spite of the fact that the caf&eacute;s were still quite animated. Now and then a carriage passed rapidly, clattering noisily
+over the worn pavement.
+
+</p>
+<p>From a room in his house that overlooked the Pasig, Simoun turned his gaze toward the Walled City, which could be seen through
+the open windows, with its roofs of galvanized iron gleaming in the moonlight and its somber towers showing dull and gloomy
+in the midst of the serene night. He laid aside his blue goggles, and his white hair, like a frame of silver, surrounded his
+energetic bronzed features, dimly lighted by a lamp whose flame was dying out from lack of oil. Apparently wrapped in thought,
+he took no notice of the fading light and impending darkness.
+<span class="pageno">
+[184]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;Within a few days,&#8221; he murmured, &#8220;when on all sides that accursed city is burning, den of presumptuous nothingness and impious
+exploitation of the ignorant and the distressed, when the tumults break out in the suburbs and there rush into the terrorized
+streets my avenging hordes, engendered by rapacity and wrongs, then will I burst the walls of your prison, I will tear you
+from the clutches of fanaticism, and my white dove, you will be the Phoenix that will rise from the glowing embers! A revolution
+plotted by men in darkness tore me from your side&#8212;another revolution will sweep me into your arms and revive me! That moon,
+before reaching the apogee of its brilliance, will light the Philippines cleansed of loathsome filth!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun, stopped suddenly, as though interrupted. A voice in his inner consciousness was asking if he, Simoun, were not also
+a part of the filth of that accursed city, perhaps its most poisonous ferment. Like the dead who are to rise at the sound
+of the last trumpet, a thousand bloody specters&#8212;desperate shades of murdered men, women violated, fathers torn from their
+families, vices stimulated and encouraged, virtues mocked, now rose in answer to the mysterious question. For the first time
+in his criminal career, since in Havana he had by means of corruption and bribery set out to fashion an instrument for the
+execution of his plans&#8212;a man without faith, patriotism, or conscience&#8212;for the first time in that life, something within rose
+up and protested against his actions. He closed his eyes and remained for some time motionless, then rubbed his hand over
+his forehead, tried to be deaf to his conscience, and felt fear creeping over him. No, he must not analyze himself, he lacked
+the courage to turn his gaze toward his past. The idea of his courage, his conviction, his self-confidence failing him at
+the very moment when his work was set before him! As the ghosts of the wretches in whose misfortunes he had taken a hand continued
+to hover before his eyes, as if issuing from the shining surface of the river to invade the room with appeals and hands extended
+toward <span class="pageno">
+[185]
+</span>him, as reproaches and laments seemed to fill the air with threats and cries for vengeance, he turned his gaze from the window
+and for the first time began to tremble.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No, I must be ill, I can&#8217;t be feeling well,&#8221; he muttered. &#8220;There are many who hate me, who ascribe their misfortunes to me,
+but&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>He felt his forehead begin to burn, so he arose to approach the window and inhale the fresh night breeze. Below him the Pasig
+dragged along its silvered stream, on whose bright surface the foam glittered, winding slowly about, receding and advancing,
+following the course of the little eddies. The city loomed up on the opposite bank, and its black walls looked fateful, mysterious,
+losing their sordidness in the moonlight that idealizes and embellishes everything. But again Simoun shivered; he seemed to
+see before him the severe countenance of his father, dying in prison, but dying for having done good; then the face of another
+man, severer still, who had given his life for him because he believed that he was going to bring about the regeneration of
+his country.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No, I can&#8217;t turn back,&#8221; he exclaimed, wiping the perspiration from his forehead. &#8220;The work is at hand and its success will
+justify me! If I had conducted myself as you did, I should have succumbed. Nothing of idealism, nothing of fallacious theories!
+Fire and steel to the cancer, chastisement to vice, and afterwards destroy the instrument, if it be bad! No, I have planned
+well, but now I feel feverish, my reason wavers, it is natural&#8212;If I have done ill, it has been that I may do good, and the
+end justifies the means. What I will do is not to expose myself&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>With his thoughts thus confused he lay down, and tried to fall asleep.
+
+</p>
+<p>On the following morning Placido listened submissively, with a smile on his lips, to his mother&#8217;s preachment. When she spoke
+of her plan of interesting the Augustinian procurator he did not protest or object, but on the contrary offered himself to
+carry it out, in order to save trouble for <span class="pageno">
+[186]
+</span>his mother, whom he begged to return at once to the province, that very day, if possible. Cabesang Andang asked him the reason
+for such haste.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Because&#8212;because if the procurator learns that you are here he won&#8217;t do anything until you send him a present and order some
+masses.&#8221;
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[187]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e3681" href="#d0e3681src" class="noteref">1</a> The Malay method of kissing is quite different from the Occidental. The mouth is placed close to the object and a deep breath
+taken, often <span class="pageno">
+[178n]
+</span>without actually touching the object, being more of a sniff than a kiss.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e3700" href="#d0e3700src" class="noteref">2</a> Now Calle Tetuan, Santa Cruz. The other names are still in use.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e3829"></a></p>
+<h1>The Arbiter</h1>
+<p>True it was that Padre Irene had said: the question of the academy of Castilian, so long before broached, was on the road
+to a solution. Don Custodio, the active Don Custodio, the most active of all the arbiters in the world, according to Ben-Zayb,
+was occupied with it, spending his days reading the petition and falling asleep without reaching any decision, waking on the
+following day to repeat the same performance, dropping off to sleep again, and so on continuously.
+
+</p>
+<p>How the good man labored, the most active of all the arbiters in the world! He wished to get out of the predicament by pleasing
+everybody&#8212;the friars, the high official, the Countess, Padre Irene, and his own liberal principles. He had consulted with
+Se&ntilde;or Pasta, and Se&ntilde;or Pasta had left him stupefied and confused, after advising him to do a million contradictory and impossible
+things. He had consulted with Pepay the dancing girl, and Pepay, who had no idea what he was talking about, executed a pirouette
+and asked him for twenty-five pesos to bury an aunt of hers who had suddenly died for the fifth time, or the fifth aunt who
+had suddenly died, according to fuller explanations, at the same time requesting that he get a cousin of hers who could read,
+write, and play the violin, a job as assistant on the public works&#8212;all things that were far from inspiring Don Custodio with
+any saving idea.
+
+</p>
+<p>Two days after the events in the Quiapo fair, Don Custodio was as usual busily studying the petition, without hitting upon
+the happy solution. While he yawns, coughs, smokes, and thinks about Pepay&#8217;s legs and her pirouettes, <span class="pageno">
+[188]
+</span>let us give some account of this exalted personage, in order to understand Padre Sibyla&#8217;s reason for proposing him as the
+arbiter of such a vexatious matter and why the other clique accepted him.
+
+</p>
+<p>Don Custodio de Salazar y Sanchez de Monteredondo, often referred to as <i>Good Authority</i>, belonged to that class of Manila society which cannot take a step without having the newspapers heap titles upon them, calling
+each <i>indedefatigable, distinguished, zealous, active, profound, intelligent, well-informed, influential</i>, and so on, as if they feared that he might be confused with some idle and ignorant possessor of the same name. Besides,
+no harm resulted from it, and the watchful censor was not disturbed. The <i>Good Authority</i> resulted from his friendship with Ben-Zayb, when the latter, in his two noisiest controversies, which he carried on for weeks
+and months in the columns of the newspapers about whether it was proper to wear a high hat, a derby, or a <i>salakot,</i> and whether the plural of <i>car&aacute;cter</i> should be <i>car&aacute;cteres</i> or <i>caract&eacute;res,</i> in order to strengthen his argument always came out with, &#8220;We have this on good authority,&#8221; &#8220;We learn this from good authority,&#8221;
+later letting it be known, for in Manila everything becomes known, that this <i>Good Authority</i> was no other than Don Custodio de Salazar y Sanchez de Monteredondo.
+
+</p>
+<p>He had come to Manila very young, with a good position that had enabled him to marry a pretty mestiza belonging to one of
+the wealthiest families of the city. As he had natural talent, boldness, and great self-possession, and knew how to make use
+of the society in which he found himself, he launched into business with his wife&#8217;s money, filling contracts for the government,
+by reason of which he was made alderman, afterwards alcalde, member of the Economic Society,<a id="d0e3868src" href="#d0e3868" class="noteref">1</a> councilor of the administration, president <span class="pageno">
+[189]
+</span>of the directory of the <i>Obras Pias</i>,<a id="d0e3879src" href="#d0e3879" class="noteref">2</a> member of the Society of Mercy, director of the Spanish-Filipino Bank, etc., etc. Nor are these <i>etceteras</i> to be taken like those ordinarily placed after a long enumeration of titles: Don Custodio, although never having seen a treatise
+on hygiene, came to be vice-chairman of the Board of Health, for the truth was that of the eight who composed this board only
+one had to be a physician and he could not be that one. So also he was a member of the Vaccination Board, which was composed
+of three physicians and seven laymen, among these being the Archbishop and three Provincials. He was a brother in all the
+confraternities of the common and of the most exalted dignity, and, as we have seen, director of the Superior Commission of
+Primary Instruction, which usually did not do anything&#8212;all these being quite sufficient reason for the newspapers to heap
+adjectives upon him no less when he traveled than when he sneezed.
+
+</p>
+<p>In spite of so many offices, Don Custodio was not among those who slept through the sessions, contenting themselves, like
+lazy and timid delegates, in voting with the majority. The opposite of the numerous kings of Europe who bear the title of
+King of Jerusalem, Don Custodio made his dignity felt and got from it all the benefit possible, often frowning, making his
+voice impressive, coughing out his words, often taking up the whole session telling a story, presenting a project, or disputing
+with a colleague who had placed himself in open opposition to him. Although not past forty, he already talked of acting with
+circumspection, of letting the figs ripen (adding under his breath &#8220;pumpkins&#8221;), of pondering deeply and of stepping with careful
+tread, of the necessity for understanding the country, because the nature of the Indians, because the prestige of the Spanish
+name, because they were first of all Spaniards, because religion&#8212;and so on. Remembered yet in Manila is a speech of his when
+for the first time it was proposed to <span class="pageno">
+[190]
+</span>light the city with kerosene in place of the old coconut oil: in such an innovation, far from seeing the extinction of the
+coconut-oil industry, he merely discerned the interests of a certain alderman&#8212;because Don Custodio saw a long way&#8212;and opposed
+it with all the resonance of his bucal cavity, considering the project too premature and predicting great social cataclysms.
+No less celebrated was his opposition to a sentimental serenade that some wished to tender a certain governor on the eve of
+his departure. Don Custodio, who felt a little resentment over some slight or other, succeeded in insinuating the idea that
+the rising star was the mortal enemy of the setting one, whereat the frightened promoters of the serenade gave it up.
+
+</p>
+<p>One day he was advised to return to Spain to be cured of a liver complaint, and the newspapers spoke of him as an Antaeus
+who had to set foot in the mother country to gain new strength. But the Manila Antaeus found himself a small and insignificant
+person at the capital. There he was nobody, and he missed his beloved adjectives. He did not mingle with the upper set, and
+his lack of education prevented him from amounting to much in the academies and scientific centers, while his backwardness
+and his parish-house politics drove him from the clubs disgusted, vexed, seeing nothing clearly but that there they were forever
+borrowing money and gambling heavily. He missed the submissive servants of Manila, who endured all his peevishness, and who
+now seemed to be far preferable; when a winter kept him between a fireplace and an attack of pneumonia, he sighed for the
+Manila winter during which a single quilt is sufficient, while in summer he missed the easy-chair and the boy to fan him.
+In short, in Madrid he was only one among many, and in spite of his diamonds he was once taken for a rustic who did not know
+how to comport himself and at another time for an <i>Indiano</i>. His scruples were scoffed at, and he was shamelessly flouted by some borrowers whom he offended. Disgusted with the conservatives,
+who took no great notice of his advice, as well as with the <span class="pageno">
+[191]
+</span>sponges who rifled his pockets, he declared himself to be of the liberal party and returned within a year to the Philippines,
+if not sound in his liver, yet completely changed in his beliefs.
+
+</p>
+<p>The eleven months spent at the capital among caf&eacute; politicians, nearly all retired half-pay office-holders, the various speeches
+caught here and there, this or that article of the opposition, all the political life that permeates the air, from the barber-shop
+where amid the scissors-clips the Figaro announces his program to the banquets where in harmonious periods and telling phrases
+the different shades of political opinion, the divergences and disagreements, are adjusted&#8212;all these things awoke in him the
+farther he got from Europe, like the life-giving sap within the sown seed prevented from bursting out by the thick husk, in
+such a way that when he reached Manila he believed that he was going to regenerate it and actually had the holiest plans and
+the purest ideals.
+
+</p>
+<p>During the first months after his return he was continually talking about the capital, about his good friends, about Minister
+So-and-So, ex-Minister Such-a-One, the delegate C., the author B., and there was not a political event, a court scandal, of
+which he was not informed to the last detail, nor was there a public man the secrets of whose private life were unknown to
+him, nor could anything occur that he had not foreseen, nor any reform be ordered but he had first been consulted. All this
+was seasoned with attacks on the conservatives in righteous indignation, with apologies of the liberal party, with a little
+anecdote here, a phrase there from some great man, dropped in as one who did not wish offices and employments, which same
+he had refused in order not to be beholden to the conservatives. Such was his enthusiasm in these first days that various
+cronies in the grocery-store which he visited from time to time affiliated themselves with the liberal party and began to
+style themselves liberals: Don Eulogio Badana, a retired sergeant of carbineers; the honest Armendia, by <span class="pageno">
+[192]
+</span>profession a pilot, and a rampant Carlist; Don Eusebio Picote, customs inspector; and Don Bonifacio Tacon, shoe- and harness-maker.<a id="d0e3902src" href="#d0e3902" class="noteref">3</a>
+
+</p>
+<p>But nevertheless, from lack of encouragement and of opposition, his enthusiasm gradually waned. He did not read the newspapers
+that came from Spain, because they arrived in packages, the sight of which made him yawn. The ideas that he had caught having
+been all expended, he needed reinforcement, and his orators were not there, and although in the casinos of Manila there was
+enough gambling, and money was borrowed as in Madrid, no speech that would nourish his political ideas was permitted in them.
+But Don Custodio was not lazy, he did more than wish&#8212;he worked. Foreseeing that he was going to leave his bones in the Philippines,
+he began to consider that country his proper sphere and to devote his efforts to its welfare. Thinking to liberalize it, he
+commenced to draw up a series of reforms or projects, which were ingenious, to say the least. It was he who, having heard
+in Madrid mention of the wooden street pavements of Paris, not yet adopted in Spain, proposed the introduction of them in
+Manila by covering the streets with boards nailed down as they are on the sides of houses; it was he who, deploring the accidents
+to two-wheeled vehicles, planned to avoid them by putting on at least three wheels; it was also he who, while acting as vice-president
+of the Board of Health, ordered everything fumigated, even the telegrams that came from infected places; it was also he who,
+in compassion for the convicts that worked in the sun and with a desire of saving to the government the cost of their equipment,
+suggested that they be clothed in a simple breech-clout and set to work not by day but at night. He marveled, he stormed,
+that his projects should encounter objectors, but consoled himself with the reflection that the man who is worth enemies has
+them, and revenged himself by attacking and <span class="pageno">
+[193]
+</span>tearing to pieces any project, good or bad, presented by others.
+
+</p>
+<p>As he prided himself on being a liberal, upon being asked what he thought of the Indians he would answer, like one conferring
+a great favor, that they were fitted for manual labor and the <i>imitative arts</i> (meaning thereby music, painting, and sculpture), adding his old postscript that to know them one must have resided many,
+many years in the country. Yet when he heard of any one of them excelling in something that was not manual labor or an <i>imitative art</i>&#8212;in chemistry, medicine, or philosophy, for example&#8212;he would exclaim: &#8220;Ah, he promises fairly, fairly well, he&#8217;s not a fool!&#8221;
+and feel sure that a great deal of Spanish blood must flow in the veins of such an <i>Indian</i>. If unable to discover any in spite of his good intentions, he then sought a Japanese origin, for it was at that time the
+fashion began of attributing to the Japanese or the Arabs whatever good the Filipinos might have in them. For him the native
+songs were Arabic music, as was also the alphabet of the ancient Filipinos&#8212;he was certain of this, although he did not know
+Arabic nor had he ever seen that alphabet.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Arabic, the purest Arabic,&#8221; he said to Ben-Zayb in a tone that admitted no reply. &#8220;At best, Chinese!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Then he would add, with a significant wink: &#8220;Nothing can be, nothing ought to be, original with the Indians, you understand!
+I like them greatly, but they mustn&#8217;t be allowed to pride themselves upon anything, for then they would take heart and turn
+into a lot of wretches.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>At other times he would say: &#8220;I love the Indians fondly, I&#8217;ve constituted myself their father and defender, but it&#8217;s necessary
+to keep everything in its proper place. Some were born to command and others to serve&#8212;plainly, that is a truism which can&#8217;t
+be uttered very loudly, but it can be put into practise without many words. For look, the trick depends upon trifles. When
+you wish to reduce a people to subjection, assure it that it is in subjection. The <span class="pageno">
+[194]
+</span>first day it will laugh, the second protest, the third doubt, and the fourth be convinced. To keep the Filipino docile, he
+must have repeated to him day after day what he is, to convince him that he is incompetent. What good would it do, besides,
+to have him believe in something else that would make him wretched? Believe me, it&#8217;s an act of charity to hold every creature
+in his place&#8212;that is order, harmony. That constitutes the <i>science</i> of government.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>In referring to his policies, Don Custodio was not satisfied with the word <i>art</i>, and upon pronouncing the word <i>government</i>, he would extend his hand downwards to the height of a man bent over on his knees.
+
+</p>
+<p>In regard to his religious ideas, he prided himself on being a Catholic, very much a Catholic&#8212;ah, Catholic Spain, the land
+of <i>Mar&iacute;a Sant&iacute;sima</i>! A liberal could be and ought to be a Catholic, when the reactionaries were setting themselves up as gods or saints, just
+as a mulatto passes for a white man in Kaffirland. But with all that, he ate meat during Lent, except on Good Friday, never
+went to confession, believed neither in miracles nor the infallibility of the Pope, and when he attended mass, went to the
+one at ten o&#8217;clock, or to the shortest, the military mass. Although in Madrid he had spoken ill of the religious orders, so
+as not to be out of harmony with his surroundings, considering them anachronisms, and had hurled curses against the Inquisition,
+while relating this or that lurid or droll story wherein the habits danced, or rather friars without habits, yet in speaking
+of the Philippines, which should be ruled by special laws, he would cough, look wise, and again extend his hand downwards
+to that mysterious altitude.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The friars are necessary, they&#8217;re a necessary evil,&#8221; he would declare.
+
+</p>
+<p>But how he would rage when any Indian dared to doubt the miracles or did not acknowledge the Pope! All the tortures of the
+Inquisition were insufficient to punish such temerity.
+
+</p>
+<p>When it was objected that to rule or to live at the expense <span class="pageno">
+[195]
+</span>of ignorance has another and somewhat ugly name and is punished by law when the culprit is a single person, he would justify
+his position by referring to other colonies. &#8220;We,&#8221; he would announce in his official tone, &#8220;can speak out plainly! We&#8217;re not
+like the British and the Dutch who, in order to hold people in subjection, make use of the lash. We avail ourselves of other
+means, milder and surer. The salutary influence of the friars is superior to the British lash.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>This last remark made his fortune. For a long time Ben-Zayb continued to use adaptations of it, and with him all Manila. The
+thinking part of Manila applauded it, and it even got to Madrid, where it was quoted in the Parliament as from <i>a liberal of long residence there</i>. The friars, flattered by the comparison and seeing their prestige enhanced, sent him sacks of chocolate, presents which
+the incorruptible Don Custodio returned, so that Ben-Zayb immediately compared him to Epaminondas. Nevertheless, this modern
+Epaminondas made use of the rattan in his choleric moments, and advised its use!
+
+</p>
+<p>At that time the conventos, fearful that he would render a decision favorable to the petition of the students, increased their
+gifts, so that on the afternoon when we see him he was more perplexed than ever, his reputation for energy was being compromised.
+It had been more than a fortnight since he had had the petition in his hands, and only that morning the high official, after
+praising his zeal, had asked for a decision. Don Custodio had replied with mysterious gravity, giving him to understand that
+it was not yet completed. The high official had smiled a smile that still worried and haunted him.
+
+</p>
+<p>As we were saying, he yawned and yawned. In one of these movements, at the moment when he opened his eyes and closed his mouth,
+his attention was caught by a file of red envelopes, arranged in regular order on a magnificent kamagon desk. On the back
+of each could be read in large letters: PROJECTS.
+<span class="pageno">
+[196]
+</span></p>
+<p>For a moment he forgot his troubles and Pepay&#8217;s pirouettes, to reflect upon all that those files contained, which had issued
+from his prolific brain in his hours of inspiration. How many original ideas, how many sublime thoughts, how many means of
+ameliorating the woes of the Philippines! Immortality and the gratitude of the country were surely his!
+
+</p>
+<p>Like an old lover who discovers a moldy package of amorous epistles, Don Custodio arose and approached the desk. The first
+envelope, thick, swollen, and plethoric, bore the title: PROJECTS IN PROJECT.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No,&#8221; he murmured, &#8220;they&#8217;re excellent things, but it would take a year to read them over.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The second, also quite voluminous, was entitled: PROJECTS UNDER CONSIDERATION. &#8220;No, not those either.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Then came the PROJECTS NEARING COMPLETION, PROJECTS PRESENTED, PROJECTS REJECTED, PROJECTS APPROVED, PROJECTS POSTPONED. These
+last envelopes held little, but the least of all was that of the PROJECTS EXECUTED.
+
+</p>
+<p>Don Custodio wrinkled up his nose&#8212;what did it contain? He had completely forgotten what was in it. A sheet of yellowish paper
+showed from under the flap, as though the envelope were sticking out its tongue. This he drew out and unfolded: it was the
+famous project for the School of Arts and Trades!
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What the devil!&#8221; he exclaimed. &#8220;If the Augustinian padres took charge of it&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Suddenly he slapped his forehead and arched his eyebrows, while a look of triumph overspread his face. &#8220;I have reached a decision!&#8221;
+he cried with an oath that was not exactly <i>eureka</i>. &#8220;My decision is made!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Repeating his peculiar <i>eureka</i> five or six times, which struck the air like so many gleeful lashes, he sat down at his desk, radiant with joy, and began
+to write furiously.
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[197]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e3868" href="#d0e3868src" class="noteref">1</a> The <i>Sociedad Econ&oacute;mica de Amigos del Pa&iacute;s</i> for the encouragement of agricultural and industrial development, was established by Basco de Vargas in 1780.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e3879" href="#d0e3879src" class="noteref">2</a> Funds managed by the government for making loans and supporting charitable enterprises.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e3902" href="#d0e3902src" class="noteref">3</a> The names are fictitious burlesques.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e3987"></a></p>
+<h1>Manila Types</h1>
+<p>That night there was a grand function at the Teatro de Variedades. Mr. Jouay&#8217;s French operetta company was giving its initial
+performance, <i>Les Cloches de Corneville</i>. To the eyes of the public was to be exhibited his select troupe, whose fame the newspapers had for days been proclaiming.
+It was reported that among the actresses was a very beautiful voice, with a figure even more beautiful, and if credit could
+be given to rumor, her amiability surpassed even her voice and figure.
+
+</p>
+<p>At half-past seven in the evening there were no more tickets to be had, not even though they had been for Padre Salvi himself
+in his direct need, and the persons waiting to enter the general admission already formed a long queue. In the ticket-office
+there were scuffles and fights, talk of filibusterism and races, but this did not produce any tickets, so that by a quarter
+before eight fabulous prices were being offered for them. The appearance of the building, profusely illuminated, with flowers
+and plants in all the doors and windows, enchanted the new arrivals to such an extent that they burst out into exclamations
+and applause. A large crowd surged about the entrance, gazing enviously at those going in, those who came early from fear
+of missing their seats. Laughter, whispering, expectation greeted the later arrivals, who disconsolately joined the curious
+crowd, and now that they could not get in contented themselves with watching those who did.
+
+</p>
+<p>Yet there was one person who seemed out of place amid such great eagerness and curiosity. He was a tall, meager man, who dragged
+one leg stiffly when he walked, dressed <span class="pageno">
+[198]
+</span>in a wretched brown coat and dirty checkered trousers that fitted his lean, bony limbs tightly. A straw sombrero, artistic
+in spite of being broken, covered an enormous head and allowed his dirty gray, almost red, hair to straggle out long and kinky
+at the end like a poet&#8217;s curls. But the most notable thing about this man was not his clothing or his European features, guiltless
+of beard or mustache, but his fiery red face, from which he got the nickname by which he was known, <i>Camaroncocido</i>.<a id="d0e4004src" href="#d0e4004" class="noteref">1</a> He was a curious character belonging to a prominent Spanish family, but he lived like a vagabond and a beggar, scoffing at
+the prestige which he flouted indifferently with his rags. He was reputed to be a kind of reporter, and in fact his gray goggle-eyes,
+so cold and thoughtful, always showed up where anything publishable was happening. His manner of living was a mystery to all,
+as no one seemed to know where he ate and slept. Perhaps he had an empty hogshead somewhere.
+
+</p>
+<p>But at that moment Camaroncocido lacked his usual hard and indifferent expression, something like mirthful pity being reflected
+in his looks. A funny little man accosted him merrily.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Friend!&#8221; exclaimed the latter, in a raucous voice, as hoarse as a frog&#8217;s, while he displayed several Mexican pesos, which
+Camaroncocido merely glanced at and then shrugged his shoulders. What did they matter to him?
+
+</p>
+<p>The little old man was a fitting contrast to him. Small, very small, he wore on his head a high hat, which presented the appearance
+of a huge hairy worm, and lost himself in an enormous frock coat, too wide and too long for him, to reappear in trousers too
+short, not reaching below his calves. His body seemed to be the grandfather and his legs the grandchildren, while as for his
+shoes he appeared to be floating on the land, for they were of an enormous sailor type, apparently protesting against the
+hairy worm <span class="pageno">
+[199]
+</span>worn on his head with all the energy of a convento beside a World&#8217;s Exposition. If Camaroncocido was red, he was brown; while
+the former, although of Spanish extraction, had not a single hair on his face, yet he, an Indian, had a goatee and mustache,
+both long, white, and sparse. His expression was lively. He was known as <i>Tio Quico</i>,<a id="d0e4018src" href="#d0e4018" class="noteref">2</a> and like his friend lived on publicity, advertising the shows and posting the theatrical announcements, being perhaps the
+only Filipino who could appear with impunity in a silk hat and frock coat, just as his friend was the first Spaniard who laughed
+at the prestige of his race.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The Frenchman has paid me well,&#8221; he said smiling and showing his picturesque gums, which looked like a street after a conflagration.
+&#8220;I did a good job in posting the bills.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Camaroncocido shrugged his shoulders again. &#8220;Quico,&#8221; he rejoined in a cavernous voice, &#8220;if they&#8217;ve given you six pesos for
+your work, how much will they give the friars?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Tio Quico threw back his head in his usual lively manner. &#8220;To the friars?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Because you surely know,&#8221; continued Camaroncocido, &#8220;that all this crowd was secured for them by the conventos.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The fact was that the friars, headed by Padre Salvi, and some lay brethren captained by Don Custodio, had opposed such shows.
+Padre Camorra, who could not attend, watered at the eyes and mouth, but argued with Ben-Zayb, who defended them feebly, thinking
+of the free tickets they would send his newspaper. Don Custodio spoke of morality, religion, good manners, and the like.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But,&#8221; stammered the writer, &#8220;if our own farces with their plays on words and phrases of double meaning&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But at least they&#8217;re in Castilian!&#8221; the virtuous councilor interrupted with a roar, inflamed to righteous wrath. &#8220;Obscenities
+in French, man, Ben-Zayb, for God&#8217;s sake, in French! Never!&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[200]
+</span></p>
+<p>He uttered this <i>never</i> with the energy of three Guzmans threatened with being killed like fleas if they did not surrender twenty Tarifas. Padre
+Irene naturally agreed with Don Custodio and execrated French operetta. Whew, he had been in Paris, but had never set foot
+in a theater, the Lord deliver him!
+
+</p>
+<p>Yet the French operetta also counted numerous partizans. The officers of the army and navy, among them the General&#8217;s aides,
+the clerks, and many society people were anxious to enjoy the delicacies of the French language from the mouths of genuine
+<i>Parisiennes</i>, and with them were affiliated those who had traveled by the M.M.<a id="d0e4046src" href="#d0e4046" class="noteref">3</a> and had jabbered a little French during the voyage, those who had visited Paris, and all those who wished to appear learned.
+
+</p>
+<p>Hence, Manila society was divided into two factions, operettists and anti-operettists. The latter were supported by the elderly
+ladies, wives jealous and careful of their husbands&#8217; love, and by those who were engaged, while those who were free and those
+who were beautiful declared themselves enthusiastic operettists. Notes and then more notes were exchanged, there were goings
+and comings, mutual recriminations, meetings, lobbyings, arguments, even talk of an insurrection of the natives, of their
+indolence, of inferior and superior races, of prestige and other humbugs, so that after much gossip and more recrimination,
+the permit was granted, Padre Salvi at the same time publishing a pastoral that was read by no one but the proof-reader. There
+were questionings whether the General had quarreled with the Countess, whether she spent her time in the halls of pleasure,
+whether His Excellency was greatly annoyed, whether there had been presents exchanged, whether the French consul&#8212;, and so
+on and on. Many names were bandied about: Quiroga the Chinaman&#8217;s, Simoun&#8217;s, and even those of many actresses.
+
+</p>
+<p>Thanks to these scandalous preliminaries, the people&#8217;s <span class="pageno">
+[201]
+</span>impatience had been aroused, and since the evening before, when the troupe arrived, there was talk of nothing but attending
+the first performance. From the hour when the red posters announced <i>Les Cloches de Corneville</i> the victors prepared to celebrate their triumph. In some offices, instead of the time being spent in reading newspapers and
+gossiping, it was devoted to devouring the synopsis and spelling out French novels, while many feigned business outside to
+consult their pocket-dictionaries on the sly. So no business was transacted, callers were told to come back the next day,
+but the public could not take offense, for they encountered some very polite and affable clerks, who received and dismissed
+them with grand salutations in the French style. The clerks were practising, brushing the dust off their French, and calling
+to one another <i>oui, monsieur, s&#8217;il vous plait</i>, and <i>pardon</i>! at every turn, so that it was a pleasure to see and hear them.
+
+</p>
+<p>But the place where the excitement reached its climax was the newspaper office. Ben-Zayb, having been appointed critic and
+translator of the synopsis, trembled like a poor woman accused of witchcraft, as he saw his enemies picking out his blunders
+and throwing up to his face his deficient knowledge of French. When the Italian opera was on, he had very nearly received
+a challenge for having mistranslated a tenor&#8217;s name, while an envious rival had immediately published an article referring
+to him as an ignoramus&#8212;him, the foremost thinking head in the Philippines! All the trouble he had had to defend himself! He
+had had to write at least seventeen articles and consult fifteen dictionaries, so with these salutary recollections, the wretched
+Ben-Zayb moved about with leaden hands, to say nothing of his feet, for that would be plagiarizing Padre Camorra, who had
+once intimated that the journalist wrote with them.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You see, Quico?&#8221; said Camaroncocido. &#8220;One half of the people have come because the friars told them not to, making it a kind
+of public protest, and the other half because <span class="pageno">
+[202]
+</span>they say to themselves, &#8216;Do the friars object to it? Then it must be instructive!&#8217; Believe me, Quico, your advertisements
+are a good thing but the pastoral was better, even taking into consideration the fact that it was read by no one.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Friend, do you believe,&#8221; asked Tio Quico uneasily, &#8220;that on account of the competition with Padre Salvi my business will
+in the future be prohibited?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Maybe so, Quico, maybe so,&#8221; replied the other, gazing at the sky. &#8220;Money&#8217;s getting scarce.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Tio Quico muttered some incoherent words: if the friars were going to turn theatrical advertisers, he would become a friar.
+After bidding his friend good-by, he moved away coughing and rattling his silver coins.
+
+</p>
+<p>With his eternal indifference Camaroncocido continued to wander about here and there with his crippled leg and sleepy looks.
+The arrival of unfamiliar faces caught his attention, coming as they did from different parts and signaling to one another
+with a wink or a cough. It was the first time that he had ever seen these individuals on such an occasion, he who knew all
+the faces and features in the city. Men with dark faces, humped shoulders, uneasy and uncertain movements, poorly disguised,
+as though they had for the first time put on sack coats, slipped about among the shadows, shunning attention, instead of getting
+in the front rows where they could see well.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Detectives or thieves?&#8221; Camaroncocido asked himself and immediately shrugged his shoulders. &#8220;But what is it to me?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The lamp of a carriage that drove up lighted in passing a group of four or five of these individuals talking with a man who
+appeared to be an army officer.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Detectives! It must be a new corps,&#8221; he muttered with his shrug of indifference. Soon, however, he noticed that the officer,
+after speaking to two or three more groups, approached a carriage and seemed to be talking vigorously with some person inside.
+Camaroncocido took a few steps <span class="pageno">
+[203]
+</span>forward and without surprise thought that he recognized the jeweler Simoun, while his sharp ears caught this short dialogue.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The signal will be a gunshot!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes, sir.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t worry&#8212;it&#8217;s the General who is ordering it, but be careful about saying so. If you follow my instructions, you&#8217;ll get
+a promotion.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes, sir.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;So, be ready!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The voice ceased and a second later the carriage drove away. In spite of his indifference Camaroncocido could not but mutter,
+&#8220;Something&#8217;s afoot&#8212;hands on pockets!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>But feeling his own to be empty, he again shrugged his shoulders. What did it matter to him, even though the heavens should
+fall?
+
+</p>
+<p>So he continued his pacing about. On passing near two persons engaged in conversation, he caught what one of them, who had
+rosaries and scapularies around his neck, was saying in Tagalog: &#8220;The friars are more powerful than the General, don&#8217;t be
+a fool! He&#8217;ll go away and they&#8217;ll stay here. So, if we do well, we&#8217;ll get rich. The signal is a gunshot.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Hold hard, hold hard,&#8221; murmured Camaroncocido, tightening his fingers. &#8220;On that side the General, on this Padre Salvi. Poor
+country! But what is it to me?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Again shrugging his shoulders and expectorating at the same time, two actions that with him were indications of supreme indifference,
+he continued his observations.
+
+</p>
+<p>Meanwhile, the carriages were arriving in dizzy streams, stopping directly before the door to set down the members of the
+select society. Although the weather was scarcely even cool, the ladies sported magnificent shawls, silk neckerchiefs, and
+even light cloaks. Among the escorts, some who were in frock coats with white ties wore overcoats, while others carried them
+on their arms to display the rich silk linings.
+<span class="pageno">
+[204]
+</span></p>
+<p>In a group of spectators, Tadeo, he who was always taken ill the moment the professor appeared, was accompanied by a fellow
+townsman of his, the novice whom we saw suffer evil consequences from reading wrongly the Cartesian principle. This novice
+was very inquisitive and addicted to tiresome questions, and Tadeo was taking advantage of his ingenuousness and inexperience
+to relate to him the most stupendous lies. Every Spaniard that spoke to him, whether clerkling or underling, was presented
+as a leading merchant, a marquis, or a count, while on the other hand any one who passed him by was a greenhorn, a petty official,
+a nobody! When pedestrians failed him in keeping up the novice&#8217;s astonishment, he resorted to the resplendent carriages that
+came up. Tadeo would bow politely, wave his hand in a friendly manner, and call out a familiar greeting.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Who&#8217;s he?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Bah!&#8221; was the negligent reply. &#8220;The Civil Governor, the Vice-Governor, Judge &#8212;&#8212;, Se&ntilde;ora &#8212;&#8212;, all friends of mine!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The novice marveled and listened in fascination, taking care to keep on the left. Tadeo the friend of judges and governors!
+
+</p>
+<p>Tadeo named all the persons who arrived, when he did not know them inventing titles, biographies, and interesting sketches.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You see that tall gentleman with dark whiskers, somewhat squint-eyed, dressed in black&#8212;he&#8217;s Judge A &#8212;&#8212;, an intimate friend
+of the wife of Colonel B &#8212;&#8212;. One day if it hadn&#8217;t been for me they would have come to blows. Hello, here comes that Colonel!
+What if they should fight?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The novice held his breath, but the colonel and the judge shook hands cordially, the soldier, an old bachelor, inquiring about
+the health of the judge&#8217;s family.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ah, thank heaven!&#8221; breathed Tadeo. &#8220;I&#8217;m the one who made them friends.&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[205]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;What if they should invite us to go in?&#8221; asked the novice timidly.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Get out, boy! I never accept favors!&#8221; retorted Tadeo majestically. &#8220;I confer them, but disinterestedly.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The novice bit his lip and felt smaller than ever, while he placed a respectful distance between himself and his fellow townsman.
+
+</p>
+<p>Tadeo resumed: &#8220;That is the musician H&#8212;&#8212;; that one, the lawyer J&#8212;&#8212;, who delivered as his own a speech printed in all the books
+and was congratulated and admired for it; Doctor K&#8212;&#8212;, that man just getting out of a hansom, is a specialist in diseases of
+children, so he&#8217;s called Herod; that&#8217;s the banker L&#8212;&#8212;, who can talk only of his money and his hoards; the poet M&#8212;&#8212;, who is
+always dealing with the stars and <i>the beyond</i>. There goes the beautiful wife of N&#8212;&#8212;, whom Padre Q&#8212;&#8212;is accustomed to meet when he calls upon the absent husband; the Jewish
+merchant P&#8212;&#8212;, who came to the islands with a thousand pesos and is now a millionaire. That fellow with the long beard is the
+physician R&#8212;&#8212;, who has become rich by making invalids more than by curing them.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Making invalids?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes, boy, in the examination of the conscripts. Attention! That finely dressed gentleman is not a physician but a homeopathist
+<i>sui generis</i>&#8212;he professes completely the <i>similis similibus</i>. The young cavalry captain with him is his chosen disciple. That man in a light suit with his hat tilted back is the government
+clerk whose maxim is never to be polite and who rages like a demon when he sees a hat on any one else&#8217;s head&#8212;they say that
+he does it to ruin the German hatters. The man just arriving with his family is the wealthy merchant C&#8212;&#8212;, who has an income
+of over a hundred thousand pesos. But what would you say if I should tell you that he still owes me four pesos, five reales,
+and twelve cuartos? But who would collect from a rich man like him?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;That gentleman in debt to you?&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[206]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;Sure! One day I got him out of a bad fix. It was on a Friday at half-past six in the morning, I still remember, because I
+hadn&#8217;t breakfasted. That lady who is followed by a duenna is the celebrated Pepay, the dancing girl, but she doesn&#8217;t dance
+any more now that a very Catholic gentleman and a great friend of mine has&#8212;forbidden it. There&#8217;s the death&#8217;s-head Z&#8212;&#8212;, who&#8217;s
+surely following her to get her to dance again. He&#8217;s a good fellow, and a great friend of mine, but has one defect&#8212;he&#8217;s a
+Chinese mestizo and yet calls himself a Peninsular Spaniard. Sssh! Look at Ben-Zayb, him with the face of a friar, who&#8217;s carrying
+a pencil and a roll of paper in his hand. He&#8217;s the great writer, Ben-Zayb, a good friend of mine&#8212;he has talent!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You don&#8217;t say! And that little man with white whiskers?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;He&#8217;s the official who has appointed his daughters, those three little girls, assistants in his department, so as to get their
+names on the pay-roll. He&#8217;s a clever man, very clever! When he makes a mistake he blames it on somebody else, he buys things
+and pays for them out of the treasury. He&#8217;s clever, very, very clever!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Tadeo was about to say more, but suddenly checked himself.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;And that gentleman who has a fierce air and gazes at everybody over his shoulders?&#8221; inquired the novice, pointing to a man
+who nodded haughtily.
+
+</p>
+<p>But Tadeo did not answer. He was craning his neck to see Paulita Gomez, who was approaching with a friend, Do&ntilde;a Victorina,
+and Juanito Pelaez. The latter had presented her with a box and was more humped than ever.
+
+</p>
+<p>Carriage after carriage drove up; the actors and actresses arrived and entered by a separate door, followed by their friends
+and admirers.
+
+</p>
+<p>After Paulita had gone in, Tadeo resumed: &#8220;Those are the nieces of the rich Captain D&#8212;&#8212;, those coming up in a landau; you
+see how pretty and healthy they are? Well, <span class="pageno">
+[207]
+</span>in a few years they&#8217;ll be dead or crazy. Captain D&#8212;&#8212; is opposed to their marrying, and the insanity of the uncle is appearing
+in the nieces. That&#8217;s the Se&ntilde;orita E&#8212;&#8212;, the rich heiress whom the world and the conventos are disputing over. Hello, I know
+that fellow! It&#8217;s Padre Irene, in disguise, with a false mustache. I recognize him by his nose. And he was so greatly opposed
+to this!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The scandalized novice watched a neatly cut coat disappear behind a group of ladies.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The Three Fates!&#8221; went on Tadeo, watching the arrival of three withered, bony, hollow-eyed, wide-mouthed, and shabbily dressed
+women. &#8220;They&#8217;re called&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Atropos?&#8221; ventured the novice, who wished to show that he also knew somebody, at least in mythology.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No, boy, they&#8217;re called the Weary Waiters&#8212;old, censorious, and dull. They pretend to hate everybody&#8212;men, women, and children.
+But look how the Lord always places beside the evil a remedy, only that sometimes it comes late. There behind the Fates, the
+frights of the city, come those three girls, the pride of their friends, among whom I count myself. That thin young man with
+goggle-eyes, somewhat stooped, who is wildly gesticulating because he can&#8217;t get tickets, is the chemist S&#8212;&#8212;, author of many
+essays and scientific treatises, some of which are notable and have captured prizes. The Spaniards say of him, &#8216;There&#8217;s some
+hope for him, some hope for him.&#8217; The fellow who is soothing him with his Voltairian smile is the poet T&#8212;&#8212;, a young man of
+talent, a great friend of mine, and, for the very reason that he has talent, he has thrown away his pen. That fellow who is
+trying to get in with the actors by the other door is the young physician U&#8212;&#8212;, who has effected some remarkable cures&#8212;it&#8217;s
+also said of him that he promises well. He&#8217;s not such a scoundrel as Pelaez but he&#8217;s cleverer and slyer still. I believe that
+he&#8217;d shake dice with death and win.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;And that brown gentleman with a mustache like hog-bristles?&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[208]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;Ah, that&#8217;s the merchant F&#8212;&#8212;, who forges everything, even his baptismal certificate. He wants to be a Spanish mestizo at any
+cost, and is making heroic efforts to forget his native language.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But his daughters are very white.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes, that&#8217;s the reason rice has gone up in price, and yet they eat nothing but bread.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The novice did not understand the connection between the price of rice and the whiteness of those girls, but he held his peace.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;There goes the fellow that&#8217;s engaged to one of them, that thin brown youth who is following them with a lingering movement
+and speaking with a protecting air to the three friends who are laughing at him. He&#8217;s a martyr to his beliefs, to his consistency.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The novice was filled with admiration and respect for the young man.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;He has the look of a fool, and he is one,&#8221; continued Tadeo. &#8220;He was born in San Pedro Makati and has inflicted many privations
+upon himself. He scarcely ever bathes or eats pork, because, according to him, the Spaniards don&#8217;t do those things, and for
+the same reason he doesn&#8217;t eat rice and dried fish, although he may be watering at the mouth and dying of hunger. Anything
+that comes from Europe, rotten or preserved, he considers divine&#8212;a month ago Basilio cured him of a severe attack of gastritis,
+for he had eaten a jar of mustard to prove that he&#8217;s a European.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>At that moment the orchestra struck up a waltz.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You see that gentleman&#8212;that hypochondriac who goes along turning his head from side to side, seeking salutes? That&#8217;s the
+celebrated governor of Pangasinan, a good man who loses his appetite whenever any Indian fails to salute him. He would have
+died if he hadn&#8217;t issued the proclamation about salutes to which he owes his celebrity. Poor fellow, it&#8217;s only been three
+days since he came from the province and look how thin he has become! Oh, here&#8217;s the great man, the illustrious&#8212;open your
+eyes!&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[209]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;Who? That man with knitted brows?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes, that&#8217;s Don Custodio, the liberal, Don Custodio. His brows are knit because he&#8217;s meditating over some important project.
+If the ideas he has in his head were carried out, this would be a different world! Ah, here comes Makaraig, your housemate.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>It was in fact Makaraig, with Pecson, Sandoval, and Isagani. Upon seeing them, Tadeo advanced and spoke to them.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Aren&#8217;t you coming in?&#8221; Makaraig asked him.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;We haven&#8217;t been able to get tickets.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Fortunately, we have a box,&#8221; replied Makaraig. &#8220;Basilio couldn&#8217;t come. Both of you, come in with us.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Tadeo did not wait for the invitation to be repeated, but the novice, fearing that he would intrude, with the timidity natural
+to the provincial Indian, excused himself, nor could he be persuaded to enter.
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[210]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e4004" href="#d0e4004src" class="noteref">1</a> &#8220;Boiled Shrimp&#8221;&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e4018" href="#d0e4018src" class="noteref">2</a> &#8220;Uncle Frank.&#8221;&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e4046" href="#d0e4046src" class="noteref">3</a> Messageries Maritimes, a French line of steamers in the Oriental trade.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e4213"></a></p>
+<h1>The Performance</h1>
+<p>The interior of the theater presented a lively aspect. It was filled from top to bottom, with people standing in the corridors
+and in the aisles, fighting to withdraw a head from some hole where they had inserted it, or to shove an eye between a collar
+and an ear. The open boxes, occupied for the most part by ladies, looked like baskets of flowers, whose petals&#8212;the fans&#8212;shook
+in a light breeze, wherein hummed a thousand bees. However, just as there are flowers of strong or delicate fragrance, flowers
+that kill and flowers that console, so from our baskets were exhaled like emanations: there were to be heard dialogues, conversations,
+remarks that bit and stung. Three or four boxes, however, were still vacant, in spite of the lateness of the hour. The performance
+had been advertised for half-past eight and it was already a quarter to nine, but the curtain did not go up, as his Excellency
+had not yet arrived. The gallery-gods, impatient and uncomfortable in their seats, started a racket, clapping their hands
+and pounding the floor with their canes.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Boom&#8212;boom&#8212;boom! Ring up the curtain! Boom&#8212;boom&#8212;boom!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The artillerymen were not the least noisy. Emulators of Mars, as Ben-Zayb called them, they were not satisfied with this music;
+thinking themselves perhaps at a bullfight, they made remarks at the ladies who passed before them in words that are euphemistically
+called flowers in Madrid, although at times they seem more like foul weeds. Without heeding the furious looks of the husbands,
+they <span class="pageno">
+[211]
+</span>bandied from one to another the sentiments and longings inspired by so many beauties.
+
+</p>
+<p>In the reserved seats, where the ladies seemed to be afraid to venture, as few were to be seen there, a murmur of voices prevailed
+amid suppressed laughter and clouds of tobacco smoke. They discussed the merits of the players and talked scandal, wondering
+if his Excellency had quarreled with the friars, if his presence at such a show was a defiance or mere curiosity. Others gave
+no heed to these matters, but were engaged in attracting the attention of the ladies, throwing themselves into attitudes more
+or less interesting and statuesque, flashing diamond rings, especially when they thought themselves the foci of insistent
+opera-glasses, while yet another would address a respectful salute to this or that se&ntilde;ora or se&ntilde;orita, at the same time lowering
+his head gravely to whisper to a neighbor, &#8220;How ridiculous she is! And such a bore!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The lady would respond with one of her most gracious smiles and an enchanting nod of her head, while murmuring to a friend
+sitting near, amid lazy flourishes of her fan, &#8220;How impudent he is! He&#8217;s madly in love, my dear.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Meanwhile, the noise increased. There remained only two vacant boxes, besides that of his Excellency, which was distinguished
+by its curtains of red velvet. The orchestra played another waltz, the audience protested, when fortunately there arose a
+charitable hero to distract their attention and relieve the manager, in the person of a man who had occupied a reserved seat
+and refused to give it up to its owner, the philosopher Don Primitivo. Finding his own arguments useless, Don Primitivo had
+appealed to an usher. &#8220;I don&#8217;t care to,&#8221; the hero responded to the latter&#8217;s protests, placidly puffing at his cigarette. The
+usher appealed to the manager. &#8220;I don&#8217;t care to,&#8221; was the response, as he settled back in the seat. The manager went away,
+while the artillerymen in the gallery began to sing out encouragement to the usurper.
+
+</p>
+<p>Our hero, now that he had attracted general attention, <span class="pageno">
+[212]
+</span>thought that to yield would be to lower himself, so he held on to the seat, while he repeated his answer to a pair of guards
+the manager had called in. These, in consideration of the rebel&#8217;s rank, went in search of their corporal, while the whole
+house broke out into applause at the firmness of the hero, who remained seated like a Roman senator.
+
+</p>
+<p>Hisses were heard, and the inflexible gentleman turned angrily to see if they were meant for him, but the galloping of horses
+resounded and the stir increased. One might have said that a revolution had broken out, or at least a riot, but no, the orchestra
+had suspended the waltz and was playing the royal march: it was his Excellency, the Captain-General and Governor of the islands,
+who was entering. All eyes sought and followed him, then lost sight of him, until he finally appeared in his box. After looking
+all about him and making some persons happy with a lordly salute, he sat down, as though he were indeed the man for whom the
+chair was waiting. The artillerymen then became silent and the orchestra tore into the prelude.
+
+</p>
+<p>Our students occupied a box directly facing that of Pepay, the dancing girl. Her box was a present from Makaraig, who had
+already got on good terms with her in order to propitiate Don Custodio. Pepay had that very afternoon written a note to the
+illustrious arbiter, asking for an answer and appointing an interview in the theater. For this reason, Don Custodio, in spite
+of the active opposition he had manifested toward the French operetta, had gone to the theater, which action won him some
+caustic remarks on the part of Don Manuel, his ancient adversary in the sessions of the Ayuntamiento.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve come to judge the operetta,&#8221; he had replied in the tone of a Cato whose conscience was clear.
+
+</p>
+<p>So Makaraig was exchanging looks of intelligence with Pepay, who was giving him to understand that she had something to tell
+him. As the dancing girl&#8217;s face wore a happy expression, the students augured that a favorable outcome was assured. Sandoval,
+who had just returned <span class="pageno">
+[213]
+</span>from making calls in other boxes, also assured them that the decision had been favorable, that that very afternoon the Superior
+Commission had considered and approved it. Every one was jubilant, even Pecson having laid aside his pessimism when he saw
+the smiling Pepay display a note. Sandoval and Makaraig congratulated one another, Isagani alone remaining cold and unsmiling.
+What had happened to this young man?
+
+</p>
+<p>Upon entering the theater, Isagani had caught sight of Paulita in a box, with Juanito Pelaez talking to her. He had turned
+pale, thinking that he must be mistaken. But no, it was she herself, she who greeted him with a gracious smile, while her
+beautiful eyes seemed to be asking pardon and promising explanations. The fact was that they had agreed upon Isagani&#8217;s going
+first to the theater to see if the show contained anything improper for a young woman, but now he found her there, and in
+no other company than that of his rival. What passed in his mind is indescribable: wrath, jealousy, humiliation, resentment
+raged within him, and there were moments even when he wished that the theater would fall in; he had a violent desire to laugh
+aloud, to insult his sweetheart, to challenge his rival, to make a scene, but finally contented himself with sitting quiet
+and not looking at her at all. He was conscious of the beautiful plans Makaraig and Sandoval were making, but they sounded
+like distant echoes, while the notes of the waltz seemed sad and lugubrious, the whole audience stupid and foolish, and several
+times he had to make an effort to keep back the tears. Of the trouble stirred up by the hero who refused to give up the seat,
+of the arrival of the Captain-General, he was scarcely conscious. He stared toward the drop-curtain, on which was depicted
+a kind of gallery with sumptuous red hangings, affording a view of a garden in which a fountain played, yet how sad the gallery
+looked to him and how melancholy the painted landscape! A thousand vague recollections surged into his memory like distant
+echoes of music heard in the night, <span class="pageno">
+[214]
+</span>like songs of infancy, the murmur of lonely forests and gloomy rivulets, moonlit nights on the shore of the sea spread wide
+before his eyes. So the enamored youth considered himself very wretched and stared fixedly at the ceiling so that the tears
+should not fall from his eyes.
+
+</p>
+<p>A burst of applause drew him from these meditations. The curtain had just risen, and the merry chorus of peasants of Corneville
+was presented, all dressed in cotton caps, with heavy wooden sabots on their feet. Some six or seven girls, well-rouged on
+the lips and cheeks, with large black circles around their eyes to increase their brilliance, displayed white arms, fingers
+covered with diamonds, round and shapely limbs. While they were chanting the Norman phrase &#8220;<i>Allez, marchez! Allez, marchez!</i>&#8221; they smiled at their different admirers in the reserved seats with such openness that Don Custodio, after looking toward
+Pepay&#8217;s box to assure himself that she was not doing the same thing with some other admirer, set down in his note-book this
+indecency, and to make sure of it lowered his head a little to see if the actresses were not showing their knees.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Oh, these Frenchwomen!&#8221; he muttered, while his imagination lost itself in considerations somewhat more elevated, as he made
+comparisons and projects.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Quoi v&#8217;la tous les cancans d&#8217;la s&#8217;maine!</i>&#8221; sang Gertrude, a proud damsel, who was looking roguishly askance at the Captain-General.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;We&#8217;re going to have the cancan!&#8221; exclaimed Tadeo, the winner of the first prize in the French class, who had managed to make
+out this word. &#8220;Makaraig, they&#8217;re going to dance the cancan!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>He rubbed his hands gleefully. From the moment the curtain rose, Tadeo had been heedless of the music. He was looking only
+for the prurient, the indecent, the immoral in actions and dress, and with his scanty French was sharpening his ears to catch
+the obscenities that the austere guardians of the fatherland had foretold.
+
+</p>
+<p>Sandoval, pretending to know French, had converted himself <span class="pageno">
+[215]
+</span>into a kind of interpreter for his friends. He knew as much about it as Tadeo, but the published synopsis helped him and his
+fancy supplied the rest. &#8220;Yes,&#8221; he said, &#8220;they&#8217;re going to dance the cancan&#8212;she&#8217;s going to lead it.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Makaraig and Pecson redoubled their attention, smiling in anticipation, while Isagani looked away, mortified to think that
+Paulita should be present at such a show and reflecting that it was his duty to challenge Juanito Pelaez the next day.
+
+</p>
+<p>But the young men waited in vain. Serpolette came on, a charming girl, in her cotton cap, provoking and challenging. &#8220;<i>Hein, qui parle de Serpolette?</i>&#8221; she demanded of the gossips, with her arms akimbo in a combative attitude. Some one applauded, and after him all those in
+the reserved seats. Without changing her girlish attitude, Serpolette gazed at the person who had started the applause and
+paid him with a smile, displaying rows of little teeth that looked like a string of pearls in a case of red velvet.
+
+</p>
+<p>Tadeo followed her gaze and saw a man in a false mustache with an extraordinarily large nose. &#8220;By the monk&#8217;s cowl!&#8221; he exclaimed.
+&#8220;It&#8217;s Irene!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes,&#8221; corroborated Sandoval, &#8220;I saw him behind the scenes talking with the actresses.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The truth was that Padre Irene, who was a melomaniac of the first degree and knew French well, had been sent to the theater
+by Padre Salvi as a sort of religious detective, or so at least he told the persons who recognized him. As a faithful critic,
+who should not be satisfied with viewing the piece from a distance, he wished to examine the actresses at first hand, so he
+had mingled in the groups of admirers and gallants, had penetrated into the greenroom, where was whispered and talked a French
+required by the situation, a <i>market French</i>, a language that is readily comprehensible for the vender when the buyer seems disposed to pay well.
+<span class="pageno">
+[216]
+</span></p>
+<p>Serpolette was surrounded by two gallant officers, a sailor, and a lawyer, when she caught sight of him moving about, sticking
+the tip of his long nose into all the nooks and corners, as though with it he were ferreting out all the mysteries of the
+stage. She ceased her chatter, knitted her eyebrows, then raised them, opened her lips and with the vivacity of a <i>Parisienne</i> left her admirers to hurl herself like a torpedo upon our critic.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Tiens, tiens, Toutou! Mon lapin!</i>&#8221; she cried, catching Padre Irene&#8217;s arm and shaking it merrily, while the air rang with her silvery laugh.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Tut, tut!&#8221; objected Padre Irene, endeavoring to conceal himself.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Mais, comment! Toi ici, grosse b&ecirc;te! Et moi qui t&#8217;croyais&#8212;</i>&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>&#8217;Tais pas d&#8217;tapage, Lily! Il faut m&#8217;respecter! &#8217;Suis ici l&#8217;Pape!</i>&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>With great difficulty Padre Irene made her listen to reason, for Lily was <i>enchante&eacute;</i> to meet in Manila an old friend who reminded her of the <i>coulisses</i> of the Grand Opera House. So it was that Padre Irene, fulfilling at the same time his duties as a friend and a critic, had
+initiated the applause to encourage her, for Serpolette deserved it.
+
+</p>
+<p>Meanwhile, the young men were waiting for the cancan. Pecson became all eyes, but there was everything except cancan. There
+was presented the scene in which, but for the timely arrival of the representatives of the law, the women would have come
+to blows and torn one another&#8217;s hair out, incited thereto by the mischievous peasants, who, like our students, hoped to see
+something more than the cancan.
+
+</p>
+<p class="beforeline"></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Scit, scit, scit, scit, scit, scit,
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Disputez-vous, battez-vous,
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Scit, scit, scit, scit, scit, scit,
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Nous allons compter les coups.</span></p>
+<p class="afterline"></p>
+<p>The music ceased, the men went away, the women returned, a few at a time, and started a conversation among <span class="pageno">
+[217]
+</span>themselves, of which our friends understood nothing. They were slandering some absent person.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;They look like the Chinamen of the <i>pansiteria!</i>&#8221; whispered Pecson.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But, the cancan?&#8221; asked Makaraig.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;They&#8217;re talking about the most suitable place to dance it,&#8221; gravely responded Sandoval.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;They look like the Chinamen of the <i>pansiteria</i>,&#8221; repeated Pecson in disgust.
+
+</p>
+<p>A lady accompanied by her husband entered at that moment and took her place in one of the two vacant boxes. She had the air
+of a queen and gazed disdainfully at the whole house, as if to say, &#8220;I&#8217;ve come later than all of you, you crowd of upstarts
+and provincials, I&#8217;ve come later than you!&#8221; There are persons who go to the theater like the contestants in a mule-race: the
+last one in, wins, and we know very sensible men who would ascend the scaffold rather than enter a theater before the first
+act. But the lady&#8217;s triumph was of short duration&#8212;she caught sight of the other box that was still empty, and began to scold
+her better half, thus starting such a disturbance that many were annoyed.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ssh! Ssh!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The blockheads! As if they understood French!&#8221; remarked the lady, gazing with supreme disdain in all directions, finally
+fixing her attention on Juanito&#8217;s box, whence she thought she had heard an impudent hiss.
+
+</p>
+<p>Juanito was in fact guilty, for he had been pretending to understand everything, holding himself up proudly and applauding
+at times as though nothing that was said escaped him, and this too without guiding himself by the actors&#8217; pantomime, because
+he scarcely looked toward the stage. The rogue had intentionally remarked to Paulita that, as there was so much more beautiful
+a woman close at hand, he did not care to strain his eyes looking beyond her. Paulita had blushed, covered her face with her
+fan, and glanced stealthily toward where Isagani, silent and morose, was abstractedly watching the show.
+<span class="pageno">
+[218]
+</span></p>
+<p>Paulita felt nettled and jealous. Would Isagani fall in love with any of those alluring actresses? The thought put her in
+a bad humor, so she scarcely heard the praises that Do&ntilde;a Victorina was heaping upon her own favorite.
+
+</p>
+<p>Juanito was playing his part well: he shook his head at times in sign of disapproval, and then there could be heard coughs
+and murmurs in some parts, at other times he smiled in approbation, and a second later applause resounded. Do&ntilde;a Victorina
+was charmed, even conceiving some vague ideas of marrying the young man the day Don Tiburcio should die&#8212;Juanito knew French
+and De Espada&ntilde;a didn&#8217;t! Then she began to flatter him, nor did he perceive the change in the drift of her talk, so occupied
+was he in watching a Catalan merchant who was sitting next to the Swiss consul. Having observed that they were conversing
+in French, Juanito was getting his inspiration from their countenances, and thus grandly giving the cue to those about him.
+
+</p>
+<p>Scene followed scene, character succeeded character, comic and ridiculous like the bailiff and Grenicheux, imposing and winsome
+like the marquis and Germaine. The audience laughed heartily at the slap delivered by Gaspard and intended for the coward
+Grenicheux, which was received by the grave bailiff, whose wig went flying through the air, producing disorder and confusion
+as the curtain dropped.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Where&#8217;s the cancan?&#8221; inquired Tadeo.
+
+</p>
+<p>But the curtain rose again immediately, revealing a scene in a servant market, with three posts on which were affixed signs
+bearing the announcements: <i>servantes</i>, <i>cochers</i>, and <i>domestiques</i>. Juanito, to improve the opportunity, turned to Do&ntilde;a Victorina and said in a loud voice, so that Paulita might hear and he
+convinced of his learning:
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Servantes</i> means servants, <i>domestiques</i> domestics.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;And in what way do the <i>servantes</i> differ from the <i>domestiques</i>?&#8221; asked Paulita.
+
+</p>
+<p>Juanito was not found wanting. &#8220;<i>Domestiques</i> are those <span class="pageno">
+[219]
+</span>that are domesticated&#8212;haven&#8217;t you noticed that some of them have the air of savages? Those are the <i>servantes</i>.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s right,&#8221; added Do&ntilde;a Victorina, &#8220;some have very bad manners&#8212;and yet I thought that in Europe everybody was cultivated.
+But as it happens in France,&#8212;well, I see!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ssh! Ssh!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>But what was Juanito&#8217;s predicament when the time came for the opening of the market and the beginning of the sale, and the
+servants who were to be hired placed themselves beside the signs that indicated their class! The men, some ten or twelve rough
+characters in livery, carrying branches in their hands, took their place under the sign <i>domestiques</i>!
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Those are the domestics,&#8221; explained Juanito.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Really, they have the appearance of being only recently domesticated,&#8221; observed Do&ntilde;a Victorina. &#8220;Now let&#8217;s have a look at
+the savages.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Then the dozen girls headed by the lively and merry Serpolette, decked out in their best clothes, each wearing a big bouquet
+of flowers at the waist, laughing, smiling, fresh and attractive, placed themselves, to Juanito&#8217;s great desperation, beside
+the post of the <i>servantes</i>.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;How&#8217;s this?&#8221; asked Paulita guilelessly. &#8220;Are those the savages that you spoke of?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No,&#8221; replied the imperturbable Juanito, &#8220;there&#8217;s a mistake&#8212;they&#8217;ve got their places mixed&#8212;those coming behind&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Those with the whips?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Juanito nodded assent, but he was rather perplexed and uneasy.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;So those girls are the <i>cochers</i>?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Here Juanito was attacked by such a violent fit of coughing that some of the spectators became annoyed.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Put him out! Put the consumptive out!&#8221; called a voice.
+
+</p>
+<p>Consumptive! To be called a consumptive before Paulita! Juanito wanted to find the blackguard and make <span class="pageno">
+[220]
+</span>him swallow that &#8220;consumptive.&#8221; Observing that the women were trying to hold him back, his bravado increased, and he became
+more conspicuously ferocious. But fortunately it was Don Custodio who had made the diagnosis, and he, fearful of attracting
+attention to himself, pretended to hear nothing, apparently busy with his criticism of the play.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;If it weren&#8217;t that I am with you,&#8221; remarked Juanito, rolling his eyes like some dolls that are moved by clockwork, and to
+make the resemblance more real he stuck out his tongue occasionally.
+
+</p>
+<p>Thus that night he acquired in Do&ntilde;a Victorina&#8217;s eyes the reputation of being brave and punctilious, so she decided in her
+heart that she would marry him just as soon as Don Tiburcio was out of the way. Paulita became sadder and sadder in thinking
+about how the girls called <i>cochers</i> could occupy Isagani&#8217;s attention, for the name had certain disagreeable associations that came from the slang of her convent
+school-days.
+
+</p>
+<p>At length the first act was concluded, the marquis taking away as servants Serpolette and Germaine, the representative of
+timid beauty in the troupe, and for coachman the stupid Grenicheux. A burst of applause brought them out again holding hands,
+those who five seconds before had been tormenting one another and were about to come to blows, bowing and smiling here and
+there to the gallant Manila public and exchanging knowing looks with various spectators.
+
+</p>
+<p>While there prevailed the passing tumult occasioned by those who crowded one another to get into the greenroom and felicitate
+the actresses and by those who were going to make calls on the ladies in the boxes, some expressed their opinions of the play
+and the players.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Undoubtedly, Serpolette is the best,&#8221; said one with a knowing air.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I prefer Germaine, she&#8217;s an ideal blonde.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But she hasn&#8217;t any voice.&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[221]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;What do I care about the voice?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Well, for shape, the tall one.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Pshaw,&#8221; said Ben-Zayb, &#8220;not a one is worth a straw, not a one is an artist!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Ben-Zayb was the critic for <i>El Grito de la Integridad</i>, and his disdainful air gave him great importance in the eyes of those who were satisfied with so little.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Serpolette hasn&#8217;t any voice, nor Germaine grace, nor is that music, nor is it art, nor is it anything!&#8221; he concluded with
+marked contempt. To set oneself up as a great critic there is nothing like appearing to be discontented with everything. Besides,
+the management had sent only two seats for the newspaper staff.
+
+</p>
+<p>In the boxes curiosity was aroused as to who could be the possessor of the empty one, for that person, would surpass every
+one in chic, since he would be the last to arrive. The rumor started somewhere that it belonged to Simoun, and was confirmed:
+no one had seen the jeweler in the reserved seats, the greenroom, or anywhere else.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yet I saw him this afternoon with Mr. Jouay,&#8221; some one said. &#8220;He presented a necklace to one of the actresses.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;To which one?&#8221; asked some of the inquisitive ladies.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;To the finest of all, the one who made eyes at his Excellency.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>This information was received with looks of intelligence, winks, exclamations of doubt, of confirmation, and half-uttered
+commentaries.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;He&#8217;s trying to play the Monte Cristo,&#8221; remarked a lady who prided herself on being literary.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Or purveyor to the Palace!&#8221; added her escort, jealous of Simoun.
+
+</p>
+<p>In the students&#8217; box, Pecson, Sandoval, and Isagani had remained, while Tadeo had gone to engage Don Custodio in conversation
+about his projects, and Makaraig to hold an interview with Pepay.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;In no way, as I have observed to you before, friend <span class="pageno">
+[222]
+</span>Isagani,&#8221; declared Sandoval with violent gestures and a sonorous voice, so that the ladies near the box, the daughters of
+the rich man who was in debt to Tadeo, might hear him, &#8220;in no way does the French language possess the rich sonorousness or
+the varied and elegant cadence of the Castilian tongue. I cannot conceive, I cannot imagine, I cannot form any idea of French
+orators, and I doubt that they have ever had any or can have any now in the strict construction of the term orator, because
+we must not confuse the name orator with the words babbler and charlatan, for these can exist in any country, in all the regions
+of the inhabited world, among the cold and curt Englishmen as among the lively and impressionable Frenchmen.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Thus he delivered a magnificent review of the nations, with his poetical characterizations and most resounding epithets. Isagani
+nodded assent, with his thoughts fixed on Paulita, whom he had surprised gazing at him with an expressive look which contained
+a wealth of meaning. He tried to divine what those eyes were expressing&#8212;those eyes that were so eloquent and not at all deceptive.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Now you who are a poet, a slave to rhyme and meter, a son of the Muses,&#8221; continued Sandoval, with an elegant wave of his
+hand, as though he were saluting, on the horizon, the Nine Sisters, &#8220;do you comprehend, can you conceive, how a language so
+harsh and unmusical as French can give birth to poets of such gigantic stature as our Garcilasos, our Herreras, our Esproncedas,
+our Calderons?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Nevertheless,&#8221; objected Pecson, &#8220;Victor Hugo&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Victor Hugo, my friend Pecson, if Victor Hugo is a poet, it is because he owes it to Spain, because it is an established
+fact, it is a matter beyond all doubt, a thing admitted even by the Frenchmen themselves, so envious of Spain, that if Victor
+Hugo has genius, if he really is a poet, it is because his childhood was spent in Madrid; there he drank in his first impressions,
+there his brain was molded, there his imagination was colored, his heart modeled, and the most beautiful concepts of his mind
+born. <span class="pageno">
+[223]
+</span>And after all, who is Victor Hugo? Is he to be compared at all with our modern&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>This peroration was cut short by the return of Makaraig with a despondent air and a bitter smile on his lips, carrying in
+his hand a note, which he offered silently to Sandoval, who read:
+
+
+</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>&#8220;MY DOVE: Your letter has reached me late, for I have already handed in my decision, and it has been approved. However, as
+if I had guessed your wish, I have decided the matter according to the desires of your prot&eacute;g&eacute;s. I&#8217;ll be at the theater and
+wait for you after the performance.
+
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Your duckling,
+
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;CUSTODINING.&#8221;</p>
+</div><p>
+
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;How tender the man is!&#8221; exclaimed Tadeo with emotion.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Well?&#8221; said Sandoval. &#8220;I don&#8217;t see anything wrong about this&#8212;quite the reverse!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes,&#8221; rejoined Makaraig with his bitter smile, &#8220;decided favorably! I&#8217;ve just seen Padre Irene.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What does Padre Irene say?&#8221; inquired Pecson.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The same as Don Custodio, and the rascal still had the audacity to congratulate me. The Commission, which has taken as its
+own the decision of the arbiter, approves the idea and felicitates the students on their patriotism and their thirst for knowledge&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Well?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Only that, considering our duties&#8212;in short, it says that in order that the idea may not be lost, it concludes that the direction
+and execution of the plan should be placed in charge of one of the religious corporations, in case the Dominicans do not wish
+to incorporate the academy with the University.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Exclamations of disappointment greeted the announcement. Isagani rose, but said nothing.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;And in order that we may participate in the management of the academy,&#8221; Makaraig went on, &#8220;we are intrusted with the collection
+of contributions and dues, with <span class="pageno">
+[224]
+</span>the obligation of turning them over to the treasurer whom the corporation may designate, which treasurer will issue us receipts.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Then we&#8217;re tax-collectors!&#8221; remarked Tadeo.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Sandoval,&#8221; said Pecson, &#8220;there&#8217;s the gauntlet&#8212;take it up!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Huh! That&#8217;s not a gauntlet&#8212;from its odor it seems more like a sock.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The funniest, part of it,&#8221; Makaraig added, &#8220;is that Padre Irene has advised us to celebrate the event with a banquet or a
+torchlight procession&#8212;a public demonstration of the students <i>en masse</i> to render thanks to all the persons who have intervened in the affair.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes, after the blow, let&#8217;s sing and give thanks. <i>Super flumina Babylonis sedimus</i>!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes, a banquet like that of the convicts,&#8221; said Tadeo.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;A banquet at which we all wear mourning and deliver funeral orations,&#8221; added Sandoval.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;A serenade with the Marseillaise and funeral marches,&#8221; proposed Isagani.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No, gentlemen,&#8221; observed Pecson with his clownish grin, &#8220;to celebrate the event there&#8217;s nothing like a banquet in a <i>pansiter&iacute;a</i>, served by the Chinamen without camisas. I insist, without camisas!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The sarcasm and grotesqueness of this idea won it ready acceptance, Sandoval being the first to applaud it, for he had long
+wished to see the interior of one of those establishments which at night appeared to be so merry and cheerful.
+
+</p>
+<p>Just as the orchestra struck up for the second act, the young men arose and left the theater, to the scandal of the whole
+house.
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[225]
+</span></p>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e4560"></a></p>
+<h1>A Corpse</h1>
+<p>Simoun had not, in fact, gone to the theater. Already, at seven o&#8217;clock in the evening, he had left his house looking worried
+and gloomy. His servants saw him return twice, accompanied by different individuals, and at eight o&#8217;clock Makaraig encountered
+him pacing along Calle Hospital near the nunnery of St. Clara, just when the bells of its church were ringing a funeral knell.
+At nine Camaroncocido saw him again, in the neighborhood of the theater, speak with a person who seemed to be a student, pay
+the latter&#8217;s admission to the show, and again disappear among the shadows of the trees.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What is it to me?&#8221; again muttered Camaroncocido. &#8220;What do I get out of watching over the populace?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio, as Makaraig said, had not gone to the show. The poor student, after returning from San Diego, whither he had gone
+to ransom Juli, his future bride, from her servitude, had turned again to his studies, spending his time in the hospital,
+in studying, or in nursing Capitan Tiago, whose affliction he was trying to cure.
+
+</p>
+<p>The invalid had become an intolerable character. During his bad spells, when he felt depressed from lack of opium, the doses
+of which Basilio was trying to reduce, he would scold, mistreat, and abuse the boy, who bore it resignedly, conscious that
+he was doing good to one to whom he owed so much, and yielded only in the last extremity. His vicious appetite satisfied,
+Capitan Tiago would fall into a good humor, become tender, and call him his son, tearfully recalling the youth&#8217;s services,
+how well he administered the estates, and would even talk of making <span class="pageno">
+[226]
+</span>him his heir. Basilio would smile bitterly and reflect that in this world complaisance with vice is rewarded better than fulfilment
+of duty. Not a few times did he feel tempted to give free rein to the craving and conduct his benefactor to the grave by a
+path of flowers and smiling illusions rather than lengthen his life along a road of sacrifice.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What a fool I am!&#8221; he often said to himself. &#8220;People are stupid and then pay for it.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>But he would shake his head as he thought of Juli, of the wide future before him. He counted upon living without a stain on
+his conscience, so he continued the treatment prescribed, and bore everything patiently.
+
+</p>
+<p>Yet with all his care the sick man, except for short periods of improvement, grew worse. Basilio had planned gradually to
+reduce the amount of the dose, or at least not to let him injure himself by increasing it, but on returning from the hospital
+or some visit he would find his patient in the heavy slumber produced by the opium, driveling, pale as a corpse. The young
+man could not explain whence the drug came: the only two persons who visited the house were Simoun and Padre Irene, the former
+rarely, while the latter never ceased exhorting him to be severe and inexorable with the treatment, to take no notice of the
+invalid&#8217;s ravings, for the main object was to save him.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Do your duty, young man,&#8221; was Padre Irene&#8217;s constant admonition. &#8220;Do your duty.&#8221; Then he would deliver a sermon on this topic
+with such great conviction and enthusiasm that Basilio would begin to feel kindly toward the preacher. Besides, Padre Irene
+promised to get him a fine assignment, a good province, and even hinted at the possibility of having him appointed a professor.
+Without being carried away by illusions, Basilio pretended to believe in them and went on obeying the dictates of his own
+conscience.
+
+</p>
+<p>That night, while <i>Les Cloches de Corneville</i> was being presented, Basilio was studying at an old table by the light <span class="pageno">
+[227]
+</span>of an oil-lamp, whose thick glass globe partly illuminated his melancholy features. An old skull, some human bones, and a
+few books carefully arranged covered the table, whereon there was also a pan of water with a sponge. The smell of opium that
+proceeded from the adjoining bedroom made the air heavy and inclined him to sleep, but he overcame the desire by bathing his
+temples and eyes from time to time, determined not to go to sleep until he had finished the book, which he had borrowed and
+must return as soon as possible. It was a volume of the <i>Medicina Legal y Toxicolog&iacute;a</i> of Dr. Friata, the only book that the professor would use, and Basilio lacked money to buy a copy, since, under the pretext
+of its being forbidden by the censor in Manila and the necessity for bribing many government employees to get it in, the booksellers
+charged a high price for it.
+
+</p>
+<p>So absorbed wras the youth in his studies that he had not given any attention at all to some pamphlets that had been sent
+to him from some unknown source, pamphlets that treated of the Philippines, among which figured those that were attracting
+the greatest notice at the time because of their harsh and insulting manner of referring to the natives of the country. Basilio
+had no time to open them, and he was perhaps restrained also by the thought that there is nothing pleasant about receiving
+an insult or a provocation without having any means of replying or defending oneself. The censorship, in fact, permitted insults
+to the Filipinos but prohibited replies on their part.
+
+</p>
+<p>In the midst of the silence that reigned in the house, broken only by a feeble snore that issued now and then from the adjoining
+bedroom, Basilio heard light footfalls on the stairs, footfalls that soon crossed the hallway and approached the room where
+he was. Raising his head, he saw the door open and to his great surprise appeared the sinister figure of the jeweler Simoun,
+who since the scene in San Diego had not come to visit either himself or Capitan Tiago.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;How is the sick man?&#8221; he inquired, throwing a rapid <span class="pageno">
+[228]
+</span>glance about the room and fixing his attention on the pamphlets, the leaves of which were still uncut.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The beating of his heart is scarcely perceptible, his pulse is very weak, his appetite entirely gone,&#8221; replied Basilio in
+a low voice with a sad smile. &#8220;He sweats profusely in the early morning.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Noticing that Simoun kept his face turned toward the pamphlets and fearing that he might reopen the subject of their conversation
+in the wood, he went on: &#8220;His system is saturated with poison. He may die any day, as though struck by lightning. The least
+irritation, any excitement may kill him.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Like the Philippines!&#8221; observed Simoun lugubriously.
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio was unable to refrain from a gesture of impatience, but he was determined not to recur to the old subject, so he proceeded
+as if he had heard nothing: &#8220;What weakens him the most is the nightmares, his terrors&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Like the government!&#8221; again interrupted Simoun.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Several nights ago he awoke in the dark and thought that he had gone blind. He raised a disturbance, lamenting and scolding
+me, saying that I had put his eyes out. When I entered his room with a light he mistook me for Padre Irene and called me his
+saviour.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Like the government, exactly!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Last night,&#8221; continued Basilio, paying no attention, &#8220;he got up begging for his favorite game-cock, the one that died three
+years ago, and I had to give him a chicken. Then he heaped blessings upon me and promised me many thousands&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>At that instant a clock struck half-past ten. Simoun shuddered and stopped the youth with a gesture.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Basilio,&#8221; he said in a low, tense voice, &#8220;listen to me carefully, for the moments are precious. I see that you haven&#8217;t opened
+the pamphlets that I sent you. You&#8217;re not interested in your country.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The youth started to protest.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s useless,&#8221; went on Simoun dryly. &#8220;Within an <span class="pageno">
+[229]
+</span>hour the revolution is going to break out at a signal from me, and tomorrow there&#8217;ll be no studies, there&#8217;ll be no University,
+there&#8217;ll be nothing but fighting and butchery. I have everything ready and my success is assured. When we triumph, all those
+who could have helped us and did not do so will be treated as enemies. Basilio, I&#8217;ve come to offer you death or a future!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Death or a future!&#8221; the boy echoed, as though he did not understand.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;With us or with the government,&#8221; rejoined Simoun. &#8220;With your country or with your oppressors. Decide, for time presses! I&#8217;ve
+come to save you because of the memories that unite us!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;With my country or with the oppressors!&#8221; repeated Basilio in a low tone. The youth was stupefied. He gazed at the jeweler
+with eyes in which terror was reflected, he felt his limbs turn cold, while a thousand confused ideas whirled about in his
+mind. He saw the streets running blood, he heard the firing, he found himself among the dead and wounded, and by the peculiar
+force of his inclinations fancied himself in an operator&#8217;s blouse, cutting off legs and extracting bullets.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The will of the government is in my hands,&#8221; said Simoun. &#8220;I&#8217;ve diverted and wasted its feeble strength and resources on foolish
+expeditions, dazzling it with the plunder it might seize. Its heads are now in the theater, calm and unsuspecting, thinking
+of a night of pleasure, but not one shall again repose upon a pillow. I have men and regiments at my disposition: some I have
+led to believe that the uprising is ordered by the General; others that the friars are bringing it about; some I have bought
+with promises, with employments, with money; many, very many, are acting from revenge, because they are oppressed and see
+it as a matter of killing or being killed. Cabesang Tales is below, he has come with me here! Again I ask you&#8212;will you come
+with us or do you prefer to expose yourself to the resentment of my followers? In critical moments, <span class="pageno">
+[230]
+</span>to declare oneself neutral is to be exposed to the wrath of both the contending parties.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio rubbed his hand over his face several times, as if he were trying to wake from a nightmare. He felt that his brow
+was cold.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Decide!&#8221; repeated Simoun.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;And what&#8212;what would I have to do?&#8221; asked the youth in a weak and broken voice.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;A very simple thing,&#8221; replied Simoun, his face lighting up with a ray of hope. &#8220;As I have to direct the movement, I cannot
+get away from the scene of action. I want you, while the attention of the whole city is directed elsewhere, at the head of
+a company to force the doors of the nunnery of St. Clara and take from there a person whom only you, besides myself and Capitan
+Tiago, can recognize. You&#8217;ll run no risk at all.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Maria Clara!&#8221; exclaimed Basilio.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes, Maria Clara,&#8221; repeated Simoun, and for the first time his voice became human and compassionate. &#8220;I want to save her;
+to save her I have wished to live, I have returned. I am starting the revolution, because only a revolution can open the doors
+of the nunneries.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ay!&#8221; sighed Basilio, clasping his hands. &#8220;You&#8217;ve come late, too late!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Why?&#8221; inquired Simoun with a frown.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Maria Clara is dead!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun arose with a bound and stood over the youth. &#8220;She&#8217;s dead?&#8221; he demanded in a terrible voice.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;This afternoon, at six. By now she must be&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s a lie!&#8221; roared Simoun, pale and beside himself. &#8220;It&#8217;s false! Maria Clara lives, Maria Clara must live! It&#8217;s a cowardly
+excuse! She&#8217;s not dead, and this night I&#8217;ll free her or tomorrow you die!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio shrugged his shoulders. &#8220;Several days ago she was taken ill and I went to the nunnery for news of her. Look, here
+is Padre Salvi&#8217;s letter, brought by Padre Irene. Capitan Tiago wept all the evening, kissing his daughter&#8217;s <span class="pageno">
+[231]
+</span>picture and begging her forgiveness, until at last he smoked an enormous quantity of opium. This evening her knell was tolled.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ah!&#8221; exclaimed Simoun, pressing his hands to his head and standing motionless. He remembered to have actually heard the knell
+while he was pacing about in the vicinity of the nunnery.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Dead!&#8221; he murmured in a voice so low that it seemed to be a ghost whispering. &#8220;Dead! Dead without my having seen her, dead
+without knowing that I lived for her&#8212;dead!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Feeling a terrible storm, a tempest of whirlwind and thunder without a drop of water, sobs without tears, cries without words,
+rage in his breast and threaten to burst out like burning lava long repressed, he rushed precipitately from the room. Basilio
+heard him descend the stairs with unsteady tread, stepping heavily, he heard a stifled cry, a cry that seemed to presage death,
+so solemn, deep, and sad that he arose from his chair pale and trembling, but he could hear the footsteps die away and the
+noisy closing of the door to the street.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Poor fellow!&#8221; he murmured, while his eyes filled with tears. Heedless now of his studies, he let his gaze wander into space
+as he pondered over the fate of those two beings: he&#8212;young, rich, educated, master of his fortunes, with a brilliant future
+before him; she&#8212;fair as a dream, pure, full of faith and innocence, nurtured amid love and laughter, destined to a happy existence,
+to be adored in the family and respected in the world; and yet of those two beings, filled with love, with illusions and hopes,
+by a fatal destiny he wandered over the world, dragged ceaselessly through a whirl of blood and tears, sowing evil instead
+of doing good, undoing virtue and encouraging vice, while she was dying in the mysterious shadows of the cloister where she
+had sought peace and perhaps found suffering, where she entered pure and stainless and expired like a crushed flower!
+<span class="pageno">
+[232]
+</span></p>
+<p>Sleep in peace, ill-starred daughter of my hapless fatherland! Bury in the grave the enchantments of youth, faded in their
+prime! When a people cannot offer its daughters a tranquil home under the protection of sacred liberty, when a man can only
+leave to his widow blushes, tears to his mother, and slavery to his children, you do well to condemn yourself to perpetual
+chastity, stifling within you the germ of a future generation accursed! Well for you that you have not to shudder in your
+grave, hearing the cries of those who groan in darkness, of those who feel that they have wings and yet are fettered, of those
+who are stifled from lack of liberty! Go, go with your poet&#8217;s dreams into the regions of the infinite, spirit of woman dim-shadowed
+in the moonlight&#8217;s beam, whispered in the bending arches of the bamboo-brakes! Happy she who dies lamented, she who leaves
+in the heart that loves her a pure picture, a sacred remembrance, unspotted by the base passions engendered by the years!
+Go, we shall remember you! In the clear air of our native land, under its azure sky, above the billows of the lake set amid
+sapphire hills and emerald shores, in the crystal streams shaded by the bamboos, bordered by flowers, enlivened by the beetles
+and butterflies with their uncertain and wavering flight as though playing with the air, in the silence of our forests, in
+the singing of our rivers, in the diamond showers of our waterfalls, in the resplendent light of our moon, in the sighs of
+the night breeze, in all that may call up the vision of the beloved, we must eternally see you as we dreamed of you, fair,
+beautiful, radiant with hope, pure as the light, yet still sad and melancholy in the contemplation of our woes!
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[233]
+</span></p>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e4675"></a></p>
+<h1>Dreams</h1>
+<p></p>
+<div class="blockquote">Amor, qu&eacute; astro eres?</div><p>
+
+
+</p>
+<p>On the following day, Thursday, at the hour of sunset, Isagani was walking along the beautiful promenade of Maria Cristina
+in the direction of the Malecon to keep an appointment which Paulita had that morning given him. The young man had no doubt
+that they were to talk about what had happened on the previous night, and as he was determined to ask for an explanation,
+and knew how proud and haughty she was, he foresaw an estrangement. In view of this eventuality he had brought with him the
+only two letters he had ever received from Paulita, two scraps of paper, whereon were merely a few hurriedly written lines
+with various blots, but in an even handwriting, things that did not prevent the enamored youth from preserving them with more
+solicitude than if they had been the autographs of Sappho and the Muse Polyhymnia.
+
+</p>
+<p>This decision to sacrifice his love on the altar of dignity, the consciousness of suffering in the discharge of duty, did
+not prevent a profound melancholy from taking possession of Isagani and brought back into his mind the beautiful days, and
+nights more beautiful still, when they had whispered sweet nothings through the flowered gratings of the entresol, nothings
+that to the youth took on such a character of seriousness and importance that they seemed to him the only matters worthy of
+meriting the attention of the most exalted human understanding. He recalled the walks on moonlit nights, the fair, the dark
+December mornings after the mass of Nativity, the holy water that he used to offer her, when she would thank him with a look
+charged <span class="pageno">
+[234]
+</span>with a whole epic of love, both of them trembling as their fingers touched. Heavy sighs, like small rockets, issued from his
+breast and brought back to him all the verses, all the sayings of poets and writers about the inconstancy of woman. Inwardly
+he cursed the creation of theaters, the French operetta, and vowed to get revenge on Pelaez at the first opportunity. Everything
+about him appeared under the saddest and somberest colors: the bay, deserted and solitary, seemed more solitary still on account
+of the few steamers that were anchored in it; the sun was dying behind Mariveles without poetry or enchantment, without the
+capricious and richly tinted clouds of happier evenings; the Anda monument, in bad taste, mean and squat, without style, without
+grandeur, looked like a lump of ice-cream or at best a chunk of cake; the people who were promenading along the Malecon, in
+spite of their complacent and contented air, appeared distant, haughty, and vain; mischievous and bad-mannered, the boys that
+played on the beach, skipping flat stones over the surface of the water or searching in the sand for mollusks and crustaceans
+which they caught for the mere fun of catching and killed without benefit to themselves; in short, even the eternal port works
+to which he had dedicated more than three odes, looked to him absurd, ridiculous child&#8217;s play.
+
+</p>
+<p>The port, ah, the port of Manila, a bastard that since its conception had brought tears of humiliation and shame to all! If
+only after so many tears there were not being brought forth a useless abortion!
+
+</p>
+<p>Abstractedly he saluted two Jesuits, former teachers of his, and scarcely noticed a tandem in which an American rode and excited
+the envy of the gallants who were in calesas only. Near the Anda monument he heard Ben-Zayb talking with another person about
+Simoun, learning that the latter had on the previous night been taken suddenly ill, that he refused to see any one, even the
+very aides of the General. &#8220;Yes!&#8221; exclaimed Isagani with a bitter smile, &#8220;for him attentions because he is rich. The soldiers
+return <span class="pageno">
+[235]
+</span>from their expeditions sick and wounded, but no one visits them.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Musing over these expeditions, over the fate of the poor soldiers, over the resistance offered by the islanders to the foreign
+yoke, he thought that, death for death, if that of the soldiers was glorious because they were obeying orders, that of the
+islanders was sublime because they were defending their homes.<a id="d0e4696src" href="#d0e4696" class="noteref">1</a>
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;A strange destiny, that of some peoples!&#8221; he mused. &#8220;Because a traveler arrives at their shores, they lose their liberty
+and become subjects and slaves, not only of the traveler, not only of his heirs, but even of all his countrymen, and not for
+a generation, but for all time! A strange conception of justice! Such a state of affairs gives ample right to exterminate
+every foreigner as the most ferocious monster that the sea can cast up!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>He reflected that those islanders, against whom his country was waging war, after all were guilty of no crime other than that
+of weakness. The travelers also arrived at the shores of other peoples, but finding them strong made no display of their strange
+pretension. With all their weakness the spectacle they presented seemed beautiful to him, and the names of the enemies, whom
+the newspapers did not fail to call cowards and traitors, appeared glorious to him, as they succumbed with glory amid the
+ruins of their crude fortifications, with greater glory even than the ancient Trojan heroes, for those islanders had carried
+away no Philippine Helen! In his poetic enthusiasm he thought of the young men of those islands who could cover themselves
+with glory in the eyes of their women, and in his amorous desperation he envied them because they could find a brilliant suicide.
+<span class="pageno">
+[236]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;Ah, I should like to die,&#8221; he exclaimed, &#8220;be reduced to nothingness, leave to my native land a glorious name, perish in its
+cause, defending it from foreign invasion, and then let the sun afterwards illumine my corpse, like a motionless sentinel
+on the rocks of the sea!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The conflict with the Germans<a id="d0e4711src" href="#d0e4711" class="noteref">2</a> came into his mind and he almost felt sorry that it had been adjusted: he would gladly have died for the Spanish-Filipino
+banner before submitting to the foreigner.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Because, after all,&#8221; he mused, &#8220;with Spain we are united by firm bonds&#8212;the past, history, religion, language&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Language, yes, language! A sarcastic smile curled his lips. That very night they would hold a banquet in the <i>pansiter&iacute;a</i> to <i>celebrate</i> the demise of the academy of Castilian.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ay!&#8221; he sighed, &#8220;provided the liberals in Spain are like those we have here, in a little while the mother country will be
+able to count the number of the faithful!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Slowly the night descended, and with it melancholy settled more heavily upon the heart of the young man, who had almost lost
+hope of seeing Paulita. The promenaders one by one left the Malecon for the Luneta, the music from which was borne to him
+in snatches of melodies on the fresh evening breeze; the sailors on a warship anchored in the river performed their evening
+drill, skipping about among the slender ropes like spiders; the boats one by one lighted their lamps, thus giving signs of
+life; while the beach,
+
+</p>
+<p class="beforeline"></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Do el viento riza las calladas olas
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Que con blando murmullo en la ribera
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Se deslizan veloces por s&iacute; solas.<a id="d0e4735src" href="#d0e4735" class="noteref">3</a></span></p>
+<p class="afterline"></p><span class="pageno">
+[237]
+</span><p>as Alaejos says, exhaled in the distance thin, vapors that the moon, now at its full, gradually converted into mysterious
+transparent gauze.
+
+</p>
+<p>A distant sound became audible, a noise that rapidly approached. Isagani turned his head and his heart began to beat violently.
+A carriage was coming, drawn by white horses, the white horses that he would know among a hundred thousand. In the carriage
+rode Paulita and her friend of the night before, with Do&ntilde;a Victorina.
+
+</p>
+<p>Before the young man could take a step, Paulita had leaped to the ground with sylph-like agility and smiled at him with a
+smile full of conciliation. He smiled in return, and it seemed to him that all the clouds, all the black thoughts that before
+had beset him, vanished like smoke, the sky lighted up, the breeze sang, flowers covered the grass by the roadside. But unfortunately
+Do&ntilde;a Victorina was there and she pounced upon the young man to ask him for news of Don Tiburcio, since Isagani had undertaken
+to discover his hiding-place by inquiry among the students he knew.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No one has been able to tell me up to now,&#8221; he answered, and he was telling the truth, for Don Tiburcio was really hidden
+in the house of the youth&#8217;s own uncle, Padre Florentino.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Let him know,&#8221; declared Do&ntilde;a Victorina furiously, &#8220;that I&#8217;ll call in the Civil Guard. Alive or dead, I want to know where
+he is&#8212;because one has to wait ten years before marrying again.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Isagani gazed at her in fright&#8212;Do&ntilde;a Victorina was thinking of remarrying! Who could the unfortunate be?
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What do you think of Juanito Pelaez?&#8221; she asked him suddenly.
+
+</p>
+<p>Juanito! Isagani knew not what to reply. He was tempted to tell all the evil he knew of Pelaez, but a feeling of delicacy
+triumphed in his heart and he spoke well of his rival, for the very reason that he was such. Do&ntilde;a Victorina, entirely satisfied
+and becoming enthusiastic, then <span class="pageno">
+[238]
+</span>broke out into exaggerations of Pelaez&#8217;s merits and was already going to make Isagani a confidant of her new passion when
+Paulita&#8217;s friend came running to say that the former&#8217;s fan had fallen among the stones of the beach, near the Malecon. Stratagem
+or accident, the fact is that this mischance gave an excuse for the friend to remain with the old woman, while Isagani might
+talk with Paulita. Moreover, it was a matter of rejoicing to Do&ntilde;a Victorina, since to get Juanito for herself she was favoring
+Isagani&#8217;s love.
+
+</p>
+<p>Paulita had her plan ready. On thanking him she assumed the role of the offended party, showed resentment, and gave him to
+understand that she was surprised to meet him there when everybody was on the Luneta, even the French actresses.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You made the appointment for me, how could I be elsewhere?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yet last night you did not even notice that I was in the theater. I was watching you all the time and you never took your
+eyes off those <i>cochers</i>.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>So they exchanged parts: Isagani, who had come to demand explanations, found himself compelled to give them and considered
+himself very happy when Paulita said that she forgave him. In regard to her presence at the theater, he even had to thank
+her for that: forced by her aunt, she had decided to go in the hope of seeing him during the performance. Little she cared
+for Juanito Pelaez!
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;My aunt&#8217;s the one who is in love with him,&#8221; she said with a merry laugh.
+
+</p>
+<p>Then they both laughed, for the marriage of Pelaez with Do&ntilde;a Victorina made them really happy, and they saw it already an
+accomplished fact, until Isagani remembered that Don Tiburcio was still living and confided the secret to his sweetheart,
+after exacting her promise that she would tell no one. Paulita promised, with the mental reservation of relating it to her
+friend.
+
+</p>
+<p>This led the conversation to Isagani&#8217;s town, surrounded <span class="pageno">
+[239]
+</span>by forests, situated on the shore of the sea which roared at the base of the high cliffs. Isagani&#8217;s gaze lighted up when he
+spoke of that obscure spot, a flush of pride overspread his cheeks, his voice trembled, his poetic imagination glowed, his
+words poured forth burning, charged with enthusiasm, as if he were talking of love to his love, and he could not but exclaim:
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Oh, in the solitude of my mountains I feel free, free as the air, as the light that shoots unbridled through space! A thousand
+cities, a thousand palaces, would I give for that spot in the Philippines, where, far from men, I could feel myself to have
+genuine liberty. There, face to face with nature, in the presence of the mysterious and the infinite, the forest and the sea,
+I think, speak, and work like a man who knows not tyrants.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>In the presence of such enthusiasm for his native place, an enthusiasm that she did not comprehend, for she was accustomed
+to hear her country spoken ill of, and sometimes joined in the chorus herself, Paulita manifested some jealousy, as usual
+making herself the offended party.
+
+</p>
+<p>But Isagani very quickly pacified her. &#8220;Yes,&#8221; he said, &#8220;I loved it above all things before I knew you! It was my delight to
+wander through the thickets, to sleep in the shade of the trees, to seat myself upon a cliff to take in with my gaze the Pacific
+which rolled its blue waves before me, bringing to me echoes of songs learned on the shores of free America. Before knowing
+you, that sea was for me my world, my delight, my love, my dream! When it slept in calm with the sun shining overhead, it
+was my delight to gaze into the abyss hundreds of feet below me, seeking monsters in the forests of madrepores and coral that
+were revealed through the limpid blue, enormous serpents that the country folk say leave the forests to dwell in the sea,
+and there take on frightful forms. Evening, they say, is the time when the sirens appear, and I saw them between the waves&#8212;so
+great was my eagerness that once I thought I could discern them amid the foam, busy in their divine <span class="pageno">
+[240]
+</span>sports, I distinctly heard their songs, songs of liberty, and I made out the sounds of their silvery harps. Formerly I spent
+hours and hours watching the transformations in the clouds, or gazing at a solitary tree in the plain or a high rock, without
+knowing why, without being able to explain the vague feelings they awoke in me. My uncle used to preach long sermons to me,
+and fearing that I would become a hypochondriac, talked of placing me under a doctor&#8217;s care. But I met you, I loved you, and
+during the last vacation it seemed that something was lacking there, the forest was gloomy, sad the river that glides through
+the shadows, dreary the sea, deserted the sky. Ah, if you should go there once, if your feet should press those paths, if
+you should stir the waters of the rivulet with your fingers, if you should gaze upon the sea, sit upon the cliff, or make
+the air ring with your melodious songs, my forest would be transformed into an Eden, the ripples of the brook would sing,
+light would burst from the dark leaves, into diamonds would be converted the dewdrops and into pearls the foam of the sea.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>But Paulita had heard that to reach Isagani&#8217;s home it was necessary to cross mountains where little leeches abounded, and
+at the mere thought of them the little coward shivered convulsively. Humored and petted, she declared that she would travel
+only in a carriage or a railway train.
+
+</p>
+<p>Having now forgotten all his pessimism and seeing only thornless roses about him, Isagani answered, &#8220;Within a short time all
+the islands are going to be crossed with networks of iron rails.
+
+</p>
+<p class="beforeline"></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">&#8220;&#8216;Por donde r&aacute;pidas
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Y voladoras
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Locomotoras
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Corriendo ir&aacute;n,&#8217;<a id="d0e4796src" href="#d0e4796" class="noteref">4</a></span></p>
+<p class="afterline"></p>
+<p>as some one said. Then the most beautiful spots of the islands will be accessible to all.&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[241]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;Then, but when? When I&#8217;m an old woman?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ah, you don&#8217;t know what we can do in a few years,&#8221; replied the youth. &#8220;You don&#8217;t realize the energy and enthusiasm that are
+awakening in the country after the sleep of centuries. Spain heeds us; our young men in Madrid are working day and night,
+dedicating to the fatherland all their intelligence, all their time, all their strength. Generous voices there are mingled
+with ours, statesmen who realize that there is no better bond than community of thought and interest. Justice will be meted
+out to us, and everything points to a brilliant future for all. It&#8217;s true that we&#8217;ve just met with a slight rebuff, we students,
+but victory is rolling along the whole line, it is in the consciousness of all! The traitorous repulse that we have suffered
+indicates the last gasp, the final convulsions of the dying. Tomorrow we shall be citizens of the Philippines, whose destiny
+will be a glorious one, because it will be in loving hands. Ah, yes, the future is ours! I see it rose-tinted, I see the movement
+that stirs the life of these regions so long dead, lethargic. I see towns arise along the railroads, and factories everywhere,
+edifices like that of Mandaloyan! I hear the steam hiss, the trains roar, the engines rattle! I see the smoke rise&#8212;their heavy
+breathing; I smell the oil&#8212;the sweat of monsters busy at incessant toil. This port, so slow and laborious of creation, this
+river where commerce is in its death agony, we shall see covered with masts, giving us an idea of the forests of Europe in
+winter. This pure air, and these stones, now so clean, will be crowded with coal, with boxes and barrels, the products of
+human industry, but let it not matter, for we shall move about rapidly in comfortable coaches to seek in the interior other
+air, other scenes on other shores, cooler temperatures on the slopes of the mountains. The warships of our navy will guard
+our coasts, the Spaniard and the Filipino will rival each other in zeal to repel all foreign invasion, to defend our homes,
+and let you bask in peace and smiles, loved and respected. Free from the system of exploitation, <span class="pageno">
+[242]
+</span>without hatred or distrust, the people will labor because then labor will cease to be a despicable thing, it will no longer
+be servile, imposed upon a slave. Then the Spaniard will not embitter his character with ridiculous pretensions of despotism,
+but with a frank look and a stout heart we shall extend our hands to one another, and commerce, industry, agriculture, the
+sciences, will develop under the mantle of liberty, with wise and just laws, as in prosperous England.&#8221;<a id="d0e4807src" href="#d0e4807" class="noteref">5</a>
+
+</p>
+<p>Paulita smiled dubiously and shook her head. &#8220;Dreams, dreams!&#8221; she sighed. &#8220;I&#8217;ve heard it said that you have many enemies.
+Aunt says that this country must always be enslaved.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Because your aunt is a fool, because she can&#8217;t live without slaves! When she hasn&#8217;t them she dreams of them in the future,
+and if they are not obtainable she forces them into her imagination. True it is that we have enemies, that there will be a
+struggle, but we shall conquer. The old system may convert the ruins of its castle into formless barricades, but we will take
+them singing hymns of liberty, in the light of the eyes of you women, to the applause of your lovely hands. But do not be
+uneasy&#8212;the struggle will be a pacific one. Enough that you spur us to zeal, that you awake in us noble and elevated thoughts
+and encourage us <span class="pageno">
+[243]
+</span>to constancy, to heroism, with your affection for our reward.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Paulita preserved her enigmatic smile and seemed thoughtful, as she gazed toward the river, patting her cheek lightly with
+her fan. &#8220;But if you accomplish nothing?&#8221; she asked abstractedly.
+
+</p>
+<p>The question hurt Isagani. He fixed his eyes on his sweetheart, caught her lightly by the hand, and began: &#8220;Listen, if we
+accomplish nothing&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>He paused in doubt, then resumed: &#8220;You know how I love you, how I adore you, you know that I feel myself a different creature
+when your gaze enfolds me, when I surprise in it the flash of love, but yet if we accomplish nothing, I would dream of another
+look of yours and would die happy, because the light of pride could burn in your eyes when you pointed to my corpse and said
+to the world: &#8216;My love died fighting for the rights of my fatherland!&#8217;&#8201;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Come home, child, you&#8217;re going to catch cold,&#8221; screeched Do&ntilde;a Victorina at that instant, and the voice brought them back
+to reality. It was time to return, and they kindly invited him to enter the carriage, an invitation which the young man did
+not give them cause to repeat. As it was Paulita&#8217;s carriage, naturally Do&ntilde;a Victorina and the friend occupied the back seat,
+while the two lovers sat on the smaller one in front.
+
+</p>
+<p>To ride in the same carriage, to have her at his side, to breathe her perfume, to rub against the silk of her dress, to see
+her pensive with folded arms, lighted by the moon of the Philippines that lends to the meanest things idealism and enchantment,
+were all dreams beyond Isagani&#8217;s hopes! What wretches they who were returning alone on foot and had to give way to the swift
+carriage! In the whole course of the drive, along the beach and down the length of La Sabana, across the Bridge of Spain,
+Isagani saw nothing but a sweet profile, gracefully set off by beautiful hair, ending in an arching neck that lost itself
+amid the gauzy pi&ntilde;a. A diamond winked at him from the lobe of the <span class="pageno">
+[244]
+</span>little ear, like a star among silvery clouds. He heard faint echoes inquiring for Don Tiburcio de Espada&ntilde;a, the name of Juanito
+Pelaez, but they sounded to him like distant bells, the confused noises heard in a dream. It was necessary to tell him that
+they had reached Plaza Santa Cruz.
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[245]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e4696" href="#d0e4696src" class="noteref">1</a> Referring to the expeditions&#8212;<i>Misi&oacute;n Espa&ntilde;ola Cat&oacute;lica</i>&#8212;to the Caroline and Pelew Islands from 1886 to 1895, headed by the Capuchin Fathers, which brought misery and disaster upon
+the natives of those islands, unprofitable losses and sufferings to the Filipino soldiers engaged in them, discredit to Spain,
+and decorations of merit to a number of Spanish officers.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e4711" href="#d0e4711src" class="noteref">2</a> Over the possession of the Caroline and Pelew Islands. The expeditions referred to in the previous note were largely inspired
+by German activity with regard to those islands, which had always been claimed by Spain, who sold her claim to them to Germany
+after the loss of the Philippines.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e4735" href="#d0e4735src" class="noteref">3</a> &#8220;Where the wind wrinkles the silent waves, that rapidly break,
+of their own movement, with a gentle murmur on the shore.&#8221;&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e4796" href="#d0e4796src" class="noteref">4</a> &#8220;Where rapid and winged engines will rush in flight.&#8221;&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e4807" href="#d0e4807src" class="noteref">5</a> There is something almost uncanny about the general accuracy of the prophecy in these lines, the economic part of which is
+now so well on the way to realization, although the writer of them would doubtless have been a very much surprised individual
+had he also foreseen how it would come about. But one of his own expressions was &#8220;fire and steel to the cancer,&#8221; and it surely
+got them.
+
+</p>
+<p class="notetext">On the very day that this passage was translated and this note written, the first commercial liner was tied up at the new
+docks, which have destroyed the Malecon but raised Manila to the front rank of Oriental seaports, and the final revision is
+made at Baguio, Mountain Province, amid the &#8220;cooler temperatures on the slopes of the mountains.&#8221; As for the political portion,
+it is difficult even now to contemplate calmly the blundering fatuity of that bigoted medieval brand of &#8220;patriotism&#8221; which
+led the decrepit Philippine government to play the Ancient Mariner and shoot the Albatross that brought this message.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e4832"></a></p>
+<h1>Smiles and Tears</h1>
+<p>The sala of the <i>Pansiteria Macanista de Buen Gusto</i><a id="d0e4839src" href="#d0e4839" class="noteref">1</a> that night presented an extraordinary aspect. Fourteen young men of the principal islands of the archipelago, from the pure
+Indian (if there be pure ones) to the Peninsular Spaniard, were met to hold the banquet advised by Padre Irene in view of
+the happy solution of the affair about instruction in Castilian. They had engaged all the tables for themselves, ordered the
+lights to be increased, and had posted on the wall beside the landscapes and Chinese kakemonos this strange versicle:
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;GLORY TO CUSTODIO FOR HIS CLEVERNESS AND PANSIT ON EABTH TO THE YOUTHS OF GOOD WILL.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>In a country where everything grotesque is covered with a mantle of seriousness, where many rise by the force of wind and
+hot air, in a country where the deeply serious and sincere may do damage on issuing from the heart and may cause trouble,
+probably this was the best way to celebrate the ingenious inspiration of the illustrious Don Custodio. The mocked replied
+to the mockery with a laugh, to the governmental joke with a plate of <i>pansit</i>, and yet&#8212;!
+
+</p>
+<p>They laughed and jested, but it could be seen that the merriment was forced. The laughter had a certain nervous ring, eyes
+flashed, and in more than one of these a tear glistened. Nevertheless, these young men were cruel, they were unreasonable!
+It was not the first time that their most <span class="pageno">
+[246]
+</span>beautiful ideas had been so treated, that their hopes had been defrauded with big words and small actions: before this Don
+Custodio there had been many, very many others.
+
+</p>
+<p>In the center of the room under the red lanterns were placed four round tables, systematically arranged to form a square.
+Little wooden stools, equally round, served as seats. In the middle of each table, according to the practise of the establishment,
+were arranged four small colored plates with four pies on each one and four cups of tea, with the accompanying dishes, all
+of red porcelain. Before each seat was a bottle and two glittering wine-glasses.
+
+</p>
+<p>Sandoval was curious and gazed about scrutinizing everything, tasting the food, examining the pictures, reading the bill of
+fare. The others conversed on the topics of the day: about the French actresses, about the mysterious illness of Simoun, who,
+according to some, had been found wounded in the street, while others averred that he had attempted to commit suicide. As
+was natural, all lost themselves in conjectures. Tadeo gave his particular version, which according to him came from a reliable
+source: Simoun had been assaulted by some unknown person in the old Plaza Vivac,<a id="d0e4860src" href="#d0e4860" class="noteref">2</a> the motive being revenge, in proof of which was the fact that Simoun himself refused to make the least explanation. From
+this they proceeded to talk of mysterious revenges, and naturally of monkish pranks, each one relating the exploits of the
+curate of his town.
+
+</p>
+<p>A notice in large black letters crowned the frieze of the room with this warning:
+
+</p>
+<p class="beforeline"></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">De esta fonda el cabecilla
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Al publico advierte
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Que nada dejen absolutamente
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Sobre alguna mesa &oacute; silla.<a id="d0e4874src" href="#d0e4874" class="noteref">3</a></span></p>
+<p class="afterline"></p><span class="pageno">
+[247]
+</span><p>&#8220;What a notice!&#8221; exclaimed Sandoval. &#8220;As if he might have confidence in the police, eh? And what verses! Don Tiburcio converted
+into a quatrain&#8212;two feet, one longer than the other, between two crutches! If Isagani sees them, he&#8217;ll present them to his
+future aunt.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Here&#8217;s Isagani!&#8221; called a voice from the stairway. The happy youth appeared radiant with joy, followed by two Chinese, without
+camisas, who carried on enormous waiters tureens that gave out an appetizing odor. Merry exclamations greeted them.
+
+</p>
+<p>Juanito Pelaez was missing, but the hour fixed had already passed, so they sat down happily to the tables. Juanito was always
+unconventional.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;If in his place we had invited Basilio,&#8221; said Tadeo, &#8220;we should have been better entertained. We might have got him drunk
+and drawn some secrets from him.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What, does the prudent Basilio possess secrets?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I should say so!&#8221; replied Tadeo. &#8220;Of the most important kind. There are some enigmas to which he alone has the key: the boy
+who disappeared, the nun&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Gentlemen, the <i>pansit lang-lang</i> is the soup <i>par excellence</i>!&#8221; cried Makaraig. &#8220;As you will observe, Sandoval, it is composed of vermicelli, crabs or shrimps, egg paste, scraps of chicken,
+and I don&#8217;t know what else. As first-fruits, let us offer the bones to Don Custodio, to see if he will project something with
+them.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>A burst of merry laughter greeted this sally.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;If he should learn&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;He&#8217;d come a-running!&#8221; concluded Sandoval. &#8220;This is excellent soup&#8212;what is it called?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Pansit lang-lang</i>, that is, Chinese <i>pansit</i>, to distinguish it from that which is peculiar to this country.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Bah! That&#8217;s a hard name to remember. In honor of Don Custodio, I christen it the <i>soup project</i>!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Gentlemen,&#8221; said Makaraig, who had prepared the menu, &#8220;there are three courses yet. Chinese stew made of pork&#8212;&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[248]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;Which should be dedicated to Padre Irene.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Get out! Padre Irene doesn&#8217;t eat pork, unless he turns his nose away,&#8221; whispered a young man from Iloilo to his neighbor.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Let him turn his nose away!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Down with Padre Irene&#8217;s nose,&#8221; cried several at once.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Respect, gentlemen, more respect!&#8221; demanded Pecson with comic gravity.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The third course is a lobster pie&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Which should be dedicated to the friars,&#8221; suggested he of the Visayas.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;For the lobsters&#8217; sake,&#8221; added Sandoval.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Right, and call it friar pie!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The whole crowd took this up, repeating in concert, &#8220;Friar pie!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I protest in the name of one of them,&#8221; said Isagani.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;And I, in the name of the lobsters,&#8221; added Tadeo.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Respect, gentlemen, more respect!&#8221; again demanded Pecson with a full mouth.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The fourth is stewed <i>pansit</i>, which is dedicated&#8212;to the government and the country!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>All turned toward Makaraig, who went on: &#8220;Until recently, gentlemen, the <i>pansit</i> was believed to be Chinese or Japanese, but the fact is that, being unknown in China or Japan, it would seem to be Filipino,
+yet those who prepare it and get the benefit from it are the Chinese&#8212;the same, the very, very same that happens to the government
+and to the Philippines: they seem to be Chinese, but whether they are or not, the Holy Mother has her doctors&#8212;all eat and
+enjoy it, yet characterize it as disagreeable and loathsome, the same as with the country, the same as with the government.
+All live at its cost, all share in its feast, and afterwards there is no worse country than the Philippines, there is no government
+more imperfect. Let us then dedicate the <i>pansit</i> to the country and to the government.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Agreed!&#8221; many exclaimed.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I protest!&#8221; cried Isagani.
+<span class="pageno">
+[249]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;Respect for the weaker, respect for the victims,&#8221; called Pecson in a hollow voice, waving a chicken-bone in the air.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Let&#8217;s dedicate the <i>pansit</i> to Quiroga the Chinaman, one of the four powers of the Filipino world,&#8221; proposed Isagani.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No, to his Black Eminence.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Silence!&#8221; cautioned one mysteriously. &#8220;There are people in the plaza watching us, and walls have ears.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>True it was that curious groups were standing by the windows, while the talk and laughter in the adjoining houses had ceased
+altogether, as if the people there were giving their attention to what was occurring at the banquet. There was something extraordinary
+about the silence.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Tadeo, deliver your speech,&#8221; Makaraig whispered to him.
+
+</p>
+<p>It had been agreed that Sandoval, who possessed the most oratorical ability, should deliver the last toast as a summing up.
+
+</p>
+<p>Tadeo, lazy as ever, had prepared nothing, so he found himself in a quandary. While disposing of a long string of vermicelli,
+he meditated how to get out of the difficulty, until he recalled a speech learned in school and decided to plagiarize it,
+with adulterations.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Beloved brethren in project!&#8221; he began, gesticulating with two Chinese chop-sticks.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Brute! Keep that chop-stick out of my hair!&#8221; cried his neighbor.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Called by you to fill the void that has been left in&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Plagiarism!&#8221; Sandoval interrupted him. &#8220;That speech was delivered by the president of our lyceum.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Called by your election,&#8221; continued the imperturbable Tadeo, &#8220;to fill the void that has been left in my mind&#8221;&#8212;pointing to
+his stomach&#8212;&#8220;by a man famous for his Christian principles and for his inspirations and projects, worthy of some little remembrance,
+what can one like myself say of him, I who am very hungry, not having breakfasted?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Have a neck, my friend!&#8221; called a neighbor, offering that portion of a chicken.
+<span class="pageno">
+[250]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;There is one course, gentlemen, the treasure of a people who are today a tale and a mockery in the world, wherein have thrust
+their hands the greatest gluttons of the western regions of the earth&#8212;&#8221; Here he pointed with his chopsticks to Sandoval, who
+was struggling with a refractory chicken-wing.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;And eastern!&#8221; retorted the latter, describing a circle in the air with his spoon, in order to include all the banqueters.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No interruptions!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I demand the floor!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I demand pickles!&#8221; added Isagani.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Bring on the stew!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>All echoed this request, so Tadeo sat down, contented with having got out of his quandary.
+
+</p>
+<p>The dish consecrated to Padre Irene did not appear to be extra good, as Sandoval cruelly demonstrated thus: &#8220;Shining with
+grease outside and with pork inside! Bring on the third course, the friar pie!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The pie was not yet ready, although the sizzling of the grease in the frying-pan could be heard. They took advantage of the
+delay to drink, begging Pecson to talk.
+
+</p>
+<p>Pecson crossed himself gravely and arose, restraining his clownish laugh with an effort, at the same time mimicking a certain
+Augustinian preacher, then famous, and beginning in a murmur, as though he were reading a text.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Si tripa plena laudal Deum, tripa famelica laudabit fratres</i>&#8212;if the full stomach praises God, the hungry stomach will praise the friars. Words spoken by the Lord Custodio through the
+mouth of Ben-Zayb, in the journal <i>El Grito de la Integridad</i>, the second article, absurdity the one hundred and fifty-seventh.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Beloved brethren in Christ: Evil blows its foul breath over the verdant shores of Frailandia, commonly called the Philippine
+Archipelago. No day passes but the attack is renewed, but there is heard some sarcasm against the reverend, venerable, infallible
+corporations, defenseless and unsupported. <span class="pageno">
+[251]
+</span>Allow me, brethren, on this occasion to constitute myself a knight-errant to sally forth in defense of the unprotected, of
+the holy corporations that have reared us, thus again confirming the saving idea of the adage&#8212;a full stomach praises God,
+which is to say, a hungry stomach will praise the friars.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Bravo, bravo!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Listen,&#8221; said Isagani seriously, &#8220;I want you to understand that, speaking of friars, I respect one.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Sandoval was getting merry, so he began to sing a shady couplet about the friars.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Hear me, brethren!&#8221; continued Pecson. &#8220;Turn your gaze toward the happy days of your infancy, endeavor to analyze the present
+and ask yourselves about the future. What do you find? Friars, friars, and friars! A friar baptized you, confirmed you, visited
+you in school with loving zeal; a friar heard your first secret; he was the first to bring you into communion with God, to
+set your feet upon the pathway of life; friars were your first and friars will be your last teachers; a friar it is who opens
+the hearts of your sweethearts, disposing them to heed your sighs; a friar marries you, makes you travel over different islands
+to afford you changes of climate and diversion; he will attend your death-bed, and even though you mount the scaffold, there
+will the friar be to accompany you with his prayers and tears, and you may rest assured that he will not desert you until
+he sees you thoroughly dead. Nor does his charity end there&#8212;dead, he will then endeavor to bury you with all pomp, he will
+fight that your corpse pass through the church to receive his supplications, and he will only rest satisfied when he can deliver
+you into the hands of the Creator, purified here on earth, thanks to temporal punishments, tortures, and humiliations. Learned
+in the doctrines of Christ, who closes heaven against the rich, they, our redeemers and genuine ministers of the Saviour,
+seek every means to lift away our sins and bear them far, far off, there where the accursed Chinese and Protestants <span class="pageno">
+[252]
+</span>dwell, to leave us this air, limpid, pure, healthful, in such a way that even should we so wish afterwards, we could not find
+a real to bring about our condemnation.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;If, then, their existence is necessary to our happiness, if wheresoever we turn we must encounter their delicate hands, hungering
+for kisses, that every day smooth the marks of abuse from our countenances, why not adore them and fatten them&#8212;why demand
+their impolitic expulsion? Consider for a moment the immense void that their absence would leave in our social system. Tireless
+workers, they improve and propagate the races! Divided as we are, thanks to our jealousies and our susceptibilities, the friars
+unite us in a common lot, in a firm bond, so firm that many are unable to move their elbows. Take away the friar, gentlemen,
+and you will see how the Philippine edifice will totter; lacking robust shoulders and hairy limbs to sustain it, Philippine
+life will again become monotonous, without the merry note of the playful and gracious friar, without the booklets and sermons
+that split our sides with laughter, without the amusing contrast between grand pretensions and small brains, without the actual,
+daily representations of the tales of Boccaccio and La Fontaine! Without the girdles and scapularies, what would you have
+our women do in the future&#8212;save that money and perhaps become miserly and covetous? Without the masses, novenaries, and processions,
+where will you find games of <i>panguingui</i> to entertain them in their hours of leisure? They would then have to devote themselves to their household duties and instead
+of reading diverting stories of miracles, we should then have to get them works that are not extant.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Take away the friar and heroism will disappear, the political virtues will fall under the control of the vulgar. Take him
+away and the Indian will cease to exist, for the friar is the Father, the Indian is the Word! The former is the sculptor,
+the latter the statue, because all that we are, think, or do, we owe to the friar&#8212;to his patience, his toil, his perseverance
+of three centuries to modify the form <span class="pageno">
+[253]
+</span>Nature gave us. The Philippines without the friar and without the Indian&#8212;what then would become of the unfortunate government
+in the hands of the Chinamen?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It will eat lobster pie,&#8221; suggested Isagani, whom Pecson&#8217;s speech bored.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;And that&#8217;s what we ought to be doing. Enough of speeches!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>As the Chinese who should have served the courses did not put in his appearance, one of the students arose and went to the
+rear, toward the balcony that overlooked the river. But he returned at once, making mysterious signs.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;We&#8217;re watched! I&#8217;ve seen Padre Sibyla&#8217;s pet!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes?&#8221; ejaculated Isagani, rising.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s no use now. When he saw me he disappeared.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Approaching the window he looked toward the plaza, then made signs to his companions to come nearer. They saw a young man
+leave the door of the <i>pansiter&iacute;a</i>, gaze all about him, then with some unknown person enter a carriage that waited at the curb. It was Simoun&#8217;s carriage.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ah!&#8221; exclaimed Makaraig. &#8220;The slave of the Vice-Rector attended by the Master of the General!&#8221;
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[254]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e4839" href="#d0e4839src" class="noteref">1</a> These establishments are still a notable feature of native life in Manila. Whether the author adopted a title already common
+or popularized one of his own invention, the fact is that they are now invariably known by the name used here. The use of
+<i>macanista</i> was due to the presence in Manila of a large number of Chinese from Macao.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e4860" href="#d0e4860src" class="noteref">2</a> Originally, Plaza San Gabriel, from the Dominican mission for the Chinese established there; later, as it became a commercial
+center, Plaza Vivac; and now known as Plaza Cervantes, being the financial center of Manila.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e4874" href="#d0e4874src" class="noteref">3</a> &#8220;The manager of this restaurant warns the public to leave absolutely nothing on any table or chair.&#8221;&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e5066"></a></p>
+<h1>Pasquinades</h1>
+<p>Very early the next morning Basilio arose to go to the hospital. He had his plans made: to visit his patients, to go afterwards
+to the University to see about his licentiateship, and then have an interview with Makaraig about the expense this would entail,
+for he had used up the greater part of his savings in ransoming Juli and in securing a house where she and her grandfather
+might live, and he had not dared to apply to Capitan Tiago, fearing that such a move would be construed as an advance on the
+legacy so often promised him.
+
+</p>
+<p>Preoccupied with these thoughts, he paid no attention to the groups of students who were at such an early hour returning from
+the Walled City, as though the classrooms had been closed, nor did he even note the abstracted air of some of them, their
+whispered conversations, or the mysterious signals exchanged among them. So it was that when he reached San Juan de Dios and
+his friends asked him about the conspiracy, he gave a start, remembering what Simoun had planned, but which had miscarried,
+owing to the unexplained accident to the jeweler. Terrified, he asked in a trembling voice, at the same time endeavoring to
+feign ignorance, &#8220;Ah, yes, what conspiracy?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s been discovered,&#8221; replied one, &#8220;and it seems that many are implicated in it.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>With an effort Basilio controlled himself. &#8220;Many implicated?&#8221; he echoed, trying to learn something from the looks of the others.
+&#8220;Who?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Students, a lot of students.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio did not think it prudent to ask more, fearing <span class="pageno">
+[255]
+</span>that he would give himself away, so on the pretext of visiting his patients he left the group. One of the clinical professors
+met him and placing his hand mysteriously on the youth&#8217;s shoulder&#8212;the professor was a friend of his&#8212;asked him in a low voice,
+&#8220;Were you at that supper last night?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>In his excited frame of mind Basilio thought the professor had said <i>night before last</i>, which was the time of his interview with Simoun. He tried to explain. &#8220;I assure you,&#8221; he stammered, &#8220;that as Capitan Tiago
+was worse&#8212;and besides I had to finish that book&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You did well not to attend it,&#8221; said the professor. &#8220;But you&#8217;re a member of the students&#8217; association?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I pay my dues.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Well then, a piece of advice: go home at once and destroy any papers you have that may compromise you.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio shrugged his shoulders&#8212;he had no papers, nothing more than his clinical notes.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Has Se&ntilde;or Simoun&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Simoun has nothing to do with the affair, thank God!&#8221; interrupted the physician. &#8220;He was opportunely wounded by some unknown
+hand and is now confined to his bed. No, other hands are concerned in this, but hands no less terrible.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio drew a breath of relief. Simoun was the only one who could compromise him, although he thought of Cabesang Tales.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Are there tulisanes&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No, man, nothing more than students.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio recovered his serenity. &#8220;What has happened then?&#8221; he made bold to ask.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Seditious pasquinades have been found; didn&#8217;t you know about them?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Where?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;In the University.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Nothing more than that?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Whew! What more do you want?&#8221; asked the professor, <span class="pageno">
+[256]
+</span>almost in a rage. &#8220;The pasquinades are attributed to the students of the association&#8212;but, keep quiet!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The professor of pathology came along, a man who had more the look of a sacristan than of a physician. Appointed by the powerful
+mandate of the Vice-Rector, without other merit than unconditional servility to the corporation, he passed for a spy and an
+informer in the eyes of the rest of the faculty.
+
+</p>
+<p>The first professor returned his greeting coldly, and winked to Basilio, as he said to him, &#8220;Now I know that Capitan Tiago
+smells like a corpse&#8212;the crows and vultures have been gathering around him.&#8221; So saying, he went inside.
+
+</p>
+<p>Somewhat calmed, Basilio now ventured to inquire for more details, but all that he could learn was that pasquinades had been
+found on the doors of the University, and that the Vice-Rector had ordered them to be taken down and sent to the Civil Government.
+It was said that they were filled with threats of assassination, invasion, and other braggadocio.
+
+</p>
+<p>The students made their comments on the affair. Their information came from the janitor, who had it from a servant in Santo
+Tomas, who had it from an usher. They prognosticated future suspensions and imprisonments, even indicating who were to be
+the victims&#8212;naturally the members of the association.
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio then recalled Simoun&#8217;s words: &#8220;The day in which they can get rid of you, you will not complete your course.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Could he have known anything?&#8221; he asked himself. &#8220;We&#8217;ll see who is the most powerful.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Recovering his serenity, he went on toward the University, to learn what attitude it behooved him to take and at the same
+time to see about his licentiateship. He passed along Calle Legazpi, then down through Beaterio, and upon arriving at the
+corner of this street and Calle Solana saw that something important must indeed have happened. Instead of the former lively,
+chattering groups on the sidewalks <span class="pageno">
+[257]
+</span>were to be seen civil-guards making the students move on, and these latter issuing from the University silent, some gloomy,
+some agitated, to stand off at a distance or make their way home.
+
+</p>
+<p>The first acquaintance he met was Sandoval, but Basilio called to him in vain. He seemed to have been smitten deaf. &#8220;Effect
+of fear on the gastro-intestinal juices,&#8221; thought Basilio.
+
+</p>
+<p>Later he met Tadeo, who wore a Christmas face&#8212;at last that eternal holiday seemed to be realized.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What has happened, Tadeo?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;We&#8217;ll have no school, at least for a week, old man! Sublime! Magnificent!&#8221; He rubbed his hands in glee.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But what has happened?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;They&#8217;re going to arrest all of us in the association.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;And are you glad of that?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;There&#8217;ll be no school, there&#8217;ll be no school!&#8221; He moved away almost bursting with joy.
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio saw Juanito Pelaez approaching, pale and suspicious. This time his hump had reached its maximum, so great was his
+haste to get away. He had been one of the most active promoters of the association while things were running smoothly.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Eh, Pelaez, what&#8217;s happened?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Nothing, I know nothing. I didn&#8217;t have anything to do with it,&#8221; he responded nervously. &#8220;I was always telling you that these
+things were quixotisms. It&#8217;s the truth, you know I&#8217;ve said so to you?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio did not remember whether he had said so or not, but to humor him replied, &#8220;Yes, man, but what&#8217;s happened?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s the truth, isn&#8217;t it? Look, you&#8217;re a witness: I&#8217;ve always been opposed&#8212;you&#8217;re a witness, don&#8217;t forget it!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes, man, but what&#8217;s going on?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Listen, you&#8217;re a witness! I&#8217;ve never had anything to do with the members of the association, except to give them <span class="pageno">
+[258]
+</span>advice. You&#8217;re not going to deny it now. Be careful, won&#8217;t you?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No, no, I won&#8217;t deny it, but for goodness&#8217; sake, what has happened?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>But Juanito was already far away. He had caught a glimpse of a guard approaching and feared arrest.
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio then went on toward the University to see if perhaps the secretary&#8217;s office might be open and if he could glean any
+further news. The office was closed, but there was an extraordinary commotion in the building. Hurrying up and down the stairways
+were friars, army officers, private persons, old lawyers and doctors, there doubtless to offer their services to the endangered
+cause.
+
+</p>
+<p>At a distance he saw his friend Isagani, pale and agitated, but radiant with youthful ardor, haranguing some fellow students
+with his voice raised as though he cared little that he be heard by everybody.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It seems preposterous, gentlemen, it seems unreal, that an incident so insignificant should scatter us and send us into flight
+like sparrows at whom a scarecrow has been shaken! But is this the first time that students have gone to prison for the sake
+of liberty? Where are those who have died, those who have been shot? Would you apostatize now?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But who can the fool be that wrote such pasquinades?&#8221; demanded an indignant listener.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What does that matter to us?&#8221; rejoined Isagani. &#8220;We don&#8217;t have to find out, let them find out! Before we know how they are
+drawn up, we have no need to make any show of agreement at a time like this. There where the danger is, there must we hasten,
+because honor is there! If what the pasquinades say is compatible with our dignity and our feelings, be he who he may that
+wrote them, he has done well, and we ought to be grateful to him and hasten to add our signatures to his! If they are unworthy
+of us, our conduct and our consciences will in themselves protest and defend us from every accusation!&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[259]
+</span></p>
+<p>Upon hearing such talk, Basilio, although he liked Isagani very much, turned and left. He had to go to Makaraig&#8217;s house to
+see about the loan.
+
+</p>
+<p>Near the house of the wealthy student he observed whisperings and mysterious signals among the neighbors, but not comprehending
+what they meant, continued serenely on his way and entered the doorway. Two guards advanced and asked him what he wanted.
+Basilio realized that he had made a bad move, but he could not now retreat.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve come to see my friend Makaraig,&#8221; he replied calmly.
+
+</p>
+<p>The guards looked at each other. &#8220;Wait here,&#8221; one of them said to him. &#8220;Wait till the corporal comes down.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio bit his lips and Simoun&#8217;s words again recurred to him. Had they come to arrest Makaraig?&#8212;was his thought, but he dared
+not give it utterance. He did not have to wait long, for in a few moments Makaraig came down, talking pleasantly with the
+corporal. The two were preceded by a warrant officer.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What, you too, Basilio?&#8221; he asked.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I came to see you&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Noble conduct!&#8221; exclaimed Makaraig laughing. &#8220;In time of calm, you avoid us.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The corporal asked Basilio his name, then scanned a list. &#8220;Medical student, Calle Anloague?&#8221; he asked.
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio bit his lip.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;ve saved us a trip,&#8221; added the corporal, placing his hand on the youth&#8217;s shoulder. &#8220;You&#8217;re under arrest!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What, I also?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Makaraig burst out into laughter.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t worry, friend. Let&#8217;s get into the carriage, while I tell you about the supper last night.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>With a graceful gesture, as though he were in his own house, he invited the warrant officer and the corporal to enter the
+carriage that waited at the door.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;To the Civil Government!&#8221; he ordered the cochero.
+
+</p>
+<p>Now that Basilio had again regained his composure, he <span class="pageno">
+[260]
+</span>told Makaraig the object of his visit. The rich student did not wait for him to finish, but seized his hand. &#8220;Count on me,
+count on me, and to the festivities celebrating our graduation we&#8217;ll invite these gentlemen,&#8221; he said, indicating the corporal
+and the warrant officer.
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[261]
+</span></p>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e5220"></a></p>
+<h1>The Friar and the Filipino</h1>
+<p></p>
+<div class="blockquote">Vox populi, vox Dei</div><p>
+
+
+</p>
+<p>We left Isagani haranguing his friends. In the midst of his enthusiasm an usher approached him to say that Padre Fernandez,
+one of the higher professors, wished to talk with him.
+
+</p>
+<p>Isagani&#8217;s face fell. Padre Fernandez was a person greatly respected by him, being the <i>one</i> always excepted by him whenever the friars were attacked.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What does Padre Fernandez want?&#8221; he inquired.
+
+</p>
+<p>The usher shrugged his shoulders and Isagani reluctantly followed him.
+
+</p>
+<p>Padre Fernandez, the friar whom we met in Los Ba&ntilde;os, was waiting in his cell, grave and sad, with his brows knitted as if
+he were in deep thought. He arose as Isagani entered, shook hands with him, and closed the door. Then he began to pace from
+one end of the room to the other. Isagani stood waiting for him to speak.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Se&ntilde;or Isagani,&#8221; he began at length with some emotion, &#8220;from the window I&#8217;ve heard you speaking, for though I am a consumptive
+I have good ears, and I want to talk with you. I have always liked the young men who express themselves clearly and have their
+own way of thinking and acting, no matter that their ideas may differ from mine. You young men, from what I have heard, had
+a supper last night. Don&#8217;t excuse yourself&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t intend to excuse myself!&#8221; interrupted Isagani.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;So much the better&#8212;it shows that you accept the consequences of your actions. Besides, you would do ill in <span class="pageno">
+[262]
+</span>retracting, and I don&#8217;t blame you, I take no notice of what may have been said there last night, I don&#8217;t accuse you, because
+after all you&#8217;re free to say of the Dominicans what seems best to you, you are not a pupil of ours&#8212;only this year have we
+had the pleasure of having you, and we shall probably not have you longer. Don&#8217;t think that I&#8217;m going to invoke considerations
+of gratitude; no, I&#8217;m not going to waste my time in stupid vulgarisms. I&#8217;ve had you summoned here because I believe that you
+are one of the few students who act from conviction, and, as I like men of conviction, I&#8217;m going to explain myself to Se&ntilde;or
+Isagani.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Padre Fernandez paused, then continued his walk with bowed head, his gaze riveted on the floor.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You may sit down, if you wish,&#8221; he remarked. &#8220;It&#8217;s a habit of mine to walk about while talking, because my ideas come better
+then.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Isagani remained standing, with his head erect, waiting for the professor to get to the point of the matter.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;For more than eight years I have been a professor here,&#8221; resumed Padre Fernandez, still continuing to pace back and forth,
+&#8220;and in that time I&#8217;ve known and dealt with more than twenty-five hundred students. I&#8217;ve taught them, I&#8217;ve tried to educate
+them, I&#8217;ve tried to inculcate in them principles of justice and of dignity, and yet in these days when there is so much murmuring
+against us I&#8217;ve not seen one who has the temerity to maintain his accusations when he finds himself in the presence of a friar,
+not even aloud in the presence of any numbers. Young men there are who behind our backs calumniate us and before us kiss our
+hands, with a base smile begging kind looks from us! Bah! What do you wish that we should do with such creatures?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The fault is not all theirs, Padre,&#8221; replied Isagani. &#8220;The fault lies partly with those who have taught them to be hypocrites,
+with those who have tyrannized over freedom of thought and freedom of speech. Here every independent <span class="pageno">
+[263]
+</span>thought, every word that is not an echo of the will of those in power, is characterized as filibusterism, and you know well
+enough what that means. A fool would he be who to please himself would say aloud what he thinks, who would lay himself liable
+to suffer persecution!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What persecution have you had to suffer?&#8221; asked Padre Fernandez, raising his head. &#8220;Haven&#8217;t I let you express yourself freely
+in my class? Nevertheless, you are an exception that, if what you say is true, I must correct, so as to make the rule as general
+as possible and thus avoid setting a bad example.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Isagani smiled. &#8220;I thank you, but I will not discuss with you whether I am an exception. I will accept your qualification
+so that you may accept mine: you also are an exception, and as here we are not going to talk about exceptions, nor plead for
+ourselves, at least, I mean, <i>I&#8217;m not</i>, I beg of my <i>professor</i> to change the course of the conversation.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>In spite of his liberal principles, Padre Fernandez raised his head and stared in surprise at Isagani. That young man was
+more independent than he had thought&#8212;although he called him <i>professor</i>, in reality he was dealing with him as an equal, since he allowed himself to offer suggestions. Like a wise diplomat, Padre
+Fernandez not only recognized the fact but even took his stand upon it.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Good enough!&#8221; he said. &#8220;But don&#8217;t look upon me as your professor. I&#8217;m a friar and you are a Filipino student, nothing more
+nor less! Now I ask you&#8212;what do the Filipino students want of us?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The question came as a surprise; Isagani was not prepared for it. It was a thrust made suddenly while they were preparing
+their defense, as they say in fencing. Thus startled, Isagani responded with a violent stand, like a beginner defending himself.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;That you do your duty!&#8221; he exclaimed.
+
+</p>
+<p>Fray Fernandez straightened up&#8212;that reply sounded to him like a cannon-shot. &#8220;That we do our duty!&#8221; he <span class="pageno">
+[264]
+</span>repeated, holding himself erect. &#8220;Don&#8217;t we, then, do our duty? What duties do you ascribe to us?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Those which you voluntarily placed upon yourselves on joining the order, and those which afterwards, once in it, you have
+been willing to assume. But, as a Filipino student, I don&#8217;t think myself called upon to examine your conduct with reference
+to your statutes, to Catholicism, to the government, to the Filipino people, and to humanity in general&#8212;those are questions
+that you have to settle with your founders, with the Pope, with the government, with the whole people, and with God. As a
+Filipino student, I will confine myself to your duties toward us. The friars in general, being the local supervisors of education
+in the provinces, and the Dominicans in particular, by monopolizing in their hands all the studies of the Filipino youth,
+have assumed the obligation to its eight millions of inhabitants, to Spain, and to humanity, of which we form a part, of steadily
+bettering the young plant, morally and physically, of training it toward its happiness, of creating a people honest, prosperous,
+intelligent, virtuous, noble, and loyal. Now I ask you in my turn&#8212;have the friars fulfilled that obligation of theirs?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;We&#8217;re fulfilling&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ah, Padre Fernandez,&#8221; interrupted Isagani, &#8220;you with your hand on <i>your</i> heart can say that you are fulfilling it, but with your hand on the heart of your order, on the heart of all the orders,
+you cannot say that without deceiving yourself. Ah, Padre Fernandez, when I find myself in the presence of a person whom I
+esteem and respect, I prefer to be the accused rather than the accuser, I prefer to defend myself rather than take the offensive.
+But now that we have entered upon the discussion, let us carry it to the end! How do they fulfill their obligation, those
+who look after education in the towns? By hindering it! And those who here monopolize education, those who try to mold the
+mind of youth, to the exclusion of all others whomsoever, how do they carry out their mission? By <span class="pageno">
+[265]
+</span>curtailing knowledge as much as possible, by extinguishing all ardor and enthusiasm, by trampling on all dignity, the soul&#8217;s
+only refuge, by inculcating in us worn-out ideas, rancid beliefs, false principles incompatible with a life of progress! Ah,
+yes, when it is a question of feeding convicts, of providing for the maintenance of criminals, the government calls for bids
+in order to find the purveyor who offers the best means of subsistence, he who at least will not let them perish from hunger,
+but when it is a question of morally feeding a whole people, of nourishing the intellect of youth, the healthiest part, that
+which is later to be the country and the all, the government not only does not ask for any bid, but restricts the power to
+that very body which makes a boast of not desiring education, of wishing no advancement. What should we say if the purveyor
+for the prisons, after securing the contract by intrigue, should then leave the prisoners to languish in want, giving them
+only what is stale and rancid, excusing himself afterwards by saying that it is not convenient for the prisoners to enjoy
+good health, because good health brings merry thoughts, because merriment improves the man, and the man ought not to be improved,
+because it is to the purveyor&#8217;s interest that there be many criminals? What should we say if afterwards the government and
+the purveyor should agree between themselves that of the ten or twelve cuartos which one received for each criminal, the other
+should receive five?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Padre Fernandek bit his lip. &#8220;Those are grave charges,&#8221; he said, &#8220;and you are overstepping the limits of our agreement.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No, Padre, not if I continue to deal with the student question. The friars&#8212;and I do not say, you friars, since I do not confuse
+you with the common herd&#8212;the friars of all the orders have constituted themselves our mental purveyors, yet they say and shamelessly
+proclaim that it is not expedient for us to become enlightened, because some day we shall declare ourselves free! That is
+just the same <span class="pageno">
+[266]
+</span>as not wishing the prisoner to be well-fed so that he may improve and get out of prison. Liberty is to man what education
+is to the intelligence, and the friars&#8217; unwillingness that we have it is the origin of our discontent.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Instruction is given only to those who deserve it,&#8221; rejoined Padre Fernandez dryly. &#8220;To give it to men without character
+and without morality is to prostitute it.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Why are there men without character and without morality?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The Dominican shrugged his shoulders. &#8220;Defects that they imbibe with their mothers&#8217; milk, that they breathe in the bosom of
+the family&#8212;how do I know?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ah, no, Padre Fernandez!&#8221; exclaimed the young man impetuously. &#8220;You have not dared to go into the subject deeply, you have
+not wished to gaze into the depths from fear of finding yourself there in the darkness of your brethren. What we are, you
+have made us. A people tyrannized over is forced to be hypocritical; a people denied the truth must resort to lies; and he
+who makes himself a tyrant breeds slaves. There is no morality, you say, so let it be&#8212;even though statistics can refute you
+in that here are not committed crimes like those among other peoples, blinded by the fumes of their moralizers. But, without
+attempting now to analyze what it is that forms the character and how far the education received determines morality, I will
+agree with you that we are defective. Who is to blame for that? You who for three centuries and a half have had in your hands
+our education, or we who submit to everything? If after three centuries and a half the artist has been able to produce only
+a caricature, stupid indeed he must be!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Or bad enough the material he works upon.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Stupider still then, when, knowing it to be bad, he does not give it up, but goes on wasting time. Not only is he stupid,
+but he is a cheat and a robber, because he knows that his work is useless, yet continues to draw his salary. Not only is he
+stupid and a thief, he is a villain in that <span class="pageno">
+[267]
+</span>he prevents any other workman from trying his skill to see if he might not produce something worth while! The deadly jealousy
+of the incompetent!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The reply was sharp and Padre Fernandez felt himself caught. To his gaze Isagani appeared gigantic, invincible, convincing,
+and for the first time in his life he felt beaten by a Filipino student. He repented of having provoked the argument, but
+it was too late to turn back. In this quandary, finding himself confronted with such a formidable adversary, he sought a strong
+shield and laid hold of the government.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You impute all the faults to us, because you see only us, who are near,&#8221; he said in a less haughty tone. &#8220;It&#8217;s natural and
+doesn&#8217;t surprise me. A person hates the soldier or policeman who arrests him and not the judge who sends him to prison. You
+and we are both dancing to the same measure of music&#8212;if at the same note you lift your foot in unison with us, don&#8217;t blame
+us for it, it&#8217;s the music that is directing our movements. Do you think that we friars have no consciences and that we do
+not desire what is right? Do you believe that we do not think about you, that we do not heed our duty, that we only eat to
+live, and live to rule? Would that it were so! But we, like you, follow the cadence, finding ourselves between Scylla and
+Charybdis: either you reject us or the government rejects us. The government commands, and he who commands, commands,&#8212;and
+must be obeyed!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;From which it may be inferred,&#8221; remarked Isagani with a bitter smile, &#8220;that the government wishes our demoralization.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Oh, no, I didn&#8217;t mean that! What I meant to say is that there are beliefs, there are theories, there are laws, which, dictated
+with the best intention, produce the most deplorable consequences. I&#8217;ll explain myself better by citing an example. To stamp
+out a small evil, there are dictated many laws that cause greater evils still: &#8216;<i>corruptissima in republica plurimae leges,</i>&#8217; said Tacitus. To prevent <span class="pageno">
+[268]
+</span>one case of fraud, there are provided a million and a half preventive or humiliating regulations, which produce the immediate
+effect of awakening in the public the desire to elude and mock such regulations. To make a people criminal, there&#8217;s nothing
+more needed than to doubt its virtue. Enact a law, not only here, but even in Spain, and you will see how the means of evading
+it will be sought, and this is for the very reason that the legislators have overlooked the fact that the more an object is
+hidden, the more a sight of it is desired. Why are rascality and astuteness regarded as great qualities in the Spanish people,
+when there is no other so noble, so proud, so chivalrous as it? Because our legislators, with the best intentions, have doubted
+its nobility, wounded its pride, challenged its chivalry! Do you wish to open in Spain a road among the rocks? Then place
+there an imperative notice forbidding the passage, and the people, in order to protest against the order, will leave the highway
+to clamber over the rocks. The day on which some legislator in Spain forbids virtue and commands vice, then all will become
+virtuous!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The Dominican paused for a brief space, then resumed: &#8220;But you may say that we are getting away from the subject, so I&#8217;ll
+return to it. What I can say to you, to convince you, is that the vices from which you suffer ought to be ascribed by you
+neither to us nor to the government. They are due to the imperfect organization of our social system: <i>qui multum probat, nihil probat</i>, one loses himself through excessive caution, lacking what is necessary and having too much of what is superfluous.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;If you admit those defects in your social system,&#8221; replied Isagani, &#8220;why then do you undertake to regulate alien societies,
+instead of first devoting your attention to yourselves?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;We&#8217;re getting away from the subject, young man. The theory in accomplished facts must be accepted.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;So let it be! I accept it because it is an accomplished <span class="pageno">
+[269]
+</span>fact, but I will further ask: why, if your social organization is defective, do you not change it or at least give heed to
+the cry of those who are injured by it?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;We&#8217;re still far away. Let&#8217;s talk about what the students want from the friars.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;From the moment when the friars hide themselves behind the government, the students have to turn to it.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>This statement was true and there appeared no means of ignoring it.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m not the government and I can&#8217;t answer for its acts. What do the students wish us to do for them within the limits by
+which we are confined?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Not to oppose the emancipation of education but to favor it.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The Dominican shook his head. &#8220;Without stating my own opinion, that is asking us to commit suicide,&#8221; he said.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;On the contrary, it is asking you for room to pass in order not to trample upon and crush you.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ahem!&#8221; coughed Padre Fernandez, stopping and remaining thoughtful. &#8220;Begin by asking something that does not cost so much,
+something that any one of us can grant without abatement of dignity or privilege, for if we can reach an understanding and
+dwell in peace, why this hatred, why this distrust?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Then let&#8217;s get down to details.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes, because if we disturb the foundation, we&#8217;ll bring down the whole edifice.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Then let&#8217;s get down to details, let&#8217;s leave the region of abstract principles,&#8221; rejoined Isagani with a smile, &#8220;and <i>also without stating my own opinion,</i>&#8221;&#8212;the youth accented these words&#8212;&#8220;the students would desist from their attitude and soften certain asperities if the professors
+would try to treat them better than they have up to the present. That is in their hands.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What?&#8221; demanded the Dominican. &#8220;Have the students any complaint to make about my conduct?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Padre, we agreed from the start not to talk of yourself <span class="pageno">
+[270]
+</span>or of myself, we&#8217;re speaking generally. The students, besides getting no great benefit out of the years spent in the classes,
+often leave there remnants of their dignity, if not the whole of it.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Padre Fernandez again bit his lip. &#8220;No one forces them to study&#8212;the fields are uncultivated,&#8221; he observed dryly.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes, there is something that impels them to study,&#8221; replied Isagani in the same tone, looking the Dominican full in the face.
+&#8220;Besides the duty of every one to seek his own perfection, there is the desire innate in man to cultivate his intellect, a
+desire the more powerful here in that it is repressed. He who gives his gold and his life to the State has the right to require
+of it opporttmity better to get that gold and better to care for his life. Yes, Padre, there is something that impels them,
+and that something is the government itself. It is you yourselves who pitilessly ridicule the uncultured Indian and deny him
+his rights, on the ground that he is ignorant. You strip him and then scoff at his nakedness.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Padre Fernandez did not reply, but continued to pace about feverishly, as though very much agitated.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You say that the fields are not cultivated,&#8221; resumed Isagani in a changed tone, after a brief pause. &#8220;Let&#8217;s not enter upon
+an analysis of the reason for this, because we should get far away. But you, Padre Fernandez, you, a teacher, you, a learned
+man, do you wish a people of peons and laborers? In your opinion, is the laborer the perfect state at which man may arrive
+in his development? Or is it that you wish knowledge for yourself and labor for the rest?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No, I want knowledge for him who deserves it, for him who knows how to use it,&#8221; was the reply. &#8220;When the students demonstrate
+that they love it, when young men of conviction appear, young men who know how to maintain their dignity and make it respected,
+then there will be knowledge, then there will be considerate professors! If <span class="pageno">
+[271]
+</span>there are now professors who resort to abuse, it is because there are pupils who submit to it.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;When there are professors, there will be students!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Begin by reforming yourselves, you who have need of change, and we will follow.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes,&#8221; said Isagani with a bitter laugh, &#8220;let us begin it, because the difficulty is on our side. Well you know what is expected
+of a pupil who stands before a professor&#8212;you yourself, with all your love of justice, with all your kind sentiments, have
+been restraining yourself by a great effort while I have been telling you bitter truths, you yourself, Padre Fernandez! What
+good has been secured by him among us who has tried to inculcate other ideas? What evils have not fallen upon you because
+you have tried to be just and perform your duty?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Se&ntilde;or Isagani,&#8221; said the Dominican, extending his hand, &#8220;although it may seem that nothing practical has resulted from this
+conversation, yet something has been gained. I&#8217;ll talk to my brethren about what you have told me and I hope that something
+can be done. Only I fear that they won&#8217;t believe in your existence.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I fear the same,&#8221; returned Isagani, shaking the Dominican&#8217;s hand. &#8220;I fear that my friends will not believe in your existence,
+as you have revealed yourself to me today.&#8221;<a id="d0e5395src" href="#d0e5395" class="noteref">1</a>
+<span class="pageno">
+[272]
+</span></p>
+<p>Considering the interview at an end, the young man took his leave.
+
+</p>
+<p>Padre Fernandez opened the door and followed him with his gaze until he disappeared around a corner in the corridor. For some
+time he listened to the retreating footsteps, then went back into his cell and waited for the youth to appear in the street.
+
+</p>
+<p>He saw him and actually heard him say to a friend who asked where he was going: &#8220;To the Civil Government! I&#8217;m going to see
+the pasquinades and join the others!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>His startled friend stared at him as one would look at a person who is about to commit suicide, then moved away from him hurriedly.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Poor boy!&#8221; murmured Padre Fernandez, feeling his eyes moisten. &#8220;I grudge you to the Jesuits who educated you.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>But Padre Fernandez was completely mistaken; the Jesuits repudiated Isagani<a id="d0e5425src" href="#d0e5425" class="noteref">2</a> when that afternoon they learned that he had been arrested, saying that he would compromise them. &#8220;That young man has thrown
+himself away, he&#8217;s going to do us harm! Let it be understood that he didn&#8217;t get those ideas here.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Nor were the Jesuits wrong. No! Those ideas come only from God through the medium of Nature.
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[273]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e5395" href="#d0e5395src" class="noteref">1</a> &#8220;We do not believe in the verisimilitude of this dialogue, fabricated by the author in order to refute the arguments of the
+friars, whose pride was so great that it would not permit any Isagani to tell them these truths face to face. The <i>invention</i> of Padre Fernandez as a Dominican professor is a stroke of generosity on Rizal&#8217;s part, in conceding that there could have
+existed <i>any</i> friar capable of talking frankly with an <i>Indian</i>.&#8221;&#8212;<i>W. E. Retana, in note to this chapter in the edition published by him at Barcelona in 1908</i>. Retana ought to know of what he is writing, for he was in the employ of the friars for several years and later in Spain
+wrote extensively for the journal supported by them to defend their position in the Philippines. He has also been charged
+with having strongly urged Rizal&#8217;s execution in 1896. Since 1898, however, he has doubled about, or, perhaps more aptly, performed
+a journalistic somersault&#8212;having written a diffuse biography and other works dealing with Rizal. He is strong in unassorted
+<span class="pageno">
+[272n]
+</span>facts, but his comments, when not inane and wearisome, approach a maudlin wail over &#8220;spilt milk,&#8221; so the above is given at
+its face value only.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e5425" href="#d0e5425src" class="noteref">2</a> Quite suggestive of, and perhaps inspired by, the author&#8217;s own experience.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e5431"></a></p>
+<h1>Tatakut</h1>
+<p>With prophetic inspiration Ben-Zayb had been for some days past maintaining in his newspaper that education was disastrous,
+very disastrous for the Philippine Islands, and now in view of the events of that Friday of pasquinades, the writer crowed
+and chanted his triumph, leaving belittled and overwhelmed his adversary <i>Horatius</i>, who in the <i>Pirotecnia</i> had dared to ridicule him in the following manner:
+
+
+
+</p>
+<p></p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>From our contemporary, <i>El Grito</i>:
+
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Education is disastrous, very disastrous, for the Philippine Islands.&#8221;
+
+
+</p>
+<p>Admitted.
+
+
+</p>
+<p>For some time <i>El Grito</i> has pretended to represent the Filipino people&#8212;<i>ergo</i>, as Fray Iba&ntilde;ez would say, if he knew Latin.
+
+
+</p>
+<p>But Fray Iba&ntilde;ez turns Mussulman when he writes, and we know how the Mussulmans dealt with education. <i>In witness whereof</i>, as a royal preacher said, the Alexandrian library!
+</p>
+</div><p>
+
+
+</p>
+<p>Now he was right, he, Ben-Zayb! He was the only one in the islands who thought, the only one who foresaw events!
+
+</p>
+<p>Truly, the news that seditious pasquinades had been found on the doors of the University not only took away the appetite from
+many and disturbed the digestion of others, but it even rendered the phlegmatic Chinese uneasy, so that they no longer dared
+to sit in their shops with one leg drawn up as usual, from fear of losing time in extending it in order to put themselves
+into flight. At eight o&#8217;clock in the morning, although the sun continued on its course and his Excellency, the Captain-General,
+did not appear at the head of his victorious cohorts, still the <span class="pageno">
+[274]
+</span>excitement had increased. The friars who were accustomed to frequent Quiroga&#8217;s bazaar did not put in their appearance, and
+this symptom presaged terrific cataclysms. If the sun had risen a square and the saints appeared only in pantaloons, Quiroga
+would not have been so greatly alarmed, for he would have taken the sun for a gaming-table and the sacred images for gamblers
+who had lost their camisas, but for the friars not to come, precisely when some novelties had just arrived for them!
+
+</p>
+<p>By means of a provincial friend of his, Quiroga forbade entrance into his gaming-houses to every Indian who was not an old
+acquaintance, as the future Chinese consul feared that they might get possession of the sums that the wretches lost there.
+After arranging his bazaar in such a way that he could close it quickly in case of need, he had a policeman accompany him
+for the short distance that separated his house from Simoun&#8217;s. Quiroga thought this occasion the most propitious for making
+use of the rifles and cartridges that he had in his warehouse, in the way the jeweler had pointed out; so that on the following
+days there would be searches made, and then&#8212;how many prisoners, how many terrified people would give up their savings! It
+was the game of the old carbineers, in slipping contraband cigars and tobacco-leaves under a house, in order to pretend a
+search and force the unfortunate owner to bribery or fines, only now the art had been perfected and, the tobacco monopoly
+abolished, resort was had to the prohibited arms.
+
+</p>
+<p>But Simoun refused to see any one and sent word to the Chinese that he should leave things as they were, whereupon he went
+to see Don Custodio to inquire whether he should fortify his bazaar, but neither would Don Custodio receive him, being at
+the time engaged in the study of a project for defense in case of a siege. He thought of Ben-Zayb as a source of information,
+but finding the writer armed to the teeth and using two loaded revolvers for paper-weights, took his leave in the shortest
+possible <span class="pageno">
+[275]
+</span>time, to shut himself up in his house and take to his bed under pretense of illness.
+
+</p>
+<p>At four in the afternoon the talk was no longer of simple pasquinades. There were whispered rumors of an understanding between
+the students and the outlaws of San Mateo, it was certain that in the <i>pansiter&iacute;a</i> they had conspired to surprise the city, there was talk of German ships outside the bay to support the movement, of a band
+of young men who under the pretext of protesting and demonstrating their Hispanism had gone to the Palace to place themselves
+at the General&#8217;s orders but had been arrested because it was discovered that they were armed. Providence had saved his Excellency,
+preventing him from receiving those precocious criminals, as he was at the time in conference with the Provincials, the Vice-Rector,
+and with Padre Irene, Padre Salvi&#8217;s representative. There was considerable truth in these rumors, if we have to believe Padre
+Irene, who in the afternoon went to visit Capitan Tiago. According to him, certain persons had advised his Excellency to improve
+the opportunity in order to inspire terror and administer a lasting lesson to the filibusters.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;A number shot,&#8221; one had advised, &#8220;some two dozen reformers deported at once, in the silence of the night, would extinguish
+forever the flames of discontent.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No,&#8221; rejoined another, who had a kind heart, &#8220;sufficient that the soldiers parade through the streets, a troop of cavalry,
+for example, with drawn sabers&#8212;sufficient to drag along some cannon, that&#8217;s enough! The people are timid and will all retire
+into their houses.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No, no,&#8221; insinuated another. &#8220;This is the opportunity to get rid of the enemy. It&#8217;s not sufficient that they retire into
+their houses, they should be made to come out, like evil humors by means of plasters. If they are inclined to start riots,
+they should be stirred up by secret agitators. I am of the opinion that the troops should be resting on their arms and appearing
+careless and indifferent, so the people may be emboldened, and then in case of any disturbance&#8212;out on them, action!&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[276]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;The end justifies the means,&#8221; remarked another. &#8220;Our end is our holy religion and the integrity of the fatherland. Proclaim
+a state of siege, and in case of the least disturbance, arrest all the rich and educated, and&#8212;clean up the country!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;If I hadn&#8217;t got there in time to counsel moderation,&#8221; added Padre Irene, speaking to Capitan Tiago, &#8220;it&#8217;s certain that blood
+would now be flowing through the streets. I thought of you, Capitan&#8212;The partizans of force couldn&#8217;t do much with the General,
+and they missed Simoun. Ah, if Simoun had not been taken ill&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>With the arrest of Basilio and the search made later among his books and papers, Capitan Tiago had become much worse. Now
+Padre Irene had come to augment his terror with hair-raising tales. Ineffable fear seized upon the wretch, manifesting itself
+first by a light shiver, which was rapidly accentuated, until he was unable to speak. With his eyes bulging and his brow covered
+with sweat, he caught Padre Irene&#8217;s arm and tried to rise, but could not, and then, uttering two groans, fell heavily back
+upon the pillow. His eyes were wide open and he was slavering&#8212;but he was dead. The terrified Padre Irene fled, and, as the
+dying man had caught hold of him, in his flight he dragged the corpse from the bed, leaving it sprawling in the middle of
+the room.
+
+</p>
+<p>By night the terror had reached a climax. Several incidents had occurred to make the timorous believe in the presence of secret
+agitators.
+
+</p>
+<p>During a baptism some cuartos were thrown to the boys and naturally there was a scramble at the door of the church. It happened
+that at the time there was passing a bold soldier, who, somewhat preoccupied, mistook the uproar for a gathering of filibusters
+and hurled himself, sword in hand, upon the boys. He went into the church, and had he not become entangled in the curtains
+suspended from the choir he would not have left a single head on shoulders. It was but the matter of a moment for the <span class="pageno">
+[277]
+</span>timorous to witness this and take to flight, spreading the news that the revolution had begun. The few shops that had been
+kept open were now hastily closed, there being Chinese who even left bolts of cloth outside, and not a few women lost their
+slippers in their flight through the streets. Fortunately, there was only one person wounded and a few bruised, among them
+the soldier himself, who suffered a fall fighting with the curtain, which smelt to him of filibusterism. Such prowess gained
+him great renown, and a renown so pure that it is to be wished all fame could be acquired in like manner&#8212;mothers would then
+weep less and earth would be more populous!
+
+</p>
+<p>In a suburb the inhabitants caught two unknown individuals burying arms under a house, whereupon a tumult arose and the people
+pursued the strangers in order to kill them and turn their bodies over to the authorities, but some one pacified the excited
+crowd by telling them that it would be sufficient to hand over the <i>corpora delictorum</i>, which proved to be some old shotguns that would surely have killed the first person who tried to fire them.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;All right,&#8221; exclaimed one braggart, &#8220;if they want us to rebel, let&#8217;s go ahead!&#8221; But he was cuffed and kicked into silence,
+the women pinching him as though he had been the owner of the shotguns.
+
+</p>
+<p>In Ermita the affair was more serious, even though there was less excitement, and that when there were shots fired. A certain
+cautious government employee, armed to the teeth, saw at nightfall an object near his house, and taking it for nothing less
+than a student, fired at it twice with a revolver. The object proved to be a policeman, and they buried him&#8212;<i>pax Christi! Mutis!</i>
+
+</p>
+<p>In Dulumbayan various shots also resounded, from which there resulted the death of a poor old deaf man, who had not heard
+the sentinel&#8217;s <i>qui&eacute;n vive</i>, and of a hog that had heard it and had not answered <i>Espa&ntilde;a</i>! The old man was buried with difficulty, since there was no money to pay for the obsequies, but the hog was eaten.
+<span class="pageno">
+[278]
+</span></p>
+<p>In Manila,<a id="d0e5526src" href="#d0e5526" class="noteref">1</a> in a confectionery near the University much frequented by the students, the arrests were thus commented upon.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;And have they arrested Tadeo?&#8221;<a id="d0e5531src" href="#d0e5531" class="noteref">2</a> asked the proprietess.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Ab&aacute;</i>!&#8221; answered a student who lived in Parian, &#8220;he&#8217;s already shot!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Shot! <i>Nak&uacute;</i>! He hasn&#8217;t paid what he owes me.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ay, don&#8217;t mention that or you&#8217;ll be taken for an accomplice. I&#8217;ve already burnt the book<a id="d0e5546src" href="#d0e5546" class="noteref">3</a> you lent me. There might be a search and it would be found. Be careful!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Did you say that Isagani is a prisoner?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Crazy fool, too, that Isagani,&#8221; replied the indignant student. &#8220;They didn&#8217;t try to catch him, but he went and surrendered.
+Let him bust himself&#8212;he&#8217;ll surely be shot.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The se&ntilde;ora shrugged her shoulders. &#8220;He doesn&#8217;t owe me anything. And what about Paulita?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;She won&#8217;t lack a husband. Sure, she&#8217;ll cry a little, and then marry a Spaniard.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The night was one of the gloomiest. In the houses the rosary was recited and pious women dedicated paternosters and requiems
+to each of the souls of their relatives and friends. By eight o&#8217;clock hardly a pedestrian could be seen&#8212;only from time to
+time was heard the galloping of a horse against whose sides a saber clanked noisily, then the whistles of the watchmen, and
+carriages that whirled along at full speed, as though pursued by mobs of filibusters.
+
+</p>
+<p>Yet terror did not reign everywhere. In the house of the silversmith, where Placido Penitente boarded, the events were commented
+upon and discussed with some freedom.
+<span class="pageno">
+[279]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t believe in the pasquinades,&#8221; declared a workman, lank and withered from operating the blowpipe. &#8220;To me it looks like
+Padre Salvi&#8217;s doings.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ahem, ahem!&#8221; coughed the silversmith, a very prudent man, who did not dare to stop the conversation from fear that he would
+be considered a coward. The good man had to content himself with coughing, winking to his helper, and gazing toward the street,
+as if to say, &#8220;They may be watching us!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;On account of the operetta,&#8221; added another workman.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Aha!&#8221; exclaimed one who had a foolish face, &#8220;I told you so!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ahem!&#8221; rejoined a clerk, in a tone of compassion, &#8220;the affair of the pasquinades is true, Chichoy, and I can give you the
+explanation.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Then he added mysteriously, &#8220;It&#8217;s a trick of the Chinaman Quiroga&#8217;s!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ahem, ahem!&#8221; again coughed the silversmith, shifting his quid of buyo from one cheek to the other.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Believe me, Chichoy, of Quiroga the Chinaman! I heard it in the office.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Nak&uacute;</i>, it&#8217;s certain then,&#8221; exclaimed the simpleton, believing it at once.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Quiroga,&#8221; explained the clerk, &#8220;has a hundred thousand pesos in Mexican silver out in the bay. How is he to get it in? Very
+easily. Fix up the pasquinades, availing himself of the question of the students, and, while every-body is excited, grease
+the officials&#8217; palms, and in the cases come!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Just it! Just it!&#8221; cried the credulous fool, striking the table with his fist. &#8220;Just it! That&#8217;s why Quiroga did it! That&#8217;s
+why&#8212;&#8221; But he had to relapse into silence as he really did not know what to say about Quiroga.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;And we must pay the damages?&#8221; asked the indignant Chichoy.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ahem, ahem, a-h-hem!&#8221; coughed the silversmith, hearing steps in the street.
+<span class="pageno">
+[280]
+</span></p>
+<p>The footsteps approached and all in the shop fell silent.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;St. Pascual Bailon is a great saint,&#8221; declared the silversmith hypocritically, in a loud voice, at the same time winking
+to the others. &#8220;St. Pascual Bailon&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>At that moment there appeared the face of Placido Penitente, who was accompanied by the pyrotechnician that we saw receiving
+orders from Simoun. The newcomers were surrounded and importuned for news.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I haven&#8217;t been able to talk with the prisoners,&#8221; explained Placido. &#8220;There are some thirty of them.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Be on your guard,&#8221; cautioned the pyrotechnician, exchanging a knowing look with Placido. &#8220;They say that to-night there&#8217;s
+going to be a massacre.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Aha! Thunder!&#8221; exclaimed Chichoy, looking about for a weapon. Seeing none, he caught up his blowpipe.
+
+</p>
+<p>The silversmith sat down, trembling in every limb. The credulous simpleton already saw himself beheaded and wept in anticipation
+over the fate of his family.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No,&#8221; contradicted the clerk, &#8220;there&#8217;s not going to be any massacre. The adviser of&#8221;&#8212;he made a mysterious gesture&#8212;&#8220;is fortunately
+sick.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Simoun!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ahem, ahem, a-h-hem!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Placido and the pyrotechnician exchanged another look.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;If he hadn&#8217;t got sick&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It would look like a revolution,&#8221; added the pyrotechnician negligently, as he lighted a cigarette in the lamp chimney. &#8220;And
+what should we do then?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Then we&#8217;d start a real one, now that they&#8217;re going to massacre us anyhow&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The violent fit of coughing that seized the silversmith prevented the rest of this speech from being heard, but Chichoy must
+have been saying terrible things, to judge from his murderous gestures with the blowpipe and the face of a Japanese tragedian
+that he put on.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Rather say that he&#8217;s playing off sick because he&#8217;s afraid to go out. As may be seen&#8212;&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[281]
+</span></p>
+<p>The silversmith was attacked by another fit of coughing so severe that he finally asked all to retire.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Nevertheless, get ready,&#8221; warned the pyrotechnician. &#8220;If they want to force us to kill or be killed&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Another fit of coughing on the part of the poor silversmith prevented further conversation, so the workmen and apprentices
+retired to their homes, carrying with them hammers and saws, and other implements, more or less cutting, more or less bruising,
+disposed to sell their lives dearly. Placido and the pyrotechnician went out again.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Prudence, prudence!&#8221; cautioned the silversmith in a tearful voice.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;ll take care of my widow and orphans!&#8221; begged the credulous simpleton in a still more tearful voice, for he already saw
+himself riddled with bullets and buried.
+
+</p>
+<p>That night the guards at the city gates were replaced with Peninsular artillerymen, and on the following morning as the sun
+rose, Ben-Zayb, who had ventured to take a morning stroll to examine the condition of the fortifications, found on the glacis
+near the Luneta the corpse of a native girl, half-naked and abandoned. Ben-Zayb was horrified, but after touching it with
+his cane and gazing toward the gates proceeded on his way, musing over a sentimental tale he might base upon the incident.
+
+</p>
+<p>However, no allusion to it appeared in the newspapers on the following days, engrossed as they were with the falls and slippings
+caused by banana-peels. In the dearth of news Ben-Zayb had to comment at length on a cyclone that had destroyed in America
+whole towns, causing the death of more than two thousand persons. Among other beautiful things he said:
+
+
+</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>&#8220;<i>The sentiment of charity</i>, MORE PREVALENT IN CATHOLIC COUNTRIES THAN IN OTHERS, and the thought of Him who, influenced by that same feeling, sacrificed
+himself for <i>humanity, moves (sic)</i> us to compassion over the misfortunes of our kind and to render thanks that <i>in this country</i>, so scourged by cyclones, there are not enacted scenes so desolating as that which the inhabitants of the United States mus
+have witnessed!&#8221;
+</p>
+</div><p>
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[282]
+</span></p>
+<p><i>Horatius</i> did not miss the opportunity, and, also without mentioning the dead, or the murdered native girl, or the assaults, answered
+him in his <i>Pirotecnia</i>:
+
+
+</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>&#8220;After such great charity and such great humanity, Fray Iba&ntilde;ez&#8212;I mean, Ben-Zayb&#8212;brings himself to pray for the Philippines.
+
+
+</p>
+<p>But he is understood.
+
+
+</p>
+<p>Because he is not Catholic, and the sentiment of charity is most prevalent,&#8221; etc.<a id="d0e5670src" href="#d0e5670" class="noteref">4</a></p>
+</div><p>
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[283]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e5526" href="#d0e5526src" class="noteref">1</a> The Walled City, the original Manila, is still known to the Spaniards and older natives exclusively as such, the other districts
+being referred to by their distinctive names.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e5531" href="#d0e5531src" class="noteref">2</a> Nearly all the dialogue in this chapter is in the mongrel Spanish-Tagalog &#8220;market language,&#8221; which cannot be reproduced in
+English.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e5546" href="#d0e5546src" class="noteref">3</a> Doubtless a reference to the author&#8217;s first work, <i>Noli Me Tangere</i>, which was tabooed by the authorities.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e5670" href="#d0e5670src" class="noteref">4</a> Such inanities as these are still a feature of Manila journalism.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e5674"></a></p>
+<h1>Exit Capitan Tiago</h1>
+<p></p>
+<div class="blockquote">Talis vita, finis ita</div><p>
+
+
+</p>
+<p>Capitan Tiago had a good end&#8212;that is, a quite exceptional funeral. True it is that the curate of the parish had ventured the
+observation to Padre Irene that Capitan Tiago had died without confession, but the good priest, smiling sardonically, had
+rubbed the tip of his nose and answered:
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Why say that to me? If we had to deny the obsequies to all who die without confession, we should forget the <i>De profundis</i>! These restrictions, as you well know, are enforced when the impenitent is also insolvent. But Capitan Tiago&#8212;out on you!
+You&#8217;ve buried infidel Chinamen, and with a requiem mass!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Capitan Tiago had named Padre Irene as his executor and willed his property in part to St. Clara, part to the Pope, to the
+Archbishop, the religious corporations, leaving twenty pesos for the matriculation of poor students. This last clause had
+been dictated at the suggestion of Padre Irene, in his capacity as protector of studious youths. Capitan Tiago had annulled
+a legacy of twenty-five pesos that he had left to Basilio, in view of the ungrateful conduct of the boy during the last few
+days, but Padre Irene had restored it and announced that he would take it upon his own purse and conscience.
+
+</p>
+<p>In the dead man&#8217;s house, where were assembled on the following day many old friends and acquaintances, considerable comment
+was indulged in over a miracle. It was reported that, at the very moment when he was dying, the <span class="pageno">
+[284]
+</span>soul of Capitan Tiago had appeared to the nuns surrounded by a brilliant light. God had saved him, thanks to the pious legacies,
+and to the numerous masses he had paid for. The story was commented upon, it was recounted vividly, it took on particulars,
+and was doubted by no one. The appearance of Capitan Tiago was minutely described&#8212;of course the frock coat, the cheek bulged
+out by the quid of buyo, without omitting the game-cock and the opium-pipe. The senior sacristan, who was present, gravely
+affirmed these facts with his head and reflected that, after death, he would appear with his cup of white <i>taj&uacute;</i>, for without that refreshing breakfast he could not comprehend happiness either on earth or in heaven.
+
+</p>
+<p>On this subject, because of their inability to discuss the events of the preceding day and because there were gamblers present,
+many strange speculations were developed. They made conjectures as to whether Capitan Tiago would invite St. Peter to a <i>soltada</i>, whether they would place bets, whether the game-cocks were immortal, whether invulnerable, and in this case who would be
+the referee, who would win, and so on: discussions quite to the taste of those who found sciences, theories, and systems,
+based on a text which they esteem infallible, revealed or dogmatic. Moreover, there were cited passages from novenas, books
+of miracles, sayings of the curates, descriptions of heaven, and other embroidery. Don Primitivo, the philosopher, was in
+his glory quoting opinions of the theologians.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Because no one can lose,&#8221; he stated with great authority. &#8220;To lose would cause hard feelings and in heaven there can&#8217;t be
+any hard feelings.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But some one has to win,&#8221; rejoined the gambler Aristorenas. &#8220;The fun lies in winning!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Well, both win, that&#8217;s easy!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>This idea of both winning could not be admitted by Aristorenas, for he had passed his life in the cockpit and had always seen
+one cock lose and the other win&#8212;at best, there was a tie. Vainly Don Primitivo argued in Latin. <span class="pageno">
+[285]
+</span>Aristorenas shook his head, and that too when Don Primitivo&#8217;s Latin was easy to understand, for he talked of <i>an gallus talisainus, acuto tari armatus, an gallus beati Petri bulikus sasabung&#771;us sit</i>,<a id="d0e5715src" href="#d0e5715" class="noteref">1</a> and so on, until at length he decided to resort to the argument which many use to convince and silence their opponents.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;re going to be damned, friend Martin, you&#8217;re falling into heresy! <i>Cave ne cadas!</i> I&#8217;m not going to play monte with you any more, and we&#8217;ll not set up a bank together. You deny the omnipotence of God, <i>peccatum mortale!</i> You deny the existence of the Holy Trinity&#8212; three are one and one is three! Take care! You indirectly deny that two natures,
+two understandings, and two wills can have only one memory! Be careful! <i>Quicumque non crederit anathema sit!</i>&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Martin Aristorenas shrank away pale and trembling, while Quiroga, who had listened with great attention to the argument, with
+marked deference offered the philosopher a magnificent cigar, at the same time asking in his caressing voice: &#8220;Surely, one
+can make a contract for a cockpit with Kilisto,<a id="d0e5753src" href="#d0e5753" class="noteref">2</a> ha? When I die, I&#8217;ll be the contractor, ha?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Among the others, they talked more of the deceased; at least they discussed what kind of clothing to put on him. Capitan Tinong
+proposed a Franciscan habit&#8212;and fortunately, he had one, old, threadbare, and patched, a precious object which, according
+to the friar who gave it to him as alms in exchange for thirty-six pesos, would preserve the corpse from the flames of hell
+and which reckoned in its <span class="pageno">
+[286]
+</span>support various pious anecdotes taken from the books distributed by the curates. Although he held this relic in great esteem,
+Capitan Tinong was disposed to part with it for the sake of his intimate friend, whom he had not been able to visit during
+his illness. But a tailor objected, with good reason, that since the nuns had seen Capitan Tiago ascending to heaven in a
+frock coat, in a frock coat he should be dressed here on earth, nor was there any necessity for preservatives and fire-proof
+garments. The deceased had attended balls and fiestas in a frock coat, and nothing else would be expected of him in the skies&#8212;and,
+wonderful to relate, the tailor accidentally happened to have one ready, which he would part with for thirty-two pesos, four
+cheaper than the Franciscan habit, because he didn&#8217;t want to make any profit on Capitan Tiago, who had been his customer in
+life and would now be his patron in heaven. But Padre Irene, trustee and executor, rejected both proposals and ordered that
+the Capitan be dressed in one of his old suits of clothes, remarking with holy unction that God paid no attention to clothing.
+
+</p>
+<p>The obsequies were, therefore, of the very first class. There were responsories in the house, and in the street three friars
+officiated, as though one were not sufficient for such a great soul. All the rites and ceremonies possible were performed,
+and it is reported that there were even <i>extras</i>, as in the benefits for actors. It was indeed a delight: loads of incense were burned, there were plenty of Latin chants,
+large quantities of holy water were expended, and Padre Irene, out of regard for his old friend, sang the <i>Dies Irae</i> in a falsetto voice from the choir, while the neighbors suffered real headaches from so much knell-ringing.
+
+</p>
+<p>Do&ntilde;a Patrocinio, the ancient rival of Capitan Tiago in religiosity, actually wanted to die on the next day, so that she might
+order even more sumptuous obsequies. The pious old lady could not bear the thought that he, whom she had long considered vanquished
+forever, should in dying come <span class="pageno">
+[287]
+</span>forward again with so much pomp. Yes, she desired to die, and it seemed that she could hear the exclamations of the people
+at the funeral: &#8220;This indeed is what you call a funeral! This indeed is to know how to die, Do&ntilde;a Patrocinio!&#8221;
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[288]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e5715" href="#d0e5715src" class="noteref">1</a> &#8220;Whether there would be a <i>talisain</i> cock, armed with a sharp gaff, whether the blessed Peter&#8217;s fighting-cock would be a <i>bulik</i>&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p class="notetext"><i>Talisain</i> and <i>bulik</i> are distinguishing terms in the vernacular for fighting-cocks, <i>tari</i> and <i>sasabung&#771;in</i> the Tagalog terms for &#8220;gaff&#8221; and &#8220;game-cock,&#8221; respectively.
+
+</p>
+<p class="notetext">The Tagalog terminology of the cockpit and monkish Latin certainly make a fearful and wonderful mixture&#8212;nor did the author
+have to resort to his imagination to get samples of it.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e5753" href="#d0e5753src" class="noteref">2</a> This is Quiroga&#8217;s pronunciation of <i>Christo</i>.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e5776"></a></p>
+<h1>Juli</h1>
+<p>The death of Capitan Tiago and Basilio&#8217;s imprisonment were soon reported in the province, and to the honor of the simple inhabitants
+of San Diego, let it be recorded that the latter was the incident more regretted and almost the only one discussed. As was
+to be expected, the report took on different forms, sad and startling details were given, what could not be understood was
+explained, the gaps being filled by conjectures, which soon passed for accomplished facts, and the phantoms thus created terrified
+their own creators.
+
+</p>
+<p>In the town of Tiani it was reported that at least, at the very least, the young man was going to be deported and would very
+probably be murdered on the journey. The timorous and pessimistic were not satisfied with this but even talked about executions
+and courts-martial&#8212;January was a fatal month; in January the Cavite affair had occurred, and <i>they</i><a id="d0e5785src" href="#d0e5785" class="noteref">1</a> even though curates, had been garroted, so a poor Basilio without protectors or friends&#8212;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I told him so!&#8221; sighed the Justice of the Peace, as if he had at some time given advice to Basilio. &#8220;I told him so.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It was to be expected,&#8221; commented Sister Penchang. &#8220;He would go into the church and when he saw that the holy water was somewhat
+dirty he wouldn&#8217;t cross himself with it. He talked about germs and disease, <i>ab&aacute;</i>, it&#8217;s the chastisement of God! He deserved it, and he got it! As <span class="pageno">
+[289]
+</span>though the holy water could transmit diseases! Quite the contrary, <i>ab&aacute;!</i>&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>She then related how she had cured herself of indigestion by moistening her stomach with holy water, at the same time reciting
+the <i>Sanctus Deus</i>, and she recommended the remedy to those present when they should suffer from dysentery, or an epidemic occurred, only that
+then they must pray in Spanish:
+
+</p>
+<p class="beforeline"></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Santo Di&oacute;s,
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Santo fuerte,
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Santo inmortal,
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">&iexcl;Libranos, Se&ntilde;or, de la peste
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline">Y de todo mal!<a id="d0e5816src" href="#d0e5816" class="noteref">2</a></span></p>
+<p class="afterline"></p>
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s an infallible remedy, but you must apply the holy water to the part affected,&#8221; she concluded.
+
+</p>
+<p>But there were many persons who did not believe in these things, nor did they attribute Basilio&#8217;s imprisonment to the chastisement
+of God. Nor did they take any stock in insurrections and pasquinades, knowing the prudent and ultra-pacific character of the
+boy, but preferred to ascribe it to revenge on the part of the friars, because of his having rescued from servitude Juli,
+the daughter of a tulisan who was the mortal enemy of a certain powerful corporation. As they had quite a poor idea of the
+morality of that same corporation and could recall cases of petty revenge, their conjecture was believed to have more probability
+and justification.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What a good thing I did when I drove her from my house!&#8221; said Sister Penchang. &#8220;I don&#8217;t want to have any trouble with the
+friars, so I urged her to find the money.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The truth was, however, that she regretted Juli&#8217;s liberty, for Juli prayed and fasted for her, and if she had stayed a longer
+time, would also have done penance. Why, if the curates pray for us and Christ died for our sins, couldn&#8217;t Juli do the same
+for Sister Penchang?
+<span class="pageno">
+[290]
+</span></p>
+<p>When the news reached the hut where the poor Juli and her grandfather lived, the girl had to have it repeated to her. She
+stared at Sister Bali, who was telling it, as though without comprehension, without ability to collect her thoughts. Her ears
+buzzed, she felt a sinking at the heart and had a vague presentiment that this event would have a disastrous influence on
+her own future. Yet she tried to seize upon a ray of hope, she smiled, thinking that Sister Bali was joking with her, a rather
+strong joke, to be sure, but she forgave her beforehand if she would acknowledge that it was such. But Sister Bali made a
+cross with one of her thumbs and a forefinger, and kissed it, to prove that she was telling the truth. Then the smile faded
+forever from the girl&#8217;s lips, she turned pale, frightfully pale, she felt her strength leave her and for the first time in
+her life she lost consciousness, falling into a swoon.
+
+</p>
+<p>When by dint of blows, pinches, dashes of water, crosses, and the application of sacred palms, the girl recovered and remembered
+the situation, silent tears sprang from her eyes, drop by drop, without sobs, without laments, without complaints! She thought
+about Basilio, who had had no other protector than Capitan Tiago, and who now, with the Capitan dead, was left completely
+unprotected and in prison. In the Philippines it is a well-known fact that patrons are needed for everything, from the time
+one is christened until one dies, in order to get justice, to secure a passport, or to develop an industry. As it was said
+that his imprisonment was due to revenge on account of herself and her father, the girl&#8217;s sorrow turned to desperation. Now
+it was her duty to liberate him, as he had done in rescuing her from servitude, and the inner voice which suggested the idea
+offered to her imagination a horrible means.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Padre Camorra, the curate,&#8221; whispered the voice. Juli gnawed at her lips and became lost in gloomy meditation.
+
+</p>
+<p>As a result of her father&#8217;s crime, her grandfather had been arrested in the hope that by such means the son could be made
+to appear. The only one who could get him <span class="pageno">
+[291]
+</span>his liberty was Padre Camorra, and Padre Camorra had shown himself to be poorly satisfied with her words of gratitude, having
+with his usual frankness asked for some sacrifices&#8212;since which time Juli had tried to avoid meeting him. But the curate made
+her kiss his hand, he twitched her nose and patted her cheeks, he joked with her, winking and laughing, and laughing he pinched
+her. Juli was also the cause of the beating the good curate had administered to some young men who were going about the village
+serenading the girls. Malicious ones, seeing her pass sad and dejected, would remark so that she might hear: &#8220;If she only
+wished it, Cabesang Tales would be pardoned.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Juli reached her home, gloomy and with wandering looks. She had changed greatly, having lost her merriment, and no one ever
+saw her smile again. She scarcely spoke and seemed to be afraid to look at her own face. One day she was seen in the town
+with a big spot of soot on her forehead, she who used to go so trim and neat. Once she asked Sister Bali if the people who
+committed suicide went to hell.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Surely!&#8221; replied that woman, and proceeded to describe the place as though she had been there.
+
+</p>
+<p>Upon Basilio&#8217;s imprisonment, the simple and grateful relatives had planned to make all kinds of sacrifices to save the young
+man, but as they could collect among themselves no more than thirty pesos, Sister Bali, as usual, thought of a better plan.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What we must do is to get some advice from the town clerk,&#8221; she said. To these poor people, the town clerk was what the Delphic
+oracle was to the ancient Greeks.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;By giving him a real and a cigar,&#8221; she continued, &#8220;he&#8217;ll tell you all the laws so that your head bursts listening to him.
+If you have a peso, he&#8217;ll save you, even though you may be at the foot of the scaffold. When my friend Simon was put in jail
+and flogged for not being able to give evidence about a robbery perpetrated near his house, <i>ab&aacute;</i>, for two reales and a half and a string of garlics, the town clerk got him out. And I saw Simon myself when <span class="pageno">
+[292]
+</span>he could scarcely walk and he had to stay in bed at least a month. Ay, his flesh rotted as a result and he died!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Sister Bali&#8217;s advice was accepted and she herself volunteered to interview the town clerk. Juli gave her four reales and added
+some strips of jerked venison her grand-father had got, for Tandang Selo had again devoted himself to hunting.
+
+</p>
+<p>But the town clerk could do nothing&#8212;the prisoner was in Manila, and his power did not extend that far. &#8220;If at least he were
+at the capital, then&#8212;&#8221; he ventured, to make a show of his authority, which he knew very well did not extend beyond the boundaries
+of Tiani, but he had to maintain his prestige and keep the jerked venison. &#8220;But I can give you a good piece of advice, and
+it is that you go with Juli to see the Justice of the Peace. But it&#8217;s very necessary that Juli go.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The Justice of the Peace was a very rough fellow, but if he should see Juli he might conduct himself less rudely&#8212;this is wherein
+lay the wisdom of the advice.
+
+</p>
+<p>With great gravity the honorable Justice listened to Sister Bali, who did the talking, but not without staring from time to
+time at the girl, who hung her head with shame. People would say that she was greatly interested in Basilio, people who did
+not remember her debt of gratitude, nor that his imprisonment, according to report, was on her account.
+
+</p>
+<p>After belching three or four times, for his Honor had that ugly habit, he said that the only person who could save Basilio
+was Padre Camorra, <i>in case he should care to do so</i>. Here he stared meaningly at the girl and advised her to deal with the curate in person.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You know what influence he has,&#8212;he got your grand-father out of jail. A report from him is enough to deport a new-born babe
+or save from death a man with the noose about his neck.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Juli said nothing, but Sister Bali took this advice as though she had read it in a novena, and was ready to accompany the
+girl to the convento. It so happened that <span class="pageno">
+[293]
+</span>she was just going there to get as alms a scapulary in exchange for four full reales.
+
+</p>
+<p>But Juli shook her head and was unwilling to go to the convento. Sister Bali thought she could guess the reason&#8212;Padre Camorra
+was reputed to be very fond of the women and was very frolicsome&#8212;so she tried to reassure her. &#8220;You&#8217;ve nothing to fear if
+I go with you. Haven&#8217;t you read in the booklet <i>Tandang Basio</i>, given you by the curate, that the girls should go to the convento, even without the knowledge of their elders, to relate
+what is going on at home? <i>Ab&aacute;</i>, that book is printed with the permission of the Archbishop!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Juli became impatient and wished to cut short such talk, so she begged the pious woman to go if she wished, but his Honor
+observed with a belch that the supplications of a youthful face were more moving than those of an old one, the sky poured
+its dew over the fresh flowers in greater abundance than over the withered ones. The metaphor was fiendishly beautiful.
+
+</p>
+<p>Juli did not reply and the two left the house. In the street the girl firmly refused to go to the convento and they returned
+to their village. Sister Bali, who felt offended at this lack of confidence in herself, on the way home relieved her feelings
+by administering a long preachment to the girl.
+
+</p>
+<p>The truth was that the girl could not take that step without damning herself in her own eyes, besides being cursed of men
+and cursed of God! It had been intimated to her several times, whether with reason or not, that if she would make that sacrifice
+her father would be pardoned, and yet she had refused, in spite of the cries of her conscience reminding her of her filial
+duty. Now must she make it for Basilio, her sweetheart? That would be to fall to the sound of mockery and laughter from all
+creation. Basilio himself would despise her! No, never! She would first hang herself or leap from some precipice. At any rate,
+she was already damned for being a wicked daughter.
+
+</p>
+<p>The poor girl had besides to endure all the reproaches <span class="pageno">
+[294]
+</span>of her relatives, who, knowing nothing of what had passed between her and Padre Camovra, laughed at her fears. Would Padre
+Camorra fix his attention upon a country girl when there were so many others in the town? Hero the good women cited names
+of unmarried girls, rich and beautiful, who had been more or less unfortunate. Meanwhile, if they should shoot Basilio?
+
+</p>
+<p>Juli covered her ears and stared wildly about, as if seeking a voice that might plead for her, but she saw only her grandfather,
+who was dumb and had his gaze fixed on his hunting-spear.
+
+</p>
+<p>That night she scarcely slept at all. Dreams and nightmares, some funereal, some bloody, danced before her sight and woke
+her often, bathed in cold perspiration. She fancied that she heard shots, she imagined that she saw her father, that father
+who had done so much for her, fighting in the forests, hunted like a wild beast because she had refused to save him. The figure
+of her father was transformed and she recognized Basilio, dying, with looks of reproach at her. The wretched girl arose, prayed,
+wept, called upon her mother, upon death, and there was even a moment when, overcome with terror, if it had not been night-time,
+she would have run straight to the convento, let happen what would.
+
+</p>
+<p>With the coming of day the sad presentiments and the terrors of darkness were partly dissipated. The light inspired hopes
+in her. But the news of the afternoon was terrible, for there was talk of persons shot, so the next night was for the girl
+frightful. In her desperation she decided to give herself up as soon as day dawned and then kill herself afterwards&#8212;anything,
+rather than enditre such tortures! But the dawn brought new hope and she would not go to church or even leave the house. She
+was afraid she would yield.
+
+</p>
+<p>So passed several days in praying and cursing, in calling upon God and wishing for death. The day gave her a slight respite
+and she trusted in some miracle. The reports that <span class="pageno">
+[295]
+</span>came from Manila, although they reached there magnified, said that of the prisoners some had secured their liberty, thanks
+to patrons and influence. Some one had to be sacrificed&#8212;who would it be? Juli shuddered and returned home biting her finger-nails.
+Then came the night with its terrors, which took on double proportions and seemed to be converted into realities. Juli feared
+to fall asleep, for her slumbers were a continuous nightmare. Looks of reproach would flash across her eyelids just as soon
+as they were closed, complaints and laments pierced her ears. She saw her father wandering about hungry, without rest or repose;
+she saw Basilio dying in the road, pierced by two bullets, just as she had seen the corpse of that neighbor who had been killed
+while in the charge of the Civil Guard. She saw the bonds that cut into the flesh, she saw the blood pouring from the mouth,
+she heard Basilio calling to her, &#8220;Save me! Save me! You alone can save me!&#8221; Then a burst of laughter would resound and she
+would turn her eyes to see her father gazing at her with eyes full of reproach. Juli would wake up, sit up on her <i>petate</i>, and draw her hands across her forehead to arrange her hair&#8212;cold sweat, like the sweat of death, moistened it!
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Mother, mother!&#8221; she sobbed.
+
+</p>
+<p>Meanwhile, they who were so carelessly disposing of people&#8217;s fates, he who commanded the legal murders, he who violated justice
+and made use of the law to maintain himself by force, slept in peace.
+
+</p>
+<p>At last a traveler arrived from Manila and reported that all the prisoners had been set free, all except Basilio, who had
+no protector. It was reported in Manila, added the traveler, that the young man would be deported to the Carolines, having
+been forced to sign a petition beforehand, in which he declared that he asked it voluntarily.<a id="d0e5911src" href="#d0e5911" class="noteref">3</a> The <span class="pageno">
+[296]
+</span>traveler had seen the very steamer that was going to take him away.
+
+</p>
+<p>This report put an end to all the girl&#8217;s hesitation. Besides, her mind was already quite weak from so many nights of watching
+and horrible dreams. Pale and with unsteady eyes, she sought out Sister Bali and, in a voice that was cause for alarm, told
+her that she was ready, asking her to accompany her. Sister Bali thereupon rejoiced and tried to soothe her, but Juli paid
+no attention to her, apparently intent only upon hurrying to the convento. She had decked herself out in her finest clothes,
+and even pretended to be quite gay, talking a great deal, although in a rather incoherent way.
+
+</p>
+<p>So they set out. Juli went ahead, becoming impatient that her companion lagged behind. But as they neared the town, her nervous
+energy began gradually to abate, she fell silent and wavered in her resolution, lessened her pace and soon dropped behind,
+so that Sister Bali had to encourage her.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;We&#8217;ll get there late,&#8221; she remonstrated.
+
+</p>
+<p>Juli now followed, pale, with downcast eyes, which she was afraid to raise. She felt that the whole world was staring at her
+and pointing its finger at her. A vile name whistled in her ears, but still she disregarded it and continued on her way. Nevertheless,
+when they came in sight of the convento, she stopped and began to tremble.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Let&#8217;s go home, let&#8217;s go home,&#8221; she begged, holding her companion back.
+
+</p>
+<p>Sister Bali had to take her by the arm and half drag her along, reassuring her and telling her about the books of the friars.
+She would not desert her, so there was nothing to fear. Padre Camorra had other things in mind&#8212;Juli was only a poor country
+girl.
+
+</p>
+<p>But upon arriving at the door of the convento, Juli firmly refused to go in, catching hold of the wall.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No, no,&#8221; she pleaded in terror. &#8220;No, no, no! Have pity!&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[297]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;But what a fool&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Sister Bali pushed her gently along, Juli, pallid and with wild features, offering resistance. The expression of her face
+said that she saw death before her.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;All right, let&#8217;s go back, if you don&#8217;t want to!&#8221; at length the good woman exclaimed in irritation, as she did not believe
+there was any real danger. Padre Camorra, in spite of all his reputation, would dare do nothing before her.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Let them carry poor Basilio into exile, let them shoot him on the way, saying that he tried to escape,&#8221; she added. &#8220;When
+he&#8217;s dead, then remorse will come. But as for myself, I owe him no favors, so he can&#8217;t reproach me!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>That was the decisive stroke. In the face of that reproach, with wrath and desperation mingled, like one who rushes to suicide,
+Juli closed her eyes in order not to see the abyss into which she was hurling herself and resolutely entered the convento.
+A sigh that sounded like the rattle of death escaped from her lips. Sister Bali followed, telling her how to act.
+
+</p>
+<p>That night comments were mysteriously whispered about certain events which had occurred that afternoon. A girl had leaped
+from a window of the convento, falling upon some stones and killing herself. Almost at the same time another woman had rushed
+out of the convento to run through the streets shouting and screaming like a lunatic. The prudent townsfolk dared not utter
+any names and many mothers pinched their daughters for letting slip expressions that might compromise them.
+
+</p>
+<p>Later, very much later, at twilight, an old man came from a village and stood calling at the door of the convento, which was
+closed and guarded by sacristans. The old man beat the door with his fists and with his head, while he littered cries stifled
+and inarticulate, like those of a dumb person, until he was at length driven away by blows and shoves. Then he made his way
+to the gobernadorcillo&#8217;s house, but was told that the gobernadorcillo was not there, <span class="pageno">
+[298]
+</span>he was at the convento; he went to the Justice of the Peace, but neither was the Justice of the Peace at home&#8212;he had been
+summoned to the convento; he went to the teniente-mayor, but he too was at the convento; he directed his steps to the barracks,
+but the lieutenant of the Civil Guard was at the convento. The old man then returned to his village, weeping like a child.
+His wails were heard in the middle of the night, causing men to bite their lips and women to clasp their hands, while the
+dogs slunk fearfully back into the houses with their tails between their legs.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ah, God, God!&#8221; said a poor woman, lean from fasting, &#8220;in Thy presence there is no rich, no poor, no white, no black&#8212;Thou
+wilt grant us justice!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes,&#8221; rejoined her husband, &#8220;just so that God they preach is not a pure invention, a fraud! They themselves are the first
+not to believe in Him.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>At eight o&#8217;clock in the evening it was rumored that more than seven friars, proceeding from neighboring towns, were assembled
+in the convento to hold a conference. On the following day, Tandang Selo disappeared forever from the village, carrying with
+him his hunting-spear.
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[299]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e5785" href="#d0e5785src" class="noteref">1</a> The native priests Burgos, Gomez, and Zamora, charged with complicity in the uprising of 1872, and executed.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e5816" href="#d0e5816src" class="noteref">2</a> This versicle, found in the booklets of prayer, is common on the scapularies, which, during the late insurrection, were easily
+converted into the <i>anting-anting</i>, or amulets, worn by the fanatics.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e5911" href="#d0e5911src" class="noteref">3</a> This practise&#8212;secretly compelling suspects to sign a request to be transferred to some other island&#8212;was by no means a figment
+of the author&#8217;s imagination, but was extensively practised to anticipate any legal difficulties that might arise.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e5956"></a></p>
+<h1>The High Official</h1>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>L&#8217;Espagne et sa, vertu, l&#8217;Espagne et sa grandeur
+<br>Tout s&#8217;en va!&#8212;Victor Hugo
+</p>
+</div>
+<p>The newspapers of Manila were so engrossed in accounts of a notorious murder committed in Europe, in panegyrics and puffs
+for various preachers in the city, in the constantly increasing success of the French operetta, that they could scarcely devote
+space to the crimes perpetrated in the provinces by a band of tulisanes headed by a fierce and terrible leader who was called
+<i>Matanglawin.</i><a id="d0e5968src" href="#d0e5968" class="noteref">1</a> Only when the object of the attack was a convento or a Spaniard there then appeared long articles giving frightful details
+and asking for martial law, energetic measures, and so on. So it was that they could take no notice of what had occurred in
+the town of Tiani, nor was there the slightest hint or allusion to it. In private circles something was whispered, but so
+confused, so vague, and so little consistent, that not even the name of the victim was known, while those who showed the greatest
+interest forgot it quickly, trusting that the affair had been settled in some way with the wronged family. The only one who
+knew anything certain was Padre Camorra, who had to leave the town, to be transferred to another or to remain for some time
+in the convento in Manila.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Poor Padre Camorra!&#8221; exclaimed Ben-Zayb in a fit of generosity. &#8220;He was so jolly and had such a good heart!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>It was true that the students had recovered their liberty, <span class="pageno">
+[300]
+</span>thanks to the exertions of their relatives, who did not hesitate at expense, gifts, or any sacrifice whatsoever. The first
+to see himself free, as was to be expected, was Makaraig, and the last Isagani, because Padre Florentine did not reach Manila
+until a week after the events. So many acts of clemency secured for the General the title of clement and merciful, which Ben-Zayb
+hastened to add to his long list of adjectives.
+
+</p>
+<p>The only one who did not obtain his liberty was Basilio, since he was also accused of having in his possession prohibited
+books. We don&#8217;t know whether this referred to his text-book on legal medicine or to the pamphlets that were found, dealing
+with the Philippines, or both together&#8212;the fact is that it was said that prohibited literature was being secretly sold, and
+upon the unfortunate boy fell all the weight of the rod of justice.
+
+</p>
+<p>It was reported that his Excellency had been thus advised: &#8220;It&#8217;s necessary that there be some one, so that the prestige of
+authority may be sustained and that it may not be said that we made a great fuss over nothing. Authority before everything.
+It&#8217;s necessary that some one be made an example of. Let there be just one, one who, according to Padre Irene, was the servant
+of Capitan Tiago&#8212;there&#8217;ll be no one to enter a complaint&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Servant and student?&#8221; asked his Excellency. &#8220;That fellow, then! Let it be he!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Your Excellency will pardon me,&#8221; observed the high official, who happened to be present, &#8220;but I&#8217;ve been told that this boy
+is a medical student and his teachers speak well of him. If he remains a prisoner he&#8217;ll lose a year, and as this year he finishes&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The high official&#8217;s interference in behalf of Basilio, instead of helping, harmed him. For some time there had been between
+this official and his Excellency strained relations and bad feelings, augmented by frequent clashes.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes? So much the greater reason that he should be kept prisoner; a year longer in his studies, instead of injuring <span class="pageno">
+[301]
+</span>him, will do good, not only to himself but to all who afterwards fall into his hands. One doesn&#8217;t become a bad physician by
+extensive practise. So much the more reason that he should remain! Soon the filibustering reformers will say that we are not
+looking out for the country!&#8221; concluded his Excellency with a sarcastic laugh.
+
+</p>
+<p>The high official realized that he had made a false move and took Basilio&#8217;s case to heart. &#8220;But it seems to me that this young
+man is the most innocent of all,&#8221; he rejoined rather timidly.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Books have been seized in his possession,&#8221; observed the secretary.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes, works on medicine and pamphlets written by Peninsulars, with the leaves uncut, and besides, what does that signify?
+Moreover, this young man was not present at the banquet in the <i>pansiter&iacute;a</i>, he hasn&#8217;t mixed up in anything. As I&#8217;ve said, he&#8217;s the most innocent&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;So much the better!&#8221; exclaimed his Excellency jocosely. &#8220;In that way the punishment will prove more salutary and exemplary,
+since it inspires greater terror. To govern is to act in this way, my dear sir, as it is often expedient to sacrifice the
+welfare of one to the welfare of many. But I&#8217;m doing more&#8212;from the welfare of one will result the welfare of all, the principle
+of endangered authority is preserved, prestige is respected and maintained. By this act of mine I&#8217;m correcting my own and
+other people&#8217;s faults.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The high official restrained himself with an effort and, disregarding the allusion, decided to take another tack. &#8220;But doesn&#8217;t
+your Excellency fear the&#8212;responsibility?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What have I to fear?&#8221; rejoined the General impatiently. &#8220;Haven&#8217;t I discretionary powers? Can&#8217;t I do what I please for the
+better government of these islands? What have I to fear? Can some menial perhaps arraign me before the tribunals and exact
+from me responsibility? Even though he had the means, he would have to consult the Ministry first, and the Minister&#8212;&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[302]
+</span></p>
+<p>He waved his hand and burst out into laughter.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The Minister who appointed me, the devil knows where he is, and he will feel honored in being able to welcome me when I return.
+The present one, I don&#8217;t even think of him, and the devil take him too! The one that relieves him will find himself in so
+many difficulties with his new duties that he won&#8217;t be able to fool with trifles. I, my dear sir, have nothing over me but
+my conscience, I act according to my conscience, and my conscience is satisfied, so I don&#8217;t care a straw for the opinions
+of this one and that. My conscience, my dear sir, my conscience!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes, General, but the country&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Tut, tut, tut, tut! The country&#8212;what have I to do Avith the country? Have I perhaps contracted any obligations to it? Do
+I owe my office to it? Was it the country that elected me?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>A brief pause ensued, during which the high official stood with bowed head. Then, as if reaching a decision, he raised it
+to stare fixedly at the General. Pale and trembling, he said with repressed energy: &#8220;That doesn&#8217;t matter, General, that doesn&#8217;t
+matter at all! Your Excellency has not been chosen by the Filipino people, but by Spain, all the more reason why you should
+treat the Filipinos well so that they may not be able to reproach Spain. The greater reason, General, the greater reason!
+Your Excellency, by coming here, has contracted the obligation to govern justly, to seek the welfare&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Am I not doing it?&#8221; interrupted his Excellency in exasperation, taking a step forward. &#8220;Haven&#8217;t I told you that I am getting
+from the good of one the good of all? Are you now going to give me lessons? If you don&#8217;t understand my actions, how am I to
+blame? Do I compel you to share my responsibility?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Certainly not,&#8221; replied the high official, drawing himself up proudly. &#8220;Your Excellency does not compel me, your Excellency
+cannot compel me, <i>me,</i> to share <i>your</i> responsibility. I understand mine in quite another way, <span class="pageno">
+[303]
+</span>and because I have it, I&#8217;m going to speak&#8212;I&#8217;ve held my peace a long time. Oh, your Excellency needn&#8217;t make those gestures,
+because the fact that I&#8217;ve come here in this or that capacity doesn&#8217;t mean that I have given up my rights, that I have been
+reduced to the part of a slave, without voice or dignity.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t want Spain to lose this beautiful empire, these eight millions of patient and submissive subjects, who live on hopes
+and delusions, but neither do I wish to soil my hands in their barbarous exploitation. I don&#8217;t wish it ever to be said that,
+the slave-trade abolished, Spain has continued to cloak it with her banner and perfect it under a wealth of specious institutions.
+No, to be great Spain does not have to be a tyrant, Spain is sufficient unto herself, Spain was greater when she had only
+her own territory, wrested from the clutches of the Moor. I too am a Spaniard, but before being a Spaniard I am a man, and
+before Spain and above Spain is her honor, the lofty principles of morality, the eternal principles of immutable justice!
+Ah, you are surprised that I think thus, because you have no idea of the grandeur of the Spanish name, no, you haven&#8217;t any
+idea of it, you identify it with persons and interests. To you the Spaniard may be a pirate, he may be a murderer, a hypocrite,
+a cheat, anything, just so he keep what he has&#8212;but to me the Spaniard should lose everything, empire, power, wealth, everything,
+before his honor! Ah, my dear sir, we protest when we read that might is placed before right, yet we applaud when in practise
+we see might play the hypocrite in not only perverting right but even in using it as a tool in order to gain control. For
+the very reason that I love Spain, I&#8217;m speaking now, and I defy your frown!
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t wish that the coming ages accuse Spain of being the stepmother of the nations, the vampire of races, the tyrant of
+small islands, since it would be a horrible mockery of the noble principles of our ancient kings. How are we carrying out
+their sacred legacy? They promised to these <span class="pageno">
+[304]
+</span>islands protection and justice, and we are playing with the lives and liberties of the inhabitants; they promised civilization,
+and^we are curtailing it, fearful that they may aspire to a nobler existence; they promised them light, and we cover their
+eyes that they may not witness our orgies; they promised to teach them virtue and we are encouraging their vice. Instead of
+peace, wealth, and justice, confusion reigns, commerce languishes, and skepticism is fostered among the masses.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Let us put ourselves in the place of the Filipinos and ask ourselves what we would do in their place. Ah, in your silence
+I read their right to rebel, and if matters do not mend they will rebel some day, and justice will be on their side, with
+them will go the sympathy of all honest men, of every patriot in the world! When a people is denied light, home, liberty,
+and justice&#8212;things that are essential to life, and therefore man&#8217;s patrimony&#8212;that people has the right to treat him who so
+despoils it as we would the robber who intercepts us on the highway. There are no distinctions, there are no exceptions, nothing
+but a fact, a right, an aggression, and every honest man who does not place himself on the side of the wronged makes himself
+an accomplice and stains his conscience.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;True, I am not a soldier, and the years are cooling the little fire in my blood, but just as I would risk being torn to pieces
+to defend the integrity of Spain against any foreign invader or against an unjustified disloyalty in her provinces, so I also
+assure you that I would place myself beside the oppressed Filipinos, because I would prefer to fall in the cause of the outraged
+rights of humanity to triumphing with the selfish interests of a nation, even when that nation be called as it is called&#8212;Spain!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Do you know when the mail-boat leaves?&#8221; inquired his Excellency coldly, when the high official had finished speaking.
+
+</p>
+<p>The latter stared at him fixedly, then dropped his head and silently left the palace.
+<span class="pageno">
+[305]
+</span></p>
+<p>Outside he found his carriage awaiting him. &#8220;Some day when you declare yourselves independent,&#8221; he said somewhat abstractedly
+to the native lackey who opened the carriage-door for him, &#8220;remember that there were not lacking in Spain hearts that beat
+for you and struggled for your rights!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Where, sir?&#8221; asked the lackey, who had understood nothing of this and was inquiring whither they should go.
+
+</p>
+<p>Two hours later the high official handed in his resignation and announced his intention of returning to Spain by the next
+mail-steamer.
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[306]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e5968" href="#d0e5968src" class="noteref">1</a> &#8220;Hawk-Eye.&#8221;&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e6051"></a></p>
+<h1>Effect of the Pasquinades</h1>
+<p>As a result of the events narrated, many mothers ordered their sons immediately to leave off their studies and devote themselves
+to idleness or to agriculture. When the examinations came, suspensions were plentiful, and he was a rare exception who finished
+the course, if he had belonged to the famous association, to which no one paid any more attention. Pecson, Tadeo, and Juanito
+Pelaez were all alike suspended&#8212;the first receiving his dismissal with his foolish grin and declaring his intention of becoming
+an officer in some court, while Tadeo, with his eternal holiday realized at last, paid for an illumination and made a bonfire
+of his books. Nor did the others get off much better, and at length they too had to abandon their studies, to the great satisfaction
+of their mothers, who always fancy their sons hanged if they should come to understand what the books teach. Juanito Pelaez
+alone took the blow ill, since it forced him to leave school for his father&#8217;s store, with whom he was thenceforward to be
+associated in the business: the rascal found the store much less entertaining, but after some time his friends again noticed
+his hump appear, a symptom that his good humor was returning. The rich Makaraig, in view of the catastrophe, took good care
+not to expose himself, and having secured a passport by means of money set out in haste for Europe. It was said that his Excellency,
+the Captain-General, in his desire to do good by good means, and careful of the interests of the Filipinos, hindered the departure
+of every one who could not first prove substantially that he had the money to spend and could live in idleness in European
+cities. Among our <span class="pageno">
+[307]
+</span>acquaintances those who got off best were Isagani and Sandoval: the former passed in the subject he studied under Padre Fernandez
+and was suspended in the others, while the latter was able to confuse the examining-board with his oratory.
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio was the only one who did not pass in any subject, who was not suspended, and who did not go to Europe, for he remained
+in Bilibid prison, subjected every three days to examinations, almost always the same in principle, without other variation
+than a change of inquisitors, since it seemed that in the presence of such great guilt all gave up or fell away in horror.
+And while the documents moldered or were shifted about, while the stamped papers increased like the plasters of an ignorant
+physician on the body of a hypochondriac, Basilio became informed of all the details of what had happened in Tiani, of the
+death of Juli and the disappearance of Tandang Selo. Sinong, the abused cochero, who had driven him to San Diego, happened
+to be in Manila at that time and called to give him all the news.
+
+</p>
+<p>Meanwhile, Simoun had recovered his health, or so at least the newspapers said. Ben-Zayb rendered thanks to &#8220;the Omnipotent
+who watches over such a precious life,&#8221; and manifested the hope that the Highest would some day reveal the malefactor, whose
+crime remained unpunished, thanks to the charity of the victim, who was too closely following the words of the Great Martyr:
+<i>Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.</i> These and other things Ben-Zayb said in print, while by mouth he was inquiring whether there was any truth in the rumor that
+the opulent jeweler was going to give a grand fiesta, a banquet such as had never before been seen, in part to celebrate his
+recovery and in part as a farewell to the country in which he had increased his fortune. It was whispered as certain that
+Simoun, who would have to leave with the Captain-General, whose command expired in May, was making every effort to secure
+from Madrid an extension, <span class="pageno">
+[308]
+</span>and that he was advising his Excellency to start a campaign in order to have an excuse for remaining, but it was further reported
+that for the first time his Excellency had disregarded the advice of his favorite, making it a point of honor not to retain
+for a single additional day the power that had been conferred upon him, a rumor which encouraged belief that the fiesta announced
+would take place; very soon. For the rest, Simoun remained unfathomable, since he had become very uncommunicative, showed
+himself seldom, and smiled mysteriously when the rumored fiesta was mentioned.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Come, Se&ntilde;or Sindbad,&#8221; Ben-Zayb had once rallied him, &#8220;dazzle us with something Yankee! You owe something to this country.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Doubtless!&#8221; was Simoun&#8217;s response, with a dry smile.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You&#8217;ll throw the house wide open, eh?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Maybe, but as I have no house&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You ought to have secured Capitan Tiago&#8217;s, which Se&ntilde;or Pelaez got for nothing.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun became silent, and from that time on he was often seen in the store of Don Timoteo Pelaez, with whom it was said he
+had entered into partnership. Some weeks afterward, in the month of April, it was rumored that Juanito Pelaez, Don Timoteo&#8217;s
+son, was going to marry Paulita Gomez, the girl coveted by Spaniards and foreigners.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Some men are lucky!&#8221; exclaimed other envious merchants. &#8220;To buy a house for nothing, sell his consignment of galvanized iron
+well, get into partnership with a Simoun, and marry his son to a rich heiress&#8212;just say if those aren&#8217;t strokes of luck that
+all honorable men don&#8217;t have!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;If you only knew whence came that luck of Se&ntilde;or Pelaez&#8217;s!&#8221; another responded, in a tone which indicated that the speaker
+did know. &#8220;It&#8217;s also assured that there&#8217;ll be a fiesta and on a grand scale,&#8221; was added with mystery.
+
+</p>
+<p>It was really true that Paulita was going to marry <span class="pageno">
+[309]
+</span>Juanito Pelaez. Her love for Isagani had gradually waned, like all first loves based on poetry and sentiment. The events of
+the pasquinades and the imprisonment of the youth had shorn him of all his charms. To whom would it have occurred to seek
+danger, to desire to share the fate of his comrades, to surrender himself, when every one was hiding and denying any complicity
+in the affair? It was quixotic, it was madness that no sensible person in Manila could pardon, and Juanito was quite right
+in ridiculing him, representing what a sorry figure he cut when he went to the Civil Government. Naturally, the brilliant
+Paulita could no longer love a young man who so erroneously understood social matters and whom all condemned. Then she began
+to reflect. Juanito was clever, capable, gay, shrewd, the son of a rich merchant of Manila, and a Spanish mestizo besides&#8212;if
+Don Timoteo was to be believed, a full-blooded Spaniard. On the other hand, Isagani was a provincial native who dreamed of
+forests infested with leeches, he was of doubtful family, with a priest for an uncle, who would perhaps be an enemy to luxury
+and balls, of which she was very fond. One beautiful morning therefore it occurred to her that she had been a downright fool
+to prefer him to his rival, and from that time on Pelaez&#8217;s hump steadily increased. Unconsciously, yet rigorously, Paulita
+was obeying the law discovered by Darwin, that the female surrenders herself to the fittest male, to him who knows how to
+adapt himself to the medium in which he lives, and to live in Manila there was no other like Pelaez, who from his infancy
+had had chicanery at his finger-tips. Lent passed with its Holy Week, its array of processions and pompous displays, without
+other novelty than a mysterious mutiny among the artillerymen, the cause of which was never disclosed. The houses of light
+materials were torn down in the presence of a troop of cavalry, ready to fall upon the owners in case they should offer resistance.
+There was a great deal of weeping and many lamentations, but the affair did not get beyond that. The curious, among <span class="pageno">
+[310]
+</span>them Simoun, went to see those who were left homeless, walking about indifferently and assuring each other that thenceforward
+they could sleep in peace.
+
+</p>
+<p>Towards the end of April, all the fears being now forgotten, Manila was engrossed with one topic: the fiesta that Don Timoteo
+Pelaez was going to celebrate at the wedding of his son, for which the General had graciously and condescendingly agreed to
+be the patron. Simoun was reported to have arranged the matter. The ceremony would be solemnized two days before the departure
+of the General, who would honor the house and make a present to the bridegroom. It was whispered that the jeweler would pour
+out cascades of diamonds and throw away handfuls of pearls in honor of his partner&#8217;s son, thus, since he could hold no fiesta
+of his own, as he was a bachelor and had no house, improving the opportunity to dazzle the Filipino people with a memorable
+farewell. All Manila prepared to be invited, and never did uneasiness take stronger hold of the mind than in view of the thought
+of not being among those bidden. Friendship with Simoun became a matter of dispute, and many husbands were forced by their
+wives to purchase bars of steel and sheets of galvanized iron in order to make friends with Don Timoteo Pelaez.
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[311]
+</span></p>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e6092"></a></p>
+<h1>La Ultima Raz&oacute;n<a id="d0e6095src" href="#d0e6095" class="noteref">1</a></h1>
+<p>At last the great day arrived. During the morning Simoun had not left his house, busied as he was in packing his arms and
+his jewels. His fabulous wealth was already locked up in the big steel chest with its canvas cover, there remaining only a
+few cases containing bracelets and pins, doubtless gifts that he meant to make. He was going to leave with the Captain-General,
+who cared in no way to lengthen his stay, fearful of what people would say. Malicious ones insinuated that Simoun did not
+dare remain alone, since without the General&#8217;s support he did not care to expose himself to the vengeance of the many wretches
+he had exploited, all the more reason for which was the fact that the General who was coming was reported to be a model of
+rectitude and might make him disgorge his gains. The superstitious Indians, on the other hand, believed that Simoun was the
+devil who did not wish to separate himself from his prey. The pessimists winked maliciously and said, &#8220;The field laid waste,
+the locust leaves for other parts!&#8221; Only a few, a very few, smiled and said nothing.
+
+</p>
+<p>In the afternoon Simoun had given orders to his servant that if there appeared a young man calling himself Basilio he should
+be admitted at once. Then he shut himself up in his room and seemed to become lost in deep thought. Since his illness the
+jeweler&#8217;s countenance had become harder and gloomier, while the wrinkles between his eyebrows had <span class="pageno">
+[312]
+</span>deepened greatly. He did not hold himself so erect as formerly, and his head was bowed.
+
+</p>
+<p>So absorbed was he in his meditations that he did not hear a knock at the door, and it had to be repeated. He shuddered and
+called out, &#8220;Come in!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>It was Basilio, but how altered! If the change that had taken place in Simoun during those two months was great, in the young
+student it was frightful. His cheeks were hollow, his hair unkempt, his clothing disordered. The tender melancholy had disappeared
+from his eyes, and in its place glittered a dark light, so that it might be said that he had died and his corpse had revived,
+horrified with what it had seen in eternity. If not crime, then the shadow of crime, had fixed itself upon his whole appearance.
+Simoun himself was startled and felt pity for the wretch.
+
+</p>
+<p>Without any greeting Basilio slowly advanced into the room, and in a voice that made the jeweler shudder said to him, &#8220;Se&ntilde;or
+Simoun, I&#8217;ve been a wicked son and a bad brother&#8212;I&#8217;ve overlooked the murder of one and the tortures of the other, and God
+has chastised me! Now there remains to me only one desire, and it is to return evil for evil, crime for crime, violence for
+violence!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun listened in silence, while Basilio continued; &#8220;Four months ago you talked to me about your plans. I refused to take
+part in them, but I did wrong, you have been right. Three months and a half ago the revolution was on the point of breaking
+out, but I did not then care to participate in it, and the movement failed. In payment for my conduct I&#8217;ve been arrested and
+owe my liberty to your efforts only. You are right and now I&#8217;ve come to say to you: put a weapon in my hand and let the revolution
+come! I am ready to serve you, along with all the rest of the unfortunates.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The cloud that had darkened Simoun&#8217;s brow suddenly disappeared, a ray of triumph darted from his eyes, and like one who has
+found what he sought he exclaimed: &#8220;I&#8217;m right, yes, I&#8217;m right! Right and Justice are on my side, because <span class="pageno">
+[313]
+</span>my cause is that of the persecuted. Thanks, young man, thanks! You&#8217;ve come to clear away my doubts, to end my hesitation.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>He had risen and his face was beaming. The zeal that had animated him when four months before he had explained his plans to
+Basilio in the wood of his ancestors reappeared in his countenance like a red sunset after a cloudy day.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes,&#8221; he resumed, &#8220;the movement failed and many have deserted me because they saw me disheartened and wavering at the supreme
+moment. I still cherished something in my heart, I was not the master of all my feelings, I still loved! Now everything is
+dead in me, no longer is there even a corpse sacred enough for me to respect its sleep. No longer will there be any vacillation,
+for you yourself, an idealistic youth, a gentle dove, understand the necessity and come to spur me to action. Somewhat late
+you have opened your eyes, for between you and me together we might have executed marvelous plans, I above in the higher circles
+spreading death amid perfume and gold, brutalizing the vicious and corrupting or paralyzing the few good, and you below among
+the people, among the young men, stirring them to life amid blood and tears. Our task, instead of being bloody and barbarous,
+would have been holy, perfect, artistic, and surely success would have crowned our efforts. But no intelligence would support
+me, I encountered fear or effeminacy among the enlightened classes, selfishness among the rich, simplicity among the youth,
+and only in the mountains, in the waste places, among the outcasts, have I found my men. But no matter now! If we can&#8217;t get
+a finished statue, rounded out in all its details, of the rough block we work upon let those to come take charge!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Seizing the arm of Basilio, who was listening without comprehending all he said, he led him to the laboratory where he kept
+his chemical mixtures. Upon the table was placed a large case made of dark shagreen, similar to those <span class="pageno">
+[314]
+</span>that hold the silver plate exchanged as gifts among the rich and powerful. Opening this, Simoun revealed to sight, upon a
+bottom of red satin, a lamp of very peculiar shape, Its body was in the form of a pomegranate as large as a man&#8217;s head, with
+fissures in it exposing to view the seeds inside, which were fashioned of enormous carnelians. The covering was of oxidized
+gold in exact imitation of the wrinkles on the fruit.
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun took it out with great care and, removing the burner, exposed to view the interior of the tank, which was lined with
+steel two centimeters in thickness and which had a capacity of over a liter. Basilio questioned him with his eyes, for as
+yet he comprehended nothing. Without entering upon explanations, Simoun carefully took from a cabinet a flask and showed the
+young man the formula written upon it.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Nitro-glycerin!&#8221; murmured Basilio, stepping backward and instinctively thrusting his hands behind him. &#8220;Nitro-glycerin! Dynamite!&#8221;
+Beginning now to understand, he felt his hair stand on end.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes, nitro-glycerin!&#8221; repeated Simoun slowly, with his cold smile and a look of delight at the glass flask. &#8220;It&#8217;s also something
+more than nitro-glycerin&#8212;it&#8217;s concentrated tears, repressed hatred, wrongs, injustice, outrage. It&#8217;s the last resort of the
+weak, force against force, violence against violence. A moment ago I was hesitating, but you have come and decided me. This
+night the most dangerous tyrants will be blown to pieces, the irresponsible rulers that hide themselves behind God and the
+State, whose abuses remain unpunished because no one can bring them to justice. This night the Philippines will hear the explosion
+that will convert into rubbish the formless monument whose decay I have fostered.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio was so terrified that his lips worked without producing any sound, his tongue was paralyzed, his throat parched. For
+the first time he was looking at the powerful liquid which he had heard talked of as a thing distilled <span class="pageno">
+[315]
+</span>in gloom by gloomy men, in open war against society. Now he had it before him, transparent and slightly yellowish, poured
+with great caution into the artistic pomegranate. Simoun looked to him like the jinnee of the <i>Arabian Nights</i> that sprang from the sea, he took on gigantic proportions, his head touched the sky, he made the house tremble and shook
+the whole city with a shrug of his shoulders. The pomegranate assumed the form of a colossal sphere, the fissures became hellish
+grins whence escaped names and glowing cinders. For the first time in his life Basilio was overcome with fright and completely
+lost his composure.
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun, meanwhile, screwed on solidly a curious and complicated mechanism, put in place a glass chimney, then the bomb, and
+crowned the whole with an elegant shade. Then he moved away some distance to contemplate the effect, inclining his head now
+to one side, now to the other, thus better to appreciate its magnificent appearance.
+
+</p>
+<p>Noticing that Basilio was watching him with questioning and suspicious eyes, he said, &#8220;Tonight there will be a fiesta and
+this lamp will be placed in a little dining-kiosk that I&#8217;ve had constructed for the purpose. The lamp will give a brilliant
+light, bright enough to suffice for the illumination of the whole place by itself, but at the end of twenty minutes the light
+will fade, and then when some one tries to turn up the wick a cap of fulminate of mercury will explode, the pomegranate will
+blow up and with it the dining-room, in the roof and floor of which I have concealed sacks of powder, so that no one shall
+escape.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>There wras a moment&#8217;s silence, while Simoun stared at his mechanism and Basilio scarcely breathed.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;So my assistance is not needed,&#8221; observed the young man.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No, you have another mission to fulfill,&#8221; replied Simoun thoughtfully. &#8220;At nine the mechanism will have exploded and the
+report will have been heard in the country round, in the mountains, in the caves. The uprising that I had arranged with the
+artillerymen was a failure from lack <span class="pageno">
+[316]
+</span>of plan and timeliness, but this time it won&#8217;t be so. Upon hearing the explosion, the wretched and the oppressed, those who
+wander about pursued by force, will sally forth armed to join Cabesang Tales in Santa Mesa, whence they will fall upon the
+city,<a id="d0e6148src" href="#d0e6148" class="noteref">2</a> while the soldiers, whom I have made to believe that the General is shamming an insurrection in order to remain, will issue
+from their barracks ready to fire upon whomsoever I may designate. Meanwhile, the cowed populace, thinking that the hour of
+massacre has come, will rush out prepared to kill or be killed, and as they have neither arms nor organization, you with some
+others will put yourself at their head and direct them to the warehouses of Quiroga, where I keep my rifles. Cabesang Tales
+and I will join one another in the city and take possession of it, while you in the suburbs will seize the bridges and throw
+up barricades, and then be ready to come to our aid to butcher not only those opposing the revolution but also every man who
+refuses to take up arms and join us.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;All?&#8221; stammered Basilio in a choking voice.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;All!&#8221; repeated Simoun in a sinister tone. &#8220;All&#8212;Indians, mestizos, Chinese, Spaniards, all who are found to be without courage,
+without energy. The race must be renewed! Cowardly fathers will only breed slavish sons, and it wouldn&#8217;t be worth while to
+destroy and then try to rebuild with rotten materials. What, do you shudder? Do you tremble, do you fear to scatter death?
+What is death? What does a hecatomb of twenty thousand wretches signify? Twenty thousand miseries less, and millions of wretches
+saved from birth! The most timid ruler does not <span class="pageno">
+[317]
+</span>hesitate to dictate a law that produces misery and lingering death for thousands and thousands of prosperous and industrious
+subjects, happy perchance, merely to satisfy a caprice, a whim, his pride, and yet you shudder because in one night are to
+be ended forever the mental tortures of many helots, because a vitiated and paralytic people has to die to give place to another,
+young, active, full of energy!
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What is death? Nothingness, or a dream? Can its specters be compared to the reality of the agonies of a whole miserable generation?
+The needful thing is to destroy the evil, to kill the dragon and bathe the new people in the blood, in order to make it strong
+and invulnerable. What else is the inexorable law of Nature, the law of strife in which the weak has to succumb so that the
+vitiated species be not perpetuated and creation thus travel backwards? Away then with effeminate scruples! Fulfill the eternal
+laws, foster them, and then the earth will be so much the more fecund the more it is fertilized with blood, and the thrones
+the more solid the more they rest upon crimes and corpses. Let there be no hesitation, no doubtings! What is the pain of death?
+A momentary sensation, perhaps confused, perhaps agreeable, like the transition from waking to sleep. What is it that is being
+destroyed? Evil, suffering&#8212;feeble weeds, in order to set in their place luxuriant plants. Do you call that destruction? I
+should call it creating, producing, nourishing, vivifying!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Such bloody sophisms, uttered with conviction and coolness, overwhelmed the youth, weakened as he was by more than three months
+in prison and blinded by his passion for revenge, so he was not in a mood to analyze the moral basis of the matter. Instead
+of replying that the worst and cowardliest of men is always something more than a plant, because he has a soul and an intelligence,
+which, however vitiated and brutalized they may be, can be redeemed; instead of replying that man has no right to dispose
+of one life for the benefit of another, that the right to life is inherent in every individual like the right to liberty and
+to <span class="pageno">
+[318]
+</span>light; instead of replying that if it is an abuse on the part of governments to punish in a culprit the faults and crimes
+to which they have driven him by their own negligence or stupidity, how much more so would it be in a man, however great and
+however unfortunate he might be, to punish in a wretched people the faults of its governments and its ancestors; instead of
+declaring that God alone can use such methods, that God can destroy because He can create, God who holds in His hands recompense,
+eternity, and the future, to justify His acts, and man never; instead of these reflections, Basilio merely interposed a cant
+reflection.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What will the world say at the sight of such butchery?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The world will applaud, as usual, conceding the right of the strongest, the most violent!&#8221; replied Simoun with his cruel
+smile. &#8220;Europe applauded when the western nations sacrificed millions of Indians in America, and not by any means to found
+nations much more moral or more pacific: there is the North with its egotistic liberty, its lynch-law, its political frauds&#8212;the
+South with its turbulent republics, its barbarous revolutions, civil wars, pronunciamientos, as in its mother Spain! Europe
+applauded when the powerful Portugal despoiled the Moluccas, it applauds while England is destroying the primitive races in
+the Pacific to make room for its emigrants. Europe will applaud as the end of a drama, the close of a tragedy, is applauded,
+for the vulgar do not fix their attention on principles, they look only at results. Commit the crime well, and you will be
+admired and have more partizans than if you had carried out virtuous actions with modesty and timidity.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Exactly,&#8221; rejoined the youth, &#8220;what does it matter to me, after all, whether they praise or censure, when this world takes
+no care of the oppressed, of the poor, and of weak womankind? What obligations have I to recognize toward society when it
+has recognized none toward me?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s what I like to hear,&#8221; declared the tempter triumphantly. <span class="pageno">
+[319]
+</span>He took a revolver from a case and gave it to Basilio, saying, &#8220;At ten o&#8217;clock wait for me in front of the church of St. Sebastian
+to receive my final instructions. Ah, at nine you must be far, very far from Calle Anloague.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio examined the weapon, loaded it, and placed it in the inside pocket of his coat, then took his leave with a curt, &#8220;I&#8217;ll
+see you later.&#8221;
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[320]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e6095" href="#d0e6095src" class="noteref">1</a> Ultima Raz&oacute;n de Reyes: the last argument of kings&#8212;force. (Expression attributed to Calderon de la Barca, the great Spanish
+dramatist.)&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e6148" href="#d0e6148src" class="noteref">2</a> Curiously enough, and by what must have been more than a mere coincidence, this route through Santa Mesa from San Juan del
+Monte was the one taken by an armed party in their attempt to enter the city at the outbreak of the Katipunan rebellion on
+the morning of August 30, 1896. (Foreman&#8217;s <i>The Philippine Islands</i>, Chap. XXVI.)
+
+</p>
+<p class="notetext">It was also on the bridge connecting these two places that the first shot in the insurrection against American sovereignty
+was fired on the night of February 4, 1899.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e6182"></a></p>
+<h1>The Wedding</h1>
+<p>Once in the street, Basilio began to consider how he might spend the time until the fatal hour arrived, for it was then not
+later than seven o&#8217;clock. It was the vacation period and all the students were back in their towns, Isagani being the only
+one who had not cared to leave, but he had disappeared that morning and no one knew his whereabouts&#8212;so Basilio had been informed
+when after leaving the prison he had gone to visit his friend and ask him for lodging. The young man did not know where to
+go, for he had no money, nothing but the revolver. The memory of the lamp filled his imagination, the great catastrophe that
+would occur within two hours. Pondering over this, he seemed to see the men who passed before his eyes walking without heads,
+and he felt a thrill of ferocious joy in telling himself that, hungry and destitute, he that night was going to be dreaded,
+that from a poor student and servant, perhaps the sun would see him transformed into some one terrible and sinister, standing
+upon pyramids of corpses, dictating laws to all those who were passing before his gaze now in magnificent carriages. He laughed
+like one condemned to death and patted the butt of the revolver. The boxes of cartridges were also in his pockets.
+
+</p>
+<p>A question suddenly occurred to him&#8212;where would the drama begin? In his bewilderment he had not thought of asking Simoun,
+but the latter had warned him to keep away from Calle Anloague. Then came a suspicion: that afternoon, upon leaving the prison,
+he had proceeded to the former house of Capitan Tiago to get his few personal effects and had found it transformed, prepared
+for a fiesta<span class="pageno">
+[321]
+</span>&#8212;the wedding of Juanito Pelaez! Simoun had spoken of a fiesta.
+
+</p>
+<p>At this moment he noticed passing in front of him a long line of carriages filled with ladies and gentlemen, conversing in
+a lively manner, and he even thought he could make out big bouquets of flowers, but he gave the detail no thought. The carriages
+were going toward Calle Rosario and in meeting those that came down off the Bridge of Spain had to move along slowly and stop
+frequently. In one he saw Juanito Pelaez at the side of a woman dressed in white with a transparent veil, in whom he recognized
+Paulita Gomez.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Paulita!&#8221; he ejaculated in surprise, realizing that it was indeed she, in a bridal gown, along with Juanito Pelaez, as though
+they were just coming from the church. &#8220;Poor Isagani!&#8221; he murmured, &#8220;what can have become of him?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>He thought for a while about his friend, a great and generous soul, and mentally asked himself if it would not be well to
+tell him about the plan, then answered himself that Isagani would never take part in such a butchery. They had not treated
+Isagani as they had him.
+
+</p>
+<p>Then he thought that had there been no imprisonment, he would have been betrothed, or a husband, at this time, a licentiate
+in medicine, living and working in some corner of his province. The ghost of Juli, crushed in her fall, crossed his mind,
+and dark flames of hatred lighted his eyes; again he caressed the butt of the revolver, regretting that the terrible hour
+had not yet come. Just then he saw Simoun come out of the door of his house, carrying in his hands the case containing the
+lamp, carefully wrapped up, and enter a carriage, which then followed those bearing the bridal party. In order not to lose
+track of Simoun, Basilio took a good look at the cochero and with astonishment recognized in him the wretch who had driven
+him to San Diego, Sinong, the fellow maltreated by the Civil Guard, the same who had come to the prison to tell him about
+the occurrences in Tiani.
+<span class="pageno">
+[322]
+</span></p>
+<p>Conjecturing that Calle Anloague was to be the scene of action, thither the youth directed his steps, hurrying forward and
+getting ahead of the carriages, which were, in fact, all moving toward the former house of Capitan Tiago&#8212;there they were assembling
+in search of a ball, but actually to dance in the air! Basilio smiled when he noticed the pairs of civil-guards who formed
+the escort, and from their number he could guess the importance of the fiesta and the guests. The house overflowed with people
+and poured floods of light from its windows, the entrance was carpeted and strewn with flowers. Upstairs there, perhaps in
+his former solitary room, an orchestra was playing lively airs, which did not completely drown the confused tumult of talk
+and laughter.
+
+</p>
+<p>Don Timoteo Pelaez was reaching the pinnacle of fortune, and the reality surpassed his dreams. He was, at last, marrying his
+son to the rich Gomez heiress, and, thanks to the money Simoun had lent him, he had royally furnished that big house, purchased
+for half its value, and was giving in it a splendid fiesta, with the foremost divinities of the Manila Olympus for his guests,
+to gild him with the light of their prestige. Since that morning there had been recurring to him, with the persistence of
+a popular song, some vague phrases that he had read in the communion service. &#8220;Now has the fortunate hour come! Now draws
+nigh the happy moment! Soon there will be fulfilled in you the admirable words of Simoun&#8212;&#8216;I live, and yet not I alone, but
+the Captain-General liveth in me.&#8217;&#8221; The Captain-General the patron of his son! True, he had not attended the ceremony, where
+Don Custodio had represented him, but he would come to dine, he would bring a wedding-gift, a lamp which not even Aladdin&#8217;s&#8212;between
+you and me, Simoun was presenting the lamp. Timoteo, what more could you desire?
+
+</p>
+<p>The transformation that Capitan Tiago&#8217;s house had undergone was considerable&#8212;it had been richly repapered, while the smoke
+and the smell of opium had been completely <span class="pageno">
+[323]
+</span>eradicated. The immense sala, widened still more by the colossal mirrors that infinitely multiplied the lights of the chandeliers,
+was carpeted throughout, for the salons of Europe had carpets, and even though the floor was of wide boards brilliantly polished,
+a carpet it must have too, since nothing should be lacking. The rich furniture of Capitan Tiago had disappeared and in its
+place was to be seen another kind, in the style of Louis&nbsp;XV. Heavy curtains of red velvet, trimmed with gold, with the initials
+of the bridal couple worked on them, and upheld by garlands of artificial orange-blossoms, hung as porti&egrave;res and swept the
+floor with their wide fringes, likewise of gold. In the corners appeared enormous Japanese vases, alternating with those of
+S&egrave;vres of a clear dark-blue, placed upon square pedestals of carved wood.
+
+</p>
+<p>The only decorations not in good taste were the screaming chromos which Don Timoteo had substituted for the old drawings and
+pictures of saints of Capitan Tiago. Simoun had been unable to dissuade him, for the merchant did not want oil-paintings&#8212;some
+one might ascribe them to Filipino artists! He, a patron of Filipino artists, never! On that point depended his peace of mind
+and perhaps his life, and he knew how to get along in the Philippines! It is true that he had heard foreign painters mentioned&#8212;Raphael,
+Murillo, Velasquez&#8212;but he did not know their addresses, and then they might prove to be somewhat seditious. With the chromos
+he ran no risk, as the Filipinos did not make them, they came cheaper, the effect was the same, if not better, the colors
+brighter and the execution very fine. Don&#8217;t say that Don Timoteo did not know how to comport himself in the Philippines!
+
+</p>
+<p>The large hallway was decorated with flowers, having been converted into a dining-room, with a long table for thirty persons
+in the center, and around the sides, pushed against the walls, other smaller ones for two or three persons each. Bouquets
+of flowers, pyramids of fruits among ribbons and lights, covered their centers. The groom&#8217;s place was designated <span class="pageno">
+[324]
+</span>by a bunch of roses and the bride&#8217;s by another of orange-blossoms and tuberoses. In the presence of so much finery and flowers
+one could imagine that nymphs in gauzy garments and Cupids with iridescent wings were going to serve nectar and ambrosia to
+aerial guests, to the sound of lyres and Aeolian harps.
+
+</p>
+<p>But the table for the greater gods was not there, being placed yonder in the middle of the wide azotea within a magnificent
+kiosk constructed especially for the occasion. A lattice of gilded wood over which clambered fragrant vines screened the interior
+from the eyes of the vulgar without impeding the free circulation of air to preserve the coolness necessary at that season.
+A raised platform lifted the table above the level of the others at which the ordinary mortals were going to dine and an arch
+decorated by the best artists would protect the august heads from the jealous gaze of the stars.
+
+</p>
+<p>On this table were laid only seven plates. The dishes were of solid silver, the cloth and napkins of the finest linen, the
+wines the most costly and exquisite. Don Timoteo had sought the most rare and expensive in everything, nor would he have hesitated
+at crime had he been assured that the Captain-General liked to eat human flesh.
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[325]
+</span></p>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e6219"></a></p>
+<h1>The Fiesta</h1>
+<p></p>
+<div class="blockquote">&#8220;Danzar sobre un volc&aacute;n.&#8221;</div><p>
+
+
+</p>
+<p>By seven in the evening the guests had begun to arrive: first, the lesser divinities, petty government officials, clerks,
+and merchants, with the most ceremonious greetings and the gravest airs at the start, as if they were parvenus, for so much
+light, so many decorations, and so much glassware had some effect. Afterwards, they began to be more at ease, shaking their
+fists playfully, with pats on the shoulders, and even familiar slaps on the back. Some, it is true, adopted a rather disdainful
+air, to let it be seen that they were accustomed to better things&#8212;of course they were! There was one goddess who yawned, for
+she found everything vulgar and even remarked that she was ravenously hungry, while another quarreled with her god, threatening
+to box his ears.
+
+</p>
+<p>Don Timoteo bowed here and bowed there, scattered his best smiles, tightened his belt, stepped backward, turned halfway round,
+then completely around, and so on again and again, until one goddess could not refrain from remarking to her neighbor, under
+cover of her fan: &#8220;My dear, how important the old man is! Doesn&#8217;t he look like a jumping-jack?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Later came the bridal couple, escorted by Do&ntilde;a Victorina and the rest of the party. Congratulations, hand-shakings, patronizing
+pats for the groom: for the bride, insistent stares and anatomical observations on the part of the men, with analyses of her
+gown, her toilette, speculations as to her health and strength on the part of the women.
+<span class="pageno">
+[326]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;Cupid and Psyche appearing on Olympus,&#8221; thought Ben-Zayb, making a mental note of the comparison to spring it at some better
+opportunity. The groom had in fact the mischievous features of the god of love, and with a little good-will his hump, which
+the severity of his frock coat did not altogether conceal, could be taken for a quiver.
+
+</p>
+<p>Don Timoteo began to feel his belt squeezing him, the corns on his feet began to ache, his neck became tired, but still the
+General had not come. The greater gods, among them Padre Irene and Padre Salvi, had already arrived, it was true, but the
+chief thunderer was still lacking. The poor man became uneasy, nervous; his heart beat violently, but still he had to bow
+and smile; he sat down, he arose, failed to hear what was said to him, did not say what he meant. In the meantime, an amateur
+god made remarks to him about his chromos, criticizing them with the statement that they spoiled the walls.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Spoil the walls!&#8221; repeated Don Timoteo, with a smile and a desire to choke him. &#8220;But they were made in Europe and are the
+most costly I could get in Manila! Spoil the walls!&#8221; Don Timoteo swore to himself that on the very next day he would present
+for payment all the chits that the critic had signed in his store.
+
+</p>
+<p>Whistles resounded, the galloping of horses was heard&#8212;at last! &#8220;The General! The Captain-General!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Pale with emotion, Don Timoteo, dissembling the pain of his corns and accompanied by his son and some of the greater gods,
+descended to receive the Mighty Jove. The pain at his belt vanished before the doubts that now assailed him: should he frame
+a smile or affect gravity; should he extend his hand or wait for the General to offer his? <i>Carambas!</i> Why had nothing of this occurred to him before, so that he might have consulted his good friend Simoun?
+
+</p>
+<p>To conceal his agitation, he whispered to his son in a low, shaky voice, &#8220;Have you a speech prepared?&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[327]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;Speeches are no longer in vogue, papa, especially on such an occasion as this.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Jupiter arrived in the company of Juno, who was converted into a tower of artificial lights&#8212;with diamonds in her hair, diamonds
+around her neck, on her arms, on her shoulders, she was literally covered with diamonds. She was arrayed in a magnificent
+silk gown having a long train decorated with embossed flowers.
+
+</p>
+<p>His Excellency literally took possession of the house, as Don Timoteo stammeringly begged him to do.<a id="d0e6255src" href="#d0e6255" class="noteref">1</a> The orchestra played the royal march while the divine couple majestically ascended the carpeted stairway.
+
+</p>
+<p>Nor was his Excellency&#8217;s gravity altogether affected. Perhaps for the first time since his arrival in the islands he felt
+sad, a strain of melancholy tinged his thoughts. This was the last triumph of his three years of government, and within two
+days he would descend forever from such an exalted height. What was he leaving behind? His Excellency did not care to turn
+his head backwards, but preferred to look ahead, to gaze into the future. Although he was carrying away a fortune, large sums
+to his credit were awaiting him in European banks, and he had residences, yet he had injured many, he had made enemies at
+the Court, the high official was waiting for him there. Other Generals had enriched themselves as rapidly as he, and now they
+were ruined. Why not stay longer, as Simoun had advised him to do? No, good taste before everything else. The bows, moreover,
+were not now so profound as before, he noticed insistent stares and even looks of dislike, but still he replied affably and
+even attempted to smile.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s plain that the sun is setting,&#8221; observed Padre Irene in Ben-Zayb&#8217;s ear. &#8220;Many now stare him in the face.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The devil with the curate&#8212;that was just what he was going to remark!
+<span class="pageno">
+[328]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;My dear,&#8221; murmured into the ear of a neighbor the lady who had referred to Don Timoteo as a jumping-jack, &#8220;did you ever see
+such a skirt?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Ugh, the curtains from the Palace!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You don&#8217;t say! But it&#8217;s true! They&#8217;re carrying everything away. You&#8217;ll see how they make wraps out of the carpets.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;That only goes to show that she has talent and taste,&#8221; observed her husband, reproving her with a look. &#8220;Women should be
+economical.&#8221; This poor god was still suffering from the dressmaker&#8217;s bill.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;My dear, give me curtains at twelve pesos a yard, and you&#8217;ll see if I put on these rags!&#8221; retorted the goddess in pique.
+&#8220;Heavens! You can talk when you have done something fine like that to give you the right!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Meanwhile, Basilio stood before the house, lost in the throng of curious spectators, counting those who alighted from their
+carriages. When he looked upon so many persons, happy and confident, when he saw the bride and groom followed by their train
+of fresh and innocent little girls, and reflected that they were going to meet there a horrible death, he was sorry and felt
+his hatred waning within him. He wanted to save so many innocents, he thought of notifying the police, but a carriage drove
+up to set down Padre Salvi and Padre Irene, both beaming with content, and like a passing cloud his good intentions vanished.
+&#8220;What does it matter to me?&#8221; he asked himself. &#8220;Let the righteous suffer with the sinners.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Then he added, to silence his scruples: &#8220;I&#8217;m not an informer, I mustn&#8217;t abuse the confidence he has placed in me. I owe him,
+<i>him</i> more than I do <i>them</i>: he dug my mother&#8217;s grave, they killed her! What have I to do with them? I did everything possible to be good and useful,
+I tried to forgive and forget, I suffered every imposition, and only asked that they leave me in peace. I got in no one&#8217;s
+way. What have they done to me? Let their mangled limbs fly through the air! We&#8217;ve suffered enough.&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[329]
+</span></p>
+<p>Then he saw Simoun alight with the terrible lamp in his hands, saw him cross the entrance with bowed head, as though deep
+in thought. Basilio felt his heart beat fainter, his feet and hands turn cold, while the black silhouette of the jeweler assumed
+fantastic shapes enveloped in flames. There at the foot of the stairway Simoun checked his steps, as if in doubt, and Basilio
+held his breath. But the hesitation was transient&#8212;Simoun raised his head, resolutely ascended the stairway, and disappeared.
+
+</p>
+<p>It then seemed to the student that the house was going to blow up at any moment, and that walls, lamps, guests, roof, windows,
+orchestra, would be hurtling through the air like a handful of coals in the midst of an infernal explosion. He gazed about
+him and fancied that he saw corpses in place of idle spectators, he saw them torn to shreds, it seemed to him that the air
+was filled with flames, but his calmer self triumphed over this transient hallucination, which was due somewhat to his hunger.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Until he comes out, there&#8217;s no danger,&#8221; he said to himself. &#8220;The Captain-General hasn&#8217;t arrived yet.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>He tried to appear calm and control the convulsive trembling in his limbs, endeavoring to divert his thoughts to other things.
+Something within was ridiculing him, saying, &#8220;If you tremble now, before the supreme moment, how will you conduct yourself
+when you see blood flowing, houses burning, and bullets whistling?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>His Excellency arrived, but the young man paid no attention to him. He was watching the face of Simoun, who was among those
+that descended to receive him, and he read in that implacable countenance the sentence of death for all those men, so that
+fresh terror seized upon him. He felt cold, he leaned against the wall, and, with his eyes fixed on the windows and his ears
+cocked, tried to guess what might be happening. In the sala he saw the crowd surround Simoun to look at the lamp, he heard
+congratulations and exclamations of admiration&#8212;the words &#8220;dining-room,&#8221; &#8220;novelty,&#8221; were repeated many times&#8212;he saw <span class="pageno">
+[330]
+</span>the General smile and conjectured that the novelty was to be exhibited that very night, by the jeweler&#8217;s arrangement, on the
+table whereat his Excellency was to dine. Simoun disappeared, followed by a crowd of admirers.
+
+</p>
+<p>At that supreme moment his good angel triumphed, he forgot his hatreds, he forgot Juli, he wanted to save the innocent. Come
+what might, he would cross the street and try to enter. But Basilio had forgotten that he was miserably dressed. The porter
+stopped him and accosted him roughly, and finally, upon his insisting, threatened to call the police.
+
+</p>
+<p>Just then Simoun came down, slightly pale, and the porter turned from Basilio to salute the jeweler as though he had been
+a saint passing. Basilio realized from the expression of Simoun&#8217;s face that he was leaving the fated house forever, that the
+lamp was lighted. <i>Alea jacta est!</i> Seized by the instinct of self-preservation, he thought then of saving himself. It might occur to any of the guests through
+curiosity to tamper with the wick and then would come the explosion to overwhelm them all. Still he heard Simoun say to the
+cochero, &#8220;The Escolta, hurry!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Terrified, dreading that he might at any moment hear the awful explosion, Basilio hurried as fast as his legs would carry
+him to get away from the accursed spot, but his legs seemed to lack the necessary agility, his feet slipped on the sidewalk
+as though they were moving but not advancing. The people he met blocked the way, and before he had gone twenty steps he thought
+that at least five minutes had elapsed.
+
+</p>
+<p>Some distance away he stumbled against a young man who was standing with his head thrown back, gazing fixedly at the house,
+and in him he recognized Isagani. &#8220;What are you doing here?&#8221; he demanded. &#8220;Come away!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Isagani stared at him vaguely, smiled sadly, and again turned his gaze toward the open balconies, across which was revealed
+the ethereal silhouette of the bride clinging to the groom&#8217;s arm as they moved slowly out of sight.
+<span class="pageno">
+[331]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;Come, Isagani, let&#8217;s get away from that house. Come!&#8221; Basilio urged in a hoarse voice, catching his friend by the arm.
+
+</p>
+<p>Isagani gently shook himself free and continued to stare with the same sad smile upon his lips.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;For God&#8217;s sake, let&#8217;s get away from here!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Why should I go away? Tomorrow it will not be she.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>There was so much sorrow in those words that Basilio for a moment forgot his own terror. &#8220;Do you want to die?&#8221; he demanded.
+
+</p>
+<p>Isagani shrugged his shoulders and continued to gaze toward the house.
+
+</p>
+<p>Basilio again tried to drag him away. &#8220;Isagani, Isagani, listen to me! Let&#8217;s not waste any time! That house is mined, it&#8217;s
+going to blow up at any moment, by the least imprudent act, the least curiosity! Isagani, all will perish in its ruins.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;In its ruins?&#8221; echoed Isagani, as if trying to understand, but without removing his gaze from the window.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes, in its ruins, yes, Isagani! For God&#8217;s sake, come! I&#8217;ll explain afterwards. Come! One who has been more unfortunate than
+either you or I has doomed them all. Do you see that white, clear light, like an electric lamp, shining from the azotea? It&#8217;s
+the light of death! A lamp charged with dynamite, in a mined dining-room, will burst and not a rat will escape alive. Come!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No,&#8221; answered Isagani, shaking his head sadly. &#8220;I want to stay here, I want to see her for the last time. Tomorrow, you see,
+she will be something different.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Let fate have its way!&#8221; Basilio then exclaimed, hurrying away.
+
+</p>
+<p>Isagani watched his friend rush away with a precipitation that indicated real terror, but continued to stare toward the charmed
+window, like the cavalier of Toggenburg waiting for his sweetheart to appear, as Schiller tells. Now the sala was deserted,
+all having repaired to the dining-rooms, <span class="pageno">
+[332]
+</span>and it occurred to Isagani that Basilio&#8217;s fears may have been well-founded. He recalled the terrified countenance of him who
+was always so calm and composed, and it set him to thinking.
+
+</p>
+<p>Suddenly an idea appeared clear in his imagination&#8212;the house was going to blow up and Paulita was there, Paulita was going
+to die a frightful death. In the presence of this idea everything was forgotten: jealousy, suffering, mental torture, and
+the generous youth thought only of his love. Without reflecting, without hesitation, he ran toward the house, and thanks to
+his stylish clothes and determined mien, easily secured admittance.
+
+</p>
+<p>While these short scenes were occurring in the street, in the dining-kiosk of the greater gods there was passed from hand
+to hand a piece of parchment on which were written in red ink these fateful words:
+
+</p>
+<p class="beforeline"></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline"><i>Mene, Tekel, Phares</i><a id="d0e6346src" href="#d0e6346" class="noteref">2</a>
+</span></p>
+<p class="line" style=""><span class="poetryline"><i>Juan Crisostomo Ibarra</i></span></p>
+<p class="afterline"></p>
+<p>&#8220;Juan Crisostomo Ibarra? Who is he?&#8221; asked his Excellency, handing the paper to his neighbor.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;A joke in very bad taste!&#8221; exclaimed Don Custodio. &#8220;To sign the name of a filibuster dead more than ten years!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;A filibuster!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s a seditious joke!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;There being ladies present&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Padre Irene looked around for the joker and saw Padre Salvi, who was seated at the right of the Countess, turn as white as
+his napkin, while he stared at the mysterious words with bulging eyes. The scene of the sphinx recurred to him.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s the matter, Padre Salvi?&#8221; he asked. &#8220;Do you recognize your friend&#8217;s signature?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Padre Salvi did not reply. He made an effort to speak <span class="pageno">
+[333]
+</span>and without being conscious of what he was doing wiped his forehead with his napkin.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What has happened to your Reverence?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It is his very handwriting!&#8221; was the whispered reply in a scarcely perceptible voice. &#8220;It&#8217;s the very handwriting of Ibarra.&#8221;
+Leaning against the back of his chair, he let his arms fall as though all strength had deserted him.
+
+</p>
+<p>Uneasiness became converted into fright, they all stared at one another without uttering a single word. His Excellency started
+to rise, but apprehending that such a move would be ascribed to fear, controlled himself and looked about him. There were
+no soldiers present, even the waiters were unknown to him.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Let&#8217;s go on eating, gentlemen,&#8221; he exclaimed, &#8220;and pay no attention to the joke.&#8221; But his voice, instead of reassuring, increased
+the general uneasiness, for it trembled.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t suppose that that <i>Mene, Tekel, Phares</i>, means that we&#8217;re to be assassinated tonight?&#8221; speculated Don Custodio.
+
+</p>
+<p>All remained motionless, but when he added, &#8220;Yet they might poison us,&#8221; they leaped up from their chairs.
+
+</p>
+<p>The light, meanwhile, had begun slowly to fade. &#8220;The lamp is going out,&#8221; observed the General uneasily. &#8220;Will you turn up
+the wick, Padre Irene?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>But at that instant, with the swiftness of a flash of lightning, a figure rushed in, overturning a chair and knocking a servant
+down, and in the midst of the general surprise seized the lamp, rushed to the azotea, and threw it into the river. The whole
+thing happened in a second and the dining-kiosk was left in darkness.
+
+</p>
+<p>The lamp had already struck the water before the servants could cry out, &#8220;Thief, thief!&#8221; and rush toward the azotea. &#8220;A revolver!&#8221;
+cried one of them. &#8220;A revolver, quick! After the thief!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>But the figure, more agile than they, had already mounted the balustrade and before a light could be brought, precipitated
+itself into the river, striking the water with a loud splash.
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[334]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e6255" href="#d0e6255src" class="noteref">1</a> Spanish etiquette requires a host to welcome his guest with the conventional phrase: &#8220;The house belongs to you.&#8221;&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e6346" href="#d0e6346src" class="noteref">2</a> The handwriting on the wall at Belshazzar&#8217;s feast, foretelling the destruction of Babylon. Daniel, v, 25&#8211;28.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e6394"></a></p>
+<h1>Ben-Zayb&#8217;s Afflictions</h1>
+<p>Immediately upon hearing of the incident, after lights had been brought and the scarcely dignified attitudes of the startled
+gods revealed, Ben-Zayb, filled with holy indignation, and with the approval of the press-censor secured beforehand, hastened
+home&#8212;an entresol where he lived in a mess with others&#8212;to write an article that would be the sublimest ever penned under the
+skies of the Philippines. The Captain-General would leave disconsolate if he did not first enjoy his dithyrambs, and this
+Ben-Zayb, in his kindness of heart, could not allow. Hence he sacrificed the dinner and ball, nor did he sleep that night.
+
+</p>
+<p>Sonorous exclamations of horror, of indignation, to fancy that the world was smashing to pieces and the stars, the eternal
+stars, were clashing together! Then a mysterious introduction, filled with allusions, veiled hints, then an account of the
+affair, and the final peroration. He multiplied the flourishes and exhausted all his euphemisms in describing the drooping
+shoulders and the tardy baptism of salad his Excellency had received on his Olympian brow, he eulogized the agility with which
+the General had recovered a vertical position, placing his head where his legs had been, and vice versa, then intoned a hymn
+to Providence for having so solicitously guarded those sacred bones. The paragraph turned out to be so perfect that his Excellency
+appeared as a hero, and fell higher, as Victor Hugo said.
+
+</p>
+<p>He wrote, erased, added, and polished, so that, without wanting in veracity&#8212;this was his special merit as a <span class="pageno">
+[335]
+</span>journalist&#8212;the whole would be an epic, grand for the seven gods, cowardly and base for the unknown thief, &#8220;who had executed
+himself, terror-stricken, and in the very act convinced of the enormity of his crime.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>He explained Padre Irene&#8217;s act of plunging under the table as &#8220;an impulse of innate valor, which the habit of a God of peace
+and gentleness, worn throughout a whole life, had been unable to extinguish,&#8221; for Padre Irene had tried to hurl himself upon
+the thief and had taken a straight course along the submensal route. In passing, he spoke of submarine passages, mentioned
+a project of Don Custodio&#8217;s, called attention to the liberal education and wide travels of the priest. Padre Salvi&#8217;s swoon
+was the excessive sorrow that took possession of the virtuous Franciscan to see the little fruit borne among the Indians by
+his pious sermons, while the immobility and fright of the other guests, among them the Countess, who &#8220;sustained&#8221; Padre Salvi
+(she grabbed him), were the serenity and sang-froid of heroes, inured to danger in the performance of their duties, beside
+whom the Roman senators surprised by the Gallic invaders were nervous schoolgirls frightened at painted cockroaches.
+
+</p>
+<p>Afterwards, to form a contrast, the picture of the thief: fear, madness, confusion, the fierce look, the distorted features,
+and&#8212;force of moral superiority in the race&#8212;his religious awe to see assembled there such august personages! Here came in opportunely
+a long imprecation, a harangue, a diatribe against the perversion of good customs, hence the necessity of a permanent military
+tribunal, &#8220;a declaration of martial law within the limits already so declared, special legislation, energetic and repressive,
+because it is in every way needful, it is of imperative importance to impress upon the malefactors and criminals that if the
+heart is generous and paternal for those who are submissive and obedient to the law, the hand is strong, firm, inexorable,
+hard, and severe for those who against all reason fail to respect it and who insult the sacred institutions of the <span class="pageno">
+[336]
+</span>fatherland. Yes, gentlemen, this is demanded not only for the welfare of these islands, not only for the welfare of all mankind,
+but also in the name of Spain, the honor of the Spanish name, the prestige of the Iberian people, because before all things
+else Spaniards we are, and the flag of Spain,&#8221; etc.
+
+</p>
+<p>He terminated the article with this farewell: &#8220;Go in peace, gallant warrior, you who with expert hand have guided the destinies
+of this country in such calamitous times! Go in peace to breathe the balmy breezes of Manzanares!<a id="d0e6413src" href="#d0e6413" class="noteref">1</a> We shall remain here like faithful sentinels to venerate your memory, to admire your wise dispositions, to avenge the infamous
+attempt upon your splendid gift, which we will recover even if we have to dry up the seas! Such a precious relic will be for
+this country an eternal monument to your splendor, your presence of mind, your gallantry!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>In this rather confused way he concluded the article and before dawn sent it to the printing-office, of course with the censor&#8217;s
+permit. Then he went to sleep like Napoleon, after he had arranged the plan for the battle of Jena.
+
+</p>
+<p>But at dawn he was awakened to have the sheets of copy returned with a note from the editor saying that his Excellency had
+positively and severely forbidden any mention of the affair, and had further ordered the denial of any versions and comments
+that might get abroad, discrediting them as exaggerated rumors.
+
+</p>
+<p>To Ben-Zayb this blow was the murder of a beautiful and sturdy child, born and nurtured with such great pain and fatigue.
+Where now hurl the Catilinarian pride, the splendid exhibition of warlike crime-avenging materials? And to think that within
+a month or two he was going to leave the Philippines, and the article could not be published in Spain, since how could he
+say those things about the criminals of Madrid, where other ideas prevailed, where <span class="pageno">
+[337]
+</span>extenuating circumstances were sought, where facts were weighed, where there were juries, and so on? Articles such as his
+were like certain poisonous rums that are manufactured in Europe, good enough to be sold among the negroes, <i>good for negroes</i>,<a id="d0e6427src" href="#d0e6427" class="noteref">2</a> with the difference that if the negroes did not drink them they would not be destroyed, while Ben-Zayb&#8217;s articles, whether
+the Filipinos read them or not, had their effect.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;If only some other crime might be committed today or tomorrow,&#8221; he mused.
+
+</p>
+<p>With the thought of that child dead before seeing the light, those frozen buds, and feeling his eyes fill with tears, he dressed
+himself to call upon the editor. But the editor shrugged his shoulders; his Excellency had forbidden it because if it should
+be divulged that seven of the greater gods had let themselves be surprised and robbed by a nobody, while they brandished knives
+and forks, that would endanger the integrity of the fatherland! So he had ordered that no search be made for the lamp or the
+thief, and had recommended to his successors that they should not run the risk of dining in any private house, without being
+surrounded by halberdiers and guards. As those who knew anything about the events that night in Don Timoteo&#8217;s house were for
+the most part military officials and government employees, it was not difficult to suppress the affair in public, for it concerned
+the integrity of the fatherland. Before this name Ben-Zayb bowed his head heroically, thinking about Abraham, Guzman El Bueno,<a id="d0e6434src" href="#d0e6434" class="noteref">3</a> or at least, Brutus and other heroes of antiquity.
+
+</p>
+<p>Such a sacrifice could not remain unrewarded, the gods of journalism being pleased with Abraham Ben-Zayb. Almost upon the
+hour came the reporting angel bearing the sacrificial lamb in the shape of an assault committed at a country-house on the
+Pasig, where certain friars were <span class="pageno">
+[338]
+</span>spending the heated season. Here was his opportunity and Ben-Zayb praised his gods.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The robbers got over two thousand pesos, leaving badly wounded one friar and two servants. The curate defended himself as
+well as he could behind a chair, which was smashed in his hands.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Wait, wait!&#8221; said Ben-Zayb, taking notes. &#8220;Forty or fifty outlaws traitorously&#8212;revolvers, bolos, shotguns, pistols&#8212;lion at
+bay&#8212;chair&#8212;splinters flying&#8212;barbarously wounded&#8212;ten thousand pesos!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>So great was his enthusiasm that he was not content with mere reports, but proceeded in person to the scene of the crime,
+composing on the road a Homeric description of the fight. A harangue in the mouth of the leader? A scornful defiance on the
+part of the priest? All the metaphors and similes applied to his Excellency, Padre Irene, and Padre Salvi would exactly fit
+the wounded friar and the description of the thief would serve for each of the outlaws. The imprecation could be expanded,
+since he could talk of religion, of the faith, of charity, of the ringing of bells, of what the Indians owed to the friars,
+he could get sentimental and melt into Castelarian<a id="d0e6447src" href="#d0e6447" class="noteref">4</a> epigrams and lyric periods. The se&ntilde;oritas of the city would read the article and murmur, &#8220;Ben-Zayb, bold as a lion and tender
+as a lamb!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>But when he reached the scene, to his great astonishment he learned that the wounded friar was no other than Padre Camorra,
+sentenced by his Provincial to expiate in the pleasant country-house on the banks of the Pasig his pranks in Tiani. He had
+a slight scratch on his hand and a bruise on his head received from flattening himself out on the floor. The robbers numbered
+three or four, armed only with bolos, the sum stolen fifty pesos!
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It won&#8217;t do!&#8221; exclaimed Ben-Zayb. &#8220;Shut up! You don&#8217;t know what you&#8217;re talking about.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;How don&#8217;t I know, <i>pu&ntilde;ales?</i>&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[339]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t be a fool&#8212;the robbers must have numbered more.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You ink-slinger&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>So they had quite an altercation. What chiefly concerned Ben-Zayb was not to throw away the article, to give importance to
+the affair, so that he could use the peroration.
+
+</p>
+<p>But a fearful rumor cut short their dispute. The robbers caught had made some important revelations. One of the outlaws under
+<i>Matanglawin</i> (Cabesang Tales) had made an appointment with them to join his band in Santa Mesa, thence to sack the conventos and houses
+of the wealthy. They would be guided by a Spaniard, tall and sunburnt, with white hair, who said that he was acting under
+the orders of the General, whose great friend he was, and they had been further assured that the artillery and various regiments
+would join them, wherefore they were to entertain no fear at all. The tulisanes would be pardoned and have a third part of
+the booty assigned to them. The signal was to have been a cannon-shot, but having waited for it in vain the tulisanes, thinking
+themselves deceived, separated, some going back to their homes, some returning to the mountains vowing vengeance on the Spaniard,
+who had thus failed twice to keep his word. Then they, the robbers caught, had decided to do something on their own account,
+attacking the country-house that they found closest at hand, resolving religiously to give two-thirds of the booty to the
+Spaniard with white hair, if perchance he should call upon them for it.
+
+</p>
+<p>The description being recognized as that of Simoun, the declaration was received as an absurdity and the robber subjected
+to all kinds of tortures, including the electric machine, for his impious blasphemy. But news of the disappearance of the
+jeweler having attracted the attention of the whole Escolta, and the sacks of powder and great quantities of cartridges having
+been discovered in his house, the story began to wear an appearance of truth. Mystery began to enwrap the affair, enveloping
+it in clouds; there <span class="pageno">
+[340]
+</span>were whispered conversations, coughs, suspicious looks, suggestive comments, and trite second-hand remarks. Those who were
+on the inside were unable to get over their astonishment, they put on long faces, turned pale, and but little was wanting
+for many persons to lose their minds in realizing certain things that had before passed unnoticed.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;We&#8217;ve had a narrow escape! Who would have said&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>In the afternoon Ben-Zayb, his pockets filled with revolvers and cartridges, went to see Don Custodio, whom he found hard
+at work over a project against American jewelers. In a hushed voice he whispered between the palms of his hands into the journalist&#8217;s
+ear mysterious words.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Really?&#8221; questioned Ben-Zayb, slapping his hand on his pocket and paling visibly.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Wherever he may be found&#8212;&#8221; The sentence was completed with an expressive pantomime. Don Custodio raised both arms to the
+height of his face, with the right more bent than the left, turned the palms of his hands toward the floor, closed one eye,
+and made two movements in advance. &#8220;Ssh! Ssh!&#8221; he hissed.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;And the diamonds?&#8221; inquired Ben-Zayb.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;If they find him&#8212;&#8221; He went through another pantomime with the fingers of his right hand, spreading them out and clenching
+them together like the closing of a fan, clutching out with them somewhat in the manner of the wings of a wind-mill sweeping
+imaginary objects toward itself with practised skill. Ben-Zayb responded with another pantomime, opening his eyes wide, arching
+his eyebrows and sucking in his breath eagerly as though nutritious air had just been discovered.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Sssh!&#8221;
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[341]
+</span></p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e6413" href="#d0e6413src" class="noteref">1</a> A town in Ciudad Real province, Spain.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e6427" href="#d0e6427src" class="noteref">2</a> The italicized words are in English in the original.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e6434" href="#d0e6434src" class="noteref">3</a> A Spanish hero, whose chief exploit was the capture of Gibraltar from the Moors in 1308.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e6447" href="#d0e6447src" class="noteref">4</a> Emilio Castelar (1832&#8211;1899), generally regarded as the greatest of Spanish orators.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e6490"></a></p>
+<h1>The Mystery</h1>
+<p></p>
+<div class="blockquote">Todo se sabe</div><p>
+
+
+</p>
+<p>Notwithstanding so many precautions, rumors reached the public, even though quite changed and mutilated. On the following
+night they were the theme of comment in the house of Orenda, a rich jewel merchant in the industrious district of Santa Cruz,
+and the numerous friends of the family gave attention to nothing else. They were not indulging in cards, or playing the piano,
+while little Tinay, the youngest of the girls, became bored playing <i>chongka</i> by herself, without being able to understand the interest awakened by assaults, conspiracies, and sacks of powder, when there
+were in the seven holes so many beautiful cowries that seemed to be winking at her in unison and smiled with their tiny mouths
+half-opened, begging to be carried up to the <i>home</i>. Even Isagani, who, when he came, always used to play with her and allow himself to be beautifully cheated, did not come
+at her call, for Isagani was gloomily and silently listening to something Chichoy the silversmith was relating. Momoy, the
+betrothed of Sensia, the eldest of the daughters&#8212;a pretty and vivacious girl, rather given to joking&#8212;had left the window where
+he was accustomed to spend his evenings in amorous discourse, and this action seemed to be very annoying to the lory whose
+cage hung from the eaves there, the lory endeared to the house from its ability to greet everybody in the morning with marvelous
+phrases of love. Capitana Loleng, the energetic and intelligent Capitana Loleng, had her account-book open before her, but
+she <span class="pageno">
+[342]
+</span>neither read nor wrote in it, nor was her attention fixed on the trays of loose pearls, nor on the diamonds&#8212;she had completely
+forgotten herself and was all ears. Her husband himself, the great Capitan Toringoy,&#8212;a transformation of the name Domingo,&#8212;the
+happiest man in the district, without other occupation than to dress well, eat, loaf, and gossip, while his whole family worked
+and toiled, had not gone to join his coterie, but was listening between fear and emotion to the hair-raising news of the lank
+Chichoy.
+
+</p>
+<p>Nor was reason for all this lacking. Chichoy had gone to deliver some work for Don Timoteo Pelaez, a pair of earrings for
+the bride, at the very time when they were tearing down the kiosk that on the previous night had served as a dining-room for
+the foremost officials. Here Chichoy turned pale and his hair stood on end.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Nak&uacute;</i>!&#8221; he exclaimed, &#8220;sacks and sacks of powder, sacks of powder under the floor, in the roof, under the table, under the chairs,
+everywhere! It&#8217;s lucky none of the workmen were smoking.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Who put those sacks of powder there?&#8221; asked Capitana Loleng, who was brave and did not turn pale, as did the enamored Momoy.
+But Momoy had attended the wedding, so his posthumous emotion can be appreciated: he had been near the kiosk.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s what no one can explain,&#8221; replied Chichoy. &#8220;Who would have any interest in breaking up the fiesta? There couldn&#8217;t
+have been more than one, as the celebrated lawyer Se&ntilde;or Pasta who was there on a visit declared&#8212;either an enemy of Don Timoteo&#8217;s
+or a rival of Juanito&#8217;s.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The Orenda girls turned instinctively toward Isagani, who smiled silently.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Hide yourself,&#8221; Capitana Loleng advised him. &#8220;They may accuse you. Hide!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Again Isagani smiled but said nothing.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Don Timoteo,&#8221; continued Chichoy, &#8220;did not know to <span class="pageno">
+[343]
+</span>whom to attribute the deed. He himself superintended the work, he and his friend Simoun, and nobody else. The house was thrown
+into an uproar, the lieutenant of the guard came, and after enjoining secrecy upon everybody, they sent me away. But&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But&#8212;but&#8212;&#8221; stammered the trembling Momoy.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>Nak&uacute;!</i>&#8221; ejaculated Sensia, gazing at her fianc&eacute; and trembling sympathetically to remember that he had been at the fiesta. &#8220;This
+young man&#8212;If the house had blown up&#8212;&#8221; She stared at her sweetheart passionately and admired his courage.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;If it had blown up&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;No one in the whole of Calle Anloague would have been left alive,&#8221; concluded Capitan Toringoy, feigning valor and indifference
+in the presence of his family.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I left in consternation,&#8221; resumed Chichoy, &#8220;thinking about how, if a mere spark, a cigarette had fallen, if a lamp had been
+overturned, at the present moment we should have neither a General, nor an Archbishop, nor any one, not even a government
+clerk! All who were at the fiesta last night&#8212;annihilated!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>V&iacute;rgen Sant&iacute;sima!</i> This young man&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;<i>&#8217;Susmariosep!</i>&#8221; exclaimed Capitana Loleng. &#8220;All our debtors were there, <i>&#8217;Susmariosep!</i> And we have a house near there! Who could it have been?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Now you may know about it,&#8221; added Chichoy in a whisper, &#8220;but you must keep it a secret. This afternoon I met a friend, a
+clerk in an office, and in talking about the affair, he gave me the clue to the mystery&#8212;he had it from some government employees.
+Who do you suppose put the sacks of powder there?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Many shrugged their shoulders, while Capitan Toringoy merely looked askance at Isagani.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The friars?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Quiroga the Chinaman?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Some student?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Makaraig?&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[344]
+</span></p>
+<p>Capitan Toringoy coughed and glanced at Isagani, while Chichoy shook his head and smiled.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The jeweler Simoun.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Simoun!!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The profound silence of amazement followed these words. Simoun, the evil genius of the Captain-General, the rich trader to
+whose house they had gone to buy unset gems, Simoun, who had received the Orenda girls with great courtesy and had paid them
+fine compliments! For the very reason that the story seemed absurd it was believed. &#8220;<i>Credo quia absurdum,</i>&#8221; said St. Augustine.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But wasn&#8217;t Simoun at the fiesta last night?&#8221; asked Sensia.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes,&#8221; said Momoy. &#8220;But now I remember! He left the house just as we were sitting down to the dinner. He went to get his wedding-gift.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But wasn&#8217;t he a friend of the General&#8217;s? Wasn&#8217;t he a partner of Don Timoteo&#8217;s?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes, he made himself a partner in order to strike the blow and kill all the Spaniards.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Aha!&#8221; cried Sensia. &#8220;Now I understand!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;What?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;You didn&#8217;t want to believe Aunt Tentay. Simoun is the devil and he has bought up the souls of all the Spaniards. Aunt Tentay
+said so!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Capitana Loleng crossed herself and looked uneasily toward the jewels, fearing to see them turn into live coals, while Capitan
+Toringoy took off the ring which had come from Simoun.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Simoun has disappeared without leaving any traces,&#8221; added Chichoy. &#8220;The Civil Guard is searching for him.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes,&#8221; observed Sensia, crossing herself, &#8220;searching for the devil.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Now many things were explained: Simoun&#8217;s fabulous wealth and the peculiar smell in his house, the smell of sulphur. Binday,
+another of the daughters, a frank and lovely girl, remembered having seen blue flames in the <span class="pageno">
+[345]
+</span>jeweler&#8217;s house one afternoon when she and her mother had gone there to buy jewels. Isagani listened attentively, but said
+nothing.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;So, last night&#8212;&#8221; ventured Momoy.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Last night?&#8221; echoed Sensia, between curiosity and fear.
+
+</p>
+<p>Momoy hesitated, but the face Sensia put on banished his fear. &#8220;Last night, while we were eating, there was a disturbance,
+the light in the General&#8217;s dining-room went out. They say that some unknown person stole the lamp that was presented by Simoun.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;A thief? One of the Black Hand?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Isagani arose to walk back and forth.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Didn&#8217;t they catch him?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;He jumped into the river before anybody recognized him. Some say he was a Spaniard, some a Chinaman, and others an Indian.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s believed that with the lamp,&#8221; added Chichoy, &#8220;he was going to set fire to the house, then the powder&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Momoy again shuddered but noticing that Sensia was watching him tried to control himself. &#8220;What a pity!&#8221; he exclaimed with
+an effort. &#8220;How wickedly the thief acted. Everybody would have been killed.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Sensia stared at him in fright, the women crossed themselves, while Capitan Toringoy, who was afraid of politics, made a move
+to go away.
+
+</p>
+<p>Momoy turned to Isagani, who observed with an enigmatic smile: &#8220;It&#8217;s always wicked to take what doesn&#8217;t belong to you. If
+that thief had known what it was all about and had been able to reflect, surely he wouldn&#8217;t have done as he did.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Then, after a pause, he added, &#8220;For nothing in the world would I want to be in his place!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>So they continued their comments and conjectures until an hour later, when Isagani bade the family farewell, to return forever
+to his uncle&#8217;s side.
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[346]
+</span></p>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e6629"></a></p>
+<h1>Fatality</h1>
+<p><i>Matanglawin</i> was the terror of Luzon. His band had as lief appear in one province where it was least expected as make a descent upon another
+that was preparing to resist it. It burned a sugar-mill in Batangas and destroyed the crops, on the following day it murdered
+the Justice of the Peace of Tiani, and on the next took possession of the town of Cavite, carrying off the arms from the town
+hall. The central provinces, from Tayabas to Pangasinan, suffered from his depredations, and his bloody name extended from
+Albay in the south to Kagayan in the north. The towns, disarmed through mistrust on the part of a weak government, fell easy
+prey into his hands&#8212;at his approach the fields were abandoned by the farmers, the herds were scattered, while a trail of blood
+and fire marked his passage. <i>Matanglawin</i> laughed at the severe measures ordered by the government against the tulisanes, since from them only the people in the outlying
+villages suffered, being captured and maltreated if they resisted the band, and if they made peace with it being flogged and
+deported by the government, provided they completed the journey and did not meet with a fatal accident on the way. Thanks
+to these terrible alternatives many of the country folk decided to enlist under his command.
+
+</p>
+<p>As a result of this reign of terror, trade among the towns, already languishing, died out completely. The rich dared not travel,
+and the poor feared to be arrested by the Civil Guard, which, being under obligation to pursue the tulisanes, often seized
+the first person encountered and subjected him to unspeakable tortures. In its impotence, the <span class="pageno">
+[347]
+</span>government put on a show of energy toward the persons whom it suspected, in order that by force of cruelty the people should
+not realize its weakness&#8212;the fear that prompted such measures.
+
+</p>
+<p>A string of these hapless suspects, some six or seven, with their arms tied behind them, bound together like a bunch of human
+meat, was one afternoon marching through the excessive heat along a road that skirted a mountain, escorted by ten or twelve
+guards armed with rifles. Their bayonets gleamed in the sun, the barrels of their rifles became hot, and even the sage-leaves
+in their helmets scarcely served to temper the effect of the deadly May sun.
+
+</p>
+<p>Deprived of the use of their arms and pressed close against one another to save rope, the prisoners moved along almost uncovered
+and unshod, he being the best off who had a handkerchief twisted around his head. Panting, suffering, covered with dust which
+perspiration converted into mud, they felt their brains melting, they saw lights dancing before them, red spots floating in
+the air. Exhaustion and dejection were pictured in their faces, desperation, wrath, something indescribable, the look of one
+who dies cursing, of a man who is weary of life, who hates himself, who blasphemes against God. The strongest lowered their
+heads to rub their faces against the dusky backs of those in front of them and thus wipe away the sweat that was blinding
+them. Many were limping, but if any one of them happened to fall and thus delay the march he would hear a curse as a soldier
+ran up brandishing a branch torn from a tree and forced him to rise by striking about in all directions. The string then started
+to run, dragging, rolling in the dust, the fallen one, who howled and begged to be killed; but perchance he succeeded in getting
+on his feet and then went along crying like a child and cursing the hour he was born.
+
+</p>
+<p>The human cluster halted at times while the guards drank, and then the prisoners continued on their way with <span class="pageno">
+[348]
+</span>parched mouths, darkened brains, and hearts full of curses. Thirst was for these wretches the least of their troubles.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Move on, you sons of &#8212;&#8212;!&#8221; cried a soldier, again refreshed, hurling the insult common among the lower classes of Filipinos.
+
+</p>
+<p>The branch whistled and fell on any shoulder whatsoever, the nearest one, or at times upon a face to leave a welt at first
+white, then red, and later dirty with the dust of the road.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Move on, you cowards!&#8221; at times a voice yelled in Spanish, deepening its tone.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Cowards!&#8221; repeated the mountain echoes.
+
+</p>
+<p>Then the cowards quickened their pace under a sky of red-hot iron, over a burning road, lashed by the knotty branch which
+was worn into shreds on their livid skins. A Siberian winter would perhaps be tenderer than the May sun of the Philippines.
+
+</p>
+<p>Yet, among the soldiers there was one who looked with disapproving eyes upon so much wanton cruelty, as he marched along silently
+with his brows knit in disgust. At length, seeing that the guard, not satisfied with the branch, was kicking the prisoners
+that fell, he could no longer restrain himself but cried out impatiently, &#8220;Here, Mautang, let them alone!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Mautang turned toward him in surprise. &#8220;What&#8217;s it to you, Carolino?&#8221; he asked.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;To me, nothing, but it hurts me,&#8221; replied Carolino. &#8220;They&#8217;re men like ourselves.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s plain that you&#8217;re new to the business!&#8221; retorted Mautang with a compassionate smile. &#8220;How did you treat the prisoners
+in the war?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;With more consideration, surely!&#8221; answered Carolino.
+
+</p>
+<p>Mautang remained silent for a moment and then, apparently having discovered the reason, calmly rejoined, &#8220;Ah, it&#8217;s because
+they are enemies and fight us, while these&#8212;these are our own countrymen.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Then drawing nearer to Carolino he whispered, &#8220;How <span class="pageno">
+[349]
+</span>stupid you are! They&#8217;re treated so in order that they may attempt to resist or to escape, and then&#8212;bang!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Carolino made no reply.
+
+</p>
+<p>One of the prisoners then begged that they let him stop for a moment.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;This is a dangerous place,&#8221; answered the corporal, gazing uneasily toward the mountain. &#8220;Move on!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Move on!&#8221; echoed Mautang and his lash whistled.
+
+</p>
+<p>The prisoner twisted himself around to stare at him with reproachful eyes. &#8220;You are more cruel than the Spaniard himself,&#8221;
+he said.
+
+</p>
+<p>Mautang replied with more blows, when suddenly a bullet whistled, followed by a loud report. Mautang dropped his rifle, uttered
+an oath, and clutching at his breast with both hands fell spinning into a heap. The prisoner saw him writhing in the dust
+with blood spurting from his mouth.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Halt!&#8221; called the corporal, suddenly turning pale.
+
+</p>
+<p>The soldiers stopped and stared about them. A wisp of smoke rose from a thicket on the height above. Another bullet sang to
+its accompanying report and the corporal, wounded in the thigh, doubled over vomiting curses. The column was attacked by men
+hidden among the rocks above.
+
+</p>
+<p>Sullen with rage the corporal motioned toward the string of prisoners and laconically ordered, &#8220;Fire!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The wretches fell upon their knees, filled with consternation. As they could not lift their hands, they begged for mercy by
+kissing the dust or bowing their heads&#8212;one talked of his children, another of his mother who would be left unprotected, one
+promised money, another called upon God&#8212;but the muzzles were quickly lowered and a hideous volley silenced them all.
+
+</p>
+<p>Then began the sharpshooting against those who were behind the rocks above, over which a light cloud of smoke began to hover.
+To judge from the scarcity of their shots, the invisible enemies could not have more than three rifles. As they advanced firing,
+the guards sought cover behind <span class="pageno">
+[350]
+</span>tree-trunks or crouched down as they attempted to scale the height. Splintered rocks leaped up, broken twigs fell from trees,
+patches of earth were torn up, and the first guard who attempted the ascent rolled back with a bullet through his shoulder.
+
+</p>
+<p>The hidden enemy had the advantage of position, but the valiant guards, who did not know how to flee, were on the point of
+retiring, for they had paused, unwilling to advance; that fight against the invisible unnerved them. Smoke and rocks alone
+could be seen&#8212;not a voice was heard, not a shadow appeared; they seemed to be fighting with the mountain.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Shoot, Carolino! What are you aiming at?&#8221; called the corporal.
+
+</p>
+<p>At that instant a man appeared upon a rock, making signs with his rifle.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Shoot him!&#8221; ordered the corporal with a foul oath.
+
+</p>
+<p>Three guards obeyed the order, but the man continued standing there, calling out at the top of his voice something unintelligible.
+
+</p>
+<p>Carolino paused, thinking that he recognized something familiar about that figure, which stood out plainly in the sunlight.
+But the corporal threatened to tie him up if he did not fire, so Carolino took aim and the report of his rifle was heard.
+The man on the rock spun around and disappeared with a cry that left Carolino horror-stricken.
+
+</p>
+<p>Then followed a rustling in the bushes, indicating that those within were scattering in all directions, so the soldiers boldly
+advanced, now that there was no more resistance. Another man appeared upon the rock, waving a spear, and they fired at him.
+He sank down slowly, catching at the branch of a tree, but with another volley fell face downwards on the rock.
+
+</p>
+<p>The guards climbed on nimbly, with bayonets fixed ready for a hand-to-hand fight. Carolino alone moved forward reluctantly,
+with a wandering, gloomy look, the cry of the man struck by his bullet still ringing in his ears. The <span class="pageno">
+[351]
+</span>first to reach the spot found an old man dying, stretched out on the rock. He plunged his bayonet into the body, but the old
+man did not even wink, his eyes being fixed on Carolino with an indescribable gaze, while with his bony hand he pointed to
+something behind the rock.
+
+</p>
+<p>The soldiers turned to see Caroline frightfully pale, his mouth hanging open, with a look in which glimmered the last spark
+of reason, for Carolino, who was no other than Tano, Cabesang Tales&#8217; son, and who had just returned from the Carolines, recognized
+in the dying man his grandfather, Tandang Selo. No longer able to speak, the old man&#8217;s dying eyes uttered a whole poem of
+grief&#8212;and then a corpse, he still continued to point to something behind the rock.
+
+
+<span class="pageno">
+[352]
+</span></p>
+<p class="div1"><a id="d0e6722"></a></p>
+<h1>Conclusion</h1>
+<p>In his solitary retreat on the shore of the sea, whose mobile surface was visible through the open, windows, extending outward
+until it mingled with the horizon, Padre Florentino was relieving the monotony by playing on his harmonium sad and melancholy
+tunes, to which the sonorous roar of the surf and the sighing of the treetops of the neighboring wood served as accompaniments.
+Notes long, full, mournful as a prayer, yet still vigorous, escaped from the old instrument. Padre Florentino, who was an
+accomplished musician, was improvising, and, as he was alone, gave free rein to the sadness in his heart.
+
+</p>
+<p>For the truth was that the old man was very sad. His good friend, Don Tiburcio de Espada&ntilde;a, had just left him, fleeing from
+the persecution of his wife. That morning he had received a note from the lieutenant of the Civil Guard, which ran thus:
+
+
+</p>
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>MY DEAR CHAPLAIN,&#8212;I have just received from the commandant a telegram that says, &#8220;Spaniard hidden house Padre Florentino capture
+forward alive dead.&#8221; As the telegram is quite explicit, warn your friend not to be there when I come to arrest him at eight
+tonight.
+
+
+</p>
+<p>Affectionately,
+
+
+</p>
+<p>PEREZ
+
+
+</p>
+<p>Burn this note.</p>
+</div><p>
+
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;T-that V-victorina!&#8221; Don Tiburcio had stammered. &#8220;S-she&#8217;s c-capable of having me s-shot!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Padre Florentino was unable to reassure him. Vainly he pointed out to him that the word <i>cojera</i> should have read <i>coger&aacute;</i>,<a id="d0e6749src" href="#d0e6749" class="noteref">1</a> and that the hidden Spaniard could not be Don <span class="pageno">
+[353]
+</span> Tiburcio, but the jeweler Simoun, who two days before had arrived, wounded and a fugitive, begging for shelter. But Don Tiburcio
+would not be convinced&#8212;<i>cojera</i> was his own lameness, his personal description, and it was an intrigue of Victorina&#8217;s to get him back alive or dead, as Isagani
+had written from Manila. So the poor Ulysses had left the priest&#8217;s house to conceal himself in the hut of a woodcutter.
+
+</p>
+<p>No doubt was entertained by Padre Florentino that the Spaniard wanted was the jeweler Simoun, who had arrived mysteriously,
+himself carrying the jewel-chest, bleeding, morose, and exhausted. With the free and cordial Filipino hospitality, the priest
+had taken him in, without asking indiscreet questions, and as news of the events in Manila had not yet reached his ears he
+was unable to understand the situation clearly. The only conjecture that occurred to him was that the General, the jeweler&#8217;s
+friend and protector, being gone, probably his enemies, the victims of wrong and abuse, were now rising and calling for vengeance,
+and that the acting Governor was pursuing him to make him disgorge the wealth he had accumulated&#8212;hence his flight. But whence
+came his wounds? Had he tried to commit suicide? Were they the result of personal revenge? Or were they merely caused by an
+accident, as Simoun claimed? Had they been received in escaping from the force that was pursuing him?
+
+</p>
+<p>This last conjecture was the one that seemed to have the greatest appearance of probability, being further strengthened by
+the telegram received and Simoun&#8217;s decided unwillingness from the start to be treated by the doctor from the capital. The
+jeweler submitted only to the ministrations of Don Tiburcio, and even to them with marked distrust. In this situation Padre
+Florentino was asking himself what <span class="pageno">
+[354]
+</span>line of conduct he should pursue when the Civil Guard came to arrest Simoun. His condition would not permit his removal, much
+less a long journey&#8212;but the telegram said alive or dead.
+
+</p>
+<p>Padre Florentine ceased playing and approached the window to gaze out at the sea, whose desolate surface was without a ship,
+without a sail&#8212;it gave him no suggestion. A solitary islet outlined in the distance spoke only of solitude and made the space
+more lonely. Infinity is at times despairingly mute.
+
+</p>
+<p>The old man was trying to analyze the sad and ironical smile with which Simoun had received the news that he was to be arrested.
+What did that smile mean? And that other smile, still sadder and more ironical, with which he received the news that they
+would not come before eight at night? What did all this mystery signify? Why did Simoun refuse to hide? There came into his
+mind the celebrated saying of St. John Chrysostom when he was defending the eunuch Eutropius: &#8220;Never was a better time than
+this to say&#8212;Vanity of vanities and all is vanity!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Yes, that Simoun, so rich, so powerful, so feared a week ago, and now more unfortunate than Eutropius, was seeking refuge,
+not at the altars of a church, but in the miserable house of a poor native priest, hidden in the forest, on the solitary seashore!
+Vanity of vanities and all is vanity! That man would within a few hours be a prisoner, dragged from the bed where he lay,
+without respect for his condition, without consideration for his wounds&#8212;dead or alive his enemies demanded him! How could
+he save him? Where could he find the moving accents of the bishop of Constantinople? What weight would his weak words have,
+the words of a native priest, whose own humiliation this same Simoun had in his better days seemed to applaud and encourage?
+
+</p>
+<p>But Padre Florentine no longer recalled the indifferent reception that two months before the jeweler had accorded to him when
+he had tried to interest him in favor of Isagani, <span class="pageno">
+[355]
+</span>then a prisoner on account of his imprudent chivalry; he forgot the activity Simoun had displayed in urging Paulita&#8217;s marriage,
+which had plunged Isagani into the fearful misanthropy that was worrying his uncle. He forgot all these things and thought
+only of the sick man&#8217;s plight and his own obligations as a host, until his senses reeled. Where must he hide him to avoid
+his falling into the clutches of the authorities? But the person chiefly concerned was not worrying, he was smiling.
+
+</p>
+<p>While he was pondering over these things, the old man was approached by a servant who said that the sick man wished to speak
+with him, so he went into the next room, a clean and well-ventilated apartment with a floor of wide boards smoothed and polished,
+and simply furnished with big, heavy armchairs of ancient design, without varnish or paint. At one end there was a large kamagon
+bed with its four posts to support the canopy, and beside it a table covered with bottles, lint, and bandages. A praying-desk
+at the feet of a Christ and a scanty library led to the suspicion that it was the priest&#8217;s own bedroom, given up to his guest
+according to the Filipino custom of offering to the stranger the best table, the best room, and the best bed in the house.
+Upon seeing the windows opened wide to admit freely the healthful sea-breeze and the echoes of its eternal lament, no one
+in the Philippines would have said that a sick person was to be found there, since it is the custom to close all the windows
+and stop up all the cracks just as soon as any one catches a cold or gets an insignificant headache.
+
+</p>
+<p>Padre Florentine looked toward the bed and was astonished to see that the sick man&#8217;s face had lost its tranquil and ironical
+expression. Hidden grief seemed to knit his brows, anxiety was depicted in his looks, his lips were curled in a smile of pain.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Are you suffering, Se&ntilde;or Simoun?&#8221; asked the priest solicitously, going to his side.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Some! But in a little while I shall cease to suffer,&#8221; he replied with a shake of his head.
+<span class="pageno">
+[356]
+</span></p>
+<p>Padre Florentine clasped his hands in fright, suspecting that he understood the terrible truth. &#8220;My God, what have you done?
+What have you taken?&#8221; He reached toward the bottles.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s useless now! There&#8217;s no remedy at all!&#8221; answered Simoun with a pained smile. &#8220;What did you expect me to do? Before the
+clock strikes eight&#8212;alive or dead&#8212;dead, yes, but alive, no!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;My God, what have you done?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Be calm!&#8221; urged the sick man with a wave of his hand. &#8220;What&#8217;s done is done. I must not fall into anybody&#8217;s hands&#8212;my secret
+would be torn from me. Don&#8217;t get excited, don&#8217;t lose your head, it&#8217;s useless! Listen&#8212;the night is coming on and there&#8217;s no
+time to be lost. I must tell you my secret, and intrust to you my last request, I must lay my life open before you. At the
+supreme moment I want to lighten myself of a load, I want to clear up a doubt of mine. You who believe so firmly in God&#8212;I
+want you to tell me if there is a God!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;But an antidote, Se&ntilde;or Simoun! I have ether, chloroform&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The priest began to search for a flask, until Simoun cried impatiently, &#8220;Useless, it&#8217;s useless! Don&#8217;t waste time! I&#8217;ll go
+away with my secret!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>The bewildered priest fell down at his desk and prayed at the feet of the Christ, hiding his face in his hands. Then he arose
+serious and grave, as if he had received from his God all the force, all the dignity, all the authority of the Judge of consciences.
+Moving a chair to the head of the bed he prepared to listen.
+
+</p>
+<p>At the first words Simoun murmured, when he told his real name, the old priest started back and gazed at him in terror, whereat
+the sick man smiled bitterly. Taken by surprise, the priest was not master of himself, but he soon recovered, and covering
+his face with a handkerchief again bent over to listen.
+
+</p>
+<p>Simoun related his sorrowful story: how, thirteen years <span class="pageno">
+[357]
+</span>before, he had returned from Europe filled with hopes and smiling illusions, having come back to marry a girl whom he loved,
+disposed to do good and forgive all who had wronged him, just so they would let him live in peace. But it was not so. A mysterious
+hand involved him in the confusion of an uprising planned by his enemies. Name, fortune, love, future, liberty, all were lost,
+and he escaped only through the heroism of a friend. Then he swore vengeance. With the wealth of his family, which had been
+buried in a wood, he had fled, had gone to foreign lands and engaged in trade. He took part in the war in Cuba, aiding first
+one side and then another, but always profiting. There he made the acquaintance of the General, then a major, whose good-will
+he won first by loans of money, and afterwards he made a friend of him by the knowledge of criminal secrets. With his money
+he had been able to secure the General&#8217;s appointment and, once in the Philippines, he had used him as a blind tool and incited
+him to all kinds of injustice, availing himself of his insatiable lust for gold.
+
+</p>
+<p>The confession was long and tedious, but during the whole of it the confessor made no further sign of surprise and rarely
+interrupted the sick man. It was night when Padre Florentino, wiping the perspiration from his face, arose and began to meditate.
+Mysterious darkness flooded the room, so that the moonbeams entering through the window filled it with vague lights and vaporous
+reflections.
+
+</p>
+<p>Into the midst of the silence the priest&#8217;s voice broke sad and deliberate, but consoling: &#8220;God will forgive you, Se&ntilde;or&#8212;Simoun,&#8221;
+he said. &#8220;He knows that we are fallible, He has seen that you have suffered, and in ordaining that the chastisement for your
+faults should come as death from the very ones you have instigated to crime, we can see His infinite mercy. He has frustrated
+your plans one by one, the best conceived, first by the death of Maria Clara, then by a lack of preparation, then in some
+mysterious way. Let us bow to His will and render Him thanks!&#8221;
+<span class="pageno">
+[358]
+</span></p>
+<p>&#8220;According to you, then,&#8221; feebly responded the sick man, &#8220;His will is that these islands&#8212;&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Should continue in the condition in which they suffer?&#8221; finished the priest, seeing that the other hesitated. &#8220;I don&#8217;t know,
+sir, I can&#8217;t read the thought of the Inscrutable. I know that He has not abandoned those peoples who in their supreme moments
+have trusted in Him and made Him the Judge of their cause, I know that His arm has never failed when, justice long trampled
+upon and every recourse gone, the oppressed have taken up the sword to fight for home and wife and children, for their inalienable
+rights, which, as the German poet says, shine ever there above, unextinguished and inextinguishable, like the eternal stars
+themselves. No, God is justice, He cannot abandon His cause, the cause of liberty, without which no justice is possible.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Why then has He denied me His aid?&#8221; asked the sick man in a voice charged with bitter complaint.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Because you chose means that He could not sanction,&#8221; was the severe reply. &#8220;The glory of saving a country is not for him
+who has contributed to its ruin. You have believed that what crime and iniquity have defiled and deformed, another crime and
+another iniquity can purify and redeem. Wrong! Hate never produces anything but monsters and crime criminals! Love alone realizes
+wonderful works, virtue alone can save! No, if our country has ever to be free, it will not be through vice and crime, it
+will not be so by corrupting its sons, deceiving some and bribing others, no! Redemption presupposes virtue, virtue sacrifice,
+and sacrifice love!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Well, I accept your explanation,&#8221; rejoined the sick man, after a pause. &#8220;I have been mistaken, but, because I have been mistaken,
+will that God deny liberty to a people and yet save many who are much worse criminals than I am? What is my mistake compared
+to the crimes of our rulers? Why has that God to give more heed to my iniquity than to the cries of so many innocents? Why
+has He not stricken me down and then made the people triumph? Why <span class="pageno">
+[359]
+</span>does He let so many worthy and just ones suffer and look complacently upon their tortures?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;The just and the worthy must suffer in order that their ideas may be known and extended! You must shake or shatter the vase
+to spread its perfume, you must smite the rock to get the spark! There is something providential in the persecutions of tyrants,
+Se&ntilde;or Simoun!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I knew it,&#8221; murmured the sick man, &#8220;and therefore I encouraged the tyranny.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Yes, my friend, but more corrupt influences than anything else were spread. You fostered the social rottenness without sowing
+an idea. From this fermentation of vices loathing alone could spring, and if anything were born overnight it would be at best
+a mushroom, for mushrooms only can spring spontaneously from filth. True it is that the vices of the government are fatal
+to it, they cause its death, but they kill also the society in whose bosom they are developed. An immoral government presupposes
+a demoralized people, a conscienceless administration, greedy and servile citizens in the settled parts, outlaws and brigands
+in the mountains. Like master, like slave! Like government, like country!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>A brief pause ensued, broken at length by the sick man&#8217;s voice. &#8220;Then, what can be done?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Suffer and work!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Suffer&#8212;work!&#8221; echoed the sick man bitterly. &#8220;Ah, it&#8217;s easy to say that, when you are not suffering, when the work is rewarded.
+If your God demands such great sacrifices from man, man who can scarcely count upon the present and doubts the future, if
+you had seen what I have, the miserable, the wretched, suffering unspeakable tortures for crimes they have not committed,
+murdered to cover up the faults and incapacity of others, poor fathers of families torn from their homes to work to no purpose
+upon highways that are destroyed each day and seem only to serve for sinking families into want. Ah, to suffer, to work, is
+the will of God! Convince them that their murder is their <span class="pageno">
+[360]
+</span>salvation, that their work is the prosperity of the home! To suffer, to work! What God is that?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;A very just God, Se&ntilde;or Simoun,&#8221; replied the priest. &#8220;A God who chastises our lack of faith, our vices, the little esteem
+in which we hold dignity and the civic virtues. We tolerate vice, we make ourselves its accomplices, at times we applaud it,
+and it is just, very just that we suffer the consequences, that our children suffer them. It is the God of liberty, Se&ntilde;or
+Simoun, who obliges us to love it, by making the yoke heavy for us&#8212;a God of mercy, of equity, who while He chastises us, betters
+us and only grants prosperity to him who has merited it through his efforts. The school of suffering tempers, the arena of
+combat strengthens the soul.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;I do not mean to say that our liberty will be secured at the sword&#8217;s point, for the sword plays but little part in modern
+affairs, but that we must secure it by making ourselves worthy of it, by exalting the intelligence and the dignity of the
+individual, by loving justice, right, and greatness, even to the extent of dying for them,&#8212;and when a people reaches that
+height God will provide a weapon, the idols will be shattered, the tyranny will crumble like a house of cards and liberty
+will shine out like the first dawn.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Our ills we owe to ourselves alone, so let us blame no one. If Spain should see that we were less complaisant with tyranny
+and more disposed to struggle and suffer for our rights, Spain would be the first to grant us liberty, because when the fruit
+of the womb reaches maturity woe unto the mother who would stifle it! So, while the Filipino people has not sufficient energy
+to proclaim, with head erect and bosom bared, its rights to social life, and to guarantee it with its sacrifices, with its
+own blood; while we see our countrymen in private life ashamed within themselves, hear the voice of conscience roar in rebellion
+and protest, yet in public life keep silence or even echo the words of him who abuses them in order to mock the abused; while
+we see them wrap themselves up in their egotism and with a <span class="pageno">
+[361]
+</span>forced smile praise the most iniquitous actions, begging with their eyes a portion of the booty&#8212;why grant them liberty? With
+Spain or without Spain they would always be the same, and perhaps worse! Why independence, if the slaves of today will be
+the tyrants of tomorrow? And that they will be such is not to be doubted, for he who submits to tyranny loves it.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;Se&ntilde;or Simoun, when our people is unprepared, when it enters the fight through fraud and force, without a clear understanding
+of what it is doing, the wisest attempts will fail, and better that they do fail, since why commit the wife to the husband
+if he does not sufficiently love her, if he is not ready to die for her?&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Padre Florentino felt the sick man catch and press his hand, so he became silent, hoping that the other might speak, but he
+merely felt a stronger pressure of the hand, heard a sigh, and then profound silence reigned in the room. Only the sea, whose
+waves were rippled by the night breeze, as though awaking from the heat of the day, sent its hoarse roar, its eternal chant,
+as it rolled against the jagged rocks. The moon, now free from the sun&#8217;s rivalry, peacefully commanded the sky, and the trees
+of the forest bent down toward one another, telling their ancient legends in mysterious murmurs borne on the wings of the
+wind.
+
+</p>
+<p>The sick man said nothing, so Padre Florentino, deeply thoughtful, murmured: &#8220;Where are the youth who will consecrate their
+golden hours, their illusions, and their enthusiasm to the welfare of their native land? Where are the youth who will generously
+pour out their blood to wash away so much shame, so much crime, so much abomination? Pure and spotless must the victim be
+that the sacrifice may be acceptable! Where are you, youth, who will embody in yourselves the vigor of life that has left
+our veins, the purity of ideas that has been contaminated in our brains, the fire of enthusiasm that has been quenched in
+our hearts? We await you, O youth! Come, for we await you!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>Feeling his eyes moisten he withdrew his hand from that <span class="pageno">
+[362]
+</span>of the sick man, arose, and went to the window to gaze out upon the wide surface of the sea. He was drawn from his meditation
+by gentle raps at the door. It was the servant asking if he should bring a light.
+
+</p>
+<p>When the priest returned to the sick man and looked at him in the light of the lamp, motionless, his eyes closed, the hand
+that had pressed his lying open and extended along the edge of the bed, he thought for a moment that he was sleeping, but
+noticing that he was not breathing touched him gently, and then realized that he was dead. His body had already commenced
+to turn cold. The priest fell upon his knees and prayed.
+
+</p>
+<p>When he arose and contemplated the corpse, in whose features were depicted the deepest grief, the tragedy of a whole wasted
+life which he was carrying over there beyond death, the old man shuddered and murmured, &#8220;God have mercy on those who turned
+him from the straight path!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p>While the servants summoned by him fell upon their knees and prayed for the dead man, curious and bewildered as they gazed
+toward the bed, reciting requiem after requiem, Padre Florentino took from a cabinet the celebrated steel chest that contained
+Simoun&#8217;s fabulous wealth. He hesitated for a moment, then resolutely descended the stairs and made his way to the cliff where
+Isagani was accustomed to sit and gaze into the depths of the sea.
+
+</p>
+<p>Padre Florentino looked down at his feet. There below he saw the dark billows of the Pacific beating into the hollows of the
+cliff, producing sonorous thunder, at the same time that, smitten by the moonbeams, the waves and foam glittered like sparks
+of fire, like handfuls of diamonds hurled into the air by some jinnee of the abyss. He gazed about him. He was alone. The
+solitary coast was lost in the distance amid the dim cloud that the moonbeams played through, until it mingled with the horizon.
+The forest murmured unintelligible sounds.
+
+</p>
+<p>Then the old man, with an effort of his herculean arms, hurled the chest into space, throwing it toward the sea. It <span class="pageno">
+[363]
+</span>whirled over and over several times and descended rapidly in a slight curve, reflecting the moonlight on its polished surface.
+The old man saw the drops of water fly and heard a loud splash as the abyss closed over and swallowed up the treasure. He
+waited for a few moments to see if the depths would restore anything, but the wave rolled on as mysteriously as before, without
+adding a fold to its rippling surface, as though into the immensity of the sea a pebble only had been dropped.
+
+</p>
+<p>&#8220;May Nature guard you in her deep abysses among the pearls and corals of her eternal seas,&#8221; then said the priest, solemnly
+extending his hands. &#8220;When for some holy and sublime purpose man may need you, God will in his wisdom draw you from the bosom
+of the waves. Meanwhile, there you will not work woe, you will not distort justice, you will not foment avarice!&#8221;
+
+
+
+</p>
+<p></p>
+<hr class="noteseparator">
+<div class="notetext">
+<p class="notetext"><a id="d0e6749" href="#d0e6749src" class="noteref">1</a> In the original the message reads: &#8220;Espa&ntilde;ol escondido casa Padre Florentino cojera remitir&aacute; vivo muerto.&#8221; Don Tiburcio understands <span class="pageno">
+[353n]
+</span><i>cojera</i> as referring to himself; there is a play upon the Spanish words <i>cojera</i>, lameness, and <i>coger&aacute;</i>, a form of the verb <i>coger</i>, to seize or capture&#8212;<i>j</i> and <i>g</i> in these two words having the same sound, that of the English <i>h</i>.&#8212;Tr.
+</p>
+</div><span class="pageno">
+[365]
+</span><p class="div1"></p>
+<h1>GLOSSARY</h1>
+<p><b>ab&aacute;:</b> A Tagalog exclamation of wonder, surprise, etc., often used to introduce or emphasize a contradictory statement.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>alcalde:</b> Governor of a province or district, with both executive and judicial authority.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>Ayuntamiento:</b> A city corporation or council, and by extension the building in which it has its offices; specifically, in Manila, the capitol.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>balete:</b> The Philippine banyan, a tree sacred in Malay folk-lore.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>banka:</b> A dugout canoe with bamboo supports or outriggers.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>batalan:</b> The platform of split bamboo attached to a <b>nipa</b> house.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>batik&uacute;lin:</b> A variety of easily-turned wood, used in carving.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>bibinka:</b> A sweetmeat made of sugar or molasses and rice-flour, commonly sold in the small shops.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>buyera:</b> A woman who prepares and sells the <b>buyo</b>.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>buyo:</b> The masticatory prepared by wrapping a piece of areca-nut with a little shell-lime in a betel-leaf&#8212;the <b>pan</b> of British India.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>cabesang:</b> Title of a <b>cabeza de barangay;</b> given by courtesy to his wife also.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>cabeza de barangay:</b> Headman and tax-collector for a group of about fifty families, for whose &#8220;tribute&#8221; he was personally responsible.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>calesa:</b> A two-wheeled chaise with folding top.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>calle:</b> Street (Spanish).
+
+</p>
+<p><b>camisa:</b> 1. A loose, collarless shirt of transparent material worn by men outside the trousers. 2. A thin, transparent waist with
+flowing sleeves, worn by women.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>capitan:</b> &#8220;Captain,&#8221; a title used in addressing or referring to a gobernadorcillo, or a former occupant of that office.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>carambas:</b> A Spanish exclamation denoting surprise or displeasure.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>carbineer:</b> Internal-revenue guard.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>carromata:</b> A small two-wheeled vehicle with a fixed top.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>casco:</b> A flat-bottomed freight barge.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>cayman:</b> The Philippine crocodile.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>cedula:</b> Certificate of registration and receipt for poll-tax.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>chongka:</b> A child&#8217;s game played with pebbles or cowry-shells.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>cigarrera:</b> A woman working in a cigar or cigarette factory.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>Civil Guard:</b> Internal quasi-military police force of Spanish officers and native soldiers.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>cochero:</b> Carriage driver, coachman.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>cuarto:</b> A copper coin, one hundred and sixty of which were equal in value to a silver peso.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>filibuster:</b> A native of the Philippines who was accused of advocating their separation from Spain.
+<span class="pageno">
+[366]
+</span></p>
+<p><b>filibusterism:</b> See <b>filibuster</b>.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>gobernadorcillo:</b> &#8220;Petty governor,&#8221; the principal municipal official&#8212;also, in Manila, the head of a commercial guild.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>gumamela:</b> The hibiscus, common as a garden shrub in the Philippines.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>Indian:</b> The Spanish designation for the Christianized Malay of the Philippines was <b>indio</b> (Indian), a term used rather contemptuously, the name <b>Filipino</b> being generally applied in a restricted sense to the children of Spaniards born in the Islands.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>kalan:</b> The small, portable, open, clay fireplace commonly used in cooking.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>kalikut:</b> A short section of bamboo for preparing the <b>buyo</b>; a primitive betel-box.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>kamagon:</b> A tree of the ebony family, from which fine cabinet-wood is obtained. Its fruit is the <b>mabolo</b>, or date-plum.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>lanete:</b> A variety of timber used in carving.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>linintikan:</b> A Tagalog exclamation of disgust or contempt&#8212;&#8220;thunder!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p><b>Malaca&ntilde;ang:</b> The palace of the Captain-General: from the vernacular name of the place where it stands, &#8220;fishermen&#8217;s resort.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p><b>Malecon:</b> A drive along the bay shore of Manila, opposite the Walled City.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>Mestizo:</b> A person of mixed Filipino and Spanish blood; sometimes applied also to a person of mixed Filipino and Chinese blood.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>nak&uacute;:</b> A Tagalog exclamation of surprise, wonder, etc.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>narra:</b> The Philippine mahogany.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>nipa:</b> Swamp palm, with the imbricated leaves of which the roofs and sides of the common native houses are constructed.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>novena:</b> A devotion consisting of prayers recited for nine consecutive days, asking for some special favor; also, a booklet of these
+prayers.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>panguingui:</b> A complicated card-game, generally for small stakes, played with a monte deck.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>panguinguera:</b> A woman addicted to <b>panguingui</b>, this being chiefly a feminine diversion in the Philippines.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>pansit:</b> A soup made of Chinese vermicelli.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>pansiter&iacute;a:</b> A shop where <b>pansit</b> is prepared and sold.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>pa&ntilde;uelo:</b> A starched neckerchief folded stiffly over the shoulders, fastened in front and falling in a point behind: the most distinctive
+portion of the customary dress of Filipino women.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>peso:</b> A silver coin, either the Spanish peso or the Mexican dollar, about the size of an American dollar and of approximately half
+its value.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>petate:</b> Sleeping-mat woven from palm leaves.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>pi&ntilde;a:</b> Fine cloth made from pineapple-leaf fibers.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>Provincial:</b> The head of a religious order in the Philippines.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>pu&ntilde;ales:</b> &#8220;Daggers!&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p><b>querida:</b> A paramour, mistress: from the Spanish &#8220;beloved.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p><b>real:</b> One-eighth of a peso, twenty cuartos.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>sala:</b> The principal room in the more pretentious Philippine houses.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>salakot:</b> Wide hat of palm or bamboo, distinctively Filipino.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>sampaguita:</b> The Arabian jasmine: a small, white, very fragrant flower, extensively cultivated, and worn in chaplets and rosaries by women
+and girls&#8212;the typical Philippine flower.
+<span class="pageno">
+[367]
+</span></p>
+<p><b>sipa</b>: A game played with a hollow ball of plaited bamboo or rattan, by boys standing in a circle, who by kicking it with their
+heels endeavor to keep it from striking the ground.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>soltada</b>: A bout between fighting-cocks.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>&#8217;Susmariosep</b>: A common exclamation: contraction of the Spanish, <b>Jes&uacute;s, Mar&iacute;a, y Jos&eacute;</b>, the Holy Family.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>tabi</b>: The cry used by carriage drivers to warn pedestrians.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>tab&uacute;</b>: A utensil fashioned from half of a coconut shell.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>taj&uacute;</b>: A thick beverage prepared from bean-meal and syrup.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>tampipi</b>: A telescopic basket of woven palm, bamboo, or rattan.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>Tandang</b>: A title of respect for an old man: from the Tagalog term for &#8220;old.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p><b>tapis</b>: A piece of dark cloth or lace, often richly worked or embroidered, worn at the waist somewhat in the fashion of an apron;
+a distinctive portion of the native women&#8217;s attire, especially among the Tagalogs.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>tatakut</b>: The Tagalog term for &#8220;fear.&#8221;
+
+</p>
+<p><b>teniente-mayor</b>: &#8220;Senior lieutenant,&#8221; the senior member of the town council and substitute for the gobernadorcillo.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>tertiary sister</b>: A member of a lay society affiliated with a regular monastic order.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>tienda</b>: A shop or stall for the sale of merchandise.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>tikbalang</b>: An evil spirit, capable of assuming various forms, but said to appear usually as a tall black man with disproportionately
+long legs: the &#8220;bogey man&#8221; of Tagalog children.
+
+</p>
+<p><b>tulisan</b>: Outlaw, bandit. Under the old r&eacute;gime in the Philippines the <b>tulisanes</b> were those who, on account of real or fancied grievances against the authorities, or from fear of punishment for crime, or
+from an instinctive desire to return to primitive simplicity, foreswore life in the towns &#8220;under the bell,&#8221; and made their
+homes in the mountains or other remote places. Gathered in small bands with such arms as they could secure, they sustained
+themselves by highway robbery and the levying of black-mail from the country folk.
+
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
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+</pre>
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+</body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Reign of Greed, by Jose Rizal
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Reign of Greed
+       Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo'
+
+Author: Jose Rizal
+
+Translator: Charles Derbyshire
+
+Release Date: October 10, 2005 [EBook #10676]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REIGN OF GREED ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jeroen Hellingman and the distributed proofreaders team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                           The Reign of Greed
+
+
+
+ A Complete English Version of _El Filibusterismo_ from the Spanish of
+                               Jose Rizal
+
+                                   By
+
+                           Charles Derbyshire
+
+
+
+                                 Manila
+                      Philippine Education Company
+                                  1912
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Copyright, 1912, by Philippine Education Company.
+Entered at Stationers' Hall.
+Registrado en las Islas Filipinas.
+_All rights reserved_.
+
+
+
+
+
+TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION
+
+
+El Filibusterismo, the second of Jose Rizal's novels of Philippine
+life, is a story of the last days of the Spanish regime in the
+Philippines. Under the name of _The Reign of Greed_ it is for the
+first time translated into English. Written some four or five years
+after _Noli Me Tangere_, the book represents Rizal's more mature
+judgment on political and social conditions in the islands, and in
+its graver and less hopeful tone reflects the disappointments and
+discouragements which he had encountered in his efforts to lead the
+way to reform. Rizal's dedication to the first edition is of special
+interest, as the writing of it was one of the grounds of accusation
+against him when he was condemned to death in 1896. It reads:
+
+
+    "To the memory of the priests, Don Mariano Gomez (85 years
+    old), Don Jose Burgos (30 years old), and Don Jacinto Zamora
+    (35 years old). Executed in Bagumbayan Field on the 28th of
+    February, 1872.
+
+    "The Church, by refusing to degrade you, has placed in doubt
+    the crime that has been imputed to you; the Government, by
+    surrounding your trials with mystery and shadows, causes the
+    belief that there was some error, committed in fatal moments;
+    and all the Philippines, by worshiping your memory and calling
+    you martyrs, in no sense recognizes your culpability. In so
+    far, therefore, as your complicity in the Cavite mutiny is not
+    clearly proved, as you may or may not have been patriots, and
+    as you may or may not have cherished sentiments for justice
+    and for liberty, I have the right to dedicate my work to
+    you as victims of the evil which I undertake to combat. And
+    while we await expectantly upon Spain some day to restore
+    your good name and cease to be answerable for your death,
+    let these pages serve as a tardy wreath of dried leaves over
+    your unknown tombs, and let it be understood that every one
+    who without clear proofs attacks your memory stains his hands
+    in your blood!
+
+        J. Rizal."
+
+
+A brief recapitulation of the story in _Noli Me Tangere_ (The Social
+Cancer) is essential to an understanding of such plot as there is
+in the present work, which the author called a "continuation" of the
+first story.
+
+Juan Crisostomo Ibarra is a young Filipino, who, after studying
+for seven years in Europe, returns to his native land to find that
+his father, a wealthy landowner, has died in prison as the result
+of a quarrel with the parish curate, a Franciscan friar named Padre
+Damaso. Ibarra is engaged to a beautiful and accomplished girl, Maria
+Clara, the supposed daughter and only child of the rich Don Santiago
+de los Santos, commonly known as "Capitan Tiago," a typical Filipino
+cacique, the predominant character fostered by the friar regime.
+
+Ibarra resolves to forego all quarrels and to work for the betterment
+of his people. To show his good intentions, he seeks to establish,
+at his own expense, a public school in his native town. He meets with
+ostensible support from all, especially Padre Damaso's successor,
+a young and gloomy Franciscan named Padre Salvi, for whom Maria Clara
+confesses to an instinctive dread.
+
+At the laying of the corner-stone for the new schoolhouse a
+suspicious accident, apparently aimed at Ibarra's life, occurs, but
+the festivities proceed until the dinner, where Ibarra is grossly and
+wantonly insulted over the memory of his father by Fray Damaso. The
+young man loses control of himself and is about to kill the friar,
+who is saved by the intervention of Maria Clara.
+
+Ibarra is excommunicated, and Capitan Tiago, through his fear of the
+friars, is forced to break the engagement and agree to the marriage of
+Maria Clara with a young and inoffensive Spaniard provided by Padre
+Damaso. Obedient to her reputed father's command and influenced
+by her mysterious dread of Padre Salvi, Maria Clara consents to
+this arrangement, but becomes seriously ill, only to be saved by
+medicines sent secretly by Ibarra and clandestinely administered by
+a girl friend.
+
+Ibarra succeeds in having the excommunication removed, but before he
+can explain matters an uprising against the Civil Guard is secretly
+brought about through agents of Padre Salvi, and the leadership is
+ascribed to Ibarra to ruin him. He is warned by a mysterious friend,
+an outlaw called Elias, whose life he had accidentally saved; but
+desiring first to see Maria Clara, he refuses to make his escape,
+and when the outbreak occurs he is arrested as the instigator of it
+and thrown into prison in Manila.
+
+On the evening when Capitan Tiago gives a ball in his Manila house to
+celebrate his supposed daughter's engagement, Ibarra makes his escape
+from prison and succeeds in seeing Maria Clara alone. He begins to
+reproach her because it is a letter written to her before he went to
+Europe which forms the basis of the charge against him, but she clears
+herself of treachery to him. The letter had been secured from her by
+false representations and in exchange for two others written by her
+mother just before her birth, which prove that Padre Damaso is her
+real father. These letters had been accidentally discovered in the
+convento by Padre Salvi, who made use of them to intimidate the girl
+and get possession of Ibarra's letter, from which he forged others
+to incriminate the young man. She tells him that she will marry the
+young Spaniard, sacrificing herself thus to save her mother's name
+and Capitan Tiago's honor and to prevent a public scandal, but that
+she will always remain true to him.
+
+Ibarra's escape had been effected by Elias, who conveys him in a
+banka up the Pasig to the Lake, where they are so closely beset by
+the Civil Guard that Elias leaps into the water and draws the pursuers
+away from the boat, in which Ibarra lies concealed.
+
+On Christmas Eve, at the tomb of the Ibarras in a gloomy wood,
+Elias appears, wounded and dying, to find there a boy named Basilio
+beside the corpse of his mother, a poor woman who had been driven
+to insanity by her husband's neglect and abuses on the part of the
+Civil Guard, her younger son having disappeared some time before in
+the convento, where he was a sacristan. Basilio, who is ignorant of
+Elias's identity, helps him to build a funeral pyre, on which his
+corpse and the madwoman's are to be burned.
+
+Upon learning of the reported death of Ibarra in the chase on the Lake,
+Maria Clara becomes disconsolate and begs her supposed godfather,
+Fray Damaso, to put her in a nunnery. Unconscious of her knowledge of
+their true relationship, the friar breaks down and confesses that all
+the trouble he has stirred up with the Ibarras has been to prevent her
+from marrying a native, which would condemn her and her children to
+the oppressed and enslaved class. He finally yields to her entreaties
+and she enters the nunnery of St. Clara, to which Padre Salvi is soon
+assigned in a ministerial capacity.
+
+
+        O masters, lords, and rulers in all lands,
+        Is this the handiwork you give to God,
+        This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?
+        How will you ever straighten up this shape-;
+        Touch it again with immortality;
+        Give back the upward looking and the light;
+        Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
+        Make right the immemorial infamies,
+        Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?
+
+        O masters, lords, and rulers in all lands,
+        How will the future reckon with this man?
+        How answer his brute question in that hour
+        When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
+        How will it be with kingdoms and with kings--
+        With those who shaped him to the thing he is--
+        When this dumb terror shall reply to God,
+        After the silence of the centuries?
+
+
+
+Edwin Markham
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+
+    I.          On the Upper Deck
+    II.         On the Lower Deck
+    III.        Legends
+    IV.         Cabesang Tales
+    V.          A Cochero's Christmas Eve
+    VI.         Basilio
+    VII.        Simoun
+    VIII.       Merry Christmas
+    IX.         Pilates
+    X.          Wealth and Want
+    XI.         Los Banos
+    XII.        Placido Penitente
+    XIII.       The Class in Physics
+    XIV.        In the House of the Students
+    XV.         Senor Pasta
+    XVI.        The Tribulations of a Chinese
+    XVII.       The Quiapo Pair
+    XVIII.      Legerdemain
+    XIX.        The Fuse
+    XX.         The Arbiter
+    XXI.        Manila Types
+    XXII.       The Performance
+    XXIII.      A Corpse
+    XXIV.       Dreams
+    XXV.        Smiles and Tears
+    XXVI.       Pasquinades
+    XXVII.      The Friar and the Filipino
+    XXVIII.     Tatakut
+    XXIX.       Exit Capitan Tiago
+    XXX.        Juli
+    XXXI.       The High Official
+    XXXII.      Effect of the Pasquinades
+    XXXIII.     La Ultima Razon
+    XXXIV.      The Wedding
+    XXXV.       The Fiesta
+    XXXVI.      Ben-Zayb's Afflictions
+    XXXVII.     The Mystery
+    XXXVIII.    Fatality
+    XXXIX.      Conclusion
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+ON THE UPPER DECK
+
+
+    Sic itur ad astra.
+
+
+One morning in December the steamer _Tabo_ was laboriously ascending
+the tortuous course of the Pasig, carrying a large crowd of passengers
+toward the province of La Laguna. She was a heavily built steamer,
+almost round, like the _tabu_ from which she derived her name,
+quite dirty in spite of her pretensions to whiteness, majestic and
+grave from her leisurely motion. Altogether, she was held in great
+affection in that region, perhaps from her Tagalog name, or from the
+fact that she bore the characteristic impress of things in the country,
+representing something like a triumph over progress, a steamer that was
+not a steamer at all, an organism, stolid, imperfect yet unimpeachable,
+which, when it wished to pose as being rankly progressive, proudly
+contented itself with putting on a fresh coat of paint. Indeed, the
+happy steamer was genuinely Filipino! If a person were only reasonably
+considerate, she might even have been taken for the Ship of State,
+constructed, as she had been, under the inspection of _Reverendos_
+and _Ilustrisimos_....
+
+Bathed in the sunlight of a morning that made the waters of the river
+sparkle and the breezes rustle in the bending bamboo on its banks,
+there she goes with her white silhouette throwing out great clouds
+of smoke--the Ship of State, so the joke runs, also has the vice of
+smoking! The whistle shrieks at every moment, hoarse and commanding
+like a tyrant who would rule by shouting, so that no one on board
+can hear his own thoughts. She menaces everything she meets: now she
+looks as though she would grind to bits the _salambaw_, insecure
+fishing apparatus which in their movements resemble skeletons of
+giants saluting an antediluvian tortoise; now she speeds straight
+toward the clumps of bamboo or against the amphibian structures,
+_karihan_, or wayside lunch-stands, which, amid _gumamelas_ and other
+flowers, look like indecisive bathers who with their feet already in
+the water cannot bring themselves to make the final plunge; at times,
+following a sort of channel marked out in the river by tree-trunks,
+she moves along with a satisfied air, except when a sudden shock
+disturbs the passengers and throws them off their balance, all the
+result of a collision with a sand-bar which no one dreamed was there.
+
+Moreover, if the comparison with the Ship of State is not yet complete,
+note the arrangement of the passengers. On the lower deck appear brown
+faces and black heads, types of Indians, [1] Chinese, and mestizos,
+wedged in between bales of merchandise and boxes, while there on the
+upper deck, beneath an awning that protects them from the sun, are
+seated in comfortable chairs a few passengers dressed in the fashion of
+Europeans, friars, and government clerks, each with his _puro_ cigar,
+and gazing at the landscape apparently without heeding the efforts
+of the captain and the sailors to overcome the obstacles in the river.
+
+The captain was a man of kindly aspect, well along in years, an old
+sailor who in his youth had plunged into far vaster seas, but who now
+in his age had to exercise much greater attention, care, and vigilance
+to avoid dangers of a trivial character. And they were the same for
+each day: the same sand-bars, the same hulk of unwieldy steamer wedged
+into the same curves, like a corpulent dame in a jammed throng. So,
+at each moment, the good man had to stop, to back up, to go forward at
+half speed, sending--now to port, now to starboard--the five sailors
+equipped with long bamboo poles to give force to the turn the rudder
+had suggested. He was like a veteran who, after leading men through
+hazardous campaigns, had in his age become the tutor of a capricious,
+disobedient, and lazy boy.
+
+Dona Victorina, the only lady seated in the European group, could say
+whether the _Tabo_ was not lazy, disobedient, and capricious--Dona
+Victorina, who, nervous as ever, was hurling invectives against the
+cascos, bankas, rafts of coconuts, the Indians paddling about, and
+even the washerwomen and bathers, who fretted her with their mirth and
+chatter. Yes, the _Tabo_ would move along very well if there were no
+Indians in the river, no Indians in the country, yes, if there were
+not a single Indian in the world--regardless of the fact that the
+helmsmen were Indians, the sailors Indians, Indians the engineers,
+Indians ninety-nine per cent, of the passengers, and she herself also
+an Indian if the rouge were scratched off and her pretentious gown
+removed. That morning Dona Victorina was more irritated than usual
+because the members of the group took very little notice of her,
+reason for which was not lacking; for just consider--there could be
+found three friars, convinced that the world would move backwards the
+very day they should take a single step to the right; an indefatigable
+Don Custodio who was sleeping peacefully, satisfied with his projects;
+a prolific writer like Ben-Zayb (anagram of Ibanez), who believed that
+the people of Manila thought because he, Ben-Zayb, was a thinker;
+a canon like Padre Irene, who added luster to the clergy with his
+rubicund face, carefully shaven, from which towered a beautiful Jewish
+nose, and his silken cassock of neat cut and small buttons; and a
+wealthy jeweler like Simoun, who was reputed to be the adviser and
+inspirer of all the acts of his Excellency, the Captain-General--just
+consider the presence there of these pillars _sine quibus non_ of the
+country, seated there in agreeable discourse, showing little sympathy
+for a renegade Filipina who dyed her hair red! Now wasn't this enough
+to exhaust the patience of a female Job--a sobriquet Dona Victorina
+always applied to herself when put out with any one!
+
+The ill-humor of the senora increased every time the captain shouted
+"Port," "Starboard" to the sailors, who then hastily seized their
+poles and thrust them against the banks, thus with the strength of
+their legs and shoulders preventing the steamer from shoving its hull
+ashore at that particular point. Seen under these circumstances the
+Ship of State might be said to have been converted from a tortoise
+into a crab every time any danger threatened.
+
+"But, captain, why don't your stupid steersmen go in that
+direction?" asked the lady with great indignation.
+
+"Because it's very shallow in the other, senora," answered the captain,
+deliberately, slowly winking one eye, a little habit which he had
+cultivated as if to say to his words on their way out, "Slowly,
+slowly!"
+
+"Half speed! Botheration, half speed!" protested Dona Victorina
+disdainfully. "Why not full?"
+
+"Because we should then be traveling over those ricefields, senora,"
+replied the imperturbable captain, pursing his lips to indicate the
+cultivated fields and indulging in two circumspect winks.
+
+This Dona Victorina was well known in the country for her caprices and
+extravagances. She was often seen in society, where she was tolerated
+whenever she appeared in the company of her niece, Paulita Gomez,
+a very beautiful and wealthy orphan, to whom she was a kind of
+guardian. At a rather advanced age she had married a poor wretch
+named Don Tiburcio de Espadana, and at the time we now see her,
+carried upon herself fifteen years of wedded life, false frizzes, and a
+half-European costume--for her whole ambition had been to Europeanize
+herself, with the result that from the ill-omened day of her wedding
+she had gradually, thanks to her criminal attempts, succeeded in
+so transforming herself that at the present time Quatrefages and
+Virchow together could not have told where to classify her among the
+known races.
+
+Her husband, who had borne all her impositions with the resignation of
+a fakir through so many years of married life, at last on one luckless
+day had had his bad half-hour and administered to her a superb whack
+with his crutch. The surprise of Madam Job at such an inconsistency
+of character made her insensible to the immediate effects, and only
+after she had recovered from her astonishment and her husband had
+fled did she take notice of the pain, then remaining in bed for
+several days, to the great delight of Paulita, who was very fond
+of joking and laughing at her aunt. As for her husband, horrified
+at the impiety of what appeared to him to be a terrific parricide,
+he took to flight, pursued by the matrimonial furies (two curs and a
+parrot), with all the speed his lameness permitted, climbed into the
+first carriage he encountered, jumped into the first banka he saw on
+the river, and, a Philippine Ulysses, began to wander from town to
+town, from province to province, from island to island, pursued and
+persecuted by his bespectacled Calypso, who bored every one that had
+the misfortune to travel in her company. She had received a report of
+his being in the province of La Laguna, concealed in one of the towns,
+so thither she was bound to seduce him back with her dyed frizzes.
+
+Her fellow travelers had taken measures of defense by keeping up
+among themselves a lively conversation on any topic whatsoever. At
+that moment the windings and turnings of the river led them to talk
+about straightening the channel and, as a matter of course, about the
+port works. Ben-Zayb, the journalist with the countenance of a friar,
+was disputing with a young friar who in turn had the countenance of an
+artilleryman. Both were shouting, gesticulating, waving their arms,
+spreading out their hands, stamping their feet, talking of levels,
+fish-corrals, the San Mateo River, [2] of cascos, of Indians, and so
+on, to the great satisfaction of their listeners and the undisguised
+disgust of an elderly Franciscan, remarkably thin and withered,
+and a handsome Dominican about whose lips flitted constantly a
+scornful smile.
+
+The thin Franciscan, understanding the Dominican's smile, decided
+to intervene and stop the argument. He was undoubtedly respected,
+for with a wave of his hand he cut short the speech of both at the
+moment when the friar-artilleryman was talking about experience and
+the journalist-friar about scientists.
+
+"Scientists, Ben-Zayb--do you know what they are?" asked the Franciscan
+in a hollow voice, scarcely stirring in his seat and making only a
+faint gesture with his skinny hand. "Here you have in the province
+a bridge, constructed by a brother of ours, which was not completed
+because the scientists, relying on their theories, condemned it as
+weak and scarcely safe--yet look, it is the bridge that has withstood
+all the floods and earthquakes!" [3]
+
+"That's it, _punales,_ that very thing, that was exactly what I was
+going to say!" exclaimed the friar-artilleryman, thumping his fists
+down on the arms of his bamboo chair. "That's it, that bridge and
+the scientists! That was just what I was going to mention, Padre
+Salvi--_punales!_"
+
+Ben-Zayb remained silent, half smiling, either out of respect or
+because he really did not know what to reply, and yet his was the only
+thinking head in the Philippines! Padre Irene nodded his approval as
+he rubbed his long nose.
+
+Padre Salvi, the thin and withered cleric, appeared to be satisfied
+with such submissiveness and went on in the midst of the silence:
+"But this does not mean that you may not be as near right as Padre
+Camorra" (the friar-artilleryman). "The trouble is in the lake--"
+
+"The fact is there isn't a single decent lake in this country,"
+interrupted Dona Victorina, highly indignant, and getting ready for
+a return to the assault upon the citadel.
+
+The besieged gazed at one another in terror, but with the promptitude
+of a general, the jeweler Simoun rushed in to the rescue. "The remedy
+is very simple," he said in a strange accent, a mixture of English
+and South American. "And I really don't understand why it hasn't
+occurred to somebody."
+
+All turned to give him careful attention, even the Dominican. The
+jeweler was a tall, meager, nervous man, very dark, dressed in the
+English fashion and wearing a pith helmet. Remarkable about him was
+his long white hair contrasted with a sparse black beard, indicating a
+mestizo origin. To avoid the glare of the sun he wore constantly a pair
+of enormous blue goggles, which completely hid his eyes and a portion
+of his cheeks, thus giving him the aspect of a blind or weak-sighted
+person. He was standing with his legs apart as if to maintain his
+balance, with his hands thrust into the pockets of his coat.
+
+"The remedy is very simple," he repeated, "and wouldn't cost a cuarto."
+
+The attention now redoubled, for it was whispered in Manila that this
+man controlled the Captain-General, and all saw the remedy in process
+of execution. Even Don Custodio himself turned to listen.
+
+"Dig a canal straight from the source to the mouth of the river,
+passing through Manila; that is, make a new river-channel and fill
+up the old Pasig. That would save land, shorten communication, and
+prevent the formation of sandbars."
+
+The project left all his hearers astounded, accustomed as they were
+to palliative measures.
+
+"It's a Yankee plan!" observed Ben-Zayb, to ingratiate himself with
+Simoun, who had spent a long time in North America.
+
+All considered the plan wonderful and so indicated by the movements
+of their heads. Only Don Custodio, the liberal Don Custodio, owing to
+his independent position and his high offices, thought it his duty
+to attack a project that did not emanate from himself--that was a
+usurpation! He coughed, stroked the ends of his mustache, and with
+a voice as important as though he were at a formal session of the
+Ayuntamiento, said, "Excuse me, Senor Simoun, my respected friend,
+if I should say that I am not of your opinion. It would cost a great
+deal of money and might perhaps destroy some towns."
+
+"Then destroy them!" rejoined Simoun coldly.
+
+"And the money to pay the laborers?"
+
+"Don't pay them! Use the prisoners and convicts!"
+
+"But there aren't enough, Senor Simoun!"
+
+"Then, if there aren't enough, let all the villagers, the old men,
+the youths, the boys, work. Instead of the fifteen days of obligatory
+service, let them work three, four, five months for the State, with the
+additional obligation that each one provide his own food and tools."
+
+The startled Don Custodio turned his head to see if there was any
+Indian within ear-shot, but fortunately those nearby were rustics,
+and the two helmsmen seemed to be very much occupied with the windings
+of the river.
+
+"But, Senor Simoun--"
+
+"Don't fool yourself, Don Custodio," continued Simoun dryly, "only in
+this way are great enterprises carried out with small means. Thus
+were constructed the Pyramids, Lake Moeris, and the Colosseum
+in Rome. Entire provinces came in from the desert, bringing their
+tubers to feed on. Old men, youths, and boys labored in transporting
+stones, hewing them, and carrying them on their shoulders under
+the direction of the official lash, and afterwards, the survivors
+returned to their homes or perished in the sands of the desert. Then
+came other provinces, then others, succeeding one another in the work
+during years. Thus the task was finished, and now we admire them,
+we travel, we go to Egypt and to Home, we extol the Pharaohs and the
+Antonines. Don't fool yourself--the dead remain dead, and might only
+is considered right by posterity."
+
+"But, Senor Simoun, such measures might provoke uprisings," objected
+Don Custodio, rather uneasy over the turn the affair had taken.
+
+"Uprisings, ha, ha! Did the Egyptian people ever rebel, I wonder? Did
+the Jewish prisoners rebel against the pious Titus? Man, I thought
+you were better informed in history!"
+
+Clearly Simoun was either very presumptuous or disregarded
+conventionalities! To say to Don Custodio's face that he did not know
+history! It was enough to make any one lose his temper! So it seemed,
+for Don Custodio forgot himself and retorted, "But the fact is that
+you're not among Egyptians or Jews!"
+
+"And these people have rebelled more than once," added the Dominican,
+somewhat timidly. "In the times when they were forced to transport
+heavy timbers for the construction of ships, if it hadn't been for
+the clerics--"
+
+"Those times are far away," answered Simoun, with a laugh even drier
+than usual. "These islands will never again rebel, no matter how much
+work and taxes they have. Haven't you lauded to me, Padre Salvi,"
+he added, turning to the Franciscan, "the house and hospital at Los
+Banos, where his Excellency is at present?"
+
+Padre Salvi gave a nod and looked up, evading the question.
+
+"Well, didn't you tell me that both buildings were constructed
+by forcing the people to work on them under the whip of a
+lay-brother? Perhaps that wonderful bridge was built in the same
+way. Now tell me, did these people rebel?"
+
+"The fact is--they have rebelled before," replied the Dominican,
+"and _ab actu ad posse valet illatio!_"
+
+"No, no, nothing of the kind," continued Simoun, starting down a
+hatchway to the cabin. "What's said, is said! And you, Padre Sibyla,
+don't talk either Latin or nonsense. What are you friars good for if
+the people can rebel?"
+
+Taking no notice of the replies and protests, Simoun descended the
+small companionway that led below, repeating disdainfully, "Bosh,
+bosh!"
+
+Padre Sibyla turned pale; this was the first time that he, Vice-Rector
+of the University, had ever been credited with nonsense. Don Custodio
+turned green; at no meeting in which he had ever found himself had
+he encountered such an adversary.
+
+"An American mulatto!" he fumed.
+
+"A British Indian," observed Ben-Zayb in a low tone.
+
+"An American, I tell you, and shouldn't I know?" retorted Don Custodio
+in ill-humor. "His Excellency has told me so. He's a jeweler whom
+the latter knew in Havana, and, as I suspect, the one who got him
+advancement by lending him money. So to repay him he has had him come
+here to let him have a chance and increase his fortune by selling
+diamonds--imitations, who knows? And he so ungrateful, that, after
+getting money from the Indians, he wishes--huh!" The sentence was
+concluded by a significant wave of the hand.
+
+No one dared to join in this diatribe. Don Custodio could discredit
+himself with his Excellency, if he wished, but neither Ben-Zayb,
+nor Padre Irene, nor Padre Salvi, nor the offended Padre Sibyla had
+any confidence in the discretion of the others.
+
+"The fact is that this man, being an American, thinks no doubt
+that we are dealing with the redskins. To talk of these matters on
+a steamer! Compel, force the people! And he's the very person who
+advised the expedition to the Carolines and the campaign in Mindanao,
+which is going to bring us to disgraceful ruin. He's the one who
+has offered to superintend the building of the cruiser, and I say,
+what does a jeweler, no matter how rich and learned he may be, know
+about naval construction?"
+
+All this was spoken by Don Custodio in a guttural tone to his neighbor
+Ben-Zayb, while he gesticulated, shrugged his shoulders, and from time
+to time with his looks consulted the others, who were nodding their
+heads ambiguously. The Canon Irene indulged in a rather equivocal
+smile, which he half hid with his hand as he rubbed his nose.
+
+"I tell you, Ben-Zayb," continued Don Custodio, slapping the journalist
+on the arm, "all the trouble comes from not consulting the old-timers
+here. A project in fine words, and especially with a big appropriation,
+with an appropriation in round numbers, dazzles, meets with acceptance
+at once, for this!" Here, in further explanation, he rubbed the tip
+of his thumb against his middle and forefinger. [4]
+
+"There's something in that, there's something in that," Ben-Zayb
+thought it his duty to remark, since in his capacity of journalist
+he had to be informed about everything.
+
+"Now look here, before the port works I presented a project, original,
+simple, useful, economical, and practicable, for clearing away the bar
+in the lake, and it hasn't been accepted because there wasn't any of
+that in it." He repeated the movement of his fingers, shrugged his
+shoulders, and gazed at the others as though to say, "Have you ever
+heard of such a misfortune?"
+
+"May we know what it was?" asked several, drawing nearer and giving
+him their attention. The projects of Don Custodio were as renowned
+as quacks' specifics.
+
+Don Custodio was on the point of refusing to explain it from
+resentment at not having found any supporters in his diatribe against
+Simoun. "When there's no danger, you want me to talk, eh? And when
+there is, you keep quiet!" he was going to say, but that would cause
+the loss of a good opportunity, and his project, now that it could
+not be carried out, might at least be known and admired.
+
+After blowing out two or three puffs of smoke, coughing, and spitting
+through a scupper, he slapped Ben-Zayb on the thigh and asked,
+"You've seen ducks?"
+
+"I rather think so--we've hunted them on the lake," answered the
+surprised journalist.
+
+"No, I'm not talking about wild ducks, I'm talking of the domestic
+ones, of those that are raised in Pateros and Pasig. Do you know what
+they feed on?"
+
+Ben-Zayb, the only thinking head, did not know--he was not engaged
+in that business.
+
+"On snails, man, on snails!" exclaimed Padre Camorra. "One doesn't
+have to be an Indian to know that; it's sufficient to have eyes!"
+
+"Exactly so, on snails!" repeated Don Custodio, flourishing his
+forefinger. "And do you know where they get them?"
+
+Again the thinking head did not know.
+
+"Well, if you had been in the country as many years as I have, you
+would know that they fish them out of the bar itself, where they
+abound, mixed with the sand."
+
+"Then your project?"
+
+"Well, I'm coming to that. My idea was to compel all the towns round
+about, near the bar, to raise ducks, and you'll see how they, all
+by themselves, will deepen the channel by fishing for the snails--no
+more and no less, no more and no less!"
+
+Here Don Custodio extended his arms and gazed triumphantly at the
+stupefaction of his hearers--to none of them had occurred such an
+original idea.
+
+"Will you allow me to write an article about that?" asked Ben-Zayb. "In
+this country there is so little thinking done--"
+
+"But, Don Custodio," exclaimed Dona Victorina with smirks and grimaces,
+"if everybody takes to raising ducks the _balot_ [5] eggs will become
+abundant. Ugh, how nasty! Rather, let the bar close up entirely!"
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+ON THE LOWER DECK
+
+
+There, below, other scenes were being enacted. Seated on benches
+or small wooden stools among valises, boxes, and baskets, a few
+feet from the engines, in the heat of the boilers, amid the human
+smells and the pestilential odor of oil, were to be seen the great
+majority of the passengers. Some were silently gazing at the changing
+scenes along the banks, others were playing cards or conversing in the
+midst of the scraping of shovels, the roar of the engine, the hiss of
+escaping steam, the swash of disturbed waters, and the shrieks of the
+whistle. In one corner, heaped up like corpses, slept, or tried to
+sleep, a number of Chinese pedlers, seasick, pale, frothing through
+half-opened lips, and bathed in their copious perspiration. Only
+a few youths, students for the most part, easily recognizable from
+their white garments and their confident bearing, made bold to move
+about from stern to bow, leaping over baskets and boxes, happy in
+the prospect of the approaching vacation. Now they commented on the
+movements of the engines, endeavoring to recall forgotten notions of
+physics, now they surrounded the young schoolgirl or the red-lipped
+_buyera_ with her collar of _sampaguitas,_ whispering into their ears
+words that made them smile and cover their faces with their fans.
+
+Nevertheless, two of them, instead of engaging in these fleeting
+gallantries, stood in the bow talking with a man, advanced in years,
+but still vigorous and erect. Both these youths seemed to be well
+known and respected, to judge from the deference shown them by their
+fellow passengers. The elder, who was dressed in complete black, was
+the medical student, Basilio, famous for his successful cures and
+extraordinary treatments, while the other, taller and more robust,
+although much younger, was Isagani, one of the poets, or at least
+rimesters, who that year came from the Ateneo, [6] a curious character,
+ordinarily quite taciturn and uncommunicative. The man talking with
+them was the rich Capitan Basilio, who was returning from a business
+trip to Manila.
+
+"Capitan Tiago is getting along about the same as usual, yes, sir,"
+said the student Basilio, shaking his head. "He won't submit to any
+treatment. At the advice of _a certain person_ he is sending me to San
+Diego under the pretext of looking after his property, but in reality
+so that he may be left to smoke his opium with complete liberty."
+
+When the student said _a certain person_, he really meant Padre Irene,
+a great friend and adviser of Capitan Tiago in his last days.
+
+"Opium is one of the plagues of modern times," replied the capitan
+with the disdain and indignation of a Roman senator. "The ancients knew
+about it but never abused it. While the addiction to classical studies
+lasted--mark this well, young men--opium was used solely as a medicine;
+and besides, tell me who smoke it the most?--Chinamen, Chinamen who
+don't understand a word of Latin! Ah, if Capitan Tiago had only devoted
+himself to Cicero--" Here the most classical disgust painted itself
+on his carefully-shaven Epicurean face. Isagani regarded him with
+attention: that gentleman was suffering from nostalgia for antiquity.
+
+"But to get back to this academy of Castilian," Capitan Basilio
+continued, "I assure you, gentlemen, that you won't materialize it."
+
+"Yes, sir, from day to day we're expecting the permit," replied
+Isagani. "Padre Irene, whom you may have noticed above, and to whom
+we've presented a team of bays, has promised it to us. He's on his
+way now to confer with the General."
+
+"That doesn't matter. Padre Sibyla is opposed to it."
+
+"Let him oppose it! That's why he's here on the steamer, in order
+to--at Los Banos before the General."
+
+And the student Basilio filled out his meaning by going through the
+pantomime of striking his fists together.
+
+"That's understood," observed Capitan Basilio, smiling. "But even
+though you get the permit, where'll you get the funds?"
+
+"We have them, sir. Each student has contributed a real."
+
+"But what about the professors?"
+
+"We have them: half Filipinos and half Peninsulars." [7]
+
+"And the house?"
+
+"Makaraig, the wealthy Makaraig, has offered one of his."
+
+Capitan Basilio had to give in; these young men had everything
+arranged.
+
+"For the rest," he said with a shrug of his shoulders, "it's not
+altogether bad, it's not a bad idea, and now that you can't know
+Latin at least you may know Castilian. Here you have another instance,
+namesake, of how we are going backwards. In our times we learned Latin
+because our books were in Latin; now you study Latin a little but
+have no Latin books. On the other hand, your books are in Castilian
+and that language is not taught--_aetas parentum pejor avis tulit
+nos nequiores!_ as Horace said." With this quotation he moved away
+majestically, like a Roman emperor.
+
+The youths smiled at each other. "These men of the past," remarked
+Isagani, "find obstacles for everything. Propose a thing to them and
+instead of seeing its advantages they only fix their attention on
+the difficulties. They want everything to come smooth and round as
+a billiard ball."
+
+"He's right at home with your uncle," observed Basilio.
+
+"They talk of past times. But listen--speaking of uncles, what does
+yours say about Paulita?"
+
+Isagani blushed. "He preached me a sermon about the choosing of
+a wife. I answered him that there wasn't in Manila another like
+her--beautiful, well-bred, an orphan--"
+
+"Very wealthy, elegant, charming, with no defect other than a
+ridiculous aunt," added Basilio, at which both smiled.
+
+"In regard to the aunt, do you know that she has charged me to look
+for her husband?"
+
+"Dona Victorina? And you've promised, in order to keep your
+sweetheart."
+
+"Naturally! But the fact is that her husband is actually hidden--in
+my uncle's house!"
+
+Both burst into a laugh at this, while Isagani continued: "That's
+why my uncle, being a conscientious man, won't go on the upper deck,
+fearful that Dona Victorina will ask him about Don Tiburcio. Just
+imagine, when Dona Victorina learned that I was a steerage passenger
+she gazed at me with a disdain that--"
+
+At that moment Simoun came down and, catching sight of the two young
+men, greeted Basilio in a patronizing tone: "Hello, Don Basilio,
+you're off for the vacation? Is the gentleman a townsman of yours?"
+
+Basilio introduced Isagani with the remark that he was not a townsman,
+but that their homes were not very far apart. Isagani lived on the
+seashore of the opposite coast. Simoun examined him with such marked
+attention that he was annoyed, turned squarely around, and faced the
+jeweler with a provoking stare.
+
+"Well, what is the province like?" the latter asked, turning again
+to Basilio.
+
+"Why, aren't you familiar with it?"
+
+"How the devil am I to know it when I've never set foot in it? I've
+been told that it's very poor and doesn't buy jewels."
+
+"We don't buy jewels, because we don't need them," rejoined Isagani
+dryly, piqued in his provincial pride.
+
+A smile played over Simoun's pallid lips. "Don't be offended, young
+man," he replied. "I had no bad intentions, but as I've been assured
+that nearly all the money is in the hands of the native priests, I
+said to myself: the friars are dying for curacies and the Franciscans
+are satisfied with the poorest, so when they give them up to the
+native priests the truth must be that the king's profile is unknown
+there. But enough of that! Come and have a beer with me and we'll
+drink to the prosperity of your province."
+
+The youths thanked him, but declined the offer.
+
+"You do wrong," Simoun said to them, visibly taken aback. "Beer is a
+good thing, and I heard Padre Camorra say this morning that the lack
+of energy noticeable in this country is due to the great amount of
+water the inhabitants drink."
+
+Isagani was almost as tall as the jeweler, and at this he drew
+himself up.
+
+"Then tell Padre Camorra," Basilio hastened to say, while he nudged
+Isagani slyly, "tell him that if he would drink water instead of wine
+or beer, perhaps we might all be the gainers and he would not give
+rise to so much talk."
+
+"And tell him, also," added Isagani, paying no attention to his
+friend's nudges, "that water is very mild and can be drunk, but that
+it drowns out the wine and beer and puts out the fire, that heated
+it becomes steam, and that ruffled it is the ocean, that it once
+destroyed mankind and made the earth tremble to its foundations!" [8]
+
+Simoun raised his head. Although his looks could not be read
+through the blue goggles, on the rest of his face surprise might
+be seen. "Rather a good answer," he said. "But I fear that he might
+get facetious and ask me when the water will be converted into steam
+and when into an ocean. Padre Camorra is rather incredulous and is
+a great wag."
+
+"When the fire heats it, when the rivulets that are now scattered
+through the steep valleys, forced by fatality, rush together in the
+abyss that men are digging," replied Isagani.
+
+"No, Senor Simoun," interposed Basilio, changing to a jesting tone,
+"rather keep in mind the verses of my friend Isagani himself:
+
+
+    'Fire you, you say, and water we,
+    Then as you wish, so let it be;
+    But let us live in peace and right,
+    Nor shall the fire e'er see us fight;
+    So joined by wisdom's glowing flame,
+    That without anger, hate, or blame,
+    We form the steam, the fifth element,
+    Progress and light, life and movement.'"
+
+
+"Utopia, Utopia!" responded Simoun dryly. "The engine is about to
+meet--in the meantime, I'll drink my beer." So, without any word of
+excuse, he left the two friends.
+
+"But what's the matter with you today that you're so
+quarrelsome?" asked Basilio.
+
+"Nothing. I don't know why, but that man fills me with horror,
+fear almost."
+
+"I was nudging you with my elbow. Don't you know that he's called
+the Brown Cardinal?"
+
+"The Brown Cardinal?"
+
+"Or Black Eminence, as you wish."
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+"Richelieu had a Capuchin adviser who was called the Gray Eminence;
+well, that's what this man is to the General."
+
+"Really?"
+
+"That's what I've heard from _a certain person,_--who always speaks
+ill of him behind his back and flatters him to his face."
+
+"Does he also visit Capitan Tiago?"
+
+"From the first day after his arrival, and I'm sure that _a certain
+person_ looks upon him as a rival--in the inheritance. I believe
+that he's going to see the General about the question of instruction
+in Castilian."
+
+At that moment Isagani was called away by a servant to his uncle.
+
+On one of the benches at the stern, huddled in among the other
+passengers, sat a native priest gazing at the landscapes that were
+successively unfolded to his view. His neighbors made room for him, the
+men on passing taking off their hats, and the gamblers not daring to
+set their table near where he was. He said little, but neither smoked
+nor assumed arrogant airs, nor did he disdain to mingle with the other
+men, returning the salutes with courtesy and affability as if he felt
+much honored and very grateful. Although advanced in years, with hair
+almost completely gray, he appeared to be in vigorous health, and even
+when seated held his body straight and his head erect, but without
+pride or arrogance. He differed from the ordinary native priests,
+few enough indeed, who at that period served merely as coadjutors or
+administered some curacies temporarily, in a certain self-possession
+and gravity, like one who was conscious of his personal dignity
+and the sacredness of his office. A superficial examination of his
+appearance, if not his white hair, revealed at once that he belonged
+to another epoch, another generation, when the better young men were
+not afraid to risk their dignity by becoming priests, when the native
+clergy looked any friar at all in the face, and when their class,
+not yet degraded and vilified, called for free men and not slaves,
+superior intelligences and not servile wills. In his sad and serious
+features was to be read the serenity of a soul fortified by study and
+meditation, perhaps tried out by deep moral suffering. This priest
+was Padre Florentino, Isagani's uncle, and his story is easily told.
+
+Scion of a wealthy and influential family of Manila, of agreeable
+appearance and cheerful disposition, suited to shine in the world, he
+had never felt any call to the sacerdotal profession, but by reason
+of some promises or vows, his mother, after not a few struggles and
+violent disputes, compelled him to enter the seminary. She was a great
+friend of the Archbishop, had a will of iron, and was as inexorable
+as is every devout woman who believes that she is interpreting the
+will of God. Vainly the young Florentine offered resistance, vainly he
+begged, vainly he pleaded his love affairs, even provoking scandals:
+priest he had to become at twenty-five years of age, and priest he
+became. The Archbishop ordained him, his first mass was celebrated
+with great pomp, three days were given over to feasting, and his
+mother died happy and content, leaving him all her fortune.
+
+But in that struggle Florentine received a wound from which he
+never recovered. Weeks before his first mass the woman he loved,
+in desperation, married a nobody--a blow the rudest he had ever
+experienced. He lost his moral energy, life became dull and
+insupportable. If not his virtue and the respect for his office,
+that unfortunate love affair saved him from the depths into which the
+regular orders and secular clergymen both fall in the Philippines. He
+devoted himself to his parishioners as a duty, and by inclination to
+the natural sciences.
+
+When the events of seventy-two occurred, [9] he feared that the
+large income his curacy yielded him would attract attention to
+him, so, desiring peace above everything, he sought and secured his
+release, living thereafter as a private individual on his patrimonial
+estate situated on the Pacific coast. He there adopted his nephew,
+Isagani, who was reported by the malicious to be his own son by his
+old sweetheart when she became a widow, and by the more serious and
+better informed, the natural child of a cousin, a lady in Manila.
+
+The captain of the steamer caught sight of the old priest and insisted
+that he go to the upper deck, saying, "If you don't do so, the friars
+will think that you don't want to associate with them."
+
+Padre Florentino had no recourse but to accept, so he summoned his
+nephew in order to let him know where he was going, and to charge him
+not to come near the upper deck while he was there. "If the captain
+notices you, he'll invite you also, and we should then be abusing
+his kindness."
+
+"My uncle's way!" thought Isagani. "All so that I won't have any
+reason for talking with Dona Victorina."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+LEGENDS
+
+
+    Ich weiss nicht was soil es bedeuten
+    Dass ich so traurig bin!
+
+
+When Padre Florentino joined the group above, the bad humor provoked by
+the previous discussion had entirely disappeared. Perhaps their spirits
+had been raised by the attractive houses of the town of Pasig, or the
+glasses of sherry they had drunk in preparation for the coming meal, or
+the prospect of a good breakfast. Whatever the cause, the fact was that
+they were all laughing and joking, even including the lean Franciscan,
+although he made little noise and his smiles looked like death-grins.
+
+"Evil times, evil times!" said Padre Sibyla with a laugh.
+
+"Get out, don't say that, Vice-Rector!" responded the Canon Irene,
+giving the other's chair a shove. "In Hongkong you're doing a fine
+business, putting up every building that--ha, ha!"
+
+"Tut, tut!" was the reply; "you don't see our expenses, and the
+tenants on our estates are beginning to complain--"
+
+"Here, enough of complaints, _punales,_ else I'll fall to
+weeping!" cried Padre Camorra gleefully. "We're not complaining,
+and we haven't either estates or banking-houses. You know that my
+Indians are beginning to haggle over the fees and to flash schedules on
+me! Just look how they cite schedules to me now, and none other than
+those of the Archbishop Basilio Sancho, [10] as if from his time up
+to now prices had not risen. Ha, ha, ha! Why should a baptism cost
+less than a chicken? But I play the deaf man, collect what I can,
+and never complain. We're not avaricious, are we, Padre Salvi?"
+
+At that moment Simoun's head appeared above the hatchway.
+
+"Well, where've you been keeping yourself?" Don Custodio called to
+him, having forgotten all about their dispute. "You're missing the
+prettiest part of the trip!"
+
+"Pshaw!" retorted Simoun, as he ascended, "I've seen so many rivers
+and landscapes that I'm only interested in those that call up legends."
+
+"As for legends, the Pasig has a few," observed the captain, who did
+not relish any depreciation of the river where he navigated and earned
+his livelihood. "Here you have that of _Malapad-na-bato,_ a rock sacred
+before the coming of the Spaniards as the abode of spirits. Afterwards,
+when the superstition had been dissipated and the rock profaned, it was
+converted into a nest of tulisanes, since from its crest they easily
+captured the luckless bankas, which had to contend against both the
+currents and men. Later, in our time, in spite of human interference,
+there are still told stories about wrecked bankas, and if on rounding
+it I didn't steer with my six senses, I'd be smashed against its
+sides. Then you have another legend, that of Dona Jeronima's cave,
+which Padre Florentino can relate to you."
+
+"Everybody knows that," remarked Padre Sibyla disdainfully.
+
+But neither Simoun, nor Ben-Zayb, nor Padre Irene, nor Padre Camorra
+knew it, so they begged for the story, some in jest and others from
+genuine curiosity. The priest, adopting the tone of burlesque with
+which some had made their request, began like an old tutor relating
+a story to children.
+
+"Once upon a time there was a student who had made a promise of
+marriage to a young woman in his country, but it seems that he failed
+to remember her. She waited for him faithfully year after year, her
+youth passed, she grew into middle age, and then one day she heard a
+report that her old sweetheart was the Archbishop of Manila. Disguising
+herself as a man, she came round the Cape and presented herself before
+his grace, demanding the fulfilment of his promise. What she asked
+was of course impossible, so the Archbishop ordered the preparation
+of the cave that you may have noticed with its entrance covered and
+decorated with a curtain of vines. There she lived and died and there
+she is buried. The legend states that Dona Jeronima was so fat that
+she had to turn sidewise to get into it. Her fame as an enchantress
+sprung from her custom of throwing into the river the silver dishes
+which she used in the sumptuous banquets that were attended by crowds
+of gentlemen. A net was spread under the water to hold the dishes
+and thus they were cleaned. It hasn't been twenty years since the
+river washed the very entrance of the cave, but it has gradually been
+receding, just as the memory of her is dying out among the people."
+
+"A beautiful legend!" exclaimed Ben-Zayb. "I'm going to write an
+article about it. It's sentimental!"
+
+Dona Victorina thought of dwelling in such a cave and was about to
+say so, when Simoun took the floor instead.
+
+"But what's your opinion about that, Padre Salvi?" he asked the
+Franciscan, who seemed to be absorbed in thought. "Doesn't it seem to
+you as though his Grace, instead of giving her a cave, ought to have
+placed her in a nunnery--in St. Clara's, for example? What do you say?"
+
+There was a start of surprise on Padre Sibyla's part to notice that
+Padre Salvi shuddered and looked askance at Simoun.
+
+"Because it's not a very gallant act," continued Simoun quite
+naturally, "to give a rocky cliff as a home to one with whose
+hopes we have trifled. It's hardly religious to expose her thus to
+temptation, in a cave on the banks of a river--it smacks of nymphs and
+dryads. It would have been more gallant, more pious, more romantic,
+more in keeping with the customs of this country, to shut her up in
+St. Clara's, like a new Eloise, in order to visit and console her
+from time to time."
+
+"I neither can nor should pass judgment upon the conduct of
+archbishops," replied the Franciscan sourly.
+
+"But you, who are the ecclesiastical governor, acting in the place
+of our Archbishop, what would you do if such a case should arise?"
+
+Padre Salvi shrugged his shoulders and calmly responded, "It's not
+worth while thinking about what can't happen. But speaking of legends,
+don't overlook the most beautiful, since it is the truest: that of
+the miracle of St. Nicholas, the ruins of whose church you may have
+noticed. I'm going to relate it to Senor Simoun, as he probably hasn't
+heard it. It seems that formerly the river, as well as the lake,
+was infested with caymans, so huge and voracious that they attacked
+bankas and upset them with a slap of the tail. Our chronicles relate
+that one day an infidel Chinaman, who up to that time had refused to be
+converted, was passing in front of the church, when suddenly the devil
+presented himself to him in the form of a cayman and upset the banka,
+in order to devour him and carry him off to hell. Inspired by God,
+the Chinaman at that moment called upon St. Nicholas and instantly
+the cayman was changed into a stone. The old people say that in
+their time the monster could easily be recognized in the pieces of
+stone that were left, and, for my part, I can assure you that I have
+clearly made out the head, to judge from which the monster must have
+been enormously large."
+
+"Marvelous, a marvelous legend!" exclaimed Ben-Zayb. "It's good for an
+article--the description of the monster, the terror of the Chinaman,
+the waters of the river, the bamboo brakes. Also, it'll do for a study
+of comparative religions; because, look you, an infidel Chinaman in
+great distress invoked exactly the saint that he must know only by
+hearsay and in whom he did not believe. Here there's no room for the
+proverb that 'a known evil is preferable to an unknown good.' If I
+should find myself in China and get caught in such a difficulty, I
+would invoke the obscurest saint in the calendar before Confucius or
+Buddha. Whether this is due to the manifest superiority of Catholicism
+or to the inconsequential and illogical inconsistency in the brains
+of the yellow race, a profound study of anthropology alone will be
+able to elucidate."
+
+Ben-Zayb had adopted the tone of a lecturer and was describing
+circles in the air with his forefinger, priding himself on his
+imagination, which from the most insignificant facts could deduce
+so many applications and inferences. But noticing that Simoun was
+preoccupied and thinking that he was pondering over what he, Ben-Zayb,
+had just said, he inquired what the jeweler was meditating about.
+
+"About two very important questions," answered Simoun; "two questions
+that you might add to your article. First, what may have become of
+the devil on seeing himself suddenly confined within a stone? Did he
+escape? Did he stay there? Was he crushed? Second, if the petrified
+animals that I have seen in various European museums may not have
+been the victims of some antediluvian saint?"
+
+The tone in which the jeweler spoke was so serious, while he rested
+his forehead on the tip of his forefinger in an attitude of deep
+meditation, that Padre Camorra responded very gravely, "Who knows,
+who knows?"
+
+"Since we're busy with legends and are now entering the lake,"
+remarked Padre Sibyla, "the captain must know many--"
+
+At that moment the steamer crossed the bar and the panorama spread out
+before their eyes was so truly magnificent that all were impressed. In
+front extended the beautiful lake bordered by green shores and blue
+mountains, like a huge mirror, framed in emeralds and sapphires,
+reflecting the sky in its glass. On the right were spread out the
+low shores, forming bays with graceful curves, and dim there in the
+distance the crags of Sungay, while in the background rose Makiling,
+imposing and majestic, crowned with fleecy clouds. On the left lay
+Talim Island with its curious sweep of hills. A fresh breeze rippled
+over the wide plain of water.
+
+"By the way, captain," said Ben-Zayb, turning around, "do you know
+in what part of the lake a certain Guevara, Navarra, or Ibarra,
+was killed?"
+
+The group looked toward the captain, with the exception of Simoun, who
+had turned away his head as though to look for something on the shore.
+
+"Ah, yes!" exclaimed Dona Victorina. "Where, captain? Did he leave
+any tracks in the water?"
+
+The good captain winked several times, an indication that he was
+annoyed, but reading the request in the eyes of all, took a few steps
+toward the bow and scanned the shore.
+
+"Look over there," he said in a scarcely audible voice, after making
+sure that no strangers were near. "According to the officer who
+conducted the pursuit, Ibarra, upon finding himself surrounded, jumped
+out of his banka there near the Kinabutasan [11] and, swimming under
+water, covered all that distance of more than two miles, saluted by
+bullets every time that he raised his head to breathe. Over yonder is
+where they lost track of him, and a little farther on near the shore
+they discovered something like the color of blood. And now I think
+of it, it's just thirteen years, day for day, since this happened."
+
+"So that his corpse--" began Ben-Zayb.
+
+"Went to join his father's," replied Padre Sibyla. "Wasn't he also
+another filibuster, Padre Salvi?"
+
+"That's what might be called cheap funerals, Padre Camorra,
+eh?" remarked Ben-Zayb.
+
+"I've always said that those who won't pay for expensive funerals
+are filibusters," rejoined the person addressed, with a merry laugh.
+
+"But what's the matter with you, Senor Simoun?" inquired Ben-Zayb,
+seeing that the jeweler was motionless and thoughtful. "Are you
+seasick--an old traveler like you? On such a drop of water as this!"
+
+"I want to tell you," broke in the captain, who had come to hold all
+those places in great affection, "that you can't call this a drop
+of water. It's larger than any lake in Switzerland and all those in
+Spain put together. I've seen old sailors who got seasick here."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+CABESANG TALES
+
+
+Those who have read the first part of this story will perhaps remember
+an old wood-cutter who lived in the depths of the forest. [12] Tandang
+Selo is still alive, and though his hair has turned completely white,
+he yet preserves his good health. He no longer hunts or cuts firewood,
+for his fortunes have improved and he works only at making brooms.
+
+His son Tales (abbreviation of Telesforo) had worked at first on shares
+on the lands of a capitalist, but later, having become the owner of
+two carabaos and several hundred pesos, determined to work on his own
+account, aided by his father, his wife, and his three children. So
+they cut down and cleared away some thick woods which were situated
+on the borders of the town and which they believed belonged to no
+one. During the labors of cleaning and cultivating the new land,
+the whole family fell ill with malaria and the mother died, along
+with the eldest daughter, Lucia, in the flower of her age. This,
+which was the natural consequence of breaking up new soil infested
+with various kinds of bacteria, they attributed to the anger of the
+woodland spirit, so they were resigned and went on with their labor,
+believing him pacified.
+
+But when they began to harvest their first crop a religious
+corporation, which owned land in the neighboring town, laid claim to
+the fields, alleging that they fell within their boundaries, and to
+prove it they at once started to set up their marks. However, the
+administrator of the religious order left to them, for humanity's
+sake, the usufruct of the land on condition that they pay a small
+sum annually--a mere bagatelle, twenty or thirty pesos. Tales, as
+peaceful a man as could be found, was as much opposed to lawsuits
+as any one and more submissive to the friars than most people; so,
+in order not to smash a _palyok_ against a _kawali_ (as he said,
+for to him the friars were iron pots and he a clay jar), he had the
+weakness to yield to their claim, remembering that he did not know
+Spanish and had no money to pay lawyers.
+
+Besides, Tandang Selo said to him, "Patience! You would spend more
+in one year of litigation than in ten years of paying what the white
+padres demand. And perhaps they'll pay you back in masses! Pretend
+that those thirty pesos had been lost in gambling or had fallen into
+the water and been swallowed by a cayman."
+
+The harvest was abundant and sold well, so Tales planned to build a
+wooden house in the barrio of Sagpang, of the town of Tiani, which
+adjoined San Diego.
+
+Another year passed, bringing another good crop, and for this reason
+the friars raised the rent to fifty pesos, which Tales paid in order
+not to quarrel and because he expected to sell his sugar at a good
+price.
+
+"Patience! Pretend that the cayman has grown some," old Selo consoled
+him.
+
+That year he at last saw his dream realized: to live in the barrio of
+Sagpang in a wooden house. The father and grandfather then thought of
+providing some education for the two children, especially the daughter
+Juliana, or Juli, as they called her, for she gave promise of being
+accomplished and beautiful. A boy who was a friend of the family,
+Basilio, was studying in Manila, and he was of as lowly origin as they.
+
+But this dream seemed destined not to be realized. The first care the
+community took when they saw the family prospering was to appoint as
+cabeza de barangay its most industrious member, which left only Tano,
+the son, who was only fourteen years old. The father was therefore
+called _Cabesang_ Tales and had to order a sack coat, buy a felt hat,
+and prepare to spend his money. In order to avoid any quarrel with
+the curate or the government, he settled from his own pocket the
+shortages in the tax-lists, paying for those who had died or moved
+away, and he lost considerable time in making the collections and on
+his trips to the capital.
+
+"Patience! Pretend that the cayman's relatives have joined him,"
+advised Tandang Selo, smiling placidly.
+
+"Next year you'll put on a long skirt and go to Manila to study like
+the young ladies of the town," Cabesang Tales told his daughter every
+time he heard her talking of Basilio's progress.
+
+But that next year did not come, and in its stead there was another
+increase in the rent. Cabesang Tales became serious and scratched
+his head. The clay jar was giving up all its rice to the iron pot.
+
+When the rent had risen to two hundred pesos, Tales was not content
+with scratching his head and sighing; he murmured and protested. The
+friar-administrator then told him that if he could not pay, some one
+else would be assigned to cultivate that land--many who desired it
+had offered themselves.
+
+He thought at first that the friar was joking, but the friar was
+talking seriously, and indicated a servant of his to take possession
+of the land. Poor Tales turned pale, he felt a buzzing in his ears, he
+saw in the red mist that rose before his eyes his wife and daughter,
+pallid, emaciated, dying, victims of the intermittent fevers--then
+he saw the thick forest converted into productive fields, he saw the
+stream of sweat watering its furrows, he saw himself plowing under
+the hot sun, bruising his feet against the stones and roots, while
+this friar had been driving about in his carriage with the wretch who
+was to get the land following like a slave behind his master. No, a
+thousand times, no! First let the fields sink into the depths of the
+earth and bury them all! Who was this intruder that he should have
+any right to his land? Had he brought from his own country a single
+handful of that soil? Had he crooked a single one of his fingers to
+pull up the roots that ran through it?
+
+Exasperated by the threats of the friar, who tried to uphold his
+authority at any cost in the presence of the other tenants, Cabesang
+Tales rebelled and refused to pay a single cuarto, having ever before
+himself that red mist, saying that he would give up his fields to the
+first man who could irrigate it with blood drawn from his own veins.
+
+Old Selo, on looking at his son's face, did not dare to mention the
+cayman, but tried to calm him by talking of clay jars, reminding him
+that the winner in a lawsuit was left without a shirt to his back.
+
+"We shall all be turned to clay, father, and without shirts we were
+born," was the reply.
+
+So he resolutely refused to pay or to give up a single span of his
+land unless the friars should first prove the legality of their claim
+by exhibiting a title-deed of some kind. As they had none, a lawsuit
+followed, and Cabesang Tales entered into it, confiding that some at
+least, if not all, were lovers of justice and respecters of the law.
+
+"I serve and have been serving the King with my money and my services,"
+he said to those who remonstrated with him. "I'm asking for justice
+and he is obliged to give it to me."
+
+Drawn on by fatality, and as if he had put into play in the lawsuit
+the whole future of himself and his children, he went on spending his
+savings to pay lawyers, notaries, and solicitors, not to mention the
+officials and clerks who exploited his ignorance and his needs. He
+moved to and fro between the village and the capital, passed his
+days without eating and his nights without sleeping, while his talk
+was always about briefs, exhibits, and appeals. There was then seen
+a struggle such as was never before carried on under the skies of the
+Philippines: that of a poor Indian, ignorant and friendless, confiding
+in the justness and righteousness of his cause, fighting against a
+powerful corporation before which Justice bowed her head, while the
+judges let fall the scales and surrendered the sword. He fought as
+tenaciously as the ant which bites when it knows that it is going
+to be crushed, as does the fly which looks into space only through
+a pane of glass. Yet the clay jar defying the iron pot and smashing
+itself into a thousand pieces bad in it something impressive--it had
+the sublimeness of desperation!
+
+On the days when his journeys left him free he patrolled his fields
+armed with a shotgun, saying that the tulisanes were hovering around
+and he had need of defending himself in order not to fall into their
+hands and thus lose his lawsuit. As if to improve his marksmanship,
+he shot at birds and fruits, even the butterflies, with such accurate
+aim that the friar-administrator did not dare to go to Sagpang without
+an escort of civil-guards, while the friar's hireling, who gazed from
+afar at the threatening figure of Tales wandering over the fields
+like a sentinel upon the walls, was terror stricken and refused to
+take the property away from him.
+
+But the local judges and those at the capital, warned by the experience
+of one of their number who had been summarily dismissed, dared not
+give him the decision, fearing their own dismissal. Yet they were not
+really bad men, those judges, they were upright and conscientious,
+good citizens, excellent fathers, dutiful sons--and they were
+able to appreciate poor Tales' situation better than Tales himself
+could. Many of them were versed in the scientific and historical
+basis of property, they knew that the friars by their own statutes
+could not own property, but they also knew that to come from far
+across the sea with an appointment secured with great difficulty,
+to undertake the duties of the position with the best intentions,
+and now to lose it because an Indian fancied that justice had to
+be done on earth as in heaven--that surely was an idea! They had
+their families and greater needs surely than that Indian: one had
+a mother to provide for, and what duty is more sacred than that of
+caring for a mother? Another had sisters, all of marriageable age;
+that other there had many little children who expected their daily
+bread and who, like fledglings in a nest, would surely die of hunger
+the day he was out of a job; even the very least of them had there,
+far away, a wife who would be in distress if the monthly remittance
+failed. All these moral and conscientious judges tried everything in
+their power in the way of counsel, advising Cabesang Tales to pay
+the rent demanded. But Tales, like all simple souls, once he had
+seen what was just, went straight toward it. He demanded proofs,
+documents, papers, title-deeds, but the friars had none of these,
+resting their case on his concessions in the past.
+
+Cabesang Tales' constant reply was: "If every day I give alms to a
+beggar to escape annoyance, who will oblige me to continue my gifts
+if he abuses my generosity?"
+
+From this stand no one could draw him, nor were there any threats that
+could intimidate him. In vain Governor M---- made a trip expressly
+to talk to him and frighten him. His reply to it all was: "You may
+do what you like, Mr. Governor, I'm ignorant and powerless. But I've
+cultivated those fields, my wife and daughter died while helping me
+clear them, and I won't give them up to any one but him who can do
+more with them than I've done. Let him first irrigate them with his
+blood and bury in them his wife and daughter!"
+
+The upshot of this obstinacy was that the honorable judges gave the
+decision to the friars, and everybody laughed at him, saying that
+lawsuits are not won by justice. But Cabesang Tales appealed, loaded
+his shotgun, and patrolled his fields with deliberation.
+
+During this period his life seemed to be a wild dream. His son,
+Tano, a youth as tall as his father and as good as his sister, was
+conscripted, but he let the boy go rather than purchase a substitute.
+
+"I have to pay the lawyers," he told his weeping daughter. "If I win
+the case I'll find a way to get him back, and if I lose it I won't
+have any need for sons."
+
+So the son went away and nothing more was heard of him except that his
+hair had been cropped and that he slept under a cart. Six months later
+it was rumored that he had been seen embarking for the Carolines;
+another report was that he had been seen in the uniform of the
+Civil Guard.
+
+"Tano in the Civil Guard! _'Susmariosep_!" exclaimed several, clasping
+their hands. "Tano, who was so good and so honest! _Requimternam!_"
+
+The grandfather went many days without speaking to the father, Juli
+fell sick, but Cabesang Tales did not shed a single tear, although for
+two days he never left the house, as if he feared the looks of reproach
+from the whole village or that he would be called the executioner of
+his son. But on the third day he again sallied forth with his shotgun.
+
+Murderous intentions were attributed to him, and there were
+well-meaning persons who whispered about that he had been heard to
+threaten that he would bury the friar-administrator in the furrows of
+his fields, whereat the friar was frightened at him in earnest. As a
+result of this, there came a decree from the Captain-General forbidding
+the use of firearms and ordering that they be taken up. Cabesang Tales
+had to hand over his shotgun but he continued his rounds armed with
+a long bolo.
+
+"What are you going to do with that bolo when the tulisanes have
+firearms?" old Selo asked him.
+
+"I must watch my crops," was the answer. "Every stalk of cane growing
+there is one of my wife's bones."
+
+The bolo was taken up on the pretext that it was too long. He then
+took his father's old ax and with it on his shoulder continued his
+sullen rounds.
+
+Every time he left the house Tandang Selo and Juli trembled for his
+life. The latter would get up from her loom, go to the window, pray,
+make vows to the saints, and recite novenas. The grandfather was at
+times unable to finish the handle of a broom and talked of returning
+to the forest--life in that house was unbearable.
+
+At last their fears were realized. As the fields were some distance
+from the village, Cabesang Tales, in spite of his ax, fell into the
+hands of tulisanes who had revolvers and rifles. They told him that
+since he had money to pay judges and lawyers he must have some also
+for the outcasts and the hunted. They therefore demanded a ransom of
+five hundred pesos through the medium of a rustic, with the warning
+that if anything happened to their messenger, the captive would pay
+for it with his life. Two days of grace were allowed.
+
+This news threw the poor family into the wildest terror, which was
+augmented when they learned that the Civil Guard was going out in
+pursuit of the bandits. In case of an encounter, the first victim
+would be the captive--this they all knew. The old man was paralyzed,
+while the pale and frightened daughter tried often to talk but could
+not. Still, another thought more terrible, an idea more cruel, roused
+them from their stupor. The rustic sent by the tulisanes said that
+the band would probably have to move on, and if they were slow in
+sending the ransom the two days would elapse and Cabesang Tales would
+have his throat cut.
+
+This drove those two beings to madness, weak and powerless as they
+were. Tandang Selo got up, sat down, went outside, came back again,
+knowing not where to go, where to seek aid. Juli appealed to her
+images, counted and recounted her money, but her two hundred pesos
+did not increase or multiply. Soon she dressed herself, gathered
+together all her jewels, and asked the advice of her grandfather,
+if she should go to see the gobernadorcillo, the judge, the notary,
+the lieutenant of the Civil Guard. The old man said yes to everything,
+or when she said no, he too said no. At length came the neighbors,
+their relatives and friends, some poorer than others, in their
+simplicity magnifying the fears. The most active of all was Sister
+Bali, a great _panguinguera,_ who had been to Manila to practise
+religious exercises in the nunnery of the Sodality.
+
+Juli was willing to sell all her jewels, except a locket set with
+diamonds and emeralds which Basilio had given her, for this locket
+had a history: a nun, the daughter of Capitan Tiago, had given it to a
+leper, who, in return for professional treatment, had made a present of
+it to Basilio. So she could not sell it without first consulting him.
+
+Quickly the shell-combs and earrings were sold, as well as Juli's
+rosary, to their richest neighbor, and thus fifty pesos were added,
+but two hundred and fifty were still lacking. The locket might be
+pawned, but Juli shook her head. A neighbor suggested that the house
+be sold and Tandang Selo approved the idea, satisfied to return to
+the forest and cut firewood as of old, but Sister Bali observed that
+this could not be done because the owner was not present.
+
+"The judge's wife once sold me her _tapis_ for a peso, but her
+husband said that the sale did not hold because it hadn't received
+his approval. _Aba!_ He took back the _tapis_ and she hasn't returned
+the peso yet, but I don't pay her when she wins at _panguingui, aba!_
+In that way I've collected twelve cuartos, and for that alone I'm
+going to play with her. I can't bear to have people fail to pay what
+they owe me, _aba!_"
+
+Another neighbor was going to ask Sister Bali why then did not
+she settle a little account with her, but the quick _panguinguera_
+suspected this and added at once: "Do you know, Juli, what you can
+do? Borrow two hundred and fifty pesos on the house, payable when
+the lawsuit is won."
+
+This seemed to be the best proposition, so they decided to act upon
+it that same day. Sister Bali offered to accompany her, and together
+they visited the houses of all the rich folks in Tiani, but no one
+would accept the proposal. The case, they said, was already lost,
+and to show favors to an enemy of the friars was to expose themselves
+to their vengeance. At last a pious woman took pity on the girl and
+lent the money on condition that Juli should remain with her as a
+servant until the debt was paid. Juli would not have so very much
+to do: sew, pray, accompany her to mass, and fast for her now and
+then. The girl accepted with tears in her eyes, received the money,
+and promised to enter her service on the following day, Christmas.
+
+When the grandfather heard of that sale he fell to weeping like a
+child. What, that granddaughter whom he had not allowed to walk in the
+sun lest her skin should be burned, Juli, she of the delicate fingers
+and rosy feet! What, that girl, the prettiest in the village and
+perhaps in the whole town, before whose window many gallants had vainly
+passed the night playing and singing! What, his only granddaughter,
+the sole joy of his fading eyes, she whom he had dreamed of seeing
+dressed in a long skirt, talking Spanish, and holding herself erect
+waving a painted fan like the daughters of the wealthy--she to become
+a servant, to be scolded and reprimanded, to ruin her fingers, to
+sleep anywhere, to rise in any manner whatsoever!
+
+So the old grandfather wept and talked of hanging or starving himself
+to death. "If you go," he declared, "I'm going back to the forest
+and will never set foot in the town."
+
+Juli soothed him by saying that it was necessary for her father to
+return, that the suit would be won, and they could then ransom her
+from her servitude.
+
+The night was a sad one. Neither of the two could taste a bite and
+the old man refused to lie down, passing the whole night seated in
+a corner, silent and motionless. Juli on her part tried to sleep,
+but for a long time could not close her eyes. Somewhat relieved about
+her father's fate, she now thought of herself and fell to weeping,
+but stifled her sobs so that the old man might not hear them. The
+next day she would be a servant, and it was the very day Basilio was
+accustomed to come from Manila with presents for her. Henceforward
+she would have to give up that love; Basilio, who was going to be a
+doctor, couldn't marry a pauper. In fancy she saw him going to the
+church in company with the prettiest and richest girl in the town,
+both well-dressed, happy and smiling, while she, Juli, followed her
+mistress, carrying novenas, buyos, and the cuspidor. Here the girl
+felt a lump rise in her throat, a sinking at her heart, and begged
+the Virgin to let her die first.
+
+But--said her conscience--he will at least know that I preferred to
+pawn myself rather than the locket he gave me.
+
+This thought consoled her a little and brought on empty dreams. Who
+knows but that a miracle might happen? She might find the two hundred
+and fifty pesos under the image of the Virgin--she had read of
+many similar miracles. The sun might not rise nor morning come, and
+meanwhile the suit would be won. Her father might return, or Basilio
+put in his appearance, she might find a bag of gold in the garden,
+the tulisanes would send the bag of gold, the curate, Padre Camorra,
+who was always teasing her, would come with the tulisanes. So her
+ideas became more and more confused, until at length, worn out by
+fatigue and sorrow, she went to sleep with dreams of her childhood
+in the depths of the forest: she was bathing in the torrent along
+with her two brothers, there were little fishes of all colors that
+let themselves be caught like fools, and she became impatient because
+she found no pleasure in catchnig such foolish little fishes! Basilio
+was under the water, but Basilio for some reason had the face of her
+brother Tano. Her new mistress was watching them from the bank.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+A COCHERO'S CHRISTMAS EVE
+
+
+Basilio reached San Diego just as the Christmas Eve procession was
+passing through the streets. He had been delayed on the road for
+several hours because the cochero, having forgotten his cedula, was
+held up by the Civil Guard, had his memory jogged by a few blows from
+a rifle-butt, and afterwards was taken before the commandant. Now the
+carromata was again detained to let the procession pass, while the
+abused cochero took off his hat reverently and recited a paternoster
+to the first image that came along, which seemed to be that of a
+great saint. It was the figure of an old man with an exceptionally
+long beard, seated at the edge of a grave under a tree filled with
+all kinds of stuffed birds. A _kalan_ with a clay jar, a mortar,
+and a _kalikut_ for mashing buyo were his only utensils, as if to
+indicate that he lived on the border of the tomb and was doing his
+cooking there. This was the Methuselah of the religious iconography
+of the Philippines; his colleague and perhaps contemporary is called
+in Europe Santa Claus, and is still more smiling and agreeable.
+
+"In the time of the saints," thought the cochero, "surely there were no
+civil-guards, because one can't live long on blows from rifle-butts."
+
+Behind the great old man came the three Magian Kings on ponies that
+were capering about, especially that of the negro Melchior, which
+seemed to be about to trample its companions.
+
+"No, there couldn't have been any civil-guards," decided the
+cochero, secretly envying those fortunate times, "because if there
+had been, that negro who is cutting up such capers beside those two
+Spaniards"--Gaspar and Bathazar--"would have gone to jail."
+
+Then, observing that the negro wore a crown and was a king, like the
+other two, the Spaniards, his thoughts naturally turned to the king
+of the Indians, and he sighed. "Do you know, sir," he asked Basilio
+respectfully, "if his right foot is loose yet?"
+
+Basilio had him repeat the question. "Whose right foot?"
+
+"The King's!" whispered the cochero mysteriously.
+
+"What King's?"
+
+"Our King's, the King of the Indians."
+
+Basilio smiled and shrugged his shoulders, while the cochero again
+sighed. The Indians in the country places preserve the legend that
+their king, imprisoned and chained in the cave of San Mateo, will
+come some day to free them. Every hundredth year he breaks one of his
+chains, so that he now has his hands and his left foot loose--only
+the right foot remains bound. This king causes the earthquakes when he
+struggles or stirs himself, and he is so strong that in shaking hands
+with him it is necessary to extend to him a bone, which he crushes
+in his grasp. For some unexplainable reason the Indians call him King
+Bernardo, perhaps by confusing him with Bernardo del Carpio. [13]
+
+"When he gets his right foot loose," muttered the cochero, stifling
+another sigh, "I'll give him my horses, and offer him my services even
+to death, for he'll free us from the Civil Guard." With a melancholy
+gaze he watched the Three Kings move on.
+
+The boys came behind in two files, sad and serious as though they were
+there under compulsion. They lighted their way, some with torches,
+others with tapers, and others with paper lanterns on bamboo poles,
+while they recited the rosary at the top of their voices, as though
+quarreling with somebody. Afterwards came St. Joseph on a modest float,
+with a look of sadness and resignation on his face, carrying his stalk
+of lilies, as he moved along between two civil-guards as though he were
+a prisoner. This enabled the cochero to understand the expression on
+the saint's face, but whether the sight of the guards troubled him or
+he had no great respect for a saint who would travel in such company,
+he did not recite a single requiem.
+
+Behind St. Joseph came the girls bearing lights, their heads covered
+with handkerchiefs knotted under their chins, also reciting the rosary,
+but with less wrath than the boys. In their midst were to be seen
+several lads dragging along little rabbits made of Japanese paper,
+lighted by red candles, with their short paper tails erect. The lads
+brought those toys into the procession to enliven the birth of the
+Messiah. The little animals, fat and round as eggs, seemed to be so
+pleased that at times they would take a leap, lose their balance, fall,
+and catch fire. The owner would then hasten to extinguish such burning
+enthusiasm, puffing and blowing until he finally beat out the fire,
+and then, seeing his toy destroyed, would fall to weeping. The cochero
+observed with sadness that the race of little paper animals disappeared
+each year, as if they had been attacked by the pest like the living
+animals. He, the abused Sinong, remembered his two magnificent horses,
+which, at the advice of the curate, he had caused to be blessed to
+save them from plague, spending therefor ten pesos--for neither
+the government nor the curates have found any better remedy for
+the epizootic--and they had died after all. Yet he consoled himself
+by remembering also that after the shower of holy water, the Latin
+phrases of the padre, and the ceremonies, the horses had become so
+vain and self-important that they would not even allow him, Sinong,
+a good Christian, to put them in harness, and he had not dared to whip
+them, because a tertiary sister had said that they were _sanctified_.
+
+The procession was closed by the Virgin dressed as the Divine Shepherd,
+with a pilgrim's hat of wide brim and long plumes to indicate the
+journey to Jerusalem. That the birth might be made more explicable, the
+curate had ordered her figure to be stuffed with rags and cotton under
+her skirt, so that no one could be in any doubt as to her condition. It
+was a very beautiful image, with the same sad expression of all the
+images that the Filipinos make, and a mien somewhat ashamed, doubtless
+at the way in which the curate had arranged her. In front came several
+singers and behind, some musicians with the usual civil-guards. The
+curate, as was to be expected after what he had done, was not in his
+place, for that year he was greatly displeased at having to use all
+his diplomacy and shrewdness to convince the townspeople that they
+should pay thirty pesos for each Christmas mass instead of the usual
+twenty. "You're turning filibusters!" he had said to them.
+
+The cochero must have been greatly preoccupied with the sights of the
+procession, for when it had passed and Basilio ordered him to go on, he
+did not notice that the lamp on his carromata had gone out. Neither did
+Basilio notice it, his attention being devoted to gazing at the houses,
+which were illuminated inside and out with little paper lanterns
+of fantastic shapes and colors, stars surrounded by hoops with long
+streamers which produced a pleasant murmur when shaken by the wind,
+and fishes of movable heads and tails, having a glass of oil inside,
+suspended from the eaves of the windows in the delightful fashion of
+a happy and homelike fiesta. But he also noticed that the lights were
+flickering, that the stars were being eclipsed, that this year had
+fewer ornaments and hangings than the former, which in turn had had
+even fewer than the year preceding it. There was scarcely any music
+in the streets, while the agreeable noises of the kitchen were not to
+be heard in all the houses, which the youth ascribed to the fact that
+for some time things had been going badly, the sugar did not bring a
+good price, the rice crops had failed, over half the live stock had
+died, but the taxes rose and increased for some inexplicable reason,
+while the abuses of the Civil Guard became more frequent to kill off
+the happiness of the people in the towns.
+
+He was just pondering over this when an energetic
+"Halt!" resounded. They were passing in front of the barracks and one
+of the guards had noticed the extinguished lamp of the carromata,
+which could not go on without it. A hail of insults fell about the
+poor cochero, who vainly excused himself with the length of the
+procession. He would be arrested for violating the ordinances and
+afterwards advertised in the newspapers, so the peaceful and prudent
+Basilio left the carromata and went his way on foot, carrying his
+valise. This was San Diego, his native town, where he had not a
+single relative.
+
+The only, house wherein there seemed to be any mirth was Capitan
+Basilio's. Hens and chickens cackled their death chant to the
+accompaniment of dry and repeated strokes, as of meat pounded on a
+chopping-block, and the sizzling of grease in the frying-pans. A feast
+was going on in the house, and even into the street there passed a
+certain draught of air, saturated with the succulent odors of stews
+and confections. In the entresol Basilio saw Sinang, as small as
+when our readers knew her before, [14] although a little rounder and
+plumper since her marriage. Then to his great surprise he made out,
+further in at the back of the room, chatting with Capitan Basilio,
+the curate, and the alferez of the Civil Guard, no less than the
+jeweler Simoun, as ever with his blue goggles and his nonchalant air.
+
+"It's understood, Senor Simoun," Capitan Basilio was saying, "that
+we'll go to Tiani to see your jewels."
+
+"I would also go," remarked the alferez, "because I need a watch-chain,
+but I'm so busy--if Capitan Basilio would undertake--"
+
+Capitan Basilio would do so with the greatest pleasure, and as
+he wished to propitiate the soldier in order that he might not be
+molested in the persons of his laborers, he refused to accept the
+money which the alferez was trying to get out of his pocket.
+
+"It's my Christmas gift!"
+
+"I can't allow you, Capitan, I can't permit it!"
+
+"All right! We'll settle up afterwards," replied Capitan Basilio with
+a lordly gesture.
+
+Also, the curate wanted a pair of lady's earrings and requested the
+capitan to buy them for him. "I want them first class. Later we'll
+fix up the account."
+
+"Don't worry about that, Padre," said the good man, who wished to be
+at peace with the Church also. An unfavorable report on the curate's
+part could do him great damage and cause him double the expense,
+for those earrings were a forced present. Simoun in the meantime was
+praising his jewels.
+
+"That fellow is fierce!" mused the student. "He does business
+everywhere. And if I can believe _a certain person,_ he buys from some
+gentlemen for a half of their value the same jewels that he himself
+has sold for presents. Everybody in this country prospers but us!"
+
+He made his way to his house, or rather Capitan Tiago's, now occupied
+by a trustworthy man who had held him in great esteem since the
+day when he had seen him perform a surgical operation with the same
+coolness that he would cut up a chicken. This man was now waiting to
+give him the news. Two of the laborers were prisoners, one was to be
+deported, and a number of carabaos had died.
+
+"The same old story," exclaimed Basilio, in a bad humor. "You always
+receive me with the same complaints." The youth was not overbearing,
+but as he was at times scolded by Capitan Tiago, he liked in his turn
+to chide those under his orders.
+
+The old man cast about for something new. "One of our tenants has died,
+the old fellow who took care of the woods, and the curate refused to
+bury him as a pauper, saying that his master is a rich man."
+
+"What did he die of?"
+
+"Of old age."
+
+"Get out! To die of old age! It must at least have been some
+disease." Basilio in his zeal for making autopsies wanted diseases.
+
+"Haven't you anything new to tell me? You take away my appetite
+relating the same old things. Do you know anything of Sagpang?"
+
+The old man then told him about the kidnapping of Cabesang
+Tales. Basilio became thoughtful and said nothing more--his appetite
+had completely left him.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+BASILIO
+
+
+When the bells began their chimes for the midnight mass and those who
+preferred a good sleep to fiestas and ceremonies arose grumbling at
+the noise and movement, Basilio cautiously left the house, took two
+or three turns through the streets to see that he was not watched
+or followed, and then made his way by unfrequented paths to the road
+that led to the ancient wood of the Ibarras, which had been acquired
+by Capitan Tiago when their property was confiscated and sold. As
+Christmas fell under the waning moon that year, the place was wrapped
+in darkness. The chimes had ceased, and only the tolling sounded
+through the darkness of the night amid the murmur of the breeze-stirred
+branches and the measured roar of the waves on the neighboring lake,
+like the deep respiration of nature sunk in profound sleep.
+
+Awed by the time and place, the youth moved along with his head down,
+as if endeavoring to see through the darkness. But from time to time
+he raised it to gaze at the stars through the open spaces between the
+treetops and went forward parting the bushes or tearing away the lianas
+that obstructed his path. At times he retraced his steps, his foot
+would get caught among the plants, he stumbled over a projecting root
+or a fallen log. At the end of a half-hour he reached a small brook on
+the opposite side of which arose a hillock, a black and shapeless mass
+that in the darkness took on the proportions of a mountain. Basilio
+crossed the brook on the stones that showed black against the shining
+surface of the water, ascended the hill, and made his way to a small
+space enclosed by old and crumbling walls. He approached the balete
+tree that rose in the center, huge, mysterious, venerable, formed of
+roots that extended up and down among the confusedly-interlaced trunks.
+
+Pausing before a heap of stones he took off his hat and seemed to be
+praying. There his mother was buried, and every time he came to the
+town his first visit was to that neglected and unknown grave. Since he
+must visit Cabesang Tales' family the next day, he had taken advantage
+of the night to perform this duty. Seated on a stone, he seemed to fall
+into deep thought. His past rose before him like a long black film,
+rosy at first, then shadowy with spots of blood, then black, black,
+gray, and then light, ever lighter. The end could not be seen, hidden
+as it was by a cloud through which shone lights and the hues of dawn.
+
+Thirteen years before to the day, almost to the hour, his mother
+had died there in the deepest distress, on a glorious night when the
+moon shone brightly and the Christians of the world were engaged in
+rejoicing. Wounded and limping, he had reached there in pursuit of
+her--she mad and terrified, fleeing from her son as from a ghost. There
+she had died, and there had come a stranger who had commanded him to
+build a funeral pyre. He had obeyed mechanically and when he returned
+he found a second stranger by the side of the other's corpse. What
+a night and what a morning those were! The stranger helped him raise
+the pyre, whereon they burned the corpse of the first, dug the grave
+in which they buried his mother, and then after giving him some pieces
+of money told him to leave the place. It was the first time that he had
+seen that man--tall, with blood-shot eyes, pale lips, and a sharp nose.
+
+Entirely alone in the world, without parents or brothers and sisters,
+he left the town whose authorities inspired in him such great fear and
+went to Manila to work in some rich house and study at the same time,
+as many do. His journey was an Odyssey of sleeplessness and startling
+surprises, in which hunger counted for little, for he ate the fruits
+in the woods, whither he retreated whenever he made out from afar the
+uniform of the Civil Guard, a sight that recalled the origin of all
+his misfortunes. Once in Manila, ragged and sick, he went from door
+to door offering his services. A boy from the provinces who knew not
+a single word of Spanish, and sickly besides! Discouraged, hungry, and
+miserable, he wandered about the streets, attracting attention by the
+wretchedness of his clothing. How often was he tempted to throw himself
+under the feet of the horses that flashed by, drawing carriages shining
+with silver and varnish, thus to end his misery at once! Fortunately,
+he saw Capitan Tiago, accompanied by Aunt Isabel. He had known them
+since the days in San Diego, and in his joy believed that in them he
+saw almost fellow-townsfolk. He followed the carriage until he lost
+sight of it, and then made inquiries for the house. As it was the
+very day that Maria Clara entered the nunnery and Capitan Tiago was
+accordingly depressed, he was admitted as a servant, without pay,
+but instead with leave to study, if he so wished, in San Juan de
+Letran. [15]
+
+Dirty, poorly dressed, with only a pair of clogs for footwear, at
+the end of several months' stay in Manila, he entered the first year
+of Latin. On seeing his clothes, his classmates drew away from him,
+and the professor, a handsome Dominican, never asked him a question,
+but frowned every time he looked at him. In the eight months that
+the class continued, the only words that passed between them were
+his name read from the roll and the daily _adsum_ with which the
+student responded. With what bitterness he left the class each
+day, and, guessing the reason for the treatment accorded him, what
+tears sprang into his eyes and what complaints were stifled in his
+heart! How he had wept and sobbed over the grave of his mother,
+relating to her his hidden sorrows, humiliations, and affronts,
+when at the approach of Christmas Capitan Tiago had taken him back
+to San Diego! Yet he memorized the lessons without omitting a comma,
+although he understood scarcely any part of them. But at length he
+became resigned, noticing that among the three or four hundred in his
+class only about forty merited the honor of being questioned, because
+they attracted the professor's attention by their appearance, some
+prank, comicality, or other cause. The greater part of the students
+congratulated themselves that they thus escaped the work of thinking
+and understanding the subject. "One goes to college, not to learn
+and study, but to gain credit for the course, so if the book can be
+memorized, what more can be asked--the year is thus gained." [16]
+
+Basilio passed the examinations by answering the solitary question
+asked him, like a machine, without stopping or breathing, and in the
+amusement of the examiners won the passing certificate. His nine
+companions--they were examined in batches of ten in order to save
+time--did not have such good luck, but were condemned to repeat the
+year of brutalization.
+
+In the second year the game-cock that he tended won a large sum and he
+received from Capitan Tiago a big tip, which he immediately invested
+in the purchase of shoes and a felt hat. With these and the clothes
+given him by his employer, which he made over to fit his person,
+his appearance became more decent, but did not get beyond that. In
+such a large class a great deal was needed to attract the professor's
+attention, and the student who in the first year did not make himself
+known by some special quality, or did not capture the good-will of the
+professors, could with difficulty make himself known in the rest of his
+school-days. But Basilio kept on, for perseverance was his chief trait.
+
+His fortune seemed to change somewhat when he entered the third
+year. His professor happened to be a very jolly fellow, fond of
+jokes and of making the students laugh, complacent enough in that
+he almost always had his favorites recite the lessons--in fact,
+he was satisfied with anything. At this time Basilio now wore shoes
+and a clean and well-ironed camisa. As his professor noticed that
+he laughed very little at the jokes and that his large eyes seemed
+to be asking something like an eternal question, he took him for
+a fool, and one day decided to make him conspicuous by calling
+on him for the lesson. Basilio recited it from beginning to end,
+without hesitating over a single letter, so the professor called him
+a parrot and told a story to make the class laugh. Then to increase
+the hilarity and justify the epithet he asked several questions,
+at the same time winking to his favorites, as if to say to them,
+"You'll see how we're going to amuse ourselves."
+
+Basilio now understood Spanish and answered the questions with the
+plain intention of making no one laugh. This disgusted everybody,
+the expected absurdity did not materialize, no one could laugh, and
+the good friar never pardoned him for having defrauded the hopes of
+the class and disappointed his own prophecies. But who would expect
+anything worth while to come from a head so badly combed and placed on
+an Indian poorly shod, classified until recently among the arboreal
+animals? As in other centers of learning, where the teachers are
+honestly desirous that the students should learn, such discoveries
+usually delight the instructors, so in a college managed by men
+convinced that for the most part knowledge is an evil, at least for
+the students, the episode of Basilio produced a bad impression and
+he was not questioned again during the year. Why should he be, when
+he made no one laugh?
+
+Quite discouraged and thinking of abandoning his studies, he passed
+to the fourth year of Latin. Why study at all, why not sleep like
+the others and trust to luck?
+
+One of the two professors was very popular, beloved by all, passing
+for a sage, a great poet, and a man of advanced ideas. One day when
+he accompanied the collegians on their walk, he had a dispute with
+some cadets, which resulted in a skirmish and a challenge. No doubt
+recalling his brilliant youth, the professor preached a crusade and
+promised good marks to all who during the promenade on the following
+Sunday would take part in the fray. The week was a lively one--there
+were occasional encounters in which canes and sabers were crossed,
+and in one of these Basilio distinguished himself. Borne in triumph
+by the students and presented to the professor, he thus became known
+to him and came to be his favorite. Partly for this reason and partly
+from his diligence, that year he received the highest marks, medals
+included, in view of which Capitan Tiago, who, since his daughter
+had become a nun, exhibited some aversion to the friars, in a fit of
+good humor induced him to transfer to the Ateneo Municipal, the fame
+of which was then in its apogee.
+
+Here a new world opened before his eyes--a system of instruction
+that he had never dreamed of. Except for a few superfluities and some
+childish things, he was filled with admiration for the methods there
+used and with gratitude for the zeal of the instructors. His eyes at
+times filled with tears when he thought of the four previous years
+during which, from lack of means, he had been unable to study at that
+center. He had to make extraordinary efforts to get himself to the
+level of those who had had a good preparatory course, and it might be
+said that in that one year he learned the whole five of the secondary
+curricula. He received his bachelor's degree, to the great satisfaction
+of his instructors, who in the examinations showed themselves to be
+proud of him before the Dominican examiners sent there to inspect the
+school. One of these, as if to dampen such great enthusiasm a little,
+asked him where he had studied the first years of Latin.
+
+"In San Juan de Letran, Padre," answered Basilio.
+
+"Aha! Of course! He's not bad,--in Latin," the Dominican then remarked
+with a slight smile.
+
+From choice and temperament he selected the course in medicine. Capitan
+Tiago preferred the law, in order that he might have a lawyer free,
+but knowledge of the laws is not sufficient to secure clientage
+in the Philippines--it is necessary to win the cases, and for this
+friendships are required, influence in certain spheres, a good deal of
+astuteness. Capitan Tiago finally gave in, remembering that medical
+students get on intimate terms with corpses, and for some time he
+had been seeking a poison to put on the gaffs of his game-cocks,
+the best he had been able to secure thus far being the blood of a
+Chinaman who had died of syphilis.
+
+With equal diligence, or more if possible, the young man continued
+this course, and after the third year began to render medical services
+with such great success that he was not only preparing a brilliant
+future for himself but also earning enough to dress well and save
+some money. This was the last year of the course and in two months he
+would be a physician; he would come back to the town, he would marry
+Juliana, and they would be happy. The granting of his licentiateship
+was not only assured, but he expected it to be the crowning act of
+his school-days, for he had been designated to deliver the valedictory
+at the graduation, and already he saw himself in the rostrum, before
+the whole faculty, the object of public attention. All those heads,
+leaders of Manila science, half-hidden in their colored capes; all
+the women who came there out of curiosity and who years before had
+gazed at him, if not with disdain, at least with indifference; all
+those men whose carriages had once been about to crush him down in the
+mud like a dog: they would listen attentively, and he was going to
+say something to them that would not be trivial, something that had
+never before resounded in that place, he was going to forget himself
+in order to aid the poor students of the future--and he would make
+his entrance on his work in the world with that speech.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+SIMOUN
+
+
+Over these matters Basilio was pondering as he visited his mother's
+grave. He was about to start back to the town when he thought he saw
+a light flickering among the trees and heard the snapping of twigs,
+the sound of feet, and rustling of leaves. The light disappeared
+but the noises became more distinct, coming directly toward where he
+was. Basilio was not naturally superstitious, especially after having
+carved up so many corpses and watched beside so many death-beds,
+but the old legends about that ghostly spot, the hour, the darkness,
+the melancholy sighing of the wind, and certain tales heard in his
+childhood, asserted their influence over his mind and made his heart
+beat violently.
+
+The figure stopped on the other side of the balete, but the youth
+could see it through an open space between two roots that had grown
+in the course of time to the proportions of tree-trunks. It produced
+from under its coat a lantern with a powerful reflecting lens, which
+it placed on the ground, thereby lighting up a pair of riding-boots,
+the rest of the figure remaining concealed in the darkness. The figure
+seemed to search its pockets and then bent over to fix a shovel-blade
+on the end of a stout cane. To his great surprise Basilio thought he
+could make out some of the features of the jeweler Simoun, who indeed
+it was.
+
+The jeweler dug in the ground and from time to time the lantern
+illuminated his face, on which were not now the blue goggles that so
+completely disguised him. Basilio shuddered: that was the same stranger
+who thirteen years before had dug his mother's grave there, only now
+he had aged somewhat, his hair had turned white, he wore a beard and
+a mustache, but yet his look was the same, the bitter expression,
+the same cloud on his brow, the same muscular arms, though somewhat
+thinner now, the same violent energy. Old impressions were stirred
+in the boy: he seemed to feel the heat of the fire, the hunger, the
+weariness of that time, the smell of freshly turned earth. Yet his
+discovery terrified him--that jeweler Simoun, who passed for a British
+Indian, a Portuguese, an American, a mulatto, the Brown Cardinal, his
+Black Eminence, the evil genius of the Captain-General as many called
+him, was no other than the mysterious stranger whose appearance and
+disappearance coincided with the death of the heir to that land! But
+of the two strangers who had appeared, which was Ibarra, the living
+or the dead?
+
+This question, which he had often asked himself whenever Ibarra's death
+was mentioned, again came into his mind in the presence of the human
+enigma he now saw before him. The dead man had had two wounds, which
+must have been made by firearms, as he knew from what he had since
+studied, and which would be the result of the chase on the lake. Then
+the dead man must have been Ibarra, who had come to die at the tomb
+of his forefathers, his desire to be cremated being explained by his
+residence in Europe, where cremation is practised. Then who was the
+other, the living, this jeweler Simoun, at that time with such an
+appearance of poverty and wretchedness, but who had now returned
+loaded with gold and a friend of the authorities? There was the
+mystery, and the student, with his characteristic cold-bloodedness,
+determined to clear it up at the first opportunity.
+
+Simoun dug away for some time, but Basilio noticed that his old vigor
+had declined--he panted and had to rest every few moments. Fearing
+that he might be discovered, the boy made a sudden resolution. Rising
+from his seat and issuing from his hiding-place, he asked in the most
+matter-of-fact tone, "Can I help you, sir?"
+
+Simoun straightened up with the spring of a tiger attacked at his
+prey, thrust his hand in his coat pocket, and stared at the student
+with a pale and lowering gaze.
+
+"Thirteen years ago you rendered me a great service, sir," went on
+Basilio unmoved, "in this very place, by burying my mother, and I
+should consider myself happy if I could serve you now."
+
+Without taking his eyes off the youth Simoun drew a revolver from
+his pocket and the click of a hammer being cocked was heard. "For
+whom do you take me?" he asked, retreating a few paces.
+
+"For a person who is sacred to me," replied Basilio with some emotion,
+for he thought his last moment had come. "For a person whom all, except
+me, believe to be dead, and whose misfortunes I have always lamented."
+
+An impressive silence followed these words, a silence that to the
+youth seemed to suggest eternity. But Simoun, after some hesitation,
+approached him and placing a hand on his shoulder said in a moving
+tone: "Basilio, you possess a secret that can ruin me and now you have
+just surprised me in another, which puts me completely in your hands,
+the divulging of which would upset all my plans. For my own security
+and for the good of the cause in which I labor, I ought to seal your
+lips forever, for what is the life of one man compared to the end I
+seek? The occasion is fitting; no one knows that I have come here;
+I am armed; you are defenceless; your death would be attributed to
+the outlaws, if not to more supernatural causes--yet I'll let you
+live and trust that I shall not regret it. You have toiled, you have
+struggled with energetic perseverance, and like myself, you have your
+scores to settle with society. Your brother was murdered, your mother
+driven to insanity, and society has prosecuted neither the assassin
+nor the executioner. You and I are the dregs of justice and instead
+of destroying we ought to aid each other."
+
+Simoun paused with a repressed sigh, and then slowly resumed, while
+his gaze wandered about: "Yes, I am he who came here thirteen years
+ago, sick and wretched, to pay the last tribute to a great and noble
+soul that was willing to die for me. The victim of a vicious system, I
+have wandered over the world, working night and day to amass a fortune
+and carry out my plan. Now I have returned to destroy that system,
+to precipitate its downfall, to hurl it into the abyss toward which
+it is senselessly rushing, even though I may have to shed oceans
+of tears and blood. It has condemned itself, it stands condemned,
+and I don't want to die before I have seen it in fragments at the
+foot of the precipice!"
+
+Simoun extended both his arms toward the earth, as if with that gesture
+he would like to hold there the broken remains. His voice took on a
+sinister, even lugubrious tone, which made the student shudder.
+
+"Called by the vices of the rulers, I have returned to these islands,
+and under the cloak of a merchant have visited the towns. My gold
+has opened a way for me and wheresoever I have beheld greed in the
+most execrable forms, sometimes hypocritical, sometimes shameless,
+sometimes cruel, fatten on the dead organism, like a vulture on a
+corpse, I have asked myself--why was there not, festering in its
+vitals, the corruption, the ptomaine, the poison of the tombs, to
+kill the foul bird? The corpse was letting itself be consumed, the
+vulture was gorging itself with meat, and because it was not possible
+for me to give it life so that it might turn against its destroyer,
+and because the corruption developed slowly, I have stimulated greed,
+I have abetted it. The cases of injustice and the abuses multiplied
+themselves; I have instigated crime and acts of cruelty, so that the
+people might become accustomed to the idea of death. I have stirred up
+trouble so that to escape from it some remedy might be found; I have
+placed obstacles in the way of trade so that the country, impoverished
+and reduced to misery, might no longer be afraid of anything; I have
+excited desires to plunder the treasury, and as this has not been
+enough to bring about a popular uprising, I have wounded the people
+in their most sensitive fiber; I have made the vulture itself insult
+the very corpse that it feeds upon and hasten the corruption.
+
+"Now, when I was about to get the supreme rottenness, the supreme
+filth, the mixture of such foul products brewing poison, when the
+greed was beginning to irritate, in its folly hastening to seize
+whatever came to hand, like an old woman caught in a conflagration,
+here you come with your cries of Hispanism, with chants of confidence
+in the government, in what cannot come to pass, here you have a body
+palpitating with heat and life, young, pure, vigorous, throbbing with
+blood, with enthusiasm, suddenly come forth to offer itself again as
+fresh food!
+
+"Ah, youth is ever inexperienced and dreamy, always running after
+the butterflies and flowers! You have united, so that by your efforts
+you may bind your fatherland to Spain with garlands of roses when in
+reality you are forging upon it chains harder than the diamond! You
+ask for equal rights, the Hispanization of your customs, and you don't
+see that what you are begging for is suicide, the destruction of your
+nationality, the annihilation of your fatherland, the consecration of
+tyranny! What will you be in the future? A people without character,
+a nation without liberty--everything you have will be borrowed, even
+your very defects! You beg for Hispanization, and do not pale with
+shame when they deny it you! And even if they should grant it to you,
+what then--what have you gained? At best, a country of pronunciamentos,
+a land of civil wars, a republic of the greedy and the malcontents,
+like some of the republics of South America! To what are you tending
+now, with your instruction in Castilian, a pretension that would be
+ridiculous were it not for its deplorable consequences! You wish to
+add one more language to the forty odd that are spoken in the islands,
+so that you may understand one another less and less."
+
+"On the contrary," replied Basilio, "if the knowledge of Castilian
+may bind us to the government, in exchange it may also unite the
+islands among themselves."
+
+"A gross error!" rejoined Simoun. "You are letting yourselves be
+deceived by big words and never go to the bottom of things to examine
+the results in their final analysis. Spanish will never be the general
+language of the country, the people will never talk it, because the
+conceptions of their brains and the feelings of their hearts cannot
+be expressed in that language--each people has its own tongue, as it
+has its own way of thinking! What are you going to do with Castilian,
+the few of you who will speak it? Kill off your own originality,
+subordinate your thoughts to other brains, and instead of freeing
+yourselves, make yourselves slaves indeed! Nine-tenths of those of
+you who pretend to be enlightened are renegades to your country! He
+among you who talks that language neglects his own in such a way that
+he neither writes nor understands it, and how many have I not seen
+who pretended not to know a single word of it! But fortunately, you
+have an imbecile government! While Russia enslaves Poland by forcing
+the Russian language upon it, while Germany prohibits French in the
+conquered provinces, your government strives to preserve yours, and
+you in return, a remarkable people under an incredible government, you
+are trying to despoil yourselves of your own nationality! One and all
+you forget that while a people preserves its language, it preserves
+the marks of its liberty, as a man preserves his independence while
+he holds to his own way of thinking. Language is the thought of the
+peoples. Luckily, your independence is assured; human passions are
+looking out for that!"
+
+Simoun paused and rubbed his hand over his forehead. The waning moon
+was rising and sent its faint light down through the branches of the
+trees, and with his white locks and severe features, illuminated from
+below by the lantern, the jeweler appeared to be the fateful spirit
+of the wood planning some evil.
+
+Basilio was silent before such bitter reproaches and listened with
+bowed head, while Simoun resumed: "I saw this movement started and have
+passed whole nights of anguish, because I understood that among those
+youths there were exceptional minds and hearts, sacrificing themselves
+for what they thought to be a good cause, when in reality they were
+working against their own country. How many times have I wished
+to speak to you young men, to reveal myself and undeceive you! But
+in view of the reputation I enjoy, my words would have been wrongly
+interpreted and would perhaps have had a counter effect. How many times
+have I not longed to approach your Makaraig, your Isagani! Sometimes
+I thought of their death, I wished to destroy them--"
+
+Simoun checked himself.
+
+"Here's why I let you live, Basilio, and by such imprudence I expose
+myself to the risk of being some day betrayed by you. But you know
+who I am, you know how much I must have suffered--then believe in
+me! You are not of the common crowd, which sees in the jeweler Simoun
+the trader who incites the authorities to commit abuses in order that
+the abused may buy jewels. I am the Judge who wishes to castigate
+this system by making use of its own defects, to make war on it by
+flattering it. I need your help, your influence among the youth, to
+combat these senseless desires for Hispanization, for assimilation,
+for equal rights. By that road you will become only a poor copy,
+and the people should look higher. It is madness to attempt to
+influence the thoughts of the rulers--they have their plan outlined,
+the bandage covers their eyes, and besides losing time uselessly, you
+are deceiving the people with vain hopes and are helping to bend their
+necks before the tyrant. What you should do is to take advantage of
+their prejudices to serve your needs. Are they unwilling that you
+be assimilated with the Spanish people? Good enough! Distinguish
+yourselves then by revealing yourselves in your own character, try
+to lay the foundations of the Philippine fatherland! Do they deny you
+hope? Good! Don't depend on them, depend upon yourselves and work! Do
+they deny you representation in their Cortes? So much the better! Even
+should you succeed in sending representatives of your own choice,
+what are you going to accomplish there except to be overwhelmed among
+so many voices, and sanction with your presence the abuses and wrongs
+that are afterwards perpetrated? The fewer rights they allow you,
+the more reason you will have later to throw off the yoke, and return
+evil for evil. If they are unwilling to teach you their language,
+cultivate your own, extend it, preserve to the people their own way
+of thinking, and instead of aspiring to be a province, aspire to be
+a nation! Instead of subordinate thoughts, think independently, to
+the end that neither by right, nor custom, nor language, the Spaniard
+can be considered the master here, nor even be looked upon as a part
+of the country, but ever as an invader, a foreigner, and sooner or
+later you will have your liberty! Here's why I let you live!"
+
+Basilio breathed freely, as though a great weight had been lifted from
+him, and after a brief pause, replied: "Sir, the honor you do me in
+confiding your plans to me is too great for me not to be frank with
+you, and tell you that what you ask of me is beyond my power. I am
+no politician, and if I have signed the petition for instruction in
+Castilian it has been because I saw in it an advantage to our studies
+and nothing more. My destiny is different; my aspiration reduces
+itself to alleviating the physical sufferings of my fellow men."
+
+The jeweler smiled. "What are physical sufferings compared to moral
+tortures? What is the death of a man in the presence of the death of a
+society? Some day you will perhaps be a great physician, if they let
+you go your way in peace, but greater yet will be he who can inject
+a new idea into this anemic people! You, what are you doing for the
+land that gave you existence, that supports your life, that affords
+you knowledge? Don't you realize that that is a useless life which is
+not consecrated to a great idea? It is a stone wasted in the fields
+without becoming a part of any edifice."
+
+"No, no, sir!" replied Basilio modestly, "I'm not folding my arms,
+I'm working like all the rest to raise up from the ruins of the past
+a people whose units will be bound together--that each one may feel
+in himself the conscience and the life of the whole. But however
+enthusiastic our generation may be, we understand that in this great
+social fabric there must be a division of labor. I have chosen my
+task and will devote myself to science."
+
+"Science is not the end of man," declared Simoun.
+
+"The most civilized nations are tending toward it."
+
+"Yes, but only as a means of seeking their welfare."
+
+"Science is more eternal, it's more human, it's more
+universal!" exclaimed the youth in a transport of enthusiasm. "Within a
+few centuries, when humanity has become redeemed and enlightened, when
+there are no races, when all peoples are free, when there are neither
+tyrants nor slaves, colonies nor mother countries, when justice rules
+and man is a citizen of the world, the pursuit of science alone will
+remain, the word patriotism will be equivalent to fanaticism, and he
+who prides himself on patriotic ideas will doubtless be isolated as
+a dangerous disease, as a menace to the social order."
+
+Simoun smiled sadly. "Yes, yes," he said with a shake of his head,
+"yet to reach that condition it is necessary that there be no
+tyrannical and no enslaved peoples, it is necessary that man go about
+freely, that he know how to respect the rights of others in their own
+individuality, and for this there is yet much blood to be shed, the
+struggle forces itself forward. To overcome the ancient fanaticism
+that bound consciences it was necessary that many should perish in
+the holocausts, so that the social conscience in horror declared
+the individual conscience free. It is also necessary that all answer
+the question which with each day the fatherland asks them, with its
+fettered hands extended! Patriotism can only be a crime in a tyrannical
+people, because then it is rapine under a beautiful name, but however
+perfect humanity may become, patriotism will always be a virtue among
+oppressed peoples, because it will at all times mean love of justice,
+of liberty, of personal dignity--nothing of chimerical dreams, of
+effeminate idyls! The greatness of a man is not in living before his
+time, a thing almost impossible, but in understanding its desires,
+in responding to its needs, and in guiding it on its forward way. The
+geniuses that are commonly believed to have existed before their time,
+only appear so because those who judge them see from a great distance,
+or take as representative of the age the line of stragglers!"
+
+Simoun fell silent. Seeing that he could awake no enthusiasm in
+that unresponsive mind, he turned to another subject and asked with
+a change of tone: "And what are you doing for the memory of your
+mother and your brother? Is it enough that you come here every year,
+to weep like a woman over a grave?" And he smiled sarcastically.
+
+The shot hit the mark. Basilio changed color and advanced a step.
+
+"What do you want me to do?" he asked angrily.
+
+"Without means, without social position, how may I bring their
+murderers to justice? I would merely be another victim, shattered like
+a piece of glass hurled against a rock. Ah, you do ill to recall this
+to me, since it is wantonly reopening a wound!"
+
+"But what if I should offer you my aid?"
+
+Basilio shook his head and remained pensive. "All the tardy
+vindications of justice, all the revenge in the world, will not restore
+a single hair of my mother's head, or recall a smile to my brother's
+lips. Let them rest in peace--what should I gain now by avenging them?"
+
+"Prevent others from suffering what you have suffered, that in
+the future there be no brothers murdered or mothers driven to
+madness. Resignation is not always a virtue; it is a crime when it
+encourages tyrants: there are no despots where there are no slaves! Man
+is in his own nature so wicked that he always abuses complaisance. I
+thought as you do, and you know what my fate was. Those who caused
+your misfortunes are watching you day and night, they suspect that
+you are only biding your time, they take your eagerness to learn,
+your love of study, your very complaisance, for burning desires for
+revenge. The day they can get rid of you they will do with you as
+they did with me, and they will not let you grow to manhood, because
+they fear and hate you!"
+
+"Hate me? Still hate me after the wrong they have done me?" asked
+the youth in surprise.
+
+Simoun burst into a laugh. "'It is natural for man to hate those
+whom he has wronged,' said Tacitus, confirming the _quos laeserunt et
+oderunt_ of Seneca. When you wish to gauge the evil or the good that
+one people has done to another, you have only to observe whether
+it hates or loves. Thus is explained the reason why many who have
+enriched themselves here in the high offices they have filled, on
+their return to the Peninsula relieve themselves by slanders and
+insults against those who have been their victims. _Proprium humani
+ingenii est odisse quern laeseris!"_
+
+"But if the world is large, if one leaves them to the peaceful
+enjoyment of power, if I ask only to be allowed to work, to live--"
+
+"And to rear meek-natured sons to send them afterwards to submit to
+the yoke," continued Simoun, cruelly mimicking Basilio's tone. "A fine
+future you prepare for them, and they have to thank you for a life
+of humiliation and suffering! Good enough, young man! When a body
+is inert, it is useless to galvanize it. Twenty years of continuous
+slavery, of systematic humiliation, of constant prostration, finally
+create in the mind a twist that cannot be straightened by the labor
+of a day. Good and evil instincts are inherited and transmitted from
+father to son. Then let your idylic ideas live, your dreams of a
+slave who asks only for a bandage to wrap the chain so that it may
+rattle less and not ulcerate his skin! You hope for a little home
+and some ease, a wife and a handful of rice--here is your ideal man
+of the Philippines! Well, if they give it to you, consider yourself
+fortunate."
+
+Basilio, accustomed to obey and bear with the caprices and humors
+of Capitan Tiago. was now dominated by Simoun, who appeared to him
+terrible and sinister on a background bathed in tears and blood. He
+tried to explain himself by saying that he did not consider himself
+fit to mix in politics, that he had no political opinions because
+he had never studied the question, but that he was always ready to
+lend his services the day they might be needed, that for the moment
+he saw only one need, the enlightenment of the people.
+
+Simoun stopped him with a gesture, and, as the dawn was coming,
+said to him: "Young man, I am not warning you to keep my secret,
+because I know that discretion is one of your good qualities, and
+even though you might wish to sell me, the jeweler Simoun, the friend
+of the authorities and of the religious corporations, will always
+be given more credit than the student Basilio, already suspected
+of filibusterism, and, being a native, so much the more marked and
+watched, and because in the profession you are entering upon you
+will encounter powerful rivals. After all, even though you have not
+corresponded to my hopes, the day on which you change your mind,
+look me up at my house in the Escolta, and I'll be glad to help you."
+
+Basilio thanked him briefly and went away.
+
+"Have I really made a mistake?" mused Simoun, when he found himself
+alone. "Is it that he doubts me and meditates his plan of revenge
+so secretly that he fears to tell it even in the solitude of the
+night? Or can it be that the years of servitude have extinguished
+in his heart every human sentiment and there remain only the animal
+desires to live and reproduce? In that case the type is deformed
+and will have to be cast over again. Then the hecatomb is preparing:
+let the unfit perish and only the strongest survive!"
+
+Then he added sadly, as if apostrophizing some one: "Have patience, you
+who left me a name and a home, have patience! I have lost all--country,
+future, prosperity, your very tomb, but have patience! And thou,
+noble spirit, great soul, generous heart, who didst live with only one
+thought and didst sacrifice thy life without asking the gratitude or
+applause of any one, have patience, have patience! The methods that I
+use may perhaps not be thine, but they are the most direct. The day
+is coming, and when it brightens I myself will come to announce it
+to you who are now indifferent. Have patience!"
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+MERRY CHRISTMAS!
+
+
+When Juli opened her sorrowing eyes, she saw that the house was still
+dark, but the cocks were crowing. Her first thought was that perhaps
+the Virgin had performed the miracle and the sun was not going to rise,
+in spite of the invocations of the cocks. She rose, crossed herself,
+recited her morning prayers with great devotion, and with as little
+noise as possible went out on the _batalan._
+
+There was no miracle--the sun was rising and promised a magnificent
+morning, the breeze was delightfully cool, the stars were paling
+in the east, and the cocks were crowing as if to see who could crow
+best and loudest. That had been too much to ask--it were much easier
+to request the Virgin to send the two hundred and fifty pesos. What
+would it cost the Mother of the Lord to give them? But underneath the
+image she found only the letter of her father asking for the ransom of
+five hundred pesos. There was nothing to do but go, so, seeing that
+her grandfather was not stirring, she thought him asleep and began
+to prepare breakfast. Strange, she was calm, she even had a desire
+to laugh! What had she had last night to afflict her so? She was not
+going very far, she could come every second day to visit the house,
+her grandfather could see her, and as for Basilio, he had known for
+some time the bad turn her father's affairs had taken, since he had
+often said to her, "When I'm a physician and we are married, your
+father won't need his fields."
+
+"What a fool I was to cry so much," she said to herself as she packed
+her _tampipi._ Her fingers struck against the locket and she pressed
+it to her lips, but immediately wiped them from fear of contagion, for
+that locket set with diamonds and emeralds had come from a leper. Ah,
+then, if she should catch that disease she could not get married.
+
+As it became lighter, she could see her grandfather seated in a
+corner, following all her movements with his eyes, so she caught up her
+_tampipi_ of clothes and approached him smilingly to kiss his hand. The
+old man blessed her silently, while she tried to appear merry. "When
+father comes back, tell him that I have at last gone to college--my
+mistress talks Spanish. It's the cheapest college I could find."
+
+Seeing the old man's eyes fill with tears, she placed the _tampipi_
+on her head and hastily went downstairs, her slippers slapping merrily
+on the wooden steps. But when she turned her head to look again at
+the house, the house wherein had faded her childhood dreams and her
+maiden illusions, when she saw it sad, lonely, deserted, with the
+windows half closed, vacant and dark like a dead man's eyes, when
+she heard the low rustling of the bamboos, and saw them nodding in
+the fresh morning breeze as though bidding her farewell, then her
+vivacity disappeared; she stopped, her eyes filled with tears, and
+letting herself fall in a sitting posture on a log by the wayside
+she broke out into disconsolate tears.
+
+Juli had been gone several hours and the sun was quite high overhead
+when Tandang Selo gazed from the window at the people in their festival
+garments going to the town to attend the high mass. Nearly all led
+by the hand or carried in their arms a little boy or girl decked out
+as if for a fiesta.
+
+Christmas day in the Philippines is, according to the elders, a fiesta
+for the children, who are perhaps not of the same opinion and who,
+it may be supposed, have for it an instinctive dread. They are roused
+early, washed, dressed, and decked out with everything new, dear,
+and precious that they possess--high silk shoes, big hats, woolen or
+velvet suits, without overlooking four or five scapularies, which
+contain texts from St. John, and thus burdened they are carried to
+the high mass, where for almost an hour they are subjected to the heat
+and the human smells from so many crowding, perspiring people, and if
+they are not made to recite the rosary they must remain quiet, bored,
+or asleep. At each movement or antic that may soil their clothing
+they are pinched and scolded, so the fact is that they do not laugh
+or feel happy, while in their round eyes can be read a protest against
+so much embroidery and a longing for the old shirt of week-days.
+
+Afterwards, they are dragged from house to house to kiss their
+relatives' hands. There they have to dance, sing, and recite all
+the amusing things they know, whether in the humor or not, whether
+comfortable or not in their fine clothes, with the eternal pinchings
+and scoldings if they play any of their tricks. Their relatives give
+them cuartos which their parents seize upon and of which they hear
+nothing more. The only positive results they are accustomed to get from
+the fiesta are the marks of the aforesaid pinchings, the vexations,
+and at best an attack of indigestion from gorging themselves with
+candy and cake in the houses of kind relatives. But such is the
+custom, and Filipino children enter the world through these ordeals,
+which afterwards prove the least sad, the least hard, of their lives.
+
+Adult persons who live independently also share in this fiesta,
+by visiting their parents and their parents' relatives, crooking
+their knees, and wishing them a merry Christmas. Their Christmas
+gift consists of a sweetmeat, some fruit, a glass of water, or some
+insignificant present.
+
+Tandang Selo saw all his friends pass and thought sadly that this
+year he had no Christmas gift for anybody, while his granddaughter
+had gone without hers, without wishing him a merry Christinas. Was
+it delicacy on Juli's part or pure forgetfulness?
+
+When he tried to greet the relatives who called on him, bringing their
+children, he found to his great surprise that he could not articulate
+a word. Vainly he tried, but no sound could he utter. He placed his
+hands on his throat, shook his head, but without effect. When he tried
+to laugh, his lips trembled convulsively and the only noise produced
+was a hoarse wheeze like the blowing of bellows.
+
+The women gazed at him in consternation. "He's dumb, he's dumb!" they
+cried in astonishment, raising at once a literal pandemonium.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+PILATES
+
+
+When the news of this misfortune became known in the town, some
+lamented it and others shrugged their shoulders. No one was to blame,
+and no one need lay it on his conscience.
+
+The lieutenant of the Civil Guard gave no sign: he had received an
+order to take up all the arms and he had performed his duty. He had
+chased the tulisanes whenever he could, and when they captured Cabesang
+Tales he had organized an expedition and brought into the town,
+with their arms bound behind them, five or six rustics who looked
+suspicious, so if Cabesang Tales did not show up it was because he
+was not in the pockets or under the skins of the prisoners, who were
+thoroughly shaken out.
+
+The friar-administrator shrugged his shoulders: he had nothing to
+do with it, it was a matter of tulisanes and he had merely done his
+duty. True it was that if he had not entered the complaint, perhaps the
+arms would not have been taken up, and poor Tales would not have been
+captured; but he, Fray Clemente, had to look after his own safety,
+and that Tales had a way of staring at him as if picking out a good
+target in some part of his body. Self-defense is natural. If there
+are tulisanes, the fault is not his, it is not his duty to run them
+down--that belongs to the Civil Guard. If Cabesang Tales, instead
+of wandering about his fields, had stayed at home, he would not have
+been captured. In short, that was a punishment from heaven upon those
+who resisted the demands of his corporation.
+
+When Sister Penchang, the pious old woman in whose service Juli
+had entered, learned of it, she ejaculated several _'Susmarioseps_,
+crossed herself, and remarked, "Often God sends these trials because
+we are sinners or have sinning relatives, to whom we should have
+taught piety and we haven't done so."
+
+Those _sinning relatives_ referred to Juliana, for to this pious
+woman Juli was a great sinner. "Think of a girl of marriageable age
+who doesn't yet know how to pray! _Jesus_, how scandalous! If the
+wretch doesn't say the _Dios te salve Maria_ without stopping at _es
+contigo_, and the _Santa Maria_ without a pause after _pecadores_, as
+every good Christian who fears God ought to do! She doesn't know the
+_oremus gratiam_, and says _mentibus_ for _mentibus_. Anybody hearing
+her would think she was talking about something else. _'Susmariosep!_"
+
+Greatly scandalized, she made the sign of the cross and thanked God,
+who had permitted the capture of the father in order that the daughter
+might be snatched from sin and learn the virtues which, according
+to the curates, should adorn every Christian woman. She therefore
+kept the girl constantly at work, not allowing her to return to the
+village to look after her grandfather. Juli had to learn how to pray,
+to read the books distributed by the friars, and to work until the
+two hundred and fifty pesos should be paid.
+
+When she learned that Basilio had gone to Manila to get his savings
+and ransom Juli from her servitude, the good woman believed that the
+girl was forever lost and that the devil had presented himself in
+the guise of the student. Dreadful as it all was, how true was that
+little book the curate had given her! Youths who go to Manila to
+study are ruined and then ruin the others. Thinking to rescue Juli,
+she made her read and re-read the book called _Tandang Basio Macunat_,
+[17] charging her always to go and see the curate in the convento,
+[18] as did the heroine, who is so praised by the author, a friar.
+
+Meanwhile, the friars had gained their point. They had certainly
+won the suit, so they took advantage of Cabesang Tales' captivity
+to turn the fields over to the one who had asked for them, without
+the least thought of honor or the faintest twinge of shame. When
+the former owner returned and learned what had happened, when he saw
+his fields in another's possession,--those fields that had cost the
+lives of his wife and daughter,--when he saw his father dumb and his
+daughter working as a servant, and when he himself received an order
+from the town council, transmitted through the headman of the village,
+to move out of the house within three days, he said nothing; he sat
+down at his father's side and spoke scarcely once during the whole day.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+WEALTH AND WANT
+
+
+On the following day, to the great surprise of the village, the jeweler
+Simoun, followed by two servants, each carrying a canvas-covered chest,
+requested the hospitality of Cabesang Tales, who even in the midst
+of his wretchedness did not forget the good Filipino customs--rather,
+he was troubled to think that he had no way of properly entertaining
+the stranger. But Simoun brought everything with him, servants and
+provisions, and merely wished to spend the day and night in the house
+because it was the largest in the village and was situated between
+San Diego and Tiani, towns where he hoped to find many customers.
+
+Simoun secured information about the condition of the roads and asked
+Cabesang Tales if his revolver was a sufficient protection against
+the tulisanes.
+
+"They have rifles that shoot a long way," was the rather absent-minded
+reply.
+
+"This revolver does no less," remarked Simoun, firing at an areca-palm
+some two hundred paces away.
+
+Cabesang Tales noticed that some nuts fell, but remained silent
+and thoughtful.
+
+Gradually the families, drawn by the fame of the jeweler's wares,
+began to collect. They wished one another merry Christmas, they
+talked of masses, saints, poor crops, but still were there to spend
+their savings for jewels and trinkets brought from Europe. It was
+known that the jeweler was the friend of the Captain-General, so it
+wasn't lost labor to get on good terms with him, and thus be prepared
+for contingencies.
+
+Capitan Basilio came with his wife, daughter, and son-in-law, prepared
+to spend at least three thousand pesos. Sister Penchang was there to
+buy a diamond ring she had promised to the Virgin of Antipolo. She
+had left Juli at home memorizing a booklet the curate had sold her for
+four cuartos, with forty days of indulgence granted by the Archbishop
+to every one who read it or listened to it read.
+
+"_Jesus!_" said the pious woman to Capitana Tika, "that poor girl has
+grown up like a mushroom planted by the _tikbalang._ I've made her read
+the book at the top of her voice at least fifty times and she doesn't
+remember a single word of it. She has a head like a sieve--full when
+it's in the water. All of us hearing her, even the dogs and cats,
+have won at least twenty years of indulgence."
+
+Simoun arranged his two chests on the table, one being somewhat larger
+than the other. "You don't want plated jewelry or imitation gems. This
+lady," turning to Sinang, "wants real diamonds."
+
+"That's it, yes, sir, diamonds, old diamonds, antique stones, you
+know," she responded. "Papa will pay for them, because he likes antique
+things, antique stones." Sinang was accustomed to joke about the great
+deal of Latin her father understood and the little her husband knew.
+
+"It just happens that I have some antique jewels," replied Simoun,
+taking the canvas cover from the smaller chest, a polished steel
+case with bronze trimmings and stout locks. "I have necklaces of
+Cleopatra's, real and genuine, discovered in the Pyramids; rings of
+Roman senators and knights, found in the ruins of Carthage."
+
+"Probably those that Hannibal sent back after the battle of
+Cannae!" exclaimed Capitan Basilio seriously, while he trembled with
+pleasure. The good man, thought he had read much about the ancients,
+had never, by reason of the lack of museums in Filipinas, seen any
+of the objects of those times.
+
+"I have brought besides costly earrings of Roman ladies, discovered
+in the villa of Annius Mucius Papilinus in Pompeii."
+
+Capitan Easilio nodded to show that he understood and was eager to
+see such precious relics. The women remarked that they also wanted
+things from Rome, such as rosaries blessed by the Pope, holy relics
+that would take away sins without the need of confessions, and so on.
+
+When the chest was opened and the cotton packing removed, there was
+exposed a tray filled with rings, reliquaries, lockets, crucifixes,
+brooches, and such like. The diamonds set in among variously colored
+stones flashed out brightly and shimmered among golden flowers of
+varied hues, with petals of enamel, all of peculiar designs and rare
+Arabesque workmanship.
+
+Simoun lifted the tray and exhibited another filled with quaint jewels
+that would have satisfied the imaginations of seven debutantes on the
+eves of the balls in their honor. Designs, one more fantastic than
+the other, combinations of precious stones and pearls worked into
+the figures of insects with azure backs and transparent forewings,
+sapphires, emeralds, rubies, turquoises, diamonds, joined to form
+dragon-flies, wasps, bees, butterflies, beetles, serpents, lizards,
+fishes, sprays of flowers. There were diadems, necklaces of pearls
+and diamonds, so that some of the girls could not withhold a _naku_
+of admiration, and Sinang gave a cluck with her tongue, whereupon
+her mother pinched her to prevent her from encouraging the jeweler
+to raise his prices, for Capitana Tika still pinched her daughter
+even after the latter was married.
+
+"Here you have some old diamonds," explained the jeweler. "This ring
+belonged to the Princess Lamballe and those earrings to one of Marie
+Antoinette's ladies." They consisted of some beautiful solitaire
+diamonds, as large as grains of corn, with somewhat bluish lights,
+and pervaded with a severe elegance, as though they still reflected
+in their sparkles the shuddering of the Reign of Terror.
+
+"Those two earrings!" exclaimed Sinang, looking at her father and
+instinctively covering the arm next to her mother.
+
+"Something more ancient yet, something Roman," said Capitan Basilio
+with a wink.
+
+The pious Sister Penchang thought that with such a gift the Virgin of
+Antipolo would be softened and grant her her most vehement desire:
+for some time she had begged for a wonderful miracle to which her
+name would be attached, so that her name might be immortalized on
+earth and she then ascend into heaven, like the Capitana Ines of the
+curates. She inquired the price and Simoun asked three thousand pesos,
+which made the good woman cross herself--_'Susmariosep!_
+
+Simoun now exposed the third tray, which was filled with watches,
+cigar- and match-cases decorated with the rarest enamels, reliquaries
+set with diamonds and containing the most elegant miniatures.
+
+The fourth tray, containing loose gems, stirred a murmur of
+admiration. Sinang again clucked with her tongue, her mother again
+pinched her, although at the same time herself emitting a _'Susmaria_
+of wonder.
+
+No one there had ever before seen so much wealth. In that chest lined
+with dark-blue velvet, arranged in trays, were the wonders of the
+_Arabian Nights,_ the dreams of Oriental fantasies. Diamonds as large
+as peas glittered there, throwing out attractive rays as if they were
+about to melt or burn with all the hues of the spectrum; emeralds from
+Peru, of varied forms and shapes; rubies from India, red as drops of
+blood; sapphires from Ceylon, blue and white; turquoises from Persia;
+Oriental pearls, some rosy, some lead-colored, others black. Those
+who have at night seen a great rocket burst in the azure darkness of
+the sky into thousands of colored lights, so bright that they make
+the eternal stars look dim, can imagine the aspect the tray presented.
+
+As if to increase the admiration of the beholders, Simoun took the
+stones out with his tapering brown fingers, gloating over their
+crystalline hardness, their luminous stream, as they poured from his
+hands like drops of water reflecting the tints of the rainbow. The
+reflections from so many facets, the thought of their great value,
+fascinated the gaze of every one.
+
+Cabesang Tales, who had approached out of curiosity, closed his eyes
+and drew back hurriedly, as if to drive away an evil thought. Such
+great riches were an insult to his misfortunes; that man had come there
+to make an exhibition of his immense wealth on the very day that he,
+Tales, for lack of money, for lack of protectors, had to abandon the
+house raised by his own hands.
+
+"Here you have two black diamonds, among the largest in existence,"
+explained the jeweler. "They're very difficult to cut because they're
+the very hardest. This somewhat rosy stone is also a diamond, as is
+this green one that many take for an emerald. Quiroga the Chinaman
+offered me six thousand pesos for it in order to present it to a very
+influential lady, and yet it is not the green ones that are the most
+valuable, but these blue ones."
+
+He selected three stones of no great size, but thick and well-cut,
+of a delicate azure tint.
+
+"For all that they are smaller than the green," he continued,
+"they cost twice as much. Look at this one, the smallest of all,
+weighing not more than two carats, which cost me twenty thousand
+pesos and which I won't sell for less than thirty. I had to make a
+special trip to buy it. This other one, from the mines of Golconda,
+weighs three and a half carats and is worth over seventy thousand. The
+Viceroy of India, in a letter I received the day before yesterday,
+offers me twelve thousand pounds sterling for it."
+
+Before such great wealth, all under the power of that man who talked
+so unaffectedly, the spectators felt a kind of awe mingled with
+dread. Sinang clucked several times and her mother did not pinch
+her, perhaps because she too was overcome, or perhaps because she
+reflected that a jeweler like Simoun was not going to try to gain
+five pesos more or less as a result of an exclamation more or less
+indiscreet. All gazed at the gems, but no one showed any desire to
+handle them, they were so awe-inspiring. Curiosity was blunted by
+wonder. Cabesang Tales stared out into the field, thinking that with
+a single diamond, perhaps the very smallest there, he could recover
+his daughter, keep his house, and perhaps rent another farm. Could
+it be that those gems were worth more than a man's home, the safety
+of a maiden, the peace of an old man in his declining days?
+
+As if he guessed the thought, Simoun remarked to those about him: "Look
+here--with one of these little blue stones, which appear so innocent
+and inoffensive, pure as sparks scattered over the arch of heaven,
+with one of these, seasonably presented, a man was able to have his
+enemy deported, the father of a family, as a disturber of the peace;
+and with this other little one like it, red as one's heart-blood,
+as the feeling of revenge, and bright as an orphan's tears, he was
+restored to liberty, the man was returned to his home, the father to
+his children, the husband to the wife, and a whole family saved from
+a wretched future."
+
+He slapped the chest and went on in a loud tone in bad Tagalog: "Here
+I have, as in a medicine-chest, life and death, poison and balm,
+and with this handful I can drive to tears all the inhabitants of
+the Philippines!"
+
+The listeners gazed at him awe-struck, knowing him to be right. In
+his voice there could be detected a strange ring, while sinister
+flashes seemed to issue from behind the blue goggles.
+
+Then as if to relieve the strain of the impression made by the gems on
+such simple folk, he lifted up the tray and exposed at the bottom the
+_sanctum sanctorum_. Cases of Russian leather, separated by layers of
+cotton, covered a bottom lined with gray velvet. All expected wonders,
+and Sinang's husband thought he saw carbuncles, gems that flashed
+fire and shone in the midst of the shadows. Capitan Basilio was on
+the threshold of immortality: he was going to behold something real,
+something beyond his dreams.
+
+"This was a necklace of Cleopatra's," said Simoun, taking out carefully
+a flat case in the shape of a half-moon. "It's a jewel that can't be
+appraised, an object for a museum, only for a rich government."
+
+It was a necklace fashioned of bits of gold representing little idols
+among green and blue beetles, with a vulture's head made from a single
+piece of rare jasper at the center between two extended wings--the
+symbol and decoration of Egyptian queens.
+
+Sinang turned up her nose and made a grimace of childish depreciation,
+while Capitan Basilio, with all his love for antiquity, could not
+restrain an exclamation of disappointment.
+
+"It's a magnificent jewel, well-preserved, almost two thousand
+years old."
+
+"Pshaw!" Sinang made haste to exclaim, to prevent her father's falling
+into temptation.
+
+"Fool!" he chided her, after overcoming his first disappointment. "How
+do you know but that to this necklace is due the present condition
+of the world? With this Cleopatra may have captivated Caesar, Mark
+Antony! This has heard the burning declarations of love from the
+greatest warriors of their time, it has listened to speeches in the
+purest and most elegant Latin, and yet you would want to wear it!"
+
+"I? I wouldn't give three pesos for it."
+
+"You could give twenty, silly," said Capitana Tika in a judicial
+tone. "The gold is good and melted down would serve for other jewelry."
+
+"This is a ring that must have belonged to Sulla," continued Simoun,
+exhibiting a heavy ring of solid gold with a seal on it.
+
+"With that he must have signed the death-wrarrants during his
+dictatorship!" exclaimed Capitan Basilio, pale with emotion. He
+examined it and tried to decipher the seal, but though he turned
+it over and over he did not understand paleography, so he could not
+read it.
+
+"What a finger Sulla had!" he observed finally. "This would fit two
+of ours--as I've said, we're degenerating!"
+
+"I still have many other jewels--"
+
+"If they're all that kind, never mind!" interrupted Sinang. "I think
+I prefer the modern."
+
+Each one selected some piece of jewelry, one a ring, another a watch,
+another a locket. Capitana Tika bought a reliquary that contained a
+fragment of the stone on which Our Saviour rested at his third fall;
+Sinang a pair of earrings; and Capitan Basilio the watch-chain for
+the alferez, the lady's earrings for the curate, and other gifts. The
+families from the town of Tiani, not to be outdone by those of San
+Diego, in like manner emptied their purses.
+
+Simoun bought or exchanged old jewelry, brought there by economical
+mothers, to whom it was no longer of use.
+
+"You, haven't you something to sell?" he asked Cabesang Tales,
+noticing the latter watching the sales and exchanges with covetous
+eyes, but the reply was that all his daughter's jewels had been sold,
+nothing of value remained.
+
+"What about Maria Clara's locket?" inquired Sinang.
+
+"True!" the man exclaimed, and his eyes blazed for a moment.
+
+"It's a locket set with diamonds and emeralds," Sinang told the
+jeweler. "My old friend wore it before she became a nun."
+
+Simoun said nothing, but anxiously watched Cabesang Tales, who, after
+opening several boxes, found the locket. He examined it carefully,
+opening and shutting it repeatedly. It was the same locket that Maria
+Clara had worn during the fiesta in San Diego and which she had in
+a moment of compassion given to a leper.
+
+"I like the design," said Simoun. "How much do you want for it?"
+
+Cabesang Tales scratched his head in perplexity, then his ear, then
+looked at the women.
+
+"I've taken a fancy to this locket," Simoun went on. "Will you take a
+hundred, five hundred pesos? Do you want to exchange it for something
+else? Take your choice here!"
+
+Tales stared foolishly at Simoun, as if in doubt of what he
+heard. "Five hundred pesos?" he murmured.
+
+"Five hundred," repeated the jeweler in a voice shaking with emotion.
+
+Cabesang Tales took the locket and made several turns about the room,
+with his heart beating violently and his hands trembling. Dared he ask
+more? That locket could save him, this was an excellent opportunity,
+such as might not again present itself.
+
+The women winked at him to encourage him to make the sale, excepting
+Penchang, who, fearing that Juli would be ransomed, observed piously:
+"I would keep it as a relic. Those who have seen Maria Clara in the
+nunnery say she has got so thin and weak that she can scarcely talk
+and it's thought that she'll die a saint. Padre Salvi speaks very
+highly of her and he's her confessor. That's why Juli didn't want
+ito give it up, but rather preferred to pawn herself."
+
+This speech had its effect--the thought of his daughter restrained
+Tales. "If you will allow me," he said, "I'll go to the town to
+consult my daughter. I'll be back before night."
+
+This was agreed upon and Tales set out at once. But when he found
+himself outside of the village, he made out at a distance, on a path,
+that entered the woods, the friar-administrator and a man whom he
+recognized as the usurper of his land. A husband seeing his wife
+enter a private room with another man could not feel more wrath or
+jealousy than Cabesang Tales experienced when he saw them moving
+over his fields, the fields cleared by him, which he had thought to
+leave to his children. It seemed to him that they were mocking him,
+laughing at his powerlessness. There flashed into his memory what he
+had said about never giving up his fields except to him who irrigated
+them with his own blood and buried in them his wife and daughter.
+
+He stopped, rubbed his hand over his forehead, and shut his eyes. When
+he again opened them, he saw that the man had turned to laugh and
+that the friar had caught his sides as though to save himself from
+bursting with merriment, then he saw them point toward his house and
+laugh again.
+
+A buzz sounded in his ears, he felt the crack of a whip around his
+chest, the red mist reappeared before his eyes, he again saw the
+corpses of his wife and daughter, and beside them the usurper with
+the friar laughing and holding his sides. Forgetting everything else,
+he turned aside into the path they had taken, the one leading to
+his fields.
+
+Simoun waited in vain for Cabesang Tales to return that night. But
+the next morning when he arose he noticed that the leather holster of
+his revolver was empty. Opening it he found inside a scrap of paper
+wrapped around the locket set with emeralds and diamonds, with these
+few lines written on it in Tagalog:
+
+
+    "Pardon, sir, that in my own house I relieve you of what
+    belongs to you, but necessity drives me to it. In exchange
+    for your revolver I leave the locket you desired so much. I
+    need the weapon, for I am going out to join the tulisanes.
+
+    "I advise you not to keep on your present road, because if
+    you fall into our power, not then being my guest, we will
+    require of you a large ransom.
+
+        Telesforo Juan de Dios."
+
+
+"At last I've found my man!" muttered Simoun with a deep breath. "He's
+somewhat scrupulous, but so much the better--he'll keep his promises."
+
+He then ordered a servant to go by boat over the lake to Los Banos with
+the larger chest and await him there. He would go on overland, taking
+the smaller chest, the one containing his famous jewels. The arrival
+of four civil-guards completed his good humor. They came to arrest
+Cabesang Tales and not finding him took Tandang Selo away instead.
+
+Three murders had been committed during the night. The
+friar-administrator and the new tenant of Cabesang Tales' land had
+been found dead, with their heads split open and their mouths full
+of earth, on the border of the fields. In the town the wife of the
+usurper was found dead at dawn, her mouth also filled with earth and
+her throat cut, with a fragment of paper beside her, on which was
+the name _Tales_, written in blood as though traced by a finger.
+
+Calm yourselves, peaceful inhabitants of Kalamba! None of you are
+named Tales, none of you have committed any crime! You are called
+Luis Habana, Matias Belarmino, Nicasio Eigasani, Cayetano de Jesus,
+Mateo Elejorde, Leandro Lopez, Antonino Lopez, Silvestre Ubaldo,
+Manuel Hidalgo, Paciano Mercado, your name is the whole village of
+Kalamba. [19] You cleared your fields, on them you have spent the
+labor of your whole lives, your savings, your vigils and privations,
+and you have been despoiled of them, driven from your homes, with the
+rest forbidden to show you hospitality! Not content with outraging
+justice, they [20] have trampled upon the sacred traditions of your
+country! You have served Spain and the King, and when in their name
+you have asked for justice, you were banished without trial, torn
+from your wives' arms and your children's caresses! Any one of you has
+suffered more than Cabesang Tales, and yet none, not one of you, has
+received justice! Neither pity nor humanity has been shown you--you
+have been persecuted beyond the tomb, as was Mariano Herbosa! [21]
+Weep or laugh, there in those lonely isles where you wander vaguely,
+uncertain of the future! Spain, the generous Spain, is watching over
+you, and sooner or later you will have justice!
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+LOS BANOS
+
+
+His Excellency, the Captain-General and Governor of the Philippine
+Islands, had been hunting in Bosoboso. But as he had to be
+accompanied by a band of music,--since such an exalted personage
+was not to be esteemed less than the wooden images carried in the
+processions,--and as devotion to the divine art of St. Cecilia has
+not yet been popularized among the deer and wild boars of Bosoboso,
+his Excellency, with the band of music and train of friars, soldiers,
+and clerks, had not been able to catch a single rat or a solitary bird.
+
+The provincial authorities foresaw dismissals and transfers, the poor
+gobernadorcillos and cabezas de barangay were restless and sleepless,
+fearing that the mighty hunter in his wrath might have a notion to make
+up with their persons for the lack of submissiveness on the part of the
+beasts of the forest, as had been done years before by an alcalde who
+had traveled on the shoulders of impressed porters because he found no
+horses gentle enough to guarantee his safety. There was not lacking
+an evil rumor that his Excellency had decided to take some action,
+since in this he saw the first symptoms of a rebellion which should be
+strangled in its infancy, that a fruitless hunt hurt the prestige of
+the Spanish name, that he already had his eye on a wretch to be dressed
+up as a deer, when his Excellency, with clemency that Ben-Zayb lacked
+words to extol sufficiently, dispelled all the fears by declaring that
+it pained him to sacrifice to his pleasure the beasts of the forest.
+
+But to tell the truth, his Excellency was secretly very well satisfied,
+for what would have happened had he missed a shot at a deer, one of
+those not familiar with political etiquette? What would the prestige
+of the sovereign power have come to then? A Captain-General of the
+Philippines missing a shot, like a raw hunter? What would have been
+said by the Indians, among whom there were some fair huntsmen? The
+integrity of the fatherland would have been endangered.
+
+So it was that his Excellency, with a sheepish smile, and posing as a
+disappointed hunter, ordered an immediate return to Los Banos. During
+the journey he related with an indifferent air his hunting exploits
+in this or that forest of the Peninsula, adopting a tone somewhat
+depreciative, as suited the case, toward hunting in Filipinas. The bath
+in Dampalit, the hot springs on the shore of the lake, card-games in
+the palace, with an occasional excursion to some neighboring waterfall,
+or the lake infested with caymans, offered more attractions and fewer
+risks to the integrity of the fatherland.
+
+Thus on one of the last days of December, his Excellency found himself
+in the sala, taking a hand at cards while he awaited the breakfast
+hour. He had come from the bath, with the usual glass of coconut-milk
+and its soft meat, so he was in the best of humors for granting favors
+and privileges. His good humor was increased by his winning a good many
+hands, for Padre Irene and Padre Sibyla, with whom he was playing,
+were exercising all their skill in secretly trying to lose, to the
+great irritation of Padre Camorra, who on account of his late arrival
+only that morning was not informed as to the game they were playing
+on the General. The friar-artilleryman was playing in good faith and
+with great care, so he turned red and bit his lip every time Padre
+Sibyla seemed inattentive or blundered, but he dared not say a word
+by reason of the respect he felt for the Dominican. In exchange he
+took his revenge out on Padre Irene, whom he looked upon as a base
+fawner and despised for his coarseness. Padre Sibyla let him scold,
+while the humbler Padre Irene tried to excuse himself by rubbing his
+long nose. His Excellency was enjoying it and took advantage, like
+the good tactician that the Canon hinted he was, of all the mistakes
+of his opponents. Padre Camorra was ignorant of the fact that across
+the table they were playing for the intellectual development of the
+Filipinos, the instruction in Castilian, but had he known it he would
+doubtless have joyfully entered into that _game_.
+
+The open balcony admitted the fresh, pure breeze and revealed the lake,
+whose waters murmured sweetly around the base of the edifice, as if
+rendering homage. On the right, at a distance, appeared Talim Island,
+a deep blue in the midst of the lake, while almost in front lay the
+green and deserted islet of Kalamba, in the shape of a half-moon. To
+the left the picturesque shores were fringed with clumps of bamboo,
+then a hill overlooking the lake, with wide ricefields beyond, then
+red roofs amid the deep green of the trees,--the town of Kalamba,--and
+beyond the shore-line fading into the distance, with the horizon at
+the back closing down over the water, giving the lake the appearance
+of a sea and justifying the name the Indians give it of _dagat na
+tabang_, or fresh-water sea.
+
+At the end of the sala, seated before a table covered with documents,
+was the secretary. His Excellency was a great worker and did not
+like to lose time, so he attended to business in the intervals of
+the game or while dealing the cards. Meanwhile, the bored secretary
+yawned and despaired. That morning he had worked, as usual, over
+transfers, suspensions of employees, deportations, pardons, and the
+like, but had not yet touched the great question that had stirred so
+much interest--the petition of the students requesting permission to
+establish an academy of Castilian. Pacing from one end of the room to
+the other and conversing animatedly but in low tones were to be seen
+Don Custodio, a high official, and a friar named Padre Fernandez, who
+hung his head with an air either of meditation or annoyance. From an
+adjoining room issued the click of balls striking together and bursts
+of laughter, amid which might be heard the sharp, dry voice of Simoun,
+who was playing billiards with Ben-Zayb.
+
+Suddenly Padre Camorra arose. "The devil with this game, _punales!_"
+he exclaimed, throwing his cards at Padre Irene's head. "_Punales_,
+that trick, if not all the others, was assured and we lost by
+default! _Punales!_ The devil with this game!"
+
+He explained the situation angrily to all the occupants of the sala,
+addressing himself especially to the three walking about, as if he had
+selected them for judges. The general played thus, he replied with
+such a card, Padre Irene had a certain card; he led, and then that
+fool of a Padre Irene didn't play his card! Padre Irene was giving
+the game away! It was a devil of a way to play! His mother's son had
+not come here to rack his brains for nothing and lose his money!
+
+Then he added, turning very red, "If the booby thinks my money grows
+on every bush!... On top of the fact that my Indians are beginning to
+haggle over payments!" Fuming, and disregarding the excuses of Padre
+Irene, who tried to explain while he rubbed the tip of his beak in
+order to conceal his sly smile, he went into the billiardroom.
+
+"Padre Fernandez, would you like to take a hand?" asked Fray Sibyla.
+
+"I'm a very poor player," replied the friar with a grimace.
+
+"Then get Simoun," said the General. "Eh, Simoun! Eh, Mister, won't
+you try a hand?"
+
+"What is your disposition concerning the arms for sporting
+purposes?" asked the secretary, taking advantage of the pause.
+
+Simoun thrust his head through the doorway.
+
+"Don't you want to take Padre Camorra's place, Senor Sindbad?" inquired
+Padre Irene. "You can bet diamonds instead of chips."
+
+"I don't care if I do," replied Simoun, advancing while he brushed
+the chalk from his hands. "What will you bet?"
+
+"What should we bet?" returned Padre Sibyla. "The General can bet
+what he likes, but we priests, clerics--"
+
+"Bah!" interrupted Simoun ironically. "You and Padre Irene can pay
+with deeds of charity, prayers, and virtues, eh?"
+
+"You know that the virtues a person may possess," gravely argued
+Padre Sibyla, "are not like the diamonds that may pass from hand to
+hand, to be sold and resold. They are inherent in the being, they
+are essential attributes of the subject--"
+
+"I'll be satisfied then if you pay me with promises," replied Simoun
+jestingly. "You, Padre Sibyla, instead of paying me five something
+or other in money, will say, for example: for five days I renounce
+poverty, humility, and obedience. You, Padre Irene: I renounce
+chastity, liberality, and so on. Those are small matters, and I'm
+putting up my diamonds."
+
+"What a peculiar man this Simoun is, what notions he has!" exclaimed
+Padre Irene with a smile.
+
+"And _he_," continued Simoun, slapping his Excellency familiarly on
+the shoulder, "he will pay me with an order for five days in prison,
+or five months, or an order of deportation made out in blank, or let
+us say a summary execution by the Civil Guard while my man is being
+conducted from one town to another."
+
+This was a strange proposition, so the three who had been pacing
+about gathered around.
+
+"But, Senor Simoun," asked the high official, "what good will you
+get out of winning promises of virtues, or lives and deportations
+and summary executions?"
+
+"A great deal! I'm tired of hearing virtues talked about and would
+like to have the whole of them, all there are in the world, tied up
+in a sack, in order to throw them into the sea, even though I had to
+use my diamonds for sinkers."
+
+"What an idea!" exclaimed Padre Irene with another smile. "And the
+deportations and executions, what of them?"
+
+"Well, to clean the country and destroy every evil seed."
+
+"Get out! You're still sore at the tulisanes. But you were lucky
+that they didn't demand a larger ransom or keep all your jewels. Man,
+don't be ungrateful!"
+
+Simoun proceeded to relate how he had been intercepted by a band of
+tulisanes, who, after entertaining him for a day, had let him go on
+his way without exacting other ransom than his two fine revolvers and
+the two boxes of cartridges he carried with him. He added that the
+tulisanes had charged him with many kind regards for his Excellency,
+the Captain-General.
+
+As a result of this, and as Simoun reported that the tulisanes were
+well provided with shotguns, rifles, and revolvers, and against such
+persons one man alone, no matter how well armed, could not defend
+himself, his Excellency, to prevent the tulisanes from getting
+weapons in the future, was about to dictate a new decree forbidding
+the introduction of sporting arms.
+
+"On the contrary, on the contrary!" protested Simoun, "for me the
+tulisanes are the most respectable men in the country, they're the
+only ones who earn their living honestly. Suppose I had fallen into
+the hands--well, of you yourselves, for example, would you have let
+me escape without taking half of my jewels, at least?"
+
+Don Custodio was on the point of protesting; that Simoun was really
+a rude American mulatto taking advantage of his friendship with the
+Captain-General to insult Padre Irene, although it may be true also
+that Padre Irene would hardly have set him free for so little.
+
+"The evil is not," went on Simoun, "in that there are tulisanes in
+the mountains and uninhabited parts--the evil lies in the tulisanes
+in the towns and cities."
+
+"Like yourself," put in the Canon with a smile.
+
+"Yes, like myself, like all of us! Let's be frank, for no Indian
+is listening to us here," continued the jeweler. "The evil is that
+we're not all openly declared tulisanes. When that happens and we all
+take to the woods, on that day the country will be saved, on that
+day will rise a new social order which will take care of itself,
+and his Excellency will be able to play his game in peace, without
+the necessity of having his attention diverted by his secretary."
+
+The person mentioned at that moment yawned, extending his folded
+arms above his head and stretching his crossed legs under the table
+as far as possible, upon noticing which all laughed. His Excellency
+wished to change the course of the conversation, so, throwing down
+the cards he had been shuffling, he said half seriously: "Come, come,
+enough of jokes and cards! Let's get to work, to work in earnest,
+since we still have a half-hour before breakfast. Are there many
+matters to be got through with?"
+
+All now gave their attention. That was the day for joining battle
+over the question of instruction in Castilian, for which purpose
+Padre Sibyla and Padre Irene had been there several days. It was known
+that the former, as Vice-Rector, was opposed to the project and that
+the latter supported it, and his activity was in turn supported by
+the Countess.
+
+"What is there, what is there?" asked his Excellency impatiently.
+
+"The petition about sporting arms," replied the secretary with a
+stifled yawn.
+
+"Forbidden!"
+
+"Pardon, General," said the high official gravely, "your Excellency
+will permit me to invite your attention to the fact that the use of
+sporting arms is permitted in all the countries of the world."
+
+The General shrugged his shoulders and remarked dryly, "We are not
+imitating any nation in the world."
+
+Between his Excellency and the high official there was always a
+difference of opinion, so it was sufficient that the latter offer
+any suggestion whatsoever to have the former remain stubborn.
+
+The high official tried another tack. "Sporting arms can harm only
+rats and chickens. They'll say--"
+
+"But are we chickens?" interrupted the General, again shrugging his
+shoulders. "Am I? I've demonstrated that I'm not."
+
+"But there's another thing," observed the secretary. "Four months ago,
+when the possession of arms was prohibited, the foreign importers
+were assured that sporting arms would be admitted."
+
+His Excellency knitted his brows.
+
+"That can be arranged," suggested Simoun.
+
+"How?"
+
+"Very simply. Sporting arms nearly all have a caliber of six
+millimeters, at least those now in the market. Authorize only the
+sale of those that haven't these six millimeters."
+
+All approved this idea of Simoun's, except the high official, who
+muttered into Padre Fernandez's ear that this was not dignified,
+nor was it the way to govern.
+
+"The schoolmaster of Tiani," proceeded the secretary, shuffling some
+papers about, "asks for a better location for--"
+
+"What better location can he want than the storehouse that he has
+all to himself?" interrupted Padre Camorra, who had returned, having
+forgotten about the card-game.
+
+"He says that it's roofless," replied the secretary, "and that having
+purchased out of his own pocket some maps and pictures, he doesn't
+want to expose them to the weather."
+
+"But I haven't anything to do with that," muttered his Excellency. "He
+should address the head secretary, [22] the governor of the province,
+or the nuncio."
+
+"I want to tell you," declared Padre Camorra, "that this little
+schoolmaster is a discontented filibuster. Just imagine--the heretic
+teaches that corpses rot just the same, whether buried with great pomp
+or without any! Some day I'm going to punch him!" Here he doubled up
+his fists.
+
+"To tell the truth," observed Padre Sibyla, as if speaking only to
+Padre Irene, "he who wishes to teach, teaches everywhere, in the open
+air. Socrates taught in the public streets, Plato in the gardens of
+the Academy, even Christ among the mountains and lakes."
+
+"I've heard several complaints against this schoolmaster," said his
+Excellency, exchanging a glance with Simoun. "I think the best thing
+would be to suspend him."
+
+"Suspended!" repeated the secretary.
+
+The luck of that unfortunate, who had asked for help and received
+his dismissal, pained the high official and he tried to do something
+for him.
+
+"It's certain," he insinuated rather timidly, "that education is not
+at all well provided for--"
+
+"I've already decreed large sums for the purchase of supplies,"
+exclaimed his Excellency haughtily, as if to say, "I've done more
+than I ought to have done."
+
+"But since suitable locations are lacking, the supplies purchased
+get ruined."
+
+"Everything can't be done at once," said his Excellency dryly. "The
+schoolmasters here are doing wrong in asking for buildings when those
+in Spain starve to death. It's great presumption to be better off
+here than in the mother country itself!"
+
+"Filibusterism--"
+
+"Before everything the fatherland! Before everything else we are
+Spaniards!" added Ben-Zayb, his eyes glowing with patriotism, but he
+blushed somewhat when he noticed that he was speaking alone.
+
+"In the future," decided the General, "all who complain will be
+suspended."
+
+"If my project were accepted--" Don Custodio ventured to remark,
+as if talking to himself.
+
+"For the construction of schoolhouses?"
+
+"It's simple, practical, economical, and, like all my projects,
+derived from long experience and knowledge of the country. The towns
+would have schools without costing the government a cuarto."
+
+"That's easy," observed the secretary sarcastically. "Compel the
+towns to construct them at their own expense," whereupon all laughed.
+
+"No, sir! No, sir!" cried the exasperated Don Custodio, turning
+very red. "The buildings are already constructed and only wait to be
+utilized. Hygienic, unsurpassable, spacious--"
+
+The friars looked at one another uneasily. Would Don Custodio propose
+that the churches and conventos be converted into schoolhouses?
+
+"Let's hear it," said the General with a frown.
+
+"Well, General, it's very simple," replied Don Custodio, drawing
+himself up and assuming his hollow voice of ceremony. "The schools
+are open only on week-days and the cockpits on holidays. Then convert
+these into schoolhouses, at least during the week."
+
+"Man, man, man!"
+
+"What a lovely idea!"
+
+"What's the matter with you, Don Custodio?"
+
+"That's a grand suggestion!"
+
+"That beats them all!"
+
+"But, gentlemen," cried Don Custodio, in answer to so many
+exclamations, "let's be practical--what places are more suitable
+than the cockpits? They're large, well constructed, and under a
+curse for the use to which they are put during the week-days. From
+a moral standpoint my project would be acceptable, by serving as a
+kind of expiation and weekly purification of the temple of chance,
+as we might say."
+
+"But the fact remains that sometimes there are cockfights during the
+week," objected Padre Camorra, "and it wouldn't be right when the
+contractors of the cockpits pay the government--" [23]
+
+"Well, on those days close the school!"
+
+"Man, man!" exclaimed the scandalized Captain-General. "Such an outrage
+shall never be perpetrated while I govern! To close the schools in
+order to gamble! Man, man, I'll resign first!" His Excellency was
+really horrified.
+
+"But, General, it's better to close them for a few days than for
+months."
+
+"It would be immoral," observed Padre Irene, more indignant even than
+his Excellency.
+
+"It's more immoral that vice has good buildings and learning
+none. Let's be practical, gentlemen, and not be carried away by
+sentiment. In politics there's nothing worse than sentiment. While
+from humane considerations we forbid the cultivation of opium in our
+colonies, we tolerate the smoking of it, and the result is that we
+do not combat the vice but impoverish ourselves."
+
+"But remember that it yields to the government, without any effort,
+more than four hundred and fifty thousand pesos," objected Padre Irene,
+who was getting more and more on the governmental side.
+
+"Enough, enough, enough!" exclaimed his Excellency, to end the
+discussion. "I have my own plans in this regard and will devote special
+attention to the matter of public instruction. Is there anything else?"
+
+The secretary looked uneasily toward Padre Sibyla and Padre Irene. The
+cat was about to come out of the bag. Both prepared themselves.
+
+"The petition of the students requesting authorization to open an
+academy of Castilian," answered the secretary.
+
+A general movement was noted among those in the room. After glancing
+at one another they fixed their eyes on the General to learn what
+his disposition would be. For six months the petition had lain there
+awaiting a decision and had become converted into a kind of _casus
+belli_ in certain circles. His Excellency had lowered his eyes,
+as if to keep his thoughts from being read.
+
+The silence became embarrassing, as the General understood, so he
+asked the high official, "What do you think?"
+
+"What should I think, General?" responded the person addressed, with
+a shrug of his shoulders and a bitter smile. "What should I think
+but that the petition is just, very just, and that I am surprised
+that six months should have been taken to consider it."
+
+"The fact is that it involves other considerations," said Padre Sibyla
+coldly, as he half closed his eyes.
+
+The high official again shrugged his shoulders, like one who did not
+comprehend what those considerations could be.
+
+"Besides the intemperateness of the demand," went on the Dominican,
+"besides the fact that it is in the nature of an infringement on
+our prerogatives--"
+
+Padre Sibyla dared not go on, but looked at Simoun.
+
+"The petition has a somewhat suspicious character," corroborated
+that individual, exchanging a look with the Dominican, who winked
+several times.
+
+Padre Irene noticed these things and realized that his cause was
+almost lost--Simoun was against him.
+
+"It's a peaceful rebellion, a revolution on stamped paper," added
+Padre Sibyla.
+
+"Revolution? Rebellion?" inquired the high official, staring from
+one to the other as if he did not understand what they could mean.
+
+"It's headed by some young men charged with being too radical and
+too much interested in reforms, not to use stronger terms," remarked
+the secretary, with a look at the Dominican. "Among them is a certain
+Isagani, a poorly balanced head, nephew of a native priest--"
+
+"He's a pupil of mine," put in Padre Fernandez, "and I'm much pleased
+with him."
+
+"_Punales,_ I like your taste!" exclaimed Padre Camorra. "On the
+steamer we nearly had a fight. He's so insolent that when I gave him
+a shove aside he returned it."
+
+"There's also one Makaragui or Makarai--"
+
+"Makaraig," Padre Irene joined in. "A very pleasant and agreeable
+young man."
+
+Then he murmured into the General's ear, "He's the one I've talked
+to you about, he's very rich. The Countess recommends him strongly."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"A medical student, one Basilio--"
+
+"Of that Basilio, I'll say nothing," observed Padre Irene, raising
+his hands and opening them, as if to say _Dominus vobiscum_. "He's
+too deep for me. I've never succeeded in fathoming what he wants or
+what he is thinking about. It's a pity that Padre Salvi isn't present
+to tell us something about his antecedents. I believe that I've heard
+that when a boy he got into trouble with the Civil Guard. His father
+was killed in--I don't remember what disturbance."
+
+Simoun smiled faintly, silently, showing his sharp white teeth.
+
+"Aha! Aha!" said his Excellency nodding. "That's the kind we have! Make
+a note of that name."
+
+"But, General," objected the high official, seeing that the matter
+was taking a bad turn, "up to now nothing positive is known against
+these young men. Their position is a very just one, and we have no
+right to deny it on the ground of mere conjectures. My opinion is that
+the government, by exhibiting confidence in the people and in its own
+stability, should grant what is asked, then it could freely revoke the
+permission when it saw that its kindness was being abused--reasons
+and pretexts would not be wanting, we can watch them. Why cause
+disaffection among some young men, who later on may feel resentment,
+when what they ask is commanded by royal decrees?"
+
+Padre Irene, Don Custodio, and Padre Fernandez nodded in agreement.
+
+"But the Indians must not understand Castilian, you know," cried Padre
+Camorra. "They mustn't learn it, for then they'll enter into arguments
+with us, and the Indians must not argue, but obey and pay. They mustn't
+try to interpret the meaning of the laws and the books, they're so
+tricky and pettifogish! Just as soon as they learn Castilian they
+become enemies of God and of Spain. Just read the _Tandang Basio
+Macunat_--that's a book! It tells truths like this!" And he held up
+his clenched fists.
+
+Padre Sibyla rubbed his hand over his tonsure in sign of
+impatience. "One word," he began in the most conciliatory tone, though
+fuming with irritation, "here we're not dealing with the instruction
+in Castilian alone. Here there is an underhand fight between the
+students and the University of Santo Tomas. If the students win this,
+our prestige will be trampled in the dirt, they will say that they've
+beaten us and will exult accordingly. Then, good-by to moral strength,
+good-by to everything! The first dike broken down, who will restrain
+this youth? With our fall we do no more than signal your own. After
+us, the government!"
+
+"_Punales_, that's not so!" exclaimed Padre Camorra. "We'll see first
+who has the biggest fists!"
+
+At this point Padre Fernandez, who thus far in the discussion had
+merely contented himself with smiling, began to talk. All gave him
+their attention, for they knew him to be a thoughtful man.
+
+"Don't take it ill of me, Padre Sibyla, if I differ from your view
+of the affair, but it's my peculiar fate to be almost always in
+opposition to my brethren. I say, then, that we ought not to be so
+pessimistic. The instruction in Castilian can be allowed without any
+risk whatever, and in order that it may not appear to be a defeat
+of the University, we Dominicans ought to put forth our efforts and
+be the first to rejoice over it--that should be our policy. To what
+end are we to be engaged in an everlasting struggle with the people,
+when after all we are the few and they are the many, when we need them
+and they do not need us? Wait, Padre Camorra, wait! Admit that now the
+people may be weak and ignorant--I also believe that--but it will not
+be true tomorrow or the day after. Tomorrow and the next day they will
+be the stronger, they will know what is good for them, and we cannot
+keep it from them, just as it is not possible to keep from children
+the knowledge of many things when they reach a certain age. I say,
+then, why should we not take advantage of this condition of ignorance
+to change our policy completely, to place it upon a basis solid and
+enduring--on the basis of justice, for example, instead of on the basis
+of ignorance? There's nothing like being just; that I've always said to
+my brethren, but they won't believe me. The Indian idolizes justice,
+like every race in its youth; he asks for punishment when he has
+done wrong, just as he is exasperated when he has not deserved it. Is
+theirs a just desire? Then grant it! Let's give them all the schools
+they want, until they are tired of them. Youth is lazy, and what urges
+them to activity is our opposition. Our bond of prestige, Padre Sibyla,
+is about worn out, so let's prepare another, the bond of gratitude,
+for example. Let's not be fools, let's do as the crafty Jesuits--"
+
+"Padre Fernandez!" Anything could be tolerated by Padre Sibyla except
+to propose the Jesuits to him as a model. Pale and trembling, he
+broke out into bitter recrimination. "A Franciscan first! Anything
+before a Jesuit!" He was beside himself.
+
+"Oh, oh!"
+
+"Eh, Padre--"
+
+A general discussion broke out, regardless of the Captain-General. All
+talked at once, they yelled, they misunderstood and contradicted
+one another. Ben-Zayb and Padre Camorra shook their fists in each
+other's faces, one talking of simpletons and the other of ink-slingers,
+Padre Sibyla kept harping on the _Capitulum_, and Padre Fernandez on
+the _Summa_ of St. Thomas, until the curate of Los Banos entered to
+announce that breakfast was served.
+
+His Excellency arose and so ended the discussion. "Well, gentlemen,"
+he said, "we've worked like niggers and yet we're on a vacation. Some
+one has said that grave matters should he considered at dessert. I'm
+entirely of that opinion."
+
+"We might get indigestion," remarked the secretary, alluding to the
+heat of the discussion.
+
+"Then we'll lay it aside until tomorrow."
+
+As they rose the high official whispered to the General, "Your
+Excellency, the daughter of Cabesang Tales has been here again begging
+for the release of her sick grandfather, who was arrested in place
+of her father."
+
+His Excellency looked at him with an expression of impatience and
+rubbed his hand across his broad forehead. "_Carambas_! Can't one be
+left to eat his breakfast in peace?"
+
+"This is the third day she has come. She's a poor girl--"
+
+"Oh, the devil!" exclaimed Padre Camorra. "I've just thought of it. I
+have something to say to the General about that--that's what I came
+over for--to support that girl's petition."
+
+The General scratched the back of his ear and said, "Oh, go along! Have
+the secretary make out an order to the lieutenant of the Civil Guard
+for the old man's release. They sha'n't say that we're not clement
+and merciful."
+
+He looked at Ben-Zayb. The journalist winked.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+PLACIDO PENITENTE
+
+
+Reluctantly, and almost with tearful eyes, Placido Penitente was going
+along the Escolta on his way to the University of Santo Tomas. It
+had hardly been a week since he had come from his town, yet he had
+already written to his mother twice, reiterating his desire to abandon
+his studies and go back there to work. His mother answered that he
+should have patience, that at the least he must be graduated as a
+bachelor of arts, since it would be unwise to desert his books after
+four years of expense and sacrifices on both their parts.
+
+Whence came to Penitente this aversion to study, when he had been
+one of the most diligent in the famous college conducted by Padre
+Valerio in Tanawan? There Penitente had been considered one of the
+best Latinists and the subtlest disputants, one who could tangle or
+untangle the simplest as well as the most abstruse questions. His
+townspeople considered him very clever, and his curate, influenced by
+that opinion, already classified him as a filibuster--a sure proof that
+he was neither foolish nor incapable. His friends could not explain
+those desires for abandoning his studies and returning: he had no
+sweethearts, was not a gambler, hardly knew anything about _hunkian_
+and rarely tried his luck at the more familiar _revesino_. He did
+not believe in the advice of the curates, laughed at _Tandang Basio
+Macunat_, had plenty of money and good clothes, yet he went to school
+reluctantly and looked with repugnance on his books.
+
+On the Bridge of Spain, a bridge whose name alone came from Spain,
+since even its ironwork came from foreign countries, he fell in with
+the long procession of young men on their way to the Walled City to
+their respective schools. Some were dressed in the European fashion and
+walked rapidly, carrying books and notes, absorbed in thoughts of their
+lessons and essays--these were the students of the Ateneo. Those from
+San Juan de Letran were nearly all dressed in the Filipino costume, but
+were more numerous and carried fewer books. Those from the University
+are dressed more carefully and elegantly and saunter along carrying
+canes instead of books. The collegians of the Philippines are not very
+noisy or turbulent. They move along in a preoccupied manner, such that
+upon seeing them one would say that before their eyes shone no hope,
+no smiling future. Even though here and there the line is brightened
+by the attractive appearance of the schoolgirls of the _Escuela
+Municipal_, [24] with their sashes across their shoulders and their
+books in their hands, followed by their servants, yet scarcely a laugh
+resounds or a joke can be heard--nothing of song or jest, at best a few
+heavy jokes or scuffles among the smaller boys. The older ones nearly
+always proceed seriously and composedly, like the German students.
+
+Placido was proceeding along the Paseo de Magallanes toward the
+breach--formerly the gate--of Santo Domingo, when he suddenly felt
+a slap on the shoulder, which made him turn quickly in ill humor.
+
+"Hello, Penitente! Hello, Penitente!"
+
+It was his schoolmate Juanito Pelaez, the _barbero_ or pet of the
+professors, as big a rascal as he could be, with a roguish look and
+a clownish smile. The son of a Spanish mestizo--a rich merchant in
+one of the suburbs, who based all his hopes and joys on the boy's
+talent--he promised well with his roguery, and, thanks to his custom
+of playing tricks on every one and then hiding behind his companions,
+he had acquired a peculiar hump, which grew larger whenever he was
+laughing over his deviltry.
+
+"What kind of time did you have, Penitente?" was his question as he
+again slapped him on the shoulder.
+
+"So, so," answered Placido, rather bored. "And you?"
+
+"Well, it was great! Just imagine--the curate of Tiani invited me to
+spend the vacation in his town, and I went. Old man, you know Padre
+Camorra, I suppose? Well, he's a liberal curate, very jolly, frank,
+very frank, one of those like Padre Paco. As there were pretty girls,
+we serenaded them all, he with his guitar and songs and I with my
+violin. I tell you, old man, we had a great time--there wasn't a
+house we didn't try!"
+
+He whispered a few words in Placido's ear and then broke out into
+laughter. As the latter exhibited some surprise, he resumed:
+"I'll swear to it! They can't help themselves, because with a
+governmental order you get rid of the father, husband, or brother,
+and then--merry Christmas! However, we did run up against a little
+fool, the sweetheart, I believe, of Basilio, you know? Look, what a
+fool this Basilio is! To have a sweetheart who doesn't know a word
+of Spanish, who hasn't any money, and who has been a servant! She's
+as shy as she can be, but pretty. Padre Camorra one night started to
+club two fellows who were serenading her and I don't know how it was
+he didn't kill them, yet with all that she was just as shy as ever. But
+it'll result for her as it does with all the women, all of them!"
+
+Juanito Pelaez laughed with a full mouth, as though he thought this
+a glorious thing, while Placido stared at him in disgust.
+
+"Listen, what did the professor explain yesterday?" asked Juanito,
+changing the conversation.
+
+"Yesterday there was no class."
+
+"Oho, and the day before yesterday?"
+
+"Man, it was Thursday!"
+
+"Right! What an ass I am! Don't you know, Placido, that I'm getting
+to be a regular ass? What about Wednesday?"
+
+"Wednesday? Wait--Wednesday, it was a little wet."
+
+"Fine! What about Tuesday, old man?"
+
+"Tuesday was the professor's nameday and we went to entertain him
+with an orchestra, present him flowers and some gifts."
+
+"Ah, _carambas!_" exclaimed Juanito, "that I should have forgotten
+about it! What an ass I am! Listen, did he ask for me?"
+
+Penitente shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know, but they gave him
+a list of his entertainers."
+
+"_Carambas!_ Listen--Monday, what happened?"
+
+"As it was the first school-day, he called the roll and assigned the
+lesson--about mirrors. Look, from here to here, by memory, word for
+word. We jump all this section, we take that." He was pointing out
+with his finger in the "Physics" the portions that were to be learned,
+when suddenly the book flew through the air, as a result of the slap
+Juanito gave it from below.
+
+"Thunder, let the lessons go! Let's have a _dia pichido!_"
+
+The students in Manila call _dia pichido_ a school-day that falls
+between two holidays and is consequently suppressed, as though forced
+out by their wish.
+
+"Do you know that you really are an ass?" exclaimed Placido, picking
+up his book and papers.
+
+"Let's have a _dia pichido!_" repeated Juanito.
+
+Placido was unwilling, since for only two the authorities were hardly
+going to suspend a class of more than a hundred and fifty. He recalled
+the struggles and privations his mother was suffering in order to keep
+him in Manila, while she went without even the necessities of life.
+
+They were just passing through the breach of Santo Domingo, and
+Juanito, gazing across the little plaza [25] in front of the old
+Customs building, exclaimed, "Now I think of it, I'm appointed to
+take up the collection."
+
+"What collection?"
+
+"For the monument."
+
+"What monument?"
+
+"Get out! For Padre Balthazar, you know."
+
+"And who was Padre Balthazar?"
+
+"Fool! A Dominican, of course--that's why the padres call on the
+students. Come on now, loosen up with three or four pesos, so that they
+may see we are sports. Don't let them say afterwards that in order
+to erect a statue they had to dig down into their own pockets. Do,
+Placido, it's not money thrown away."
+
+He accompanied these words with a significant wink. Placido recalled
+the case of a student who had passed through the entire course by
+presenting canary-birds, so he subscribed three pesos.
+
+"Look now, I'll write your name plainly so that the professor will read
+it, you see--Placido Penitente, three pesos. Ah, listen! In a couple
+of weeks comes the nameday of the professor of natural history. You
+know that he's a good fellow, never marks absences or asks about the
+lesson. Man, we must show our appreciation!"
+
+"That's right!"
+
+"Then don't you think that we ought to give him a celebration? The
+orchestra must not be smaller than the one you had for the professor
+of physics."
+
+"That's right!"
+
+"What do you think about making the contribution two pesos? Come,
+Placido, you start it, so you'll be at the head of the list."
+
+Then, seeing that Placido gave the two pesos without hesitation,
+he added, "Listen, put up four, and afterwards I'll return you
+two. They'll serve as a decoy."
+
+"Well, if you're going to return them to me, why give them to
+you? It'll be sufficient, for you to write four."
+
+"Ah, that's right! What an ass I am! Do you know, I'm getting to be
+a regular ass! But let me have them anyhow, so that I can show them."
+
+Placido, in order not to give the lie to the priest who christened him,
+gave what was asked, just as they reached the University.
+
+In the entrance and along the walks on each side of it were gathered
+the students, awaiting the appearance of the professors. Students of
+the preparatory year of law, of the fifth of the secondary course,
+of the preparatory in medicine, formed lively groups. The latter
+were easily distinguished by their clothing and by a certain air
+that was lacking in the others, since the greater part of them came
+from the Ateneo Municipal. Among them could be seen the poet Isagani,
+explaining to a companion the theory of the refraction of light. In
+another group they were talking, disputing, citing the statements
+of the professor, the text-books, and scholastic principles; in
+yet another they were gesticulating and waving their books in the
+air or making demonstrations with their canes by drawing diagrams
+on the ground; farther on, they were entertaining themselves in
+watching the pious women go into the neighboring church, all the
+students making facetious remarks. An old woman leaning on a young
+girl limped piously, while the girl moved along writh downcast eyes,
+timid and abashed to pass before so many curious eyes. The old lady,
+catching up her coffee-colored skirt, of the Sisterhood of St. Rita,
+to reveal her big feet and white stockings, scolded her companion
+and shot furious glances at the staring bystanders.
+
+"The rascals!" she grunted. "Don't look at them, keep your eyes down."
+
+Everything was noticed; everything called forth jokes and comments. Now
+it was a magnificent victoria which stopped at the door to set down a
+family of votaries on their way to visit the Virgin of the Rosary [26]
+on her favorite day, while the inquisitive sharpened their eyes to get
+a glimpse of the shape and size of the young ladies' feet as they got
+out of the carriages; now it was a student who came out of the door
+with devotion still shining in his eyes, for he had passed through
+the church to beg the Virgin's help in understanding his lesson and
+to see if his sweetheart was there, to exchange a few glances with
+her and go on to his class with the recollection of her loving eyes.
+
+Soon there was noticed some movement in the groups, a certain air of
+expectancy, while Isagani paused and turned pale. A carriage drawn
+by a pair of well-known white horses had stopped at the door. It
+was that of Paulita Gomez, and she had already jumped down, light
+as a bird, without giving the rascals time to see her foot. With a
+bewitching whirl of her body and a sweep of her hand she arranged
+the folds of her skirt, shot a rapid and apparently careless glance
+toward Isagani, spoke to him and smiled. Dona Victorina descended
+in her turn, gazed over her spectacles, saw Juanito Pelaez, smiled,
+and bowed to him affably.
+
+Isagani, flushed with excitement, returned a timid salute, while
+Juanito bowed profoundly, took off his hat, and made the same gesture
+as the celebrated clown and caricaturist Panza when he received
+applause.
+
+"Heavens, what a girl!" exclaimed one of the students, starting
+forward. "Tell the professor that I'm seriously ill." So Tadeo,
+as this invalid youth was known, entered the church to follow the girl.
+
+Tadeo went to the University every day to ask if the classes would be
+held and each time seemed to be more and more astonished that they
+would. He had a fixed idea of a latent and eternal _holiday_, and
+expected it to come any day. So each morning, after vainly proposing
+that they play truant, he would go away alleging important business,
+an appointment, or illness, just at the very moment when his companions
+were going to their classes. But by some occult, thaumaturgic art
+Tadeo passed the examinations, was beloved by the professors, and
+had before him a promising future.
+
+Meanwhile, the groups began to move inside, for the professor
+of physics and chemistry had put in his appearance. The students
+appeared to be cheated in their hopes and went toward the interior
+of the building with exclamations of discontent. Placido went along
+with the crowd.
+
+"Penitente, Penitente!" called a student with a certain mysterious
+air. "Sign this!"
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Never mind--sign it!"
+
+It seemed to Placido that some one was twitching his ears. He recalled
+the story of a cabeza de barangay in his town who, for having signed
+a document that he did not understand, was kept a prisoner for months
+and months, and came near to deportation. An uncle of Placido's,
+in order to fix the lesson in his memory, had given him a severe
+ear-pulling, so that always whenever he heard signatures spoken of,
+his ears reproduced the sensation.
+
+"Excuse me, but I can't sign anything without first understanding
+what it's about."
+
+"What a fool you are! If two _celestial carbineers_ have signed it,
+what have you to fear?"
+
+The name of _celestial carbineers_ inspired confidence, being, as it
+was, a sacred company created to aid God in the warfare against the
+evil spirit and to prevent the smuggling of heretical contraband into
+the markets of the New Zion. [27]
+
+Placido was about to sign to make an end of it, because he was in
+a hurry,--already his classmates were reciting the _O Thoma_,--but
+again his ears twitched, so he said, "After the class! I want to read
+it first."
+
+"It's very long, don't you see? It concerns the presentation of a
+counter-petition, or rather, a protest. Don't you understand? Makaraig
+and some others have asked that an academy of Castilian be opened,
+which is a piece of genuine foolishness--"
+
+"All right, all right, after awhile. They're already beginning,"
+answered Placido, trying to get away.
+
+"But your professor may not call the roll--"
+
+"Yes, yes; but he calls it sometimes. Later on, later on! Besides,
+I don't want to put myself in opposition to Makaraig."
+
+"But it's not putting yourself in opposition, it's only--"
+
+Placido heard no more, for he was already far away, hurrying to his
+class. He heard the different voices--_adsum, adsum_--the roll was
+being called! Hastening his steps he got to the door just as the
+letter Q was reached.
+
+"_Tinamaan ng--!_" [28] he muttered, biting his lips.
+
+He hesitated about entering, for the mark was already down against
+him and was not to be erased. One did not go to the class to
+learn but in order not to get this absence mark, for the class was
+reduced to reciting the lesson from memory, reading the book, and
+at the most answering a few abstract, profound, captious, enigmatic
+questions. True, the usual preachment was never lacking--the same
+as ever, about humility, submission, and respect to the clerics,
+and he, Placido, was humble, submissive, and respectful. So he was
+about to turn away when he remembered that the examinations were
+approaching and his professor had not yet asked him a question nor
+appeared to notice him--this would be a good opportunity to attract
+his attention and become known! To be known was to gain a year, for
+if it cost nothing to suspend one who was not known, it required a
+hard heart not to be touched by the sight of a youth who by his daily
+presence was a reproach over a year of his life wasted.
+
+So Placido went in, not on tiptoe as was his custom, but noisily on his
+heels, and only too well did he succeed in his intent! The professor
+stared at him, knitted his brows, and shook his head, as though to say,
+"Ah, little impudence, you'll pay for that!"
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE CLASS IN PHYSICS
+
+
+The classroom was a spacious rectangular hall with large grated
+windows that admitted an abundance of light and air. Along the two
+sides extended three wide tiers of stone covered with wood, filled
+with students arranged in alphabetical order. At the end opposite the
+entrance, under a print of St. Thomas Aquinas, rose the professor's
+chair on an elevated platform with a little stairway on each side. With
+the exception of a beautiful blackboard in a narra frame, scarcely
+ever used, since there was still written on it the _viva_ that had
+appeared on the opening day, no furniture, either useful or useless,
+was to be seen. The walls, painted white and covered with glazed tiles
+to prevent scratches, were entirely bare, having neither a drawing
+nor a picture, nor even an outline of any physical apparatus. The
+students had no need of any, no one missed the practical instruction
+in an extremely experimental science; for years and years it has been
+so taught and the country has not been upset, but continues just as
+ever. Now and then some little instrument descended from heaven and
+was exhibited to the class from a distance, like the monstrance to
+the prostrate worshipers--look, but touch not! From time to time,
+when some complacent professor appeared, one day in the year was
+set aside for visiting the mysterious laboratory and gazing from
+without at the puzzling apparatus arranged in glass cases. No one
+could complain, for on that day there were to be seen quantities of
+brass and glassware, tubes, disks, wheels, bells, and the like--the
+exhibition did not get beyond that, and the country was not upset.
+
+Besides, the students were convinced that those instruments had not
+been purchased for them--the friars would be fools! The laboratory
+was intended to be shown to the visitors and the high officials who
+came from the Peninsula, so that upon seeing it they would nod their
+heads with satisfaction, while their guide would smile, as if to say,
+"Eh, you thought you were going to find some backward monks! Well,
+we're right up with the times--we have a laboratory!"
+
+The visitors and high officials, after being handsomely entertained,
+would then write in their _Travels_ or _Memoirs_: "The Royal
+and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas of Manila, in charge of
+the enlightened Dominican Order, possesses a magnificent physical
+laboratory for the instruction of youth. Some two hundred and fifty
+students annually study this subject, but whether from apathy,
+indolence, the limited capacity of the Indian, or some other
+ethnological or incomprehensible reason, up to now there has not
+developed a Lavoisier, a Secchi, or a Tyndall, not even in miniature,
+in the Malay-Filipino race."
+
+Yet, to be exact, we will say that in this laboratory are held the
+classes of thirty or forty _advanced_ students, under the direction of
+an instructor who performs his duties well enough, but as the greater
+part of these students come from the Ateneo of the Jesuits, where
+science is taught practically in the laboratory itself, its utility
+does not come to be so great as it would be if it could be utilized by
+the two hundred and fifty who pay their matriculation fees, buy their
+books, memorize them, and waste a year to know nothing afterwards. As
+a result, with the exception of some rare usher or janitor who has
+had charge of the museum for years, no one has ever been known to
+get any advantage from the lessons memorized with so great effort.
+
+But let us return to the class. The professor was a young Dominican,
+who had filled several chairs in San Juan de Letran with zeal and
+good repute. He had the reputation of being a great logician as well
+as a profound philosopher, and was one of the most promising in his
+clique. His elders treated him with consideration, while the younger
+men envied him, for there were also cliques among them. This was the
+third year of his professorship and, although the first in which he
+had taught physics and chemistry, he already passed for a sage, not
+only with the complaisant students but also among the other nomadic
+professors. Padre Millon did not belong to the common crowd who each
+year change their subject in order to acquire scientific knowledge,
+students among other students, with the difference only that they
+follow a single course, that they quiz instead of being quizzed,
+that they have a better knowledge of Castilian, and that they are not
+examined at the completion of the course. Padre Millon went deeply
+into science, knew the physics of Aristotle and Padre Amat, read
+carefully his "Ramos," and sometimes glanced at "Ganot." With all that,
+he would often shake his head with an air of doubt, as he smiled and
+murmured: "_transeat_." In regard to chemistry, no common knowledge
+was attributed to him after he had taken as a premise the statement of
+St. Thomas that water is a mixture and proved plainly that the Angelic
+Doctor had long forestalled Berzelius, Gay-Lussac, Bunsen, and other
+more or less presumptuous materialists. Moreover, in spite of having
+been an instructor in geography, he still entertained certain doubts as
+to the rotundity of the earth and smiled maliciously when its rotation
+and revolution around the sun were mentioned, as he recited the verses
+
+
+    "El mentir de las estrellas
+    Es un comodo mentir." [29]
+
+
+He also smiled maliciously in the presence of certain physical
+theories and considered visionary, if not actually insane, the
+Jesuit Secchi, to whom he imputed the making of triangulations on
+the host as a result of his astronomical mania, for which reason it
+was said that he had been forbidden to celebrate mass. Many persons
+also noticed in him some aversion to the sciences that he taught,
+but these vagaries were trifles, scholarly and religious prejudices
+that were easily explained, not only by the fact that the physical
+sciences were eminently practical, of pure observation and deduction,
+while his forte was philosophy, purely speculative, of abstraction
+and induction, but also because, like any good Dominican, jealous
+of the fame of his order, he could hardly feel any affection for a
+science in which none of his brethren had excelled--he was the first
+who did not accept the chemistry of St. Thomas Aquinas--and in which
+so much renown had been acquired by hostile, or rather, let us say,
+rival orders.
+
+This was the professor who that morning called the roll and directed
+many of the students to recite the lesson from memory, word for
+word. The phonographs got into operation, some well, some ill, some
+stammering, and received their grades. He who recited without an error
+earned a good mark and he who made more than three mistakes a bad mark.
+
+A fat boy with a sleepy face and hair as stiff and hard as the bristles
+of a brush yawned until he seemed to be about to dislocate his jaws,
+and stretched himself with his arms extended as though he were in
+his bed. The professor saw this and wished to startle him.
+
+"Eh, there, sleepy-head! What's this? Lazy, too, so it's sure you
+[30] don't know the lesson, ha?"
+
+Padre Millon not only used the depreciative _tu_ with the students,
+like a good friar, but he also addressed them in the slang of the
+markets, a practise that he had acquired from the professor of
+canonical law: whether that reverend gentleman wished to humble the
+students or the sacred decrees of the councils is a question not yet
+settled, in spite of the great attention that has been given to it.
+
+This question, instead of offending the class, amused them, and many
+laughed--it was a daily occurrence. But the sleeper did not laugh;
+he arose with a bound, rubbed his eyes, and, as though a steam-engine
+were turning the phonograph, began to recite.
+
+"The name of mirror is applied to all polished surfaces intended to
+produce by the reflection of light the images of the objects placed
+before said surfaces. From the substances that form these surfaces,
+they are divided into metallic mirrors and glass mirrors--"
+
+"Stop, stop, stop!" interrupted the professor. "Heavens, what a
+rattle! We are at the point where the mirrors are divided into
+metallic and glass, eh? Now if I should present to you a block of
+wood, a piece of kamagon for instance, well polished and varnished,
+or a slab of black marble well burnished, or a square of jet, which
+would reflect the images of objects placed before them, how would
+you classify those mirrors?"
+
+Whether he did not know what to answer or did not understand
+the question, the student tried to get out of the difficulty by
+demonstrating that he knew the lesson, so he rushed on like a torrent.
+
+"The first are composed of brass or an alloy of different metals and
+the second of a sheet of glass, with its two sides well polished,
+one of which has an amalgam of tin adhering to it."
+
+"Tut, tut, tut! That's not it! I say to you '_Dominus vobiscum_,'
+and you answer me with '_Requiescat in pace!_' "
+
+The worthy professor then repeated the question in the vernacular of
+the markets, interspersed with _cosas_ and _abas_ at every moment.
+
+The poor youth did not know how to get out of the quandary: he doubted
+whether to include the kamagon with the metals, or the marble with
+glasses, and leave the jet as a neutral substance, until Juanito
+Pelaez maliciously prompted him:
+
+"The mirror of kamagon among the wooden mirrors."
+
+The incautious youth repeated this aloud and half the class was
+convulsed with laughter.
+
+"A good sample of wood you are yourself!" exclaimed the professor,
+laughing in spite of himself. "Let's see from what you would define a
+mirror--from a surface _per se, in quantum est superficies_, or from a
+substance that forms the surface, or from the substance upon which the
+surface rests, the raw material, modified by the attribute 'surface,'
+since it is clear that, surface being an accidental property of bodies,
+it cannot exist without substance. Let's see now--what do you say?"
+
+"I? Nothing!" the wretched boy was about to reply, for he did not
+understand what it was all about, confused as he was by so many
+surfaces and so many accidents that smote cruelly on his ears, but
+a sense of shame restrained him. Filled with anguish and breaking
+into a cold perspiration, he began to repeat between his teeth:
+"The name of mirror is applied to all polished surfaces--"
+
+"_Ergo, per te_, the mirror is the surface," angled the
+professor. "Well, then, clear up this difficulty. If the surface is the
+mirror, it must be of no consequence to the 'essence' of the mirror
+what may be found behind this surface, since what is behind it does
+not affect the 'essence' that is before it, _id est_, the surface,
+_quae super faciem est, quia vocatur superficies, facies ea quae
+supra videtur_. Do you admit that or do you not admit it?"
+
+The poor youth's hair stood up straighter than ever, as though acted
+upon by some magnetic force.
+
+"Do you admit it or do you not admit it?"
+
+"Anything! Whatever you wish, Padre," was his thought, but he did
+not dare to express it from fear of ridicule. That was a dilemma
+indeed, and he had never been in a worse one. He had a vague idea
+that the most innocent thing could not be admitted to the friars
+but that they, or rather their estates and curacies, would get out
+of it all the results and advantages imaginable. So his good angel
+prompted him to deny everything with all the energy of his soul and
+refractoriness of his hair, and he was about to shout a proud _nego_,
+for the reason that he who denies everything does not compromise
+himself in anything, as a certain lawyer had once told him; but the
+evil habit of disregarding the dictates of one's own conscience,
+of having little faith in legal folk, and of seeking aid from others
+where one is sufficient unto himself, was his undoing. His companions,
+especially Juanito Pelaez, were making signs to him to admit it,
+so he let himself be carried away by his evil destiny and exclaimed,
+"_Concedo_, Padre," in a voice as faltering as though he were saying,
+"_In manus tuas commendo spiritum meum._"
+
+"_Concedo antecedentum_," echoed the professor, smiling
+maliciously. "_Ergo_, I can scratch the mercury off a looking-glass,
+put in its place a piece of _bibinka_, and we shall still have a
+mirror, eh? Now what shall we have?"
+
+The youth gazed at his prompters, but seeing them surprised and
+speechless, contracted his features into an expression of bitterest
+reproach. "_Deus meus, Deus meus, quare dereliquiste me,_" said his
+troubled eyes, while his lips muttered "_Linintikan!_" Vainly he
+coughed, fumbled at his shirt-bosom, stood first on one foot and then
+on the other, but found no answer.
+
+"Come now, what have we?" urged the professor, enjoying the effect
+of his reasoning.
+
+"_Bibinka!_" whispered Juanito Pelaez. "_Bibinka!_"
+
+"Shut up, you fool!" cried the desperate youth, hoping to get out of
+the difficulty by turning it into a complaint.
+
+"Let's see, Juanito, if you can answer the question for me," the
+professor then said to Pelaez, who was one of his pets.
+
+The latter rose slowly, not without first giving Penitente, who
+followed him on the roll, a nudge that meant, "Don't forget to
+prompt me."
+
+"_Nego consequentiam_, Padre," he replied resolutely.
+
+"Aha, then _probo consequentiam! Per te_, the polished surface
+constitutes the 'essence' of the mirror--"
+
+_"Nego suppositum!"_ interrupted Juanito, as he felt Placido pulling
+at his coat.
+
+"How? _Per te_--"
+
+"_Nego!_"
+
+"_Ergo,_ you believe that what is behind affects what is in front?"
+
+_"Nego!"_ the student cried with still more ardor, feeling another
+jerk at his coat.
+
+Juanito, or rather Placido, who was prompting him, was unconsciously
+adopting Chinese tactics: not to admit the most inoffensive foreigner
+in order not to be invaded.
+
+"Then where are we?" asked the professor, somewhat disconcerted,
+and looking uneasily at the refractory student. "Does the substance
+behind affect, or does it not affect, the surface?"
+
+To this precise and categorical question, a kind of ultimatum, Juanito
+did not know what to reply and his coat offered no suggestions. In vain
+he made signs to Placido, but Placido himself was in doubt. Juanito
+then took advantage of a moment in which the professor was staring
+at a student who was cautiously and secretly taking off the shoes
+that hurt his feet, to step heavily on Placido's toes and whisper,
+"Tell me, hurry up, tell me!"
+
+"I distinguish--Get out! What an ass you are!" yelled Placido
+unreservedly, as he stared with angry eyes and rubbed his hand over
+his patent-leather shoe.
+
+The professor heard the cry, stared at the pair, and guessed what
+had happened.
+
+"Listen, you meddler," he addressed Placido, "I wasn't questioning
+you, but since you think you can save others, let's see if you can
+save yourself, _salva te ipsum,_ and decide this question."
+
+Juanito sat down in content, and as a mark of gratitude stuck out
+his tongue at his prompter, who had arisen blushing with shame and
+muttering incoherent excuses.
+
+For a moment Padre Millon regarded him as one gloating over a favorite
+dish. What a good thing it would be to humiliate and hold up to
+ridicule that dudish boy, always smartly dressed, with head erect
+and serene look! It would be a deed of charity, so the charitable
+professor applied himself to it with all his heart, slowly repeating
+the question.
+
+"The book says that the metallic mirrors are made of brass and an
+alloy of different metals--is that true or is it not true?"
+
+"So the book says, Padre."
+
+"_Liber dixit, ergo ita est_. Don't pretend that you know more than the
+book does. It then adds that the glass mirrors are made of a sheet of
+glass whose two surfaces are well polished, one of them having applied
+to it an amalgam of tin, _nota bene_, an amalgam of tin! Is that true?"
+
+"If the book says so, Padre."
+
+"Is tin a metal?"
+
+"It seems so, Padre. The book says so."
+
+"It is, it is, and the word amalgam means that it is compounded with
+mercury, which is also a metal. _Ergo_, a glass mirror is a metallic
+mirror; _ergo_, the terms of the distinction are confused; _ergo_,
+the classification is imperfect--how do you explain that, meddler?"
+
+He emphasized the _ergos_ and the familiar "you's" with indescribable
+relish, at the same time winking, as though to say, "You're done for."
+
+"It means that, it means that--" stammered Placido.
+
+"It means that you haven't learned the lesson, you petty meddler,
+you don't understand it yourself, and yet you prompt your neighbor!"
+
+The class took no offense, but on the contrary many thought the
+epithet funny and laughed. Placido bit his lips.
+
+"What's your name?" the professor asked him.
+
+"Placido," was the curt reply.
+
+"Aha! Placido Penitente, although you look more like Placido the
+Prompter--or the Prompted. But, _Penitent_, I'm going to impose some
+_penance_ on you for your promptings."
+
+Pleased with his play on words, he ordered the youth to recite the
+lesson, and the latter, in the state of mind to which he was reduced,
+made more than three mistakes. Shaking his head up and down, the
+professor slowly opened the register and slowly scanned it while he
+called off the names in a low voice.
+
+"Palencia--Palomo--Panganiban--Pedraza--Pelado--Pelaez--Penitents,
+aha! Placido Penitente, fifteen unexcused absences--"
+
+Placido started up. "Fifteen absences, Padre?"
+
+"Fifteen unexcused absences," continued the professor, "so that you
+only lack one to be dropped from the roll."
+
+"Fifteen absences, fifteen absences," repeated Placido in
+amazement. "I've never been absent more than four times, and with
+today, perhaps five."
+
+"Jesso, jesso, monseer," [31] replied the professor, examining the
+youth over his gold eye-glasses. "You confess that you have missed
+five times, and God knows if you may have missed oftener. _Atqui_,
+as I rarely call the roll, every time I catch any one I put five
+marks against him; _ergo_, how many are five times five? Have you
+forgotten the multiplication table? Five times five?"
+
+"Twenty-five."
+
+"Correct, correct! Thus you've still got away with ten, because I have
+caught you only three times. Huh, if I had caught you every time--Now,
+how many are three times five?"
+
+"Fifteen."
+
+"Fifteen, right you are!" concluded the professor, closing the
+register. "If you miss once more--out of doors with you, get out! Ah,
+now a mark for the failure in the daily lesson."
+
+He again opened the register, sought out the name, and entered the
+mark. "Come, only one mark," he said, "since you hadn't any before."
+
+"But, Padre," exclaimed Placido, restraining himself, "if your
+Reverence puts a mark against me for failing in the lesson, your
+Reverence owes it to me to erase the one for absence that you have
+put against me for today."
+
+His Reverence made no answer. First he slowly entered the mark,
+then contemplated it with his head on one side,--the mark must be
+artistic,--closed the register, and asked with great sarcasm, "_Aba_,
+and why so, sir?"
+
+"Because I can't conceive, Padre, how one can be absent from the
+class and at the same time recite the lesson in it. Your Reverence
+is saying that to be is not to be."
+
+"_Naku_, a metaphysician, but a rather premature one! So you can't
+conceive of it, eh? _Sed patet experientia_ and _contra experientiam
+negantem, fusilibus est arguendum_, do you understand? And can't
+you conceive, with your philosophical head, that one can be absent
+from the class and not know the lesson at the same time? Is it a fact
+that absence necessarily implies knowledge? What do you say to that,
+philosophaster?"
+
+This last epithet was the drop of water that made the full cup
+overflow. Placido enjoyed among his friends the reputation of being
+a philosopher, so he lost his patience, threw down his book, arose,
+and faced the professor.
+
+"Enough, Padre, enough! Your Reverence can put all the marks against me
+that you wish, but you haven't the right to insult me. Your Reverence
+may stay with the class, I can't stand any more." Without further
+farewell, he stalked away.
+
+The class was astounded; such an assumption of dignity had scarcely
+ever been seen, and who would have thought it of Placido Penitente? The
+surprised professor bit his lips and shook his head threateningly as he
+watched him depart. Then in a trembling voice he began his preachment
+on the same old theme, delivered however with more energy and more
+eloquence. It dealt with the growing arrogance, the innate ingratitude,
+the presumption, the lack of respect for superiors, the pride that
+the spirit of darkness infused in the young, the lack of manners,
+the absence of courtesy, and so on. From this he passed to coarse
+jests and sarcasm over the presumption which some good-for-nothing
+"prompters" had of teaching their teachers by establishing an academy
+for instruction in Castilian.
+
+"Aha, aha!" he moralized, "those who the day before yesterday scarcely
+knew how to say, 'Yes, Padre,' 'No, Padre,' now want to know more
+than those who have grown gray teaching them. He who wishes to learn,
+will learn, academies or no academies! Undoubtedly that fellow who
+has just gone out is one of those in the project. Castilian is in good
+hands with such guardians! When are you going to get the time to attend
+the academy if you have scarcely enough to fulfill your duties in the
+regular classes? We wish that you may all know Spanish and that you
+pronounce it well, so that you won't split our ear-drums with your
+twist of expression and your 'p's'; [32] but first business and then
+pleasure: finish your studies first, and afterwards learn Castilian,
+and all become clerks, if you so wish."
+
+So he went on with his harangue until the bell rang and the class was
+over. The two hundred and thirty-four students, after reciting their
+prayers, went out as ignorant as when they went in, but breathing more
+freely, as if a great weight had been lifted from them. Each youth had
+lost another hour of his life and with it a portion of his dignity and
+self-respect, and in exchange there was an increase of discontent,
+of aversion to study, of resentment in their hearts. After all this
+ask for knowledge, dignity, gratitude!
+
+_De nobis, post haec, tristis sententia fertur_!
+
+Just as the two hundred and thirty-four spent their class hours,
+so the thousands of students who preceded them have spent theirs,
+and, if matters do not mend, so will those yet to come spend theirs,
+and be brutalized, while wounded dignity and youthful enthusiasm
+will be converted into hatred and sloth, like the waves that become
+polluted along one part of the shore and roll on one after another,
+each in succession depositing a larger sediment of filth. But yet He
+who from eternity watches the consequences of a deed develop like a
+thread through the loom of the centuries, He who weighs the value
+of a second and has ordained for His creatures as an elemental
+law progress and development, He, if He is just, will demand a
+strict accounting from those who must render it, of the millions of
+intelligences darkened and blinded, of human dignity trampled upon
+in millions of His creatures, and of the incalculable time lost and
+effort wasted! And if the teachings of the Gospel are based on truth,
+so also will these have to answer--the millions and millions who do
+not know how to preserve the light of their intelligences and their
+dignity of mind, as the master demanded an accounting from the cowardly
+servant for the talent that he let be taken from him.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+IN THE HOUSE OF THE STUDENTS
+
+
+The house where Makaraig lived was worth visiting. Large and spacious,
+with two entresols provided with elegant gratings, it seemed to be
+a school during the first hours of the morning and pandemonium from
+ten o'clock on. During the boarders' recreation hours, from the lower
+hallway of the spacious entrance up to the main floor, there was a
+bubbling of laughter, shouts, and movement. Boys in scanty clothing
+played _sipa_ or practised gymnastic exercises on improvised trapezes,
+while on the staircase a fight was in progress between eight or nine
+armed with canes, sticks, and ropes, but neither attackers nor attacked
+did any great damage, their blows generally falling sidewise upon the
+shoulders of the Chinese pedler who was there selling his outlandish
+mixtures and indigestible pastries. Crowds of boys surrounded him,
+pulled at his already disordered queue, snatched pies from him,
+haggled over the prices, and committed a thousand deviltries. The
+Chinese yelled, swore, forswore, in all the languages he could jabber,
+not omitting his own; he whimpered, laughed, pleaded, put on a smiling
+face when an ugly one would not serve, or the reverse.
+
+He cursed them as devils, savages, _no kilistanos_ [33] but that
+mattered nothing. A whack would bring his face around smiling, and
+if the blow fell only upon his shoulders he would calmly continue
+his business transactions, contenting himself with crying out to
+them that he was not in the game, but if it struck the flat basket
+on which were placed his wares, then he would swear never to come
+again, as he poured out upon them all the imprecations and anathemas
+imaginable. Then the boys would redouble their efforts to make him
+rage the more, and when at last his vocabulary was exhausted and they
+were satiated with his fearful mixtures, they paid him religiously,
+and sent him away happy, winking, chuckling to himself, and receiving
+as caresses the light blows from their canes that the students gave
+him as tokens of farewell.
+
+Concerts on the piano and violin, the guitar, and the accordion,
+alternated with the continual clashing of blades from the fencing
+lessons. Around a long, wide table the students of the Ateneo prepared
+their compositions or solved their problems by the side of others
+writing to their sweethearts on pink perforated note-paper covered
+with drawings. Here one was composing a melodrama at the side of
+another practising on the flute, from which he drew wheezy notes. Over
+there, the older boys, students in professional courses, who affected
+silk socks and embroidered slippers, amused themselves in teasing
+the smaller boys by pulling their ears, already red from repeated
+fillips, while two or three held down a little fellow who yelled and
+cried, defending himself with his feet against being reduced to the
+condition in which he was born, kicking and howling. In one room,
+around a small table, four were playing _revesino_ with laughter and
+jokes, to the great annoyance of another who pretended to be studying
+his lesson but who was in reality waiting his turn to play.
+
+Still another came in with exaggerated wonder, scandalized as he
+approached the table. "How wicked you are! So early in the morning
+and already gambling! Let's see, let's see! You fool, take it with
+the three of spades!" Closing his book, he too joined in the game.
+
+Cries and blows were heard. Two boys were fighting in the adjoining
+room--a lame student who was very sensitive about his infirmity and
+an unhappy newcomer from the provinces who was just commencing his
+studies. He was working over a treatise on philosophy and reading
+innocently in a loud voice, with a wrong accent, the Cartesian
+principle: "_Cogito, ergo sum!_"
+
+The little lame boy (_el cojito_) took this as an insult and the others
+intervened to restore peace, but in reality only to sow discord and
+come to blows themselves.
+
+In the dining-room a young man with a can of sardines, a bottle of
+wine, and the provisions that he had just brought from his town, was
+making heroic efforts to the end that his friends might participate
+in his lunch, while they were offering in their turn heroic resistance
+to his invitation. Others were bathing on the azotea, playing firemen
+with the water from the well, and joining in combats with pails of
+water, to the great delight of the spectators.
+
+But the noise and shouts gradually died away with the coming of leading
+students, summoned by Makaraig to report to them the progress of the
+academy of Castilian. Isagani was cordially greeted, as was also the
+Peninsular, Sandoval, who had come to Manila as a government employee
+and was finishing his studies, and who had completely identified
+himself with the cause of the Filipino students. The barriers that
+politics had established between the races had disappeared in the
+schoolroom as though dissolved by the zeal of science and youth.
+
+From lack of lyceums and scientific, literary, or political centers,
+Sandoval took advantage of all the meetings to cultivate his great
+oratorical gifts, delivering speeches and arguing on any subject,
+to draw forth applause from his friends and listeners. At that moment
+the subject of conversation was the instruction in Castilian, but as
+Makaraig had not yet arrived conjecture was still the order of the day.
+
+"What can have happened?"
+
+"What has the General decided?"
+
+"Has he refused the permit?"
+
+"Has Padre Irene or Padre Sibyla won?"
+
+Such were the questions they asked one another, questions that could
+be answered only by Makaraig.
+
+Among the young men gathered together there were optimists like Isagani
+and Sandoval, who saw the thing already accomplished and talked of
+congratulations and praise from the government for the patriotism of
+the students--outbursts of optimism that led Juanito Pelaez to claim
+for himself a large part of the glory of founding the society.
+
+All this was answered by the pessimist Pecson, a chubby youth with
+a wide, clownish grin, who spoke of outside influences, whether the
+Bishop A., the Padre B., or the Provincial C., had been consulted or
+not, whether or not they had advised that the whole association should
+be put in jail--a suggestion that made Juanito Pelaez so uneasy that
+he stammered out, "_Carambas_, don't you drag me into--"
+
+Sandoval, as a Peninsular and a liberal, became furious at
+this. "But pshaw!" he exclaimed, "that is holding a bad opinion of his
+Excellency! I know that he's quite a friar-lover, but in such a matter
+as this he won't let the friars interfere. Will you tell me, Pecson, on
+what you base your belief that the General has no judgment of his own?"
+
+"I didn't say that, Sandoval," replied Pecson, grinning until he
+exposed his wisdom-tooth. "For me the General has _his own_ judgment,
+that is, the judgment of all those within his reach. That's plain!"
+
+"You're dodging--cite me a fact, cite me a fact!" cried
+Sandoval. "Let's get away from hollow arguments, from empty phrases,
+and get on the solid ground of facts,"--this with an elegant
+gesture. "Facts, gentlemen, facts! The rest is prejudice--I won't
+call it filibusterism."
+
+Pecson smiled like one of the blessed as he retorted, "There comes the
+filibusterism. But can't we enter into a discussion without resorting
+to accusations?"
+
+Sandoval protested in a little extemporaneous speech, again demanding
+facts.
+
+"Well, not long ago there was a dispute between some private persons
+and certain friars, and the acting Governor rendered a decision
+that it should be settled by the Provincial of the Order concerned,"
+replied Pecson, again breaking out into a laugh, as though he were
+dealing with an insignificant matter, he cited names and dates,
+and promised documents that would prove how justice was dispensed.
+
+"But, on what ground, tell me this, on what ground can they refuse
+permission for what plainly appears to be extremely useful and
+necessary?" asked Sandoval.
+
+Pecson shrugged his shoulders. "It's that it endangers the integrity
+of the fatherland," he replied in the tone of a notary reading an
+allegation.
+
+"That's pretty good! What has the integrity of the fatherland to do
+with the rules of syntax?"
+
+"The Holy Mother Church has learned doctors--what do I know? Perhaps
+it is feared that we may come to understand the laws so that we can
+obey them. What will become of the Philippines on the day when we
+understand one another?"
+
+Sandoval did not relish the dialectic and jesting turn of the
+conversation; along that path could rise no speech worth the
+while. "Don't make a joke of things!" he exclaimed. "This is a
+serious matter."
+
+"The Lord deliver me from joking when there are friars concerned!"
+
+"But, on what do you base--"
+
+"On the fact that, the hours for the classes having to come at
+night," continued Pecson in the same tone, as if he were quoting
+known and recognized formulas, "there may be invoked as an obstacle
+the immorality of the thing, as was done in the case of the school
+at Malolos."
+
+"Another! But don't the classes of the Academy of Drawing, and the
+novenaries and the processions, cover themselves with the mantle
+of night?"
+
+"The scheme affects the dignity of the University," went on the chubby
+youth, taking no notice of the question.
+
+"Affects nothing! The University has to accommodate itself to the needs
+of the students. And granting that, what is a university then? Is it
+an institution to discourage study? Have a few men banded themselves
+together in the name of learning and instruction in order to prevent
+others from becoming enlightened?"
+
+"The fact is that movements initiated from below are regarded as
+discontent--"
+
+"What about projects that come from above?" interpolated one of the
+students. "There's the School of Arts and Trades!"
+
+"Slowly, slowly, gentlemen," protested Sandoval. "I'm not a
+friar-lover, my liberal views being well known, but render unto Caesar
+that which is Caesar's. Of that School of Arts and Trades, of which I
+have been the most enthusiastic supporter and the realization of which
+I shall greet as the first streak of dawn for these fortunate islands,
+of that School of Arts and Trades the friars have taken charge--"
+
+"Or the cat of the canary, which amounts to the same thing," added
+Pecson, in his turn interrupting the speech.
+
+"Get out!" cried Sandoval, enraged at the interruption, which had
+caused him to lose the thread of his long, well-rounded sentence. "As
+long as we hear nothing bad, let's not be pessimists, let's not be
+unjust, doubting the liberty and independence of the government."
+
+Here he entered upon a defense in beautiful phraseology of the
+government and its good intentions, a subject that Pecson dared not
+break in upon.
+
+"The Spanish government," he said among other things, "has given
+you everything, it has denied you nothing! We had absolutism in
+Spain and you had absolutism here; the friars covered our soil with
+conventos, and conventos occupy a third part of Manila; in Spain
+the garrote prevails and here the garrote is the extreme punishment;
+we are Catholics and we have made you Catholics; we were scholastics
+and scholasticism sheds its light in your college halls; in short,
+gentlemen, we weep when you weep, we suffer when you suffer, we have
+the same altars, the same courts, the same punishments, and it is
+only just that we should give you our rights and our joys."
+
+As no one interrupted him, he became more and more enthusiastic,
+until he came to speak of the future of the Philippines.
+
+"As I have said, gentlemen, the dawn is not far distant. Spain is now
+breaking the eastern sky for her beloved Philippines, and the times
+are changing, as I positively know, faster than we imagine. This
+government, which, according to you, is vacillating and weak, should
+be strengthened by our confidence, that we may make it see that it is
+the custodian of our hopes. Let us remind it by our conduct (should
+it ever forget itself, which I do not believe can happen) that we
+have faith in its good intentions and that it should be guided by no
+other standard than justice and the welfare of all the governed. No,
+gentlemen," he went on in a tone more and more declamatory, "we must
+not admit at all in this matter the possibility of a consultation with
+other more or less hostile entities, as such a supposition would imply
+our resignation to the fact. Your conduct up to the present has been
+frank, loyal, without vacillation, above suspicion; you have addressed
+it simply and directly; the reasons you have presented could not be
+more sound; your aim is to lighten the labor of the teachers in the
+first years and to facilitate study among the hundreds of students
+who fill the college halls and for whom one solitary professor cannot
+suffice. If up to the present the petition has not been granted, it
+has been for the reason, as I feel sure, that there has been a great
+deal of material accumulated, but I predict that the campaign is
+won, that the summons of Makaraig is to announce to us the victory,
+and tomorrow we shall see our efforts crowned with the applause and
+appreciation of the country, and who knows, gentlemen, but that the
+government may confer upon you some handsome decoration of merit,
+benefactors as you are of the fatherland!"
+
+Enthusiastic applause resounded. All immediately believed in the
+triumph, and many in the decoration.
+
+"Let it be remembered, gentlemen," observed Juanito, "that I was one
+of the first to propose it."
+
+The pessimist Pecson was not so enthusiastic. "Just so we don't get
+that decoration on our ankles," he remarked, but fortunately for
+Pelaez this comment was not heard in the midst of the applause.
+
+When they had quieted down a little, Pecson replied, "Good, good,
+very good, but one supposition: if in spite of all that, the General
+consults and consults and consults, and afterwards refuses the permit?"
+
+This question fell like a dash of cold water. All turned to Sandoval,
+who was taken aback. "Then--" he stammered.
+
+"Then?"
+
+"Then," he exclaimed in a burst of enthusiasm, still excited by the
+applause, "seeing that in writing and in printing it boasts of desiring
+your enlightenment, and yet hinders and denies it when called upon to
+make it a reality--then, gentlemen, your efforts will not have been
+in vain, you will have accomplished what no one else has been able
+to do. Make them drop the mask and fling down the gauntlet to you!"
+
+"Bravo, bravo!" cried several enthusiastically.
+
+"Good for Sandoval! Hurrah for the gauntlet!" added others.
+
+"Let them fling down the gauntlet to us!" repeated Pecson
+disdainfully. "But afterwards?"
+
+Sandoval seemed to be cut short in his triumph, but with the vivacity
+peculiar to his race and his oratorical temperament he had an
+immediate reply.
+
+"Afterwards?" he asked. "Afterwards, if none of the Filipinos dare
+to accept the challenge, then I, Sandoval, in the name of Spain, will
+take up the gauntlet, because such a policy would give the lie to the
+good intentions that she has always cherished toward her provinces,
+and because he who is thus faithless to the trust reposed in him and
+abuses his unlimited authority deserves neither the protection of
+the fatherland nor the support of any Spanish citizen!"
+
+The enthusiasm of his hearers broke all bounds. Isagani embraced him,
+the others following his example. They talked of the fatherland,
+of union, of fraternity, of fidelity. The Filipinos declared that
+if there were only Sandovals in Spain all would be Sandovals in the
+Philippines. His eyes glistened, and it might well be believed that if
+at that moment any kind of gauntlet had been flung at him he would have
+leaped upon any kind of horse to ride to death for the Philippines.
+
+The "cold water" alone replied: "Good, that's very good, Sandoval. I
+could also say the same if I were a Peninsular, but not being one,
+if I should say one half of what you have, you yourself would take
+me for a filibuster."
+
+Sandoval began a speech in protest, but was interrupted.
+
+"Rejoice, friends, rejoice! Victory!" cried a youth who entered at
+that moment and began to embrace everybody.
+
+"Rejoice, friends! Long live the Castilian tongue!"
+
+An outburst of applause greeted this announcement. They fell to
+embracing one another and their eyes filled with tears. Pecson alone
+preserved his skeptical smile.
+
+The bearer of such good news was Makaraig, the young man at the head
+of the movement. This student occupied in that house, by himself, two
+rooms, luxuriously furnished, and had his servant and a cochero to look
+after his carriage and horses. He was of robust carriage, of refined
+manners, fastidiously dressed, and very rich. Although studying law
+only that he might have an academic degree, he enjoyed a reputation for
+diligence, and as a logician in the scholastic way had no cause to envy
+the most frenzied quibblers of the University faculty. Nevertheless
+he was not very far behind in regard to modern ideas and progress,
+for his fortune enabled him to have all the books and magazines that a
+watchful censor was unable to keep out. With these qualifications and
+his reputation for courage, his fortunate associations in his earlier
+years, and his refined and delicate courtesy, it was not strange that
+he should exercise such great influence over his associates and that
+he should have been chosen to carry out such a difficult undertaking
+as that of the instruction in Castilian.
+
+After the first outburst of enthusiasm, which in youth always takes
+hold in such exaggerated forms, since youth finds everything beautiful,
+they wanted to be informed how the affair had been managed.
+
+"I saw Padre Irene this morning," said Makaraig with a certain air
+of mystery.
+
+"Hurrah for Padre Irene!" cried an enthusiastic student.
+
+"Padre Irene," continued Makaraig, "has told me about everything that
+took place at Los Banos. It seems that they disputed for at least
+a week, he supporting and defending our case against all of them,
+against Padre Sibyla, Padre Fernandez, Padre Salvi, the General,
+the jeweler Simoun--"
+
+"The jeweler Simoun!" interrupted one of his listeners. "What has that
+Jew to do with the affairs of our country? We enrich him by buying--"
+
+"Keep quiet!" admonished another impatiently, anxious to learn how
+Padre Irene had been able to overcome such formidable opponents.
+
+"There were even high officials who were opposed to our project,
+the Head Secretary, the Civil Governor, Quiroga the Chinaman--"
+
+"Quiroga the Chinaman! The pimp of the--"
+
+"Shut up!"
+
+"At last," resumed Makaraig, "they were going to pigeonhole the
+petition and let it sleep for months and months, when Padre Irene
+remembered the Superior Commission of Primary Instruction and proposed,
+since the matter concerned the teaching of the Castilian tongue,
+that the petition be referred to that body for a report upon it."
+
+"But that Commission hasn't been in operation for a long time,"
+observed Pecson.
+
+"That's exactly what they replied to Padre Irene, and he answered
+that this was a good opportunity to revive it, and availing himself
+of the presence of Don Custodio, one of its members, he proposed on
+the spot that a committee should be appointed. Don Custodio's activity
+being known and recognized, he was named as arbiter and the petition
+is now in his hands. He promised that he would settle it this month."
+
+"Hurrah for Don Custodio!"
+
+"But suppose Don Custodio should report unfavorably upon it?" inquired
+the pessimist Pecson.
+
+Upon this they had not reckoned, being intoxicated with the thought
+that the matter would not be pigeonholed, so they all turned to
+Makaraig to learn how it could be arranged.
+
+"The same objection I presented to Padre Irene, but with his sly smile
+he said to me: 'We've won a great deal, we have succeeded in getting
+the matter on the road to a decision, the opposition sees itself
+forced to join battle.' If we can bring some influence to bear upon
+Don Custodio so that he, in accordance with his liberal tendencies,
+may report favorably, all is won, for the General showed himself to
+be absolutely neutral."
+
+Makaraig paused, and an impatient listener asked, "How can we
+influence him?"
+
+"Padre Irene pointed out to me two ways--"
+
+"Quiroga," some one suggested.
+
+"Pshaw, great use Quiroga--"
+
+"A fine present."
+
+"No, that won't do, for he prides himself upon being incorruptible."
+
+"Ah, yes, I know!" exclaimed Pecson with a laugh. "Pepay the dancing
+girl."
+
+"Ah, yes, Pepay the dancing girl," echoed several.
+
+This Pepay was a showy girl, supposed to be a great friend of
+Don Custodio. To her resorted the contractors, the employees, the
+intriguers, when they wanted to get something from the celebrated
+councilor. Juanito Pelaez, who was also a great friend of the dancing
+girl, offered to look after the matter, but Isagani shook his head,
+saying that it was sufficient that they had made use of Padre Irene
+and that it would be going too far to avail themselves of Pepay in
+such an affair.
+
+"Show us the other way."
+
+"The other way is to apply to his attorney and adviser, Senor Pasta,
+the oracle before whom Don Custodio bows."
+
+"I prefer that," said Isagani. "Senor Pasta is a Filipino, and was
+a schoolmate of my uncle's. But how can we interest him?"
+
+"There's the _quid_," replied Makaraig, looking earnestly at
+Isagani. "Senor Pasta has a dancing girl--I mean, a seamstress."
+
+Isagani again shook his head.
+
+"Don't be such a puritan," Juanito Pelaez said to him. "The end
+justifies the means! I know the seamstress, Matea, for she has a shop
+where a lot of girls work."
+
+"No, gentlemen," declared Isagani, "let's first employ decent
+methods. I'll go to Senor Pasta and, if I don't accomplish anything,
+then you can do what you wish with the dancing girls and seamstresses."
+
+They had to accept this proposition, agreeing that Isagani should
+talk to Senor Pasta that very day, and in the afternoon report to
+his associates at the University the result of the interview.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+SENOR PASTA
+
+
+Isagani presented himself in the house of the lawyer, one of the
+most talented minds in Manila, whom the friars consulted in their
+great difficulties. The youth had to wait some time on account of the
+numerous clients, but at last his turn came and he entered the office,
+or _bufete_, as it is generally called in the Philippines. The lawyer
+received him with a slight cough, looking down furtively at his feet,
+but he did not rise or offer a seat, as he went on writing. This gave
+Isagani an opportunity for observation and careful study of the lawyer,
+who had aged greatly. His hair was gray and his baldness extended
+over nearly the whole crown of his head. His countenance was sour
+and austere.
+
+There was complete silence in the study, except for the whispers of the
+clerks and understudies who were at work in an adjoining room. Their
+pens scratched as though quarreling with the paper.
+
+At length the lawyer finished what he was writing, laid down his pen,
+raised his head, and, recognizing the youth, let his face light up
+with a smile as he extended his hand affectionately.
+
+"Welcome, young man! But sit down, and excuse me, for I didn't know
+that it was you. How is your uncle?"
+
+Isagani took courage, believing that his case would get on well. He
+related briefly what had been done, the while studying the effect of
+his words. Senor Pasta listened impassively at first and, although
+he was informed of the efforts of the students, pretended ignorance,
+as if to show that he had nothing to do with such childish matters,
+but when he began to suspect what was wanted of him and heard mention
+of the Vice-Rector, friars, the Captain-General, a project, and so on,
+his face slowly darkened and he finally exclaimed, "This is the land
+of projects! But go on, go on!"
+
+Isagani was not yet discouraged. He spoke of the manner in which a
+decision was to be reached and concluded with an expression of the
+confidence which the young men entertained that he, Senor Pasta,
+would _intercede_ in their behalf in case Don Custodio should consult
+him, as was to be expected. He did not dare to say would _advise_,
+deterred by the wry face the lawyer put on.
+
+But Senor Pasta had already formed his resolution, and it was not
+to mix at all in the affair, either as consulter or consulted. He
+was familiar with what had occurred at Los Banos, he knew that there
+existed two factions, and that Padre Irene was not the only champion
+on the side of the students, nor had he been the one who proposed
+submitting the petition to the Commission of Primary Instruction,
+but quite the contrary. Padre Irene, Padre Fernandez, the Countess,
+a merchant who expected to sell the materials for the new academy,
+and the high official who had been citing royal decree after royal
+decree, were about to triumph, when Padre Sibyla, wishing to gain
+time, had thought of the Commission. All these facts the great lawyer
+had present in his mind, so that when Isagani had finished speaking,
+he determined to confuse him with evasions, tangle the matter up,
+and lead the conversation to other subjects.
+
+"Yes," he said, pursing his lips and scratching his head, "there is
+no one who surpasses me in love for the country and in aspirations
+toward progress, but--I can't compromise myself, I don't know whether
+you clearly understand my position, a position that is very delicate,
+I have so many interests, I have to labor within the limits of strict
+prudence, it's a risk--"
+
+The lawyer sought to bewilder the youth with an exuberance of words,
+so he went on speaking of laws and decrees, and talked so much that
+instead of confusing the youth, he came very near to entangling
+himself in a labyrinth of citations.
+
+"In no way do we wish to compromise you," replied Isagani with great
+calmness. "God deliver us from injuring in the least the persons
+whose lives are so useful to the rest of the Filipinos! But, as
+little versed as I may be in the laws, royal decrees, writs, and
+resolutions that obtain in this country, I can't believe that there
+can be any harm in furthering the high purposes of the government,
+in trying to secure a proper interpretation of these purposes. We
+are seeking the same end and differ only about the means."
+
+The lawyer smiled, for the youth had allowed himself to wander away
+from the subject, and there where the former was going to entangle
+him he had already entangled himself.
+
+"That's exactly the _quid_, as is vulgarly said. It's clear that it
+is laudable to aid the government, when one aids it submissively,
+following out its desires and the true spirit of the laws in agreement
+with the just beliefs of the governing powers, and when not in
+contradiction to the fundamental and general way of thinking of the
+persons to whom is intrusted the common welfare of the individuals that
+form a social organism. Therefore, it is criminal, it is punishable,
+because it is offensive to the high principle of authority, to attempt
+any action contrary to its initiative, even supposing it to be better
+than the governmental proposition, because such action would injure
+its prestige, which is the elementary basis upon which all colonial
+edifices rest."
+
+Confident that this broadside had at least stunned Isagani, the old
+lawyer fell back in his armchair, outwardly very serious, but laughing
+to himself.
+
+Isagani, however, ventured to reply. "I should think that governments,
+the more they are threatened, would be all the more careful to seek
+bases that are impregnable. The basis of prestige for colonial
+governments is the weakest of all, since it does not depend upon
+themselves but upon the consent of the governed, while the latter
+are willing to recognize it. The basis of justice or reason would
+seem to be the most durable."
+
+The lawyer raised his head. How was this--did that youth dare to reply
+and argue with him, _him_, Senor Pasta? Was he not yet bewildered
+with his big words?
+
+"Young man, you must put those considerations aside, for they are
+dangerous," he declared with a wave of his hand. "What I advise is
+that you let the government attend to its own business."
+
+"Governments are established for the welfare of the peoples, and
+in order to accomplish this purpose properly they have to follow
+the suggestions of the citizens, who are the ones best qualified to
+understand their own needs."
+
+"Those who constitute the government are also citizens, and among
+the most enlightened."
+
+"But, being men, they are fallible, and ought not to disregard the
+opinions of others."
+
+"They must be trusted, they have to attend to everything."
+
+"There is a Spanish proverb which says, 'No tears, no milk,' in other
+words, 'To him who does not ask, nothing is given.' "
+
+"Quite the reverse," replied the lawyer with a sarcastic smile;
+"with the government exactly the reverse occurs--"
+
+But he suddenly checked himself, as if he had said too much and
+wished to correct his imprudence. "The government has given us things
+that we have not asked for, and that we could not ask for, because
+to ask--to ask, presupposes that it is in some way incompetent and
+consequently is not performing its functions. To suggest to it a course
+of action, to try to guide it, when not really antagonizing it, is to
+presuppose that it is capable of erring, and as I have already said
+to you such suppositions are menaces to the existence of colonial
+governments. The common crowd overlooks this and the young men who
+set to work thoughtlessly do not know, do not comprehend, do not try
+to comprehend the counter-effect of asking, the menace to order there
+is in that idea--"
+
+"Pardon me," interrupted Isagani, offended by the arguments the jurist
+was using with him, "but when by legal methods people ask a government
+for something, it is because they think it good and disposed to grant a
+blessing, and such action, instead of irritating it, should flatter it
+--to the mother one appeals, never to the stepmother. The government,
+in my humble opinion, is not an omniscient being that can see and
+anticipate everything, and even if it could, it ought not to feel
+offended, for here you have the church itself doing nothing but asking
+and begging of God, who sees and knows everything, and you yourself
+ask and demand many things in the courts of this same government,
+yet neither God nor the courts have yet taken offense. Every one
+realizes that the government, being the human institution that it is,
+needs the support of all the people, it needs to be made to see and
+feel the reality of things. You yourself are not convinced of the
+truth of your objection, you yourself know that it is a tyrannical
+and despotic government which, in order to make a display of force
+and independence, denies everything through fear or distrust, and
+that the tyrannized and enslaved peoples are the only ones whose duty
+it is never to ask for anything. A people that hates its government
+ought to ask for nothing but that it abdicate its power."
+
+The old lawyer grimaced and shook his head from side to side, in sign
+of discontent, while he rubbed his hand over his bald pate and said
+in a tone of condescending pity: "Ahem! those are bad doctrines, bad
+theories, ahem! How plain it is that you are young and inexperienced
+in life. Look what is happening with the inexperienced young men
+who in Madrid are asking for so many reforms. They are accused of
+filibusterism, many of them don't dare return here, and yet, what
+are they asking for? Things holy, ancient, and recognized as quite
+harmless. But there are matters that can't be explained, they're so
+delicate. Let's see--I confess to you that there are other reasons
+besides those expressed that might lead a sensible government to
+deny systematically the wishes of the people--no--but it may happen
+that we find ourselves under rulers so fatuous and ridiculous--but
+there are always other reasons, even though what is asked be quite
+just--different governments encounter different conditions--"
+
+The old man hesitated, stared fixedly at Isagani, and then with a
+sudden resolution made a sign with his hand as though he would dispel
+some idea.
+
+"I can guess what you mean," said Isagani, smiling sadly. "You mean
+that a colonial government, for the very reason that it is imperfectly
+constituted and that it is based on premises--"
+
+"No, no, not that, no!" quickly interrupted the old lawyer, as he
+sought for something among his papers. "No, I meant--but where are
+my spectacles?"
+
+"There they are," replied Isagani.
+
+The old man put them on and pretended to look over some papers, but
+seeing that the youth was waiting, he mumbled, "I wanted to tell you
+something, I wanted to say--but it has slipped from my mind. You
+interrupted me in your eagerness--but it was an insignificant
+matter. If you only knew what a whirl my head is in, I have so much
+to do!"
+
+Isagani understood that he was being dismissed. "So," he said, rising,
+"we--"
+
+"Ah, you will do well to leave the matter in the hands of the
+government, which will settle it as it sees fit. You say that the
+Vice-Rector is opposed to the teaching of Castilian. Perhaps he may
+be, not as to the fact but as to the form. It is said that the Rector
+who is on his way will bring a project for reform in education. Wait
+a while, give time a chance, apply yourself to your studies as
+the examinations are near, and--_carambas!_--you who already speak
+Castilian and express yourself easily, what are you bothering yourself
+about? What interest have you in seeing it specially taught? Surely
+Padre Florentino thinks as I do! Give him my regards."
+
+"My uncle," replied Isagani, "has always admonished me to think of
+others as much as of myself. I didn't come for myself, I came in the
+name of those who are in worse condition."
+
+"What the devil! Let them do as you have done, let them singe their
+eyebrows studying and come to be bald like myself, stuffing whole
+paragraphs into their memories! I believe that if you talk Spanish it
+is because you have studied it--you're not of Manila or of Spanish
+parents! Then let them learn it as you have, and do as I have done:
+I've been a servant to all the friars, I've prepared their chocolate,
+and while with my right hand I stirred it, with the left I held a
+grammar, I learned, and, thank God! have never needed other teachers
+or academies or permits from the government. Believe me, he who wishes
+to learn, learns and becomes wise!"
+
+"But how many among those who wish to learn come to be what you
+are? One in ten thousand, and more!"
+
+"Pish! Why any more?" retorted the old man, shrugging his
+shoulders. "There are too many lawyers now, many of them become mere
+clerks. Doctors? They insult and abuse one another, and even kill
+each other in competition for a patient. Laborers, sir, laborers,
+are what we need, for agriculture!"
+
+Isagani realized that he was losing time, but still could not forbear
+replying: "Undoubtedly, there are many doctors and lawyers, but I won't
+say there are too many, since we have towns that lack them entirely,
+and if they do abound in quantity, perhaps they are deficient in
+quality. Since the young men can't be prevented from studying, and
+no other professions are open to us, why let them waste their time
+and effort? And if the instruction, deficient as it is, does not keep
+many from becoming lawyers and doctors, if we must finally have them,
+why not have good ones? After all, even if the sole wish is to make
+the country a country of farmers and laborers, and condemn in it all
+intellectual activity, I don't see any evil in enlightening those
+same farmers and laborers, in giving them at least an education that
+will aid them in perfecting themselves and in perfecting their work,
+in placing them in a condition to understand many things of which
+they are at present ignorant."
+
+"Bah, bah, bah!" exclaimed the lawyer, drawing circles in the air
+with his hand to dispel the ideas suggested. "To be a good farmer no
+great amount of rhetoric is needed. Dreams, illusions, fancies! Eh,
+will you take a piece of advice?"
+
+He arose and placed his hand affectionately on the youth's shoulder,
+as he continued: "I'm going to give you one, and a very good one,
+because I see that you are intelligent and the advice will not be
+wasted. You're going to study medicine? Well, confine yourself to
+learning how to put on plasters and apply leeches, and don't ever try
+to improve or impair the condition of your kind. When you become a
+licentiate, marry a rich and devout girl, try to make cures and charge
+well, shun everything that has any relation to the general state of
+the country, attend mass, confession, and communion when the rest do,
+and you will see afterwards how you will thank me, and I shall see
+it, if I am still alive. Always remember that charity begins at home,
+for man ought not to seek on earth more than the greatest amount of
+happiness for himself, as Bentham says. If you involve yourself in
+quixotisms you will have no career, nor will you get married, nor
+will you ever amount to anything. All will abandon you, your own
+countrymen will be the first to laugh at your simplicity. Believe
+me, you will remember me and see that I am right, when you have gray
+hairs like myself, gray hairs such as these!"
+
+Here the old lawyer stroked his scanty white hair, as he smiled sadly
+and shook his head.
+
+"When I have gray hairs like those, sir," replied Isagani with equal
+sadness, "and turn my gaze back over my past and see that I have
+worked only for myself, without having done what I plainly could
+and should have done for the country that has given me everything,
+for the citizens that have helped me to live--then, sir, every gray
+hair will be a thorn, and instead of rejoicing, they will shame me!"
+
+So saying, he took his leave with a profound bow. The lawyer remained
+motionless in his place, with an amazed look on his face. He listened
+to the footfalls that gradually died away, then resumed his seat.
+
+"Poor boy!" he murmured, "similar thoughts also crossed my mind
+once! What more could any one desire than to be able to say: 'I
+have done this for the good of the fatherland, I have consecrated
+my life to the welfare of others!' A crown of laurel, steeped in
+aloes, dry leaves that cover thorns and worms! That is not life,
+that does not get us our daily bread, nor does it bring us honors--
+the laurel would hardly serve for a salad, nor produce ease, nor aid
+us in winning lawsuits, but quite the reverse! Every country has its
+code of ethics, as it has its climate and its diseases, different
+from the climate and the diseases of other countries."
+
+After a pause, he added: "Poor boy! If all should think and act as
+he does, I don't say but that--Poor boy! Poor Florentino!"
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE TRIBULATIONS OF A CHINESE
+
+
+In the evening of that same Saturday, Quiroga, the Chinese, who
+aspired to the creation of a consulate for his nation, gave a dinner
+in the rooms over his bazaar, located in the Escolta. His feast was
+well attended: friars, government employees, soldiers, merchants,
+all of them his customers, partners or patrons, were to be seen
+there, for his store supplied the curates and the conventos with
+all their necessities, he accepted the chits of all the employees,
+and he had servants who were discreet, prompt, and complaisant. The
+friars themselves did not disdain to pass whole hours in his store,
+sometimes in view of the public, sometimes in the chambers with
+agreeable company.
+
+That night, then, the sala presented a curious aspect, being filled
+with friars and clerks seated on Vienna chairs, stools of black wood,
+and marble benches of Cantonese origin, before little square tables,
+playing cards or conversing among themselves, under the brilliant glare
+of the gilt chandeliers or the subdued light of the Chinese lanterns,
+which were brilliantly decorated with long silken tassels. On the
+walls there was a lamentable medley of landscapes in dim and gaudy
+colors, painted in Canton or Hongkong, mingled with tawdry chromos
+of odalisks, half-nude women, effeminate lithographs of Christ,
+the deaths of the just and of the sinners--made by Jewish houses in
+Germany to be sold in the Catholic countries. Nor were there lacking
+the Chinese prints on red paper representing a man seated, of venerable
+aspect, with a calm, smiling face, behind whom stood a servant, ugly,
+horrible, diabolical, threatening, armed with a lance having a wide,
+keen blade. Among the Indians some call this figure Mohammed, others
+Santiago, [34] we do not know why, nor do the Chinese themselves give
+a very clear explanation of this popular pair. The pop of champagne
+corks, the rattle of glasses, laughter, cigar smoke, and that odor
+peculiar to a Chinese habitation--a mixture of punk, opium, and dried
+fruits--completed the collection.
+
+Dressed as a Chinese mandarin in a blue-tasseled cap, Quiroga moved
+from room to room, stiff and straight, but casting watchful glances
+here and there as though to assure himself that nothing was being
+stolen. Yet in spite of this natural distrust, he exchanged handshakes
+with each guest, greeted some with a smile sagacious and humble,
+others with a patronizing air, and still others with a certain shrewd
+look that seemed to say, "I know! You didn't come on my account,
+you came for the dinner!"
+
+And Quiroga was right! That fat gentleman who is now praising him
+and speaking of the advisability of a Chinese consulate in Manila,
+intimating that to manage it there could be no one but Quiroga, is the
+Senor Gonzalez who hides behind the pseudonym _Pitili_ when he attacks
+Chinese immigration through the columns of the newspapers. That
+other, an elderly man who closely examines the lamps, pictures,
+and other furnishings with grimaces and ejaculations of disdain,
+is Don Timoteo Pelaez, Juanito's father, a merchant who inveighs
+against the Chinese competition that is ruining his business. The
+one over there, that thin, brown individual with a sharp look and a
+pale smile, is the celebrated originator of the dispute over Mexican
+pesos, which so troubled one of Quiroga's proteges: that government
+clerk is regarded in Manila as very clever. That one farther on, he
+of the frowning look and unkempt mustache, is a government official
+who passes for a most meritorious fellow because he has the courage
+to speak ill of the business in lottery tickets carried on between
+Quiroga and an exalted dame in Manila society. The fact is that
+two thirds of the tickets go to China and the few that are left in
+Manila are sold at a premium of a half-real. The honorable gentleman
+entertains the conviction that some day he will draw the first prize,
+and is in a rage at finding himself confronted with such tricks.
+
+The dinner, meanwhile, was drawing to an end. From the dining-room
+floated into the sala snatches of toasts, interruptions, bursts and
+ripples of laughter. The name of Quiroga was often heard mingled with
+the words "consul," "equality," "justice." The amphitryon himself
+did not eat European dishes, so he contented himself with drinking
+a glass of wine with his guests from time to time, promising to dine
+with those who were not seated at the first table.
+
+Simoun, who was present, having already dined, was in the sala talking
+with some merchants, who were complaining of business conditions:
+everything was going wrong, trade was paralyzed, the European exchanges
+were exorbitantly high. They sought information from the jeweler
+or insinuated to him a few ideas, with the hope that these would be
+communicated to the Captain-General. To all the remedies suggested
+Simoun responded with a sarcastic and unfeeling exclamation about
+nonsense, until one of them in exasperation asked him for his opinion.
+
+"My opinion?" he retorted. "Study how other nations prosper, and then
+do as they do."
+
+"And why do they prosper, Senor Simoun?"
+
+Simoun replied with a shrug of his shoulders.
+
+"The port works, which weigh so heavily upon commerce, and the port
+not yet completed!" sighed Don Timoteo Pelaez. "A Penelope's web,
+as my son says, that is spun and unspun. The taxes--"
+
+"You complaining!" exclaimed another. "Just as the General has decreed
+the destruction of houses of light materials! [35] And you with a
+shipment of galvanized iron!"
+
+"Yes," rejoined Don Timoteo, "but look what that decree cost me! Then,
+the destruction will not be carried out for a month, not until Lent
+begins, and other shipments may arrive. I would have wished them
+destroyed right away, but--Besides, what are the owners of those
+houses going to buy from me if they are all poor, all equally beggars?"
+
+"You can always buy up their shacks for a trifle."
+
+"And afterwards have the decree revoked and sell them back at double
+the price--that's business!"
+
+Simoun smiled his frigid smile. Seeing Quiroga approach, he left the
+querulous merchants to greet the future consul, who on catching sight
+of him lost his satisfied expression and assigned a countenance like
+those of the merchants, while he bent almost double.
+
+Quiroga respected the jeweler greatly, not only because he knew him
+to be very wealthy, but also on account of his rumored influence
+with the Captain-General. It was reported that Simoun favored
+Quiroga's ambitions, that he was an advocate for the consulate,
+and a certain newspaper hostile to the Chinese had alluded to him
+in many paraphrases, veiled allusions, and suspension points, in the
+celebrated controversy with another sheet that was favorable to the
+queued folk. Some prudent persons added with winks and half-uttered
+words that his Black Eminence was advising the General to avail himself
+of the Chinese in order to humble the tenacious pride of the natives.
+
+"To hold the people in subjection," he was reported to have said,
+"there's nothing like humiliating them and humbling them in their
+own eyes."
+
+To this end an opportunity had soon presented itself. The guilds
+of mestizos and natives were continually watching one another,
+venting their bellicose spirits and their activities in jealousy
+and distrust. At mass one day the gobernadorcillo of the natives was
+seated on a bench to the right, and, being extremely thin, happened
+to cross one of his legs over the other, thus adopting a nonchalant
+attitude, in order to expose his thighs more and display his pretty
+shoes. The gobernadorcillo of the guild of mestizos, who was seated on
+the opposite bench, as he had bunions, and could not cross his legs on
+account of his obesity, spread his legs wide apart to expose a plain
+waistcoat adorned with a beautiful gold chain set with diamonds. The
+two cliques comprehended these maneuvers and joined battle. On the
+following Sunday all the mestizos, even the thinnest, had large
+paunches and spread their legs wide apart as though on horseback,
+while the natives placed one leg over the other, even the fattest,
+there being one cabeza de barangay who turned a somersault. Seeing
+these movements, the Chinese all adopted their own peculiar attitude,
+that of sitting as they do in their shops, with one leg drawn back
+and upward, the other swinging loose. There resulted protests and
+petitions, the police rushed to arms ready to start a civil war,
+the curates rejoiced, the Spaniards were amused and made money out
+of everybody, until the General settled the quarrel by ordering that
+every one should sit as the Chinese did, since they were the heaviest
+contributors, even though they were not the best Catholics. The
+difficulty for the mestizos and natives then was that their trousers
+were too tight to permit of their imitating the Chinese. But to make
+the intention of humiliating them the more evident, the measure was
+carried out with great pomp and ceremony, the church being surrounded
+by a troop of cavalry, while all those within were sweating. The matter
+was carried to the Cortes, but it was repeated that the Chinese, as
+the ones who paid, should have their way in the religious ceremonies,
+even though they apostatized and laughed at Christianity immediately
+after. The natives and the mestizos had to be content, learning thus
+not to waste time over such fatuity. [36]
+
+Quiroga, with his smooth tongue and humble smile, was lavishly and
+flatteringly attentive to Simoun. His voice was caressing and his
+bows numerous, but the jeweler cut his blandishments short by asking
+brusquely:
+
+"Did the bracelets suit her?"
+
+At this question all Quiroga's liveliness vanished like a dream. His
+caressing voice became plaintive; he bowed lower, gave the Chinese
+salutation of raising his clasped hands to the height of his face,
+and groaned: "Ah, Senor Simoun! I'm lost, I'm ruined!" [37]
+
+"How, Quiroga, lost and ruined when you have so many bottles of
+champagne and so many guests?"
+
+Quiroga closed his eyes and made a grimace. Yes, the affair of that
+afternoon, that affair of the bracelets, had ruined him. Simoun smiled,
+for when a Chinese merchant complains it is because all is going well,
+and when he makes a show that things are booming it is quite certain
+that he is planning an assignment or flight to his own country.
+
+"You didn't know that I'm lost, I'm ruined? Ah, Senor Simoun, I'm
+_busted!_" To make his condition plainer, he illustrated the word by
+making a movement as though he were falling in collapse.
+
+Simoun wanted to laugh, but restrained himself and said that he knew
+nothing, nothing at all, as Quiroga led him to a room and closed the
+door. He then explained the cause of his misfortune.
+
+Three diamond bracelets that he had secured from Simoun on pretense
+of showing them to his wife were not for her, a poor native shut up in
+her room like a Chinese woman, but for a beautiful and charming lady,
+the friend of a powerful man, whose influence was needed by him in
+a certain deal in which he could clear some six thousand pesos. As
+he did not understand feminine tastes and wished to be gallant, the
+Chinese had asked for the three finest bracelets the jeweler had, each
+priced at three to four thousand pesos. With affected simplicity and
+his most caressing smile, Quiroga had begged the lady to select the
+one she liked best, and the lady, more simple and caressing still,
+had declared that she liked all three, and had kept them.
+
+Simoun burst out into laughter.
+
+"Ah, sir, I'm lost, I'm ruined!" cried the Chinese, slapping himself
+lightly with his delicate hands; but the jeweler continued his
+laughter.
+
+"Ugh, bad people, surely not a real lady," went on the Chinaman,
+shaking his head in disgust. "What! She has no decency, while me,
+a Chinaman, me always polite! Ah, surely she not a real lady--a
+_cigarrera_ has more decency!"
+
+"They've caught you, they've caught you!" exclaimed Simoun, poking
+him in the chest.
+
+"And everybody's asking for loans and never pays--what about
+that? Clerks, officials, lieutenants, soldiers--" he checked them off
+on his long-nailed fingers--"ah, Senor Simoun, I'm lost, I'm _busted_!"
+
+"Get out with your complaints," said Simoun. "I've saved you from many
+officials that wanted money from you. I've lent it to them so that
+they wouldn't bother you, even when I knew that they couldn't pay."
+
+"But, Senor Simoun, you lend to officials; I lend to women, sailors,
+everybody."
+
+"I bet you get your money back."
+
+"Me, money back? Ah, surely you don't understand! When it's lost in
+gambling they never pay. Besides, you have a consul, you can force
+them, but I haven't."
+
+Simoun became thoughtful. "Listen, Quiroga," he said, somewhat
+abstractedly, "I'll undertake to collect what the officers and sailors
+owe you. Give me their notes."
+
+Quiroga again fell to whining: they had never given him any notes.
+
+"When they come to you asking for money, send them to me. I want to
+help you."
+
+The grateful Quiroga thanked him, but soon fell to lamenting again
+about the bracelets. "A _cigarrera_ wouldn't be so shameless!" he
+repeated.
+
+"The devil!" exclaimed Simoun, looking askance at the Chinese, as
+though studying him. "Exactly when I need the money and thought that
+you could pay me! But it can all be arranged, as I don't want you
+to fail for such a small amount. Come, a favor, and I'll reduce to
+seven the nine thousand pesos you owe me. You can get anything you
+wish through the Customs--boxes of lamps, iron, copper, glassware,
+Mexican pesos--you furnish arms to the conventos, don't you?"
+
+The Chinese nodded affirmation, but remarked that he had to do a good
+deal of bribing. "I furnish the padres everything!"
+
+"Well, then," added Simoun in a low voice, "I need you to get in for
+me some boxes of rifles that arrived this evening. I want you to keep
+them in your warehouse; there isn't room for all of them in my house."
+
+Quiroga began to show symptoms of fright.
+
+"Don't get scared, you don't run any risk. These rifles are to be
+concealed, a few at a time, in various dwellings, then a search will
+be instituted, and many people will be sent to prison. You and I can
+make a haul getting them set free. Understand me?"
+
+Quiroga wavered, for he was afraid of firearms. In his desk he had
+an empty revolver that he never touched without turning his head away
+and closing his eyes.
+
+"If you can't do it, I'll have to apply to some one else, but then I'll
+need the nine thousand pesos to cross their palms and shut their eyes."
+
+"All right, all right!" Quiroga finally agreed. "But many people will
+be arrested? There'll be a search, eh?"
+
+When Quiroga and Simoun returned to the sala they found there, in
+animated conversation, those who had finished their dinner, for the
+champagne had loosened their tongues and stirred their brains. They
+were talking rather freely.
+
+In a group where there were a number of government clerks, some ladies,
+and Don Custodio, the topic was a commission sent to India to make
+certain investigations about footwear for the soldiers.
+
+"Who compose it?" asked an elderly lady.
+
+"A colonel, two other officers, and his Excellency's nephew."
+
+"Four?" rejoined a clerk. "What a commission! Suppose they
+disagree--are they competent?"
+
+"That's what I asked," replied a clerk. "It's said that one civilian
+ought to go, one who has no military prejudices--a shoemaker,
+for instance."
+
+"That's right," added an importer of shoes, "but it wouldn't do
+to send an Indian or a Chinaman, and the only Peninsular shoemaker
+demanded such large fees--"
+
+"But why do they have to make any investigations about
+footwear?" inquired the elderly lady. "It isn't for the Peninsular
+artillerymen. The Indian soldiers can go barefoot, as they do in
+their towns." [38]
+
+"Exactly so, and the treasury would save more," corroborated another
+lady, a widow who was not satisfied with her pension.
+
+"But you must remember," remarked another in the group, a friend of
+the officers on the commission, "that while it's true they go barefoot
+in the towns, it's not the same as moving about under orders in the
+service. They can't choose the hour, nor the road, nor rest when
+they wish. Remember, madam, that, with the noonday sun overhead and
+the earth below baking like an oven, they have to march over sandy
+stretches, where there are stones, the sun above and fire below,
+bullets in front--"
+
+"It's only a question of getting used to it!"
+
+"Like the donkey that got used to not eating! In our present campaign
+the greater part of our losses have been due to wounds on the soles
+of the feet. Remember the donkey, madam, remember the donkey!"
+
+"But, my dear sir," retorted the lady, "look how much money is wasted
+on shoe-leather. There's enough to pension many widows and orphans
+in order to maintain our prestige. Don't smile, for I'm not talking
+about myself, and I have my pension, even though a very small one,
+insignificant considering the services my husband rendered, but I'm
+talking of others who are dragging out miserable lives! It's not
+right that after so much persuasion to come and so many hardships in
+crossing the sea they should end here by dying of hunger. What you say
+about the soldiers may be true, but the fact is that I've been in the
+country more than three years, and I haven't seen any soldier limping."
+
+"In that I agree with the lady," said her neighbor. "Why issue them
+shoes when they were born without them?"
+
+"And why shirts?"
+
+"And why trousers?"
+
+"Just calculate what we should economize on soldiers clothed only in
+their skins!" concluded he who was defending the army.
+
+In another group the conversation was more heated. Ben-Zayb was
+talking and declaiming, while Padre Camorra, as usual, was constantly
+interrupting him. The friar-journalist, in spite of his respect for
+the cowled gentry, was always at loggerheads with Padre Camorra,
+whom he regarded as a silly half-friar, thus giving himself the
+appearance of being independent and refuting the accusations of those
+who called him Fray Ibanez. Padre Camorra liked his adversary, as the
+latter was the only person who would take seriously what he styled
+his arguments. They were discussing magnetism, spiritualism, magic,
+and the like. Their words flew through the air like the knives and
+balls of jugglers, tossed back and forth from one to the other.
+
+That year great attention had been attracted in the Quiapo fair
+by a head, wrongly called a sphinx, exhibited by Mr. Leeds, an
+American. Glaring advertisements covered the walls of the houses,
+mysterious and funereal, to excite the curiosity of the public. Neither
+Ben-Zayb nor any of the padres had yet seen it; Juanito Pelaez was the
+only one who had, and he was describing his wonderment to the party.
+
+Ben-Zayb, as a journalist, looked for a natural explanation. Padre
+Camorra talked of the devil, Padre Irene smiled, Padre Salvi remained
+grave.
+
+"But, Padre, the devil doesn't need to come--we are sufficient to
+damn ourselves--"
+
+"It can't be explained any other way."
+
+"If science--"
+
+"Get out with science, _punales_!"
+
+"But, listen to me and I'll convince you. It's all a question of
+optics. I haven't yet seen the head nor do I know how it looks, but
+this gentleman"--indicating Juanito Pelaez--"tells us that it does not
+look like the talking heads that are usually exhibited. So be it! But
+the principle is the same--it's all a question of optics. Wait! A
+mirror is placed thus, another mirror behind it, the image is
+reflected--I say, it is purely a problem in physics."
+
+Taking down from the walls several mirrors, he arranged them, turned
+them round and round, but, not getting the desired result, concluded:
+"As I say, it's nothing more or less than a question of optics."
+
+"But what do you want mirrors for, if Juanito tells us that the head is
+inside a box placed on the table? I see in it spiritualism, because the
+spiritualists always make use of tables, and I think that Padre Salvi,
+as the ecclesiastical governor, ought to prohibit the exhibition."
+
+Padre Salvi remained silent, saying neither yes nor no.
+
+"In order to learn if there are devils or mirrors inside it,"
+suggested Simoun, "the best thing would be for you to go and see the
+famous sphinx."
+
+The proposal was a good one, so it was accepted, although Padre
+Salvi and Don Custodio showed some repugnance. They at a fair, to rub
+shoulders with the public, to see sphinxes and talking heads! What
+would the natives say? These might take them for mere men, endowed
+with the same passions and weaknesses as others. But Ben-Zayb, with
+his journalistic ingenuity, promised to request Mr. Leeds not to
+admit the public while they were inside. They would be honoring him
+sufficiently by the visit not to admit of his refusal, and besides
+he would not charge any admission fee. To give a show of probability
+to this, he concluded: "Because, remember, if I should expose the
+trick of the mirrors to the public, it would ruin the poor American's
+business." Ben-Zayb was a conscientious individual.
+
+About a dozen set out, among them our acquaintances, Padres Salvi,
+Camorra, and Irene, Don Custodio, Ben-Zayb, and Juanito Pelaez. Their
+carriages set them down at the entrance to the Quiapo Plaza.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE QUIAPO FAIR
+
+
+It was a beautiful night and the plaza presented a most animated
+aspect. Taking advantage of the freshness of the breeze and the
+splendor of the January moon, the people filled the fair to see, be
+seen, and amuse themselves. The music of the cosmoramas and the lights
+of the lanterns gave life and merriment to every one. Long rows of
+booths, brilliant with tinsel and gauds, exposed to view clusters of
+balls, masks strung by the eyes, tin toys, trains, carts, mechanical
+horses, carriages, steam-engines with diminutive boilers, Lilliputian
+tableware of porcelain, pine Nativities, dolls both foreign and
+domestic, the former red and smiling, the latter sad and pensive like
+little ladies beside gigantic children. The beating of drums, the roar
+of tin horns, the wheezy music of the accordions and the hand-organs,
+all mingled in a carnival concert, amid the coming and going of the
+crowd, pushing, stumbling over one another, with their faces turned
+toward the booths, so that the collisions were frequent and often
+amusing. The carriages were forced to move slowly, with the _tabi_ of
+the cocheros repeated every moment. Met and mingled government clerks,
+soldiers, friars, students, Chinese, girls with their mammas or aunts,
+all greeting, signaling, calling to one another merrily.
+
+Padre Camorra was in the seventh heaven at the sight of so many pretty
+girls. He stopped, looked back, nudged Ben-Zayb, chuckled and swore,
+saying, "And that one, and that one, my ink-slinger? And that one
+over there, what say you?" In his contentment he even fell to using
+the familiar _tu_ toward his friend and adversary. Padre Salvi stared
+at him from time to time, but he took little note of Padre Salvi. On
+the contrary, he pretended to stumble so that he might brush against
+the girls, he winked and made eyes at them.
+
+"_Punales!_" he kept saying to himself. "When shall I be the curate
+of Quiapo?"
+
+Suddenly Ben-Zayb let go an oath, jumped aside, and slapped his hand
+on his arm; Padre Camorra in his excess of enthusiasm had pinched
+him. They were approaching a dazzling senorita who was attracting the
+attention of the whole plaza, and Padre Camorra, unable to restrain
+his delight, had taken Ben-Zayb's arm as a substitute for the girl's.
+
+It was Paulita Gomez, the prettiest of the pretty, in company with
+Isagani, followed by Dona Victorina. The young woman was resplendent
+in her beauty: all stopped and craned their necks, while they ceased
+their conversation and followed her with their eyes--even Dona
+Victorina was respectfully saluted.
+
+Paulita was arrayed in a rich camisa and panuelo of embroidered pina,
+different from those she had worn that morning to the church. The
+gauzy texture of the pina set off her shapely head, and the Indians
+who saw her compared her to the moon surrounded by fleecy clouds. A
+silk rose-colored skirt, caught up in rich and graceful folds by her
+little hand, gave majesty to her erect figure, the movement of which,
+harmonizing with her curving neck, displayed all the triumphs of vanity
+and satisfied coquetry. Isagani appeared to be rather disgusted,
+for so many curious eyes fixed upon the beauty of his sweetheart
+annoyed him. The stares seemed to him robbery and the girl's smiles
+faithlessness.
+
+Juanito saw her and his hump increased when he spoke to her. Paulita
+replied negligently, while Dona Victorina called to him, for Juanito
+was her favorite, she preferring him to Isagani.
+
+"What a girl, what a girl!" muttered the entranced Padre Camorra.
+
+"Come, Padre, pinch yourself and let me alone," said Ben-Zayb
+fretfully.
+
+"What a girl, what a girl!" repeated the friar. "And she has for a
+sweetheart a pupil of mine, the boy I had the quarrel with."
+
+"Just my luck that she's not of my town," he added, after turning
+his head several times to follow her with his looks. He was even
+tempted to leave his companions to follow the girl, and Ben-Zayb had
+difficulty in dissuading him. Paulita's beautiful figure moved on,
+her graceful little head nodding with inborn coquetry.
+
+Our promenaders kept on their way, not without sighs on the part
+of the friar-artilleryman, until they reached a booth surrounded by
+sightseers, who quickly made way for them. It was a shop of little
+wooden figures, of local manufacture, representing in all shapes and
+sizes the costumes, races, and occupations of the country: Indians,
+Spaniards, Chinese, mestizos, friars, clergymen, government clerks,
+gobernadorcillos, students, soldiers, and so on.
+
+Whether the artists had more affection for the priests, the folds
+of whose habits were better suited to their esthetic purposes, or
+whether the friars, holding such an important place in Philippine life,
+engaged the attention of the sculptor more, the fact was that, for one
+cause or another, images of them abounded, well-turned and finished,
+representing them in the sublimest moments of their lives--the opposite
+of what is done in Europe, where they are pictured as sleeping on
+casks of wine, playing cards, emptying tankards, rousing themselves
+to gaiety, or patting the cheeks of a buxom girl. No, the friars
+of the Philippines were different: elegant, handsome, well-dressed,
+their tonsures neatly shaven, their features symmetrical and serene,
+their gaze meditative, their expression saintly, somewhat rosy-cheeked,
+cane in hand and patent-leather shoes on their feet, inviting adoration
+and a place in a glass case. Instead of the symbols of gluttony and
+incontinence of their brethren in Europe, those of Manila carried the
+book, the crucifix, and the palm of martyrdom; instead of kissing the
+simple country lasses, those of Manila gravely extended the hand to
+be kissed by children and grown men doubled over almost to kneeling;
+instead of the full refectory and dining-hall, their stage in Europe,
+in Manila they had the oratory, the study-table; instead of the
+mendicant friar who goes from door to door with his donkey and sack,
+begging alms, the friars of the Philippines scattered gold from full
+hands among the miserable Indians.
+
+"Look, here's Padre Camorra!" exclaimed Ben-Zayb, upon whom the effect
+of the champagne still lingered. He pointed to a picture of a lean
+friar of thoughtful mien who was seated at a table with his head
+resting on the palm of his hand, apparently writing a sermon by the
+light of a lamp. The contrast suggested drew laughter from the crowd.
+
+Padre Camorra, who had already forgotten about Paulita, saw what was
+meant and laughing his clownish laugh, asked in turn, "Whom does this
+other figure resemble, Ben-Zayb?"
+
+It was an old woman with one eye, with disheveled hair, seated on
+the ground like an Indian idol, ironing clothes. The sad-iron was
+carefully imitated, being of copper with coals of red tinsel and
+smoke-wreaths of dirty twisted cotton.
+
+"Eh, Ben-Zayb, it wasn't a fool who designed that" asked Padre Camorra
+with a laugh.
+
+"Well, I don't see the point," replied the journalist.
+
+"But, _punales_, don't you see the title, _The Philippine Press_? That
+utensil with which the old woman is ironing is here called the press!"
+
+All laughed at this, Ben-Zayb himself joining in good-naturedly.
+
+Two soldiers of the Civil Guard, appropriately labeled, were placed
+behind a man who was tightly bound and had his face covered by his
+hat. It was entitled _The Country of Abaka_, [39] and from appearances
+they were going to shoot him.
+
+Many of our visitors were displeased with the exhibition. They talked
+of rules of art, they sought proportion--one said that this figure did
+not have seven heads, that the face lacked a nose, having only three,
+all of which made Padre Camorra somewhat thoughtful, for he did not
+comprehend how a figure, to be correct, need have four noses and
+seven heads. Others said, if they were muscular, that they could not
+be Indians; still others remarked that it was not sculpture, but mere
+carpentry. Each added his spoonful of criticism, until Padre Camorra,
+not to be outdone, ventured to ask for at least thirty legs for each
+doll, because, if the others wanted noses, couldn't he require feet? So
+they fell to discussing whether the Indian had or had not any aptitude
+for sculpture, and whether it would be advisable to encourage that
+art, until there arose a general dispute, which was cut short by Don
+Custodio's declaration that the Indians had the aptitude, but that
+they should devote themselves exclusively to the manufacture of saints.
+
+"One would say," observed Ben-Zayb, who was full of bright ideas
+that night, "that this Chinaman is Quiroga, but on close examination
+it looks like Padre Irene. And what do you say about that British
+Indian? He looks like Simoun!"
+
+Fresh peals of laughter resounded, while Padre Irene rubbed his nose.
+
+"That's right!"
+
+"It's the very image of him!"
+
+"But where is Simoun? Simoun should buy it."
+
+But the jeweler had disappeared, unnoticed by any one.
+
+"_Punales!_" exclaimed Padre Camorra, "how stingy the American
+is! He's afraid we would make him pay the admission for all of us
+into Mr. Leeds' show."
+
+"No!" rejoined Ben-Zayb, "what he's afraid of is that he'll compromise
+himself. He may have foreseen the joke in store for his friend
+Mr. Leeds and has got out of the way."
+
+Thus, without purchasing the least trifle, they continued on their
+way to see the famous sphinx. Ben-Zayb offered to manage the affair,
+for the American would not rebuff a journalist who could take revenge
+in an unfavorable article. "You'll see that it's all a question
+of mirrors," he said, "because, you see--" Again he plunged into a
+long demonstration, and as he had no mirrors at hand to discredit
+his theory he tangled himself up in all kinds of blunders and wound
+up by not knowing himself what he was saying. "In short, you'll see
+how it's all a question of optics."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+LEGERDEMAIN
+
+
+Mr. Leeds, a genuine Yankee, dressed completely in black, received his
+visitors with great deference. He spoke Spanish well, from having been
+for many years in South America, and offered no objection to their
+request, saying that they might examine everything, both before and
+after the exhibition, but begged that they remain quiet while it was
+in progress. Ben-Zayb smiled in pleasant anticipation of the vexation
+he had prepared for the American.
+
+The room, hung entirely in black, was lighted by ancient lamps burning
+alcohol. A rail wrapped in black velvet divided it into two almost
+equal parts, one of which was filled with seats for the spectators and
+the other occupied by a platform covered with a checkered carpet. In
+the center of this platform was placed a table, over which was spread
+a piece of black cloth adorned with skulls and cabalistic signs. The
+_mise en scene_ was therefore lugubrious and had its effect upon
+the merry visitors. The jokes died away, they spoke in whispers,
+and however much some tried to appear indifferent, their lips framed
+no smiles. All felt as if they had entered a house where there was a
+corpse, an illusion accentuated by an odor of wax and incense. Don
+Custodio and Padre Salvi consulted in whispers over the expediency
+of prohibiting such shows.
+
+Ben-Zayb, in order to cheer the dispirited group and embarrass
+Mr. Leeds, said to him in a familiar tone: "Eh, Mister, since there
+are none but ourselves here and we aren't Indians who can be fooled,
+won't you let us see the trick? We know of course that it's purely
+a question of optics, but as Padre Camorra won't be convinced--"
+
+Here he started to jump over the rail, instead of going through the
+proper opening, while Padre Camorra broke out into protests, fearing
+that Ben-Zayb might be right.
+
+"And why not, sir?" rejoined the American. "But don't break anything,
+will you?"
+
+The journalist was already on the platform. "You will allow me,
+then?" he asked, and without waiting for the permission, fearing that
+it might not be granted, raised the cloth to look for the mirrors
+that he expected should be between the legs of the table. Ben-Zayb
+uttered an exclamation and stepped back, again placed both hands under
+the table and waved them about; he encountered only empty space. The
+table had three thin iron legs, sunk into the floor.
+
+The journalist looked all about as though seeking something.
+
+"Where are the mirrors?" asked Padre Camorra.
+
+Ben-Zayb looked and looked, felt the table with his fingers, raised
+the cloth again, and rubbed his hand over his forehead from time to
+time, as if trying to remember something.
+
+"Have you lost anything?" inquired Mr. Leeds.
+
+"The mirrors, Mister, where are the mirrors?"
+
+"I don't know where yours are--mine are at the hotel. Do you want to
+look at yourself? You're somewhat pale and excited."
+
+Many laughed, in spite of their weird impressions, on seeing the
+jesting coolness of the American, while Ben-Zayb retired, quite
+abashed, to his seat, muttering, "It can't be. You'll see that he
+doesn't do it without mirrors. The table will have to be changed
+later."
+
+Mr. Leeds placed the cloth on the table again and turning toward his
+illustrious audience, asked them, "Are you satisfied? May we begin?"
+
+"Hurry up! How cold-blooded he is!" said the widow.
+
+"Then, ladies and gentlemen, take your seats and get your questions
+ready."
+
+Mr. Leeds disappeared through a doorway and in a few moments returned
+with a black box of worm-eaten wood, covered with inscriptions in
+the form of birds, beasts, and human heads.
+
+"Ladies and gentlemen," he began solemnly, "once having had occasion
+to visit the great pyramid of Khufu, a Pharaoh of the fourth dynasty,
+I chanced upon a sarcophagus of red granite in a forgotten chamber. My
+joy was great, for I thought that I had found a royal mummy, but what
+was my disappointment on opening the coffin, at the cost of infinite
+labor, to find nothing more than this box, which you may examine."
+
+He handed the box to those in the front row. Padre Camorra drew back in
+loathing, Padre Salvi looked at it closely as if he enjoyed sepulchral
+things, Padre Irene smiled a knowing smile, Don Custodio affected
+gravity and disdain, while Ben-Zayb hunted for his mirrors--there
+they must be, for it was a question of mirrors.
+
+"It smells like a corpse," observed one lady, fanning herself
+furiously. "Ugh!"
+
+"It smells of forty centuries," remarked some one with emphasis.
+
+Ben-Zayb forgot about his mirrors to discover who had made this
+remark. It was a military official who had read the history of
+Napoleon.
+
+Ben-Zayb felt jealous and to utter another epigram that might annoy
+Padre Camorra a little said, "It smells of the Church."
+
+"This box, ladies and gentlemen," continued the American, "contained
+a handful of ashes and a piece of papyrus on which were written
+some words. Examine them yourselves, but I beg of you not to breathe
+heavily, because if any of the dust is lost my sphinx will appear in
+a mutilated condition."
+
+The humbug, described with such seriousness and conviction, was
+gradually having its effect, so much so that when the box was passed
+around, no one dared to breathe. Padre Camorra, who had so often
+depicted from the pulpit of Tiani the torments and sufferings of hell,
+while he laughed in his sleeves at the terrified looks of the sinners,
+held his nose, and Padre Salvi--the same Padre Salvi who had on All
+Souls' Day prepared a phantasmagoria of the souls in purgatory with
+flames and transparencies illuminated with alcohol lamps and covered
+with tinsel, on the high altar of the church in a suburb, in order
+to get alms and orders for masses--the lean and taciturn Padre Salvi
+held his breath and gazed suspiciously at that handful of ashes.
+
+"_Memento, homo, quia pulvis es_!" muttered Padre Irene with a smile.
+
+"Pish!" sneered Ben-Zayb--the same thought had occurred to him,
+and the Canon had taken the words out of his mouth.
+
+"Not knowing what to do," resumed Mr. Leeds, closing the box carefully,
+"I examined the papyrus and discovered two words whose meaning
+was unknown to me. I deciphered them, and tried to pronounce them
+aloud. Scarcely had I uttered the first word when I felt the box
+slipping from my hands, as if pressed down by an enormous weight,
+and it glided along the floor, whence I vainly endeavored to remove
+it. But my surprise was converted into terror when it opened and I
+found within a human head that stared at me fixedly. Paralyzed with
+fright and uncertain what to do in the presence of such a phenomenon,
+I remained for a time stupefied, trembling like a person poisoned
+with mercury, but after a while recovered myself and, thinking that
+it was a vain illusion, tried to divert my attention by reading
+the second word. Hardly had I pronounced it when the box closed,
+the head disappeared, and in its place I again found the handful of
+ashes. Without suspecting it I had discovered the two most potent
+words in nature, the words of creation and destruction, of life and
+of death!"
+
+He paused for a few moments to note the effect of his story, then
+with grave and measured steps approached the table and placed the
+mysterious box upon it.
+
+"The cloth, Mister!" exclaimed the incorrigible Ben-Zayb.
+
+"Why not?" rejoined Mr. Leeds, very complaisantly.
+
+Lifting the box with his right hand, he caught up the cloth with his
+left, completely exposing the table sustained by its three legs. Again
+he placed the box upon the center and with great gravity turned to
+his audience.
+
+"Here's what I want to see," said Ben-Zayb to his neighbor. "You
+notice how he makes some excuse."
+
+Great attention was depicted on all countenances and silence
+reigned. The noise and roar of the street could be distinctly heard,
+but all were so affected that a snatch of dialogue which reached them
+produced no effect.
+
+"Why can't we go in?" asked a woman's voice.
+
+"_Aba_, there's a lot of friars and clerks in there," answered a
+man. "The sphinx is for them only."
+
+"The friars are inquisitive too," said the woman's voice, drawing
+away. "They don't want us to know how they're being fooled. Why,
+is the head a friar's _querida_?"
+
+In the midst of a profound silence the American announced in a tone
+of emotion: "Ladies and gentlemen, with a word I am now going to
+reanimate the handful of ashes, and you will talk with a being that
+knows the past, the present, and much of the future!"
+
+Here the prestidigitator uttered a soft cry, first mournful, then
+lively, a medley of sharp sounds like imprecations and hoarse notes
+like threats, which made Ben-Zayb's hair stand on end.
+
+"_Deremof_!" cried the American.
+
+The curtains on the wall rustled, the lamps burned low, the table
+creaked. A feeble groan responded from the interior of the box. Pale
+and uneasy, all stared at one another, while one terrified senora
+caught hold of Padre Salvi.
+
+The box then opened of its own accord and presented to the eyes of
+the audience a head of cadaverous aspect, surrounded by long and
+abundant black hair. It slowly opened its eyes and looked around
+the whole audience. Those eyes had a vivid radiance, accentuated by
+their cavernous sockets, and, as if deep were calling unto deep,
+fixed themselves upon the profound, sunken eyes of the trembling
+Padre Salvi, who was staring unnaturally, as though he saw a ghost.
+
+"Sphinx," commanded Mr. Leeds, "tell the audience who you are."
+
+A deep silence prevailed, while a chill wind blew through the room
+and made the blue flames of the sepulchral lamps flicker. The most
+skeptical shivered.
+
+"I am Imuthis," declared the head in a funereal, but strangely
+menacing, voice. "I was born in the time of Amasis and died under the
+Persian domination, when Cambyses was returning from his disastrous
+expedition into the interior of Libya. I had come to complete my
+education after extensive travels through Greece, Assyria, and Persia,
+and had returned to my native laud to dwell in it until Thoth should
+call me before his terrible tribunal. But to my undoing, on passing
+through Babylonia, I discovered an awful secret--the secret of the
+false Smerdis who usurped the throne, the bold Magian Gaumata who
+governed as an impostor. Fearing that I would betray him to Cambyses,
+he determined upon my ruin through the instrumentality of the Egyptian
+priests, who at that time ruled my native country. They were the
+owners of two-thirds of the land, the monopolizers of learning, they
+held the people down in ignorance and tyranny, they brutalized them,
+thus making them fit to pass without resistance from one domination
+to another. The invaders availed themselves of them, and knowing their
+usefulness, protected and enriched them. The rulers not only depended
+on their will, but some were reduced to mere instruments of theirs. The
+Egyptian priests hastened to execute Gaumata's orders, with greater
+zeal from their fear of me, because they were afraid that I would
+reveal their impostures to the people. To accomplish their purpose,
+they made use of a young priest of Abydos, who passed for a saint."
+
+A painful silence followed these words. That head was talking
+of priestly intrigues and impostures, and although referring to
+another age and other creeds, all the friars present were annoyed,
+possibly because they could see in the general trend of the speech
+some analogy to the existing situation. Padre Salvi was in the grip
+of convulsive shivering; he worked his lips and with bulging eyes
+followed the gaze of the head as though fascinated. Beads of sweat
+began to break out on his emaciated face, but no one noticed this,
+so deeply absorbed and affected were they.
+
+"What was the plot concocted by the priests of your country against
+you?" asked Mr. Leeds.
+
+The head uttered a sorrowful groan, which seemed to come from the
+bottom of the heart, and the spectators saw its eyes, those fiery
+eyes, clouded and filled with tears. Many shuddered and felt their
+hair rise. No, that was not an illusion, it was not a trick: the head
+was the victim and what it told was its own story.
+
+"Ay!" it moaned, shaking with affliction, "I loved a maiden,
+the daughter of a priest, pure as light, like the freshly opened
+lotus! The young priest of Abydos also desired her and planned a
+rebellion, using my name and some papyri that he had secured from
+my beloved. The rebellion broke out at the time when Cambyses was
+returning in rage over the disasters of his unfortunate campaign. I was
+accused of being a rebel, was made a prisoner, and having effected my
+escape was killed in the chase on Lake Moeris. From out of eternity
+I saw the imposture triumph. I saw the priest of Abydos night and
+day persecuting the maiden, who had taken refuge in a temple of Isis
+on the island of Philae. I saw him persecute and harass her, even
+in the subterranean chambers, I saw him drive her mad with terror
+and suffering, like a huge bat pursuing a white dove. Ah, priest,
+priest of Abydos, I have returned to life to expose your infamy, and
+after so many years of silence, I name thee murderer, hypocrite, liar!"
+
+A dry, hollow laugh accompanied these words, while a choked voice
+responded, "No! Mercy!"
+
+It was Padre Salvi, who had been overcome with terror and with arms
+extended was slipping in collapse to the floor.
+
+"What's the matter with your Reverence? Are you ill?" asked Padre
+Irene.
+
+"The heat of the room--"
+
+"This odor of corpses we're breathing here--"
+
+"Murderer, slanderer, hypocrite!" repeated the head. "I accuse
+you--murderer, murderer, murderer!"
+
+Again the dry laugh, sepulchral and menacing, resounded, as though
+that head were so absorbed in contemplation of its wrongs that it
+did not see the tumult that prevailed in the room.
+
+"Mercy! She still lives!" groaned Padre Salvi, and then lost
+consciousness. He was as pallid as a corpse. Some of the ladies
+thought it their duty to faint also, and proceeded to do so.
+
+"He is out of his head! Padre Salvi!"
+
+"I told him not to eat that bird's-nest soup," said Padre Irene. "It
+has made him sick."
+
+"But he didn't eat anything," rejoined Don Custodio shivering. "As
+the head has been staring at him fixedly, it has mesmerized him."
+
+So disorder prevailed, the room seemed to be a hospital or a
+battlefield. Padre Salvi looked like a corpse, and the ladies,
+seeing that no one was paying them any attention, made the best of
+it by recovering.
+
+Meanwhile, the head had been reduced to ashes, and Mr. Leeds, having
+replaced the cloth on the table, bowed his audience out.
+
+"This show must be prohibited," said Don Custodio on leaving. "It's
+wicked and highly immoral."
+
+"And above all, because it doesn't use mirrors," added Ben-Zayb,
+who before going out of the room tried to assure himself finally,
+so he leaped over the rail, went up to the table, and raised the
+cloth: nothing, absolutely nothing! [40] On the following day he
+wrote an article in which he spoke of occult sciences, spiritualism,
+and the like.
+
+An order came immediately from the ecclesiastical governor prohibiting
+the show, but Mr. Leeds had already disappeared, carrying his secret
+with him to Hongkong.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+THE FUSE
+
+
+Placido Penitente left the class with his heart overflowing with
+bitterness and sullen gloom in his looks. He was worthy of his name
+when not driven from his usual course, but once irritated he was a
+veritable torrent, a wild beast that could only be stopped by the
+death of himself or his foe. So many affronts, so many pinpricks,
+day after day, had made his heart quiver, lodging in it to sleep the
+sleep of lethargic vipers, and they now were awaking to shake and
+hiss with fury. The hisses resounded in his ears with the jesting
+epithets of the professor, the phrases in the slang of the markets,
+and he seemed to hear blows and laughter. A thousand schemes for
+revenge rushed into his brain, crowding one another, only to fade
+immediately like phantoms in a dream. His vanity cried out to him
+with desperate tenacity that he must do something.
+
+"Placido Penitente," said the voice, "show these youths that you
+have dignity, that you are the son of a valiant and noble province,
+where wrongs are washed out with blood. You're a Batangan, Placido
+Penitente! Avenge yourself, Placido Penitente!"
+
+The youth groaned and gnashed his teeth, stumbling against every
+one in the street and on the Bridge of Spain, as if he were seeking
+a quarrel. In the latter place he saw a carriage in which was the
+Vice-Rector, Padre Sibyla, accompanied by Don Custodio, and he had
+a great mind to seize the friar and throw him into the river.
+
+He proceeded along the Escolta and was tempted to assault two
+Augustinians who were seated in the doorway of Quiroga's bazaar,
+laughing and joking with other friars who must have been inside in
+joyous conversation, for their merry voices and sonorous laughter
+could be heard. Somewhat farther on, two cadets blocked up the
+sidewalk, talking with the clerk of a warehouse, who was in his
+shirtsleeves. Penitents moved toward them to force a passage and
+they, perceiving his dark intention, good-humoredly made way for
+him. Placido was by this time under the influence of the _amok_,
+as the Malayists say.
+
+As he approached his home--the house of a silversmith where he lived as
+a boarder--he tried to collect his thoughts and make a plan--to return
+to his town and avenge himself by showing the friars that they could
+not with impunity insult a youth or make a joke of him. He decided to
+write a letter immediately to his mother, Cabesang Andang, to inform
+her of what had happened and to tell her that the schoolroom had closed
+forever for him. Although there was the Ateneo of the Jesuits, where he
+might study that year, yet it was not very likely that the Dominicans
+would grant him the transfer, and, even though he should secure it,
+in the following year he would have to return to the University.
+
+"They say that we don't know how to avenge ourselves!" he
+muttered. "Let the lightning strike and we'll see!"
+
+But Placido was not reckoning upon what awaited him in the house
+of the silversmith. Cabesang Andang had just arrived from Batangas,
+having come to do some shopping, to visit her son, and to bring him
+money, jerked venison, and silk handkerchiefs.
+
+The first greetings over, the poor woman, who had at once noticed her
+son's gloomy look, could no longer restrain her curiosity and began
+to ask questions. His first explanations Cabesang Andang regarded as
+some subterfuge, so she smiled and soothed her son, reminding him of
+their sacrifices and privations. She spoke of Capitana Simona's son,
+who, having entered the seminary, now carried himself in the town like
+a bishop, and Capitana Simona already considered herself a Mother of
+God, clearly so, for her son was going to be another Christ.
+
+"If the son becomes a priest," said she, "the mother won't have to
+pay us what she owes us. Who will collect from her then?"
+
+But on seeing that Placido was speaking seriously and reading in his
+eyes the storm that raged within him, she realized that what he was
+telling her was unfortunately the strict truth. She remained silent
+for a while and then broke out into lamentations.
+
+"Ay!" she exclaimed. "I promised your father that I would care for
+you, educate you, and make a lawyer of you! I've deprived myself of
+everything so that you might go to school! Instead of joining the
+_panguingui_ where the stake is a half peso, I Ve gone only where it's
+a half real, enduring the bad smells and the dirty cards. Look at my
+patched camisa; for instead of buying new ones I've spent the money in
+masses and presents to St. Sebastian, even though I don't have great
+confidence in his power, because the curate recites the masses fast
+and hurriedly, he's an entirely new saint and doesn't yet know how
+to perform miracles, and isn't made of _batikulin_ but of _lanete._
+Ay, what will your father say to me when I die and see him again!"
+
+So the poor woman lamented and wept, while Placido became gloomier
+and let stifled sighs escape from his breast.
+
+"What would I get out of being a lawyer?" was his response.
+
+"What will become of you?" asked his mother, clasping her
+hands. "They'll call you a filibuster and garrote you. I've told you
+that you must have patience, that you must be humble. I don't tell
+you that you must kiss the hands of the curates, for I know that
+you have a delicate sense of smell, like your father, who couldn't
+endure European cheese. [41] But we have to suffer, to be silent,
+to say yes to everything. What are we going to do? The friars own
+everything, and if they are unwilling, no one will become a lawyer
+or a doctor. Have patience, my son, have patience!"
+
+"But I've had a great deal, mother, I've suffered for months and
+months."
+
+Cabesang Andang then resumed her lamentations. She did not ask that he
+declare himself a partizan of the friars, she was not one herself--it
+was enough to know that for one good friar there were ten bad, who
+took the money from the poor and deported the rich. But one must be
+silent, suffer, and endure--there was no other course. She cited this
+man and that one, who by being _patient_ and humble, even though in
+the bottom of his heart he hated his masters, had risen from servant
+of the friars to high office; and such another who was rich and
+could commit abuses, secure of having patrons who would protect him
+from the law, yet who had been nothing more than a poor sacristan,
+humble and obedient, and who had married a pretty girl whose son had
+the curate for a godfather. So Cabesang Andang continued her litany
+of humble and _patient_ Filipinos, as she called them, and was about
+to cite others who by not being so had found themselves persecuted
+and exiled, when Placido on some trifling pretext left the house to
+wander about the streets.
+
+He passed through Sibakong, [42] Tondo, San Nicolas, and Santo Cristo,
+absorbed in his ill-humor, without taking note of the sun or the hour,
+and only when he began to feel hungry and discovered that he had no
+money, having given it all for celebrations and contributions, did
+he return to the house. He had expected that he would not meet his
+mother there, as she was in the habit, when in Manila, of going out
+at that hour to a neighboring house where _panguingui_ was played,
+but Cabesang Andang was waiting to propose her plan. She would avail
+herself of the procurator of the Augustinians to restore her son to
+the good graces of the Dominicans.
+
+Placido stopped her with a gesture. "I'll throw myself into the sea
+first," he declared. "I'll become a tulisan before I'll go back to
+the University."
+
+Again his mother began her preachment about patience and humility,
+so he went away again without having eaten anything, directing his
+steps toward the quay where the steamers tied up. The sight of a
+steamer weighing anchor for Hongkong inspired him with an idea--to go
+to Hongkong, to run away, get rich there, and make war on the friars.
+
+The thought of Hongkong awoke in his mind the recollection of
+a story about frontals, cirials, and candelabra of pure silver,
+which the piety of the faithful had led them to present to a certain
+church. The friars, so the silversmith told, had sent to Hongkong to
+have duplicate frontals, cirials, and candelabra made of German silver,
+which they substituted for the genuine ones, these being melted down
+and coined into Mexican pesos. Such was the story he had heard, and
+though it was no more than a rumor or a story, his resentment gave it
+the color of truth and reminded him of other tricks of theirs in that
+same style. The desire to live free, and certain half-formed plans,
+led him to decide upon Hongkong. If the corporations sent all their
+money there, commerce must be flourishing and he could enrich himself.
+
+"I want to be free, to live free!"
+
+Night surprised him wandering along San Fernando, but not meeting any
+sailor he knew, he decided to return home. As the night was beautiful,
+with a brilliant moon transforming the squalid city into a fantastic
+fairy kingdom, he went to the fair. There he wandered back and forth,
+passing booths without taking any notice of the articles in them, ever
+with the thought of Hongkong, of living free, of enriching himself.
+
+He was about to leave the fair when he thought he recognized the
+jeweler Simoun bidding good-by to a foreigner, both of them speaking
+in English. To Placido every language spoken in the Philippines
+by Europeans, when not Spanish, had to be English, and besides, he
+caught the name Hongkong. If only the jeweler would recommend him to
+that foreigner, who must be setting out for Hongkong!
+
+Placido paused. He was acquainted with the jeweler, as the latter had
+been in his town peddling his wares, and he had accompanied him on
+one of his trips, when Simoun had made himself very amiable indeed,
+telling him of the life in the universities of the free countries--what
+a difference!
+
+So he followed the jeweler. "Senor Simoun, Senor Simoun!" he called.
+
+The jeweler was at that moment entering his carriage. Recognizing
+Placido, he checked himself.
+
+"I want to ask a favor of you, to say a few words to you."
+
+Simoun made a sign of impatience which Placido in his perturbation
+did not observe. In a few words the youth related what had happened
+and made known his desire to go to Hongkong.
+
+"Why?" asked Simoun, staring fixedly at Placido through his blue
+goggles.
+
+Placido did not answer, so Simoun threw back his head, smiled his cold,
+silent smile and said, "All right! Come with me. To Calle Iris!" he
+directed the cochero.
+
+Simoun remained silent throughout the whole drive, apparently absorbed
+in meditation of a very important nature. Placido kept quiet, waiting
+for him to speak first, and entertained himself in watching the
+promenaders who were enjoying the clear moonlight: pairs of infatuated
+lovers, followed by watchful mammas or aunts; groups of students
+in white clothes that the moonlight made whiter still; half-drunken
+soldiers in a carriage, six together, on their way to visit some nipa
+temple dedicated to Cytherea; children playing their games and Chinese
+selling sugar-cane. All these filled the streets, taking on in the
+brilliant moonlight fantastic forms and ideal outlines. In one house
+an orchestra was playing waltzes, and couples might be seen dancing
+under the bright lamps and chandeliers--what a sordid spectacle they
+presented in comparison with the sight the streets afforded! Thinking
+of Hongkong, he asked himself if the moonlit nights in that island
+were so poetical and sweetly melancholy as those of the Philippines,
+and a deep sadness settled down over his heart.
+
+Simoun ordered the carriage to stop and both alighted, just at the
+moment when Isagani and Paulita Gomez passed them murmuring sweet
+inanities. Behind them came Dona Victorina with Juanito Pelaez, who
+was talking in a loud voice, busily gesticulating, and appearing to
+have a larger hump than ever. In his preoccupation Pelaez did not
+notice his former schoolmate.
+
+"There's a fellow who's happy!" muttered Placido with a sigh,
+as he gazed toward the group, which became converted into vaporous
+silhouettes, with Juanito's arms plainly visible, rising and falling
+like the arms of a windmill.
+
+"That's all he's good for," observed Simoun. "It's fine to be young!"
+
+To whom did Placido and Simoun each allude?
+
+The jeweler made a sign to the young man, and they left the street
+to pick their way through a labyrinth of paths and passageways among
+various houses, at times leaping upon stones to avoid the mudholes
+or stepping aside from the sidewalks that were badly constructed and
+still more badly tended. Placido was surprised to see the rich jeweler
+move through such places as if he were familiar with them. They at
+length reached an open lot where a wretched hut stood off by itself
+surrounded by banana-plants and areca-palms. Some bamboo frames and
+sections of the same material led Placido to suspect that they were
+approaching the house of a pyrotechnist.
+
+Simoun rapped on the window and a man's face appeared.
+
+"Ah, sir!" he exclaimed, and immediately came outside.
+
+"Is the powder here?" asked Simoun.
+
+"In sacks. I'm waiting for the shells."
+
+"And the bombs?"
+
+"Are all ready."
+
+"All right, then. This very night you must go and inform the lieutenant
+and the corporal. Then keep on your way, and in Lamayan you will find a
+man in a banka. You will say _Cabesa_ and he will answer _Tales_. It's
+necessary that he be here tomorrow. There's no time to be lost."
+
+Saying this, he gave him some gold coins.
+
+"How's this, sir?" the man inquired in very good Spanish. "Is there
+any news?"
+
+"Yes, it'll be done within the coming week."
+
+"The coming week!" exclaimed the unknown, stepping backward. "The
+suburbs are not yet ready, they hope that the General will withdraw
+the decree. I thought it was postponed until the beginning of Lent."
+
+Simoun shook his head. "We won't need the suburbs," he said. "With
+Cabesang Tales' people, the ex-carbineers, and a regiment, we'll have
+enough. Later, Maria Clara may be dead. Start at once!"
+
+The man disappeared. Placido, who had stood by and heard all of this
+brief interview, felt his hair rise and stared with startled eyes at
+Simoun, who smiled.
+
+"You're surprised," he said with his icy smile, "that this Indian,
+so poorly dressed, speaks Spanish well? He was a schoolmaster who
+persisted in teaching Spanish to the children and did not stop until
+he had lost his position and had been deported as a disturber of
+the public peace, and for having been a friend of the unfortunate
+Ibarra. I got him back from his deportation, where he had been working
+as a pruner of coconut-palms, and have made him a pyrotechnist."
+
+They returned to the street and set out for Trozo. Before a wooden
+house of pleasant and well-kept appearance was a Spaniard on crutches,
+enjoying the moonlight. When Simoun accosted him, his attempt to rise
+was accompanied by a stifled groan.
+
+"You're ready?" Simoun inquired of him.
+
+"I always am!"
+
+"The coming week?"
+
+"So soon?"
+
+"At the first cannon-shot!"
+
+He moved away, followed by Placido, who was beginning to ask himself
+if he were not dreaming.
+
+"Does it surprise you," Simoun asked him, "to see a Spaniard so young
+and so afflicted with disease? Two years ago he was as robust as you
+are, but his enemies succeeded in sending him to Balabak to work in a
+penal settlement, and there he caught the rheumatism and fever that
+are dragging him into the grave. The poor devil had married a very
+beautiful woman."
+
+As an empty carriage was passing, Simoun hailed it and with Placido
+directed it to his house in the Escolta, just at the moment when the
+clocks were striking half-past ten.
+
+Two hours later Placido left the jeweler's house and walked gravely
+and thoughtfully along the Escolta, then almost deserted, in spite
+of the fact that the cafes were still quite animated. Now and then
+a carriage passed rapidly, clattering noisily over the worn pavement.
+
+From a room in his house that overlooked the Pasig, Simoun turned
+his gaze toward the Walled City, which could be seen through the open
+windows, with its roofs of galvanized iron gleaming in the moonlight
+and its somber towers showing dull and gloomy in the midst of the
+serene night. He laid aside his blue goggles, and his white hair,
+like a frame of silver, surrounded his energetic bronzed features,
+dimly lighted by a lamp whose flame was dying out from lack of
+oil. Apparently wrapped in thought, he took no notice of the fading
+light and impending darkness.
+
+"Within a few days," he murmured, "when on all sides that accursed city
+is burning, den of presumptuous nothingness and impious exploitation
+of the ignorant and the distressed, when the tumults break out in the
+suburbs and there rush into the terrorized streets my avenging hordes,
+engendered by rapacity and wrongs, then will I burst the walls of
+your prison, I will tear you from the clutches of fanaticism, and my
+white dove, you will be the Phoenix that will rise from the glowing
+embers! A revolution plotted by men in darkness tore me from your
+side--another revolution will sweep me into your arms and revive
+me! That moon, before reaching the apogee of its brilliance, will
+light the Philippines cleansed of loathsome filth!"
+
+Simoun, stopped suddenly, as though interrupted. A voice in his inner
+consciousness was asking if he, Simoun, were not also a part of the
+filth of that accursed city, perhaps its most poisonous ferment. Like
+the dead who are to rise at the sound of the last trumpet, a thousand
+bloody specters--desperate shades of murdered men, women violated,
+fathers torn from their families, vices stimulated and encouraged,
+virtues mocked, now rose in answer to the mysterious question. For
+the first time in his criminal career, since in Havana he had by
+means of corruption and bribery set out to fashion an instrument
+for the execution of his plans--a man without faith, patriotism, or
+conscience--for the first time in that life, something within rose up
+and protested against his actions. He closed his eyes and remained
+for some time motionless, then rubbed his hand over his forehead,
+tried to be deaf to his conscience, and felt fear creeping over
+him. No, he must not analyze himself, he lacked the courage to turn
+his gaze toward his past. The idea of his courage, his conviction,
+his self-confidence failing him at the very moment when his work was
+set before him! As the ghosts of the wretches in whose misfortunes
+he had taken a hand continued to hover before his eyes, as if issuing
+from the shining surface of the river to invade the room with appeals
+and hands extended toward him, as reproaches and laments seemed to
+fill the air with threats and cries for vengeance, he turned his gaze
+from the window and for the first time began to tremble.
+
+"No, I must be ill, I can't be feeling well," he muttered. "There
+are many who hate me, who ascribe their misfortunes to me, but--"
+
+He felt his forehead begin to burn, so he arose to approach the window
+and inhale the fresh night breeze. Below him the Pasig dragged along
+its silvered stream, on whose bright surface the foam glittered,
+winding slowly about, receding and advancing, following the course of
+the little eddies. The city loomed up on the opposite bank, and its
+black walls looked fateful, mysterious, losing their sordidness in
+the moonlight that idealizes and embellishes everything. But again
+Simoun shivered; he seemed to see before him the severe countenance
+of his father, dying in prison, but dying for having done good; then
+the face of another man, severer still, who had given his life for him
+because he believed that he was going to bring about the regeneration
+of his country.
+
+"No, I can't turn back," he exclaimed, wiping the perspiration from
+his forehead. "The work is at hand and its success will justify me! If
+I had conducted myself as you did, I should have succumbed. Nothing
+of idealism, nothing of fallacious theories! Fire and steel to the
+cancer, chastisement to vice, and afterwards destroy the instrument,
+if it be bad! No, I have planned well, but now I feel feverish, my
+reason wavers, it is natural--If I have done ill, it has been that I
+may do good, and the end justifies the means. What I will do is not
+to expose myself--"
+
+With his thoughts thus confused he lay down, and tried to fall asleep.
+
+On the following morning Placido listened submissively, with a smile
+on his lips, to his mother's preachment. When she spoke of her plan of
+interesting the Augustinian procurator he did not protest or object,
+but on the contrary offered himself to carry it out, in order to
+save trouble for his mother, whom he begged to return at once to the
+province, that very day, if possible. Cabesang Andang asked him the
+reason for such haste.
+
+"Because--because if the procurator learns that you are here he won't
+do anything until you send him a present and order some masses."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+THE ARBITER
+
+
+True it was that Padre Irene had said: the question of the academy of
+Castilian, so long before broached, was on the road to a solution. Don
+Custodio, the active Don Custodio, the most active of all the arbiters
+in the world, according to Ben-Zayb, was occupied with it, spending
+his days reading the petition and falling asleep without reaching any
+decision, waking on the following day to repeat the same performance,
+dropping off to sleep again, and so on continuously.
+
+How the good man labored, the most active of all the arbiters
+in the world! He wished to get out of the predicament by pleasing
+everybody--the friars, the high official, the Countess, Padre Irene,
+and his own liberal principles. He had consulted with Senor Pasta, and
+Senor Pasta had left him stupefied and confused, after advising him to
+do a million contradictory and impossible things. He had consulted with
+Pepay the dancing girl, and Pepay, who had no idea what he was talking
+about, executed a pirouette and asked him for twenty-five pesos to
+bury an aunt of hers who had suddenly died for the fifth time, or the
+fifth aunt who had suddenly died, according to fuller explanations, at
+the same time requesting that he get a cousin of hers who could read,
+write, and play the violin, a job as assistant on the public works--all
+things that were far from inspiring Don Custodio with any saving idea.
+
+Two days after the events in the Quiapo fair, Don Custodio was as
+usual busily studying the petition, without hitting upon the happy
+solution. While he yawns, coughs, smokes, and thinks about Pepay's
+legs and her pirouettes, let us give some account of this exalted
+personage, in order to understand Padre Sibyla's reason for proposing
+him as the arbiter of such a vexatious matter and why the other clique
+accepted him.
+
+Don Custodio de Salazar y Sanchez de Monteredondo, often referred
+to as _Good Authority_, belonged to that class of Manila society
+which cannot take a step without having the newspapers heap titles
+upon them, calling each _indedefatigable, distinguished, zealous,
+active, profound, intelligent, well-informed, influential_, and so
+on, as if they feared that he might be confused with some idle and
+ignorant possessor of the same name. Besides, no harm resulted from
+it, and the watchful censor was not disturbed. The _Good Authority_
+resulted from his friendship with Ben-Zayb, when the latter, in his two
+noisiest controversies, which he carried on for weeks and months in the
+columns of the newspapers about whether it was proper to wear a high
+hat, a derby, or a _salakot,_ and whether the plural of _caracter_
+should be _caracteres_ or _caracteres,_ in order to strengthen his
+argument always came out with, "We have this on good authority,"
+"We learn this from good authority," later letting it be known,
+for in Manila everything becomes known, that this _Good Authority_
+was no other than Don Custodio de Salazar y Sanchez de Monteredondo.
+
+He had come to Manila very young, with a good position that had enabled
+him to marry a pretty mestiza belonging to one of the wealthiest
+families of the city. As he had natural talent, boldness, and great
+self-possession, and knew how to make use of the society in which
+he found himself, he launched into business with his wife's money,
+filling contracts for the government, by reason of which he was
+made alderman, afterwards alcalde, member of the Economic Society,
+[43] councilor of the administration, president of the directory of
+the _Obras Pias_, [44] member of the Society of Mercy, director of
+the Spanish-Filipino Bank, etc., etc. Nor are these _etceteras_ to be
+taken like those ordinarily placed after a long enumeration of titles:
+Don Custodio, although never having seen a treatise on hygiene, came
+to be vice-chairman of the Board of Health, for the truth was that of
+the eight who composed this board only one had to be a physician and
+he could not be that one. So also he was a member of the Vaccination
+Board, which was composed of three physicians and seven laymen, among
+these being the Archbishop and three Provincials. He was a brother in
+all the confraternities of the common and of the most exalted dignity,
+and, as we have seen, director of the Superior Commission of Primary
+Instruction, which usually did not do anything--all these being quite
+sufficient reason for the newspapers to heap adjectives upon him no
+less when he traveled than when he sneezed.
+
+In spite of so many offices, Don Custodio was not among those who
+slept through the sessions, contenting themselves, like lazy and timid
+delegates, in voting with the majority. The opposite of the numerous
+kings of Europe who bear the title of King of Jerusalem, Don Custodio
+made his dignity felt and got from it all the benefit possible, often
+frowning, making his voice impressive, coughing out his words, often
+taking up the whole session telling a story, presenting a project, or
+disputing with a colleague who had placed himself in open opposition
+to him. Although not past forty, he already talked of acting with
+circumspection, of letting the figs ripen (adding under his breath
+"pumpkins"), of pondering deeply and of stepping with careful tread,
+of the necessity for understanding the country, because the nature of
+the Indians, because the prestige of the Spanish name, because they
+were first of all Spaniards, because religion--and so on. Remembered
+yet in Manila is a speech of his when for the first time it was
+proposed to light the city with kerosene in place of the old coconut
+oil: in such an innovation, far from seeing the extinction of the
+coconut-oil industry, he merely discerned the interests of a certain
+alderman--because Don Custodio saw a long way--and opposed it with
+all the resonance of his bucal cavity, considering the project too
+premature and predicting great social cataclysms. No less celebrated
+was his opposition to a sentimental serenade that some wished to tender
+a certain governor on the eve of his departure. Don Custodio, who felt
+a little resentment over some slight or other, succeeded in insinuating
+the idea that the rising star was the mortal enemy of the setting one,
+whereat the frightened promoters of the serenade gave it up.
+
+One day he was advised to return to Spain to be cured of a liver
+complaint, and the newspapers spoke of him as an Antaeus who had
+to set foot in the mother country to gain new strength. But the
+Manila Antaeus found himself a small and insignificant person at the
+capital. There he was nobody, and he missed his beloved adjectives. He
+did not mingle with the upper set, and his lack of education prevented
+him from amounting to much in the academies and scientific centers,
+while his backwardness and his parish-house politics drove him from
+the clubs disgusted, vexed, seeing nothing clearly but that there
+they were forever borrowing money and gambling heavily. He missed the
+submissive servants of Manila, who endured all his peevishness, and
+who now seemed to be far preferable; when a winter kept him between
+a fireplace and an attack of pneumonia, he sighed for the Manila
+winter during which a single quilt is sufficient, while in summer he
+missed the easy-chair and the boy to fan him. In short, in Madrid he
+was only one among many, and in spite of his diamonds he was once
+taken for a rustic who did not know how to comport himself and at
+another time for an _Indiano_. His scruples were scoffed at, and he
+was shamelessly flouted by some borrowers whom he offended. Disgusted
+with the conservatives, who took no great notice of his advice, as well
+as with the sponges who rifled his pockets, he declared himself to be
+of the liberal party and returned within a year to the Philippines,
+if not sound in his liver, yet completely changed in his beliefs.
+
+The eleven months spent at the capital among cafe politicians, nearly
+all retired half-pay office-holders, the various speeches caught here
+and there, this or that article of the opposition, all the political
+life that permeates the air, from the barber-shop where amid the
+scissors-clips the Figaro announces his program to the banquets
+where in harmonious periods and telling phrases the different
+shades of political opinion, the divergences and disagreements,
+are adjusted--all these things awoke in him the farther he got from
+Europe, like the life-giving sap within the sown seed prevented from
+bursting out by the thick husk, in such a way that when he reached
+Manila he believed that he was going to regenerate it and actually
+had the holiest plans and the purest ideals.
+
+During the first months after his return he was continually talking
+about the capital, about his good friends, about Minister So-and-So,
+ex-Minister Such-a-One, the delegate C., the author B., and there was
+not a political event, a court scandal, of which he was not informed
+to the last detail, nor was there a public man the secrets of whose
+private life were unknown to him, nor could anything occur that he
+had not foreseen, nor any reform be ordered but he had first been
+consulted. All this was seasoned with attacks on the conservatives
+in righteous indignation, with apologies of the liberal party, with
+a little anecdote here, a phrase there from some great man, dropped
+in as one who did not wish offices and employments, which same he
+had refused in order not to be beholden to the conservatives. Such
+was his enthusiasm in these first days that various cronies in
+the grocery-store which he visited from time to time affiliated
+themselves with the liberal party and began to style themselves
+liberals: Don Eulogio Badana, a retired sergeant of carbineers;
+the honest Armendia, by profession a pilot, and a rampant Carlist;
+Don Eusebio Picote, customs inspector; and Don Bonifacio Tacon, shoe-
+and harness-maker. [45]
+
+But nevertheless, from lack of encouragement and of opposition, his
+enthusiasm gradually waned. He did not read the newspapers that came
+from Spain, because they arrived in packages, the sight of which made
+him yawn. The ideas that he had caught having been all expended, he
+needed reinforcement, and his orators were not there, and although in
+the casinos of Manila there was enough gambling, and money was borrowed
+as in Madrid, no speech that would nourish his political ideas was
+permitted in them. But Don Custodio was not lazy, he did more than
+wish--he worked. Foreseeing that he was going to leave his bones in
+the Philippines, he began to consider that country his proper sphere
+and to devote his efforts to its welfare. Thinking to liberalize it,
+he commenced to draw up a series of reforms or projects, which were
+ingenious, to say the least. It was he who, having heard in Madrid
+mention of the wooden street pavements of Paris, not yet adopted in
+Spain, proposed the introduction of them in Manila by covering the
+streets with boards nailed down as they are on the sides of houses;
+it was he who, deploring the accidents to two-wheeled vehicles,
+planned to avoid them by putting on at least three wheels; it was
+also he who, while acting as vice-president of the Board of Health,
+ordered everything fumigated, even the telegrams that came from
+infected places; it was also he who, in compassion for the convicts
+that worked in the sun and with a desire of saving to the government
+the cost of their equipment, suggested that they be clothed in a
+simple breech-clout and set to work not by day but at night. He
+marveled, he stormed, that his projects should encounter objectors,
+but consoled himself with the reflection that the man who is worth
+enemies has them, and revenged himself by attacking and tearing to
+pieces any project, good or bad, presented by others.
+
+As he prided himself on being a liberal, upon being asked what he
+thought of the Indians he would answer, like one conferring a great
+favor, that they were fitted for manual labor and the _imitative
+arts_ (meaning thereby music, painting, and sculpture), adding his
+old postscript that to know them one must have resided many, many
+years in the country. Yet when he heard of any one of them excelling
+in something that was not manual labor or an _imitative art_--in
+chemistry, medicine, or philosophy, for example--he would exclaim:
+"Ah, he promises fairly, fairly well, he's not a fool!" and feel sure
+that a great deal of Spanish blood must flow in the veins of such an
+_Indian_. If unable to discover any in spite of his good intentions,
+he then sought a Japanese origin, for it was at that time the fashion
+began of attributing to the Japanese or the Arabs whatever good the
+Filipinos might have in them. For him the native songs were Arabic
+music, as was also the alphabet of the ancient Filipinos--he was
+certain of this, although he did not know Arabic nor had he ever seen
+that alphabet.
+
+"Arabic, the purest Arabic," he said to Ben-Zayb in a tone that
+admitted no reply. "At best, Chinese!"
+
+Then he would add, with a significant wink: "Nothing can be, nothing
+ought to be, original with the Indians, you understand! I like them
+greatly, but they mustn't be allowed to pride themselves upon anything,
+for then they would take heart and turn into a lot of wretches."
+
+At other times he would say: "I love the Indians fondly, I've
+constituted myself their father and defender, but it's necessary to
+keep everything in its proper place. Some were born to command and
+others to serve--plainly, that is a truism which can't be uttered very
+loudly, but it can be put into practise without many words. For look,
+the trick depends upon trifles. When you wish to reduce a people
+to subjection, assure it that it is in subjection. The first day it
+will laugh, the second protest, the third doubt, and the fourth be
+convinced. To keep the Filipino docile, he must have repeated to him
+day after day what he is, to convince him that he is incompetent. What
+good would it do, besides, to have him believe in something else that
+would make him wretched? Believe me, it's an act of charity to hold
+every creature in his place--that is order, harmony. That constitutes
+the _science_ of government."
+
+In referring to his policies, Don Custodio was not satisfied with the
+word _art_, and upon pronouncing the word _government_, he would extend
+his hand downwards to the height of a man bent over on his knees.
+
+In regard to his religious ideas, he prided himself on being a
+Catholic, very much a Catholic--ah, Catholic Spain, the land of
+_Maria Santisima_! A liberal could be and ought to be a Catholic,
+when the reactionaries were setting themselves up as gods or saints,
+just as a mulatto passes for a white man in Kaffirland. But with all
+that, he ate meat during Lent, except on Good Friday, never went to
+confession, believed neither in miracles nor the infallibility of the
+Pope, and when he attended mass, went to the one at ten o'clock, or
+to the shortest, the military mass. Although in Madrid he had spoken
+ill of the religious orders, so as not to be out of harmony with his
+surroundings, considering them anachronisms, and had hurled curses
+against the Inquisition, while relating this or that lurid or droll
+story wherein the habits danced, or rather friars without habits,
+yet in speaking of the Philippines, which should be ruled by special
+laws, he would cough, look wise, and again extend his hand downwards
+to that mysterious altitude.
+
+"The friars are necessary, they're a necessary evil," he would declare.
+
+But how he would rage when any Indian dared to doubt the miracles
+or did not acknowledge the Pope! All the tortures of the Inquisition
+were insufficient to punish such temerity.
+
+When it was objected that to rule or to live at the expense of
+ignorance has another and somewhat ugly name and is punished by law
+when the culprit is a single person, he would justify his position
+by referring to other colonies. "We," he would announce in his
+official tone, "can speak out plainly! We're not like the British
+and the Dutch who, in order to hold people in subjection, make use
+of the lash. We avail ourselves of other means, milder and surer. The
+salutary influence of the friars is superior to the British lash."
+
+This last remark made his fortune. For a long time Ben-Zayb continued
+to use adaptations of it, and with him all Manila. The thinking
+part of Manila applauded it, and it even got to Madrid, where it
+was quoted in the Parliament as from _a liberal of long residence
+there_. The friars, flattered by the comparison and seeing their
+prestige enhanced, sent him sacks of chocolate, presents which the
+incorruptible Don Custodio returned, so that Ben-Zayb immediately
+compared him to Epaminondas. Nevertheless, this modern Epaminondas
+made use of the rattan in his choleric moments, and advised its use!
+
+At that time the conventos, fearful that he would render a decision
+favorable to the petition of the students, increased their gifts,
+so that on the afternoon when we see him he was more perplexed than
+ever, his reputation for energy was being compromised. It had been
+more than a fortnight since he had had the petition in his hands,
+and only that morning the high official, after praising his zeal,
+had asked for a decision. Don Custodio had replied with mysterious
+gravity, giving him to understand that it was not yet completed. The
+high official had smiled a smile that still worried and haunted him.
+
+As we were saying, he yawned and yawned. In one of these movements, at
+the moment when he opened his eyes and closed his mouth, his attention
+was caught by a file of red envelopes, arranged in regular order on a
+magnificent kamagon desk. On the back of each could be read in large
+letters: PROJECTS.
+
+For a moment he forgot his troubles and Pepay's pirouettes, to
+reflect upon all that those files contained, which had issued from his
+prolific brain in his hours of inspiration. How many original ideas,
+how many sublime thoughts, how many means of ameliorating the woes
+of the Philippines! Immortality and the gratitude of the country were
+surely his!
+
+Like an old lover who discovers a moldy package of amorous epistles,
+Don Custodio arose and approached the desk. The first envelope, thick,
+swollen, and plethoric, bore the title: PROJECTS IN PROJECT.
+
+"No," he murmured, "they're excellent things, but it would take a
+year to read them over."
+
+The second, also quite voluminous, was entitled: PROJECTS UNDER
+CONSIDERATION. "No, not those either."
+
+Then came the PROJECTS NEARING COMPLETION, PROJECTS PRESENTED, PROJECTS
+REJECTED, PROJECTS APPROVED, PROJECTS POSTPONED. These last envelopes
+held little, but the least of all was that of the PROJECTS EXECUTED.
+
+Don Custodio wrinkled up his nose--what did it contain? He had
+completely forgotten what was in it. A sheet of yellowish paper
+showed from under the flap, as though the envelope were sticking out
+its tongue. This he drew out and unfolded: it was the famous project
+for the School of Arts and Trades!
+
+"What the devil!" he exclaimed. "If the Augustinian padres took charge
+of it--"
+
+Suddenly he slapped his forehead and arched his eyebrows, while a look
+of triumph overspread his face. "I have reached a decision!" he cried
+with an oath that was not exactly _eureka_. "My decision is made!"
+
+Repeating his peculiar _eureka_ five or six times, which struck the
+air like so many gleeful lashes, he sat down at his desk, radiant
+with joy, and began to write furiously.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+MANILA TYPES
+
+
+That night there was a grand function at the Teatro de
+Variedades. Mr. Jouay's French operetta company was giving its initial
+performance, _Les Cloches de Corneville_. To the eyes of the public
+was to be exhibited his select troupe, whose fame the newspapers had
+for days been proclaiming. It was reported that among the actresses
+was a very beautiful voice, with a figure even more beautiful, and
+if credit could be given to rumor, her amiability surpassed even her
+voice and figure.
+
+At half-past seven in the evening there were no more tickets to be
+had, not even though they had been for Padre Salvi himself in his
+direct need, and the persons waiting to enter the general admission
+already formed a long queue. In the ticket-office there were scuffles
+and fights, talk of filibusterism and races, but this did not produce
+any tickets, so that by a quarter before eight fabulous prices were
+being offered for them. The appearance of the building, profusely
+illuminated, with flowers and plants in all the doors and windows,
+enchanted the new arrivals to such an extent that they burst out into
+exclamations and applause. A large crowd surged about the entrance,
+gazing enviously at those going in, those who came early from fear
+of missing their seats. Laughter, whispering, expectation greeted the
+later arrivals, who disconsolately joined the curious crowd, and now
+that they could not get in contented themselves with watching those
+who did.
+
+Yet there was one person who seemed out of place amid such great
+eagerness and curiosity. He was a tall, meager man, who dragged one
+leg stiffly when he walked, dressed in a wretched brown coat and dirty
+checkered trousers that fitted his lean, bony limbs tightly. A straw
+sombrero, artistic in spite of being broken, covered an enormous
+head and allowed his dirty gray, almost red, hair to straggle out
+long and kinky at the end like a poet's curls. But the most notable
+thing about this man was not his clothing or his European features,
+guiltless of beard or mustache, but his fiery red face, from which he
+got the nickname by which he was known, _Camaroncocido_. [46] He was
+a curious character belonging to a prominent Spanish family, but he
+lived like a vagabond and a beggar, scoffing at the prestige which he
+flouted indifferently with his rags. He was reputed to be a kind of
+reporter, and in fact his gray goggle-eyes, so cold and thoughtful,
+always showed up where anything publishable was happening. His manner
+of living was a mystery to all, as no one seemed to know where he
+ate and slept. Perhaps he had an empty hogshead somewhere.
+
+But at that moment Camaroncocido lacked his usual hard and indifferent
+expression, something like mirthful pity being reflected in his
+looks. A funny little man accosted him merrily.
+
+"Friend!" exclaimed the latter, in a raucous voice, as hoarse as a
+frog's, while he displayed several Mexican pesos, which Camaroncocido
+merely glanced at and then shrugged his shoulders. What did they
+matter to him?
+
+The little old man was a fitting contrast to him. Small, very small,
+he wore on his head a high hat, which presented the appearance of a
+huge hairy worm, and lost himself in an enormous frock coat, too wide
+and too long for him, to reappear in trousers too short, not reaching
+below his calves. His body seemed to be the grandfather and his legs
+the grandchildren, while as for his shoes he appeared to be floating
+on the land, for they were of an enormous sailor type, apparently
+protesting against the hairy worm worn on his head with all the energy
+of a convento beside a World's Exposition. If Camaroncocido was red,
+he was brown; while the former, although of Spanish extraction, had
+not a single hair on his face, yet he, an Indian, had a goatee and
+mustache, both long, white, and sparse. His expression was lively. He
+was known as _Tio Quico_, [47] and like his friend lived on publicity,
+advertising the shows and posting the theatrical announcements,
+being perhaps the only Filipino who could appear with impunity in a
+silk hat and frock coat, just as his friend was the first Spaniard
+who laughed at the prestige of his race.
+
+"The Frenchman has paid me well," he said smiling and showing his
+picturesque gums, which looked like a street after a conflagration. "I
+did a good job in posting the bills."
+
+Camaroncocido shrugged his shoulders again. "Quico," he rejoined in
+a cavernous voice, "if they've given you six pesos for your work,
+how much will they give the friars?"
+
+Tio Quico threw back his head in his usual lively manner. "To the
+friars?"
+
+"Because you surely know," continued Camaroncocido, "that all this
+crowd was secured for them by the conventos."
+
+The fact was that the friars, headed by Padre Salvi, and some lay
+brethren captained by Don Custodio, had opposed such shows. Padre
+Camorra, who could not attend, watered at the eyes and mouth, but
+argued with Ben-Zayb, who defended them feebly, thinking of the free
+tickets they would send his newspaper. Don Custodio spoke of morality,
+religion, good manners, and the like.
+
+"But," stammered the writer, "if our own farces with their plays on
+words and phrases of double meaning--"
+
+"But at least they're in Castilian!" the virtuous councilor interrupted
+with a roar, inflamed to righteous wrath. "Obscenities in French,
+man, Ben-Zayb, for God's sake, in French! Never!"
+
+He uttered this _never_ with the energy of three Guzmans threatened
+with being killed like fleas if they did not surrender twenty
+Tarifas. Padre Irene naturally agreed with Don Custodio and execrated
+French operetta. Whew, he had been in Paris, but had never set foot
+in a theater, the Lord deliver him!
+
+Yet the French operetta also counted numerous partizans. The officers
+of the army and navy, among them the General's aides, the clerks,
+and many society people were anxious to enjoy the delicacies of the
+French language from the mouths of genuine _Parisiennes_, and with
+them were affiliated those who had traveled by the M.M. [48] and had
+jabbered a little French during the voyage, those who had visited
+Paris, and all those who wished to appear learned.
+
+Hence, Manila society was divided into two factions, operettists
+and anti-operettists. The latter were supported by the elderly
+ladies, wives jealous and careful of their husbands' love, and by
+those who were engaged, while those who were free and those who
+were beautiful declared themselves enthusiastic operettists. Notes
+and then more notes were exchanged, there were goings and comings,
+mutual recriminations, meetings, lobbyings, arguments, even talk of
+an insurrection of the natives, of their indolence, of inferior and
+superior races, of prestige and other humbugs, so that after much
+gossip and more recrimination, the permit was granted, Padre Salvi
+at the same time publishing a pastoral that was read by no one but
+the proof-reader. There were questionings whether the General had
+quarreled with the Countess, whether she spent her time in the halls
+of pleasure, whether His Excellency was greatly annoyed, whether
+there had been presents exchanged, whether the French consul--, and
+so on and on. Many names were bandied about: Quiroga the Chinaman's,
+Simoun's, and even those of many actresses.
+
+Thanks to these scandalous preliminaries, the people's impatience had
+been aroused, and since the evening before, when the troupe arrived,
+there was talk of nothing but attending the first performance. From
+the hour when the red posters announced _Les Cloches de Corneville_ the
+victors prepared to celebrate their triumph. In some offices, instead
+of the time being spent in reading newspapers and gossiping, it was
+devoted to devouring the synopsis and spelling out French novels, while
+many feigned business outside to consult their pocket-dictionaries
+on the sly. So no business was transacted, callers were told to come
+back the next day, but the public could not take offense, for they
+encountered some very polite and affable clerks, who received and
+dismissed them with grand salutations in the French style. The clerks
+were practising, brushing the dust off their French, and calling to
+one another _oui, monsieur, s'il vous plait_, and _pardon_! at every
+turn, so that it was a pleasure to see and hear them.
+
+But the place where the excitement reached its climax was the newspaper
+office. Ben-Zayb, having been appointed critic and translator of the
+synopsis, trembled like a poor woman accused of witchcraft, as he saw
+his enemies picking out his blunders and throwing up to his face his
+deficient knowledge of French. When the Italian opera was on, he had
+very nearly received a challenge for having mistranslated a tenor's
+name, while an envious rival had immediately published an article
+referring to him as an ignoramus--him, the foremost thinking head in
+the Philippines! All the trouble he had had to defend himself! He
+had had to write at least seventeen articles and consult fifteen
+dictionaries, so with these salutary recollections, the wretched
+Ben-Zayb moved about with leaden hands, to say nothing of his feet,
+for that would be plagiarizing Padre Camorra, who had once intimated
+that the journalist wrote with them.
+
+"You see, Quico?" said Camaroncocido. "One half of the people have
+come because the friars told them not to, making it a kind of public
+protest, and the other half because they say to themselves, 'Do the
+friars object to it? Then it must be instructive!' Believe me, Quico,
+your advertisements are a good thing but the pastoral was better,
+even taking into consideration the fact that it was read by no one."
+
+"Friend, do you believe," asked Tio Quico uneasily, "that on account
+of the competition with Padre Salvi my business will in the future
+be prohibited?"
+
+"Maybe so, Quico, maybe so," replied the other, gazing at the
+sky. "Money's getting scarce."
+
+Tio Quico muttered some incoherent words: if the friars were going to
+turn theatrical advertisers, he would become a friar. After bidding his
+friend good-by, he moved away coughing and rattling his silver coins.
+
+With his eternal indifference Camaroncocido continued to wander about
+here and there with his crippled leg and sleepy looks. The arrival
+of unfamiliar faces caught his attention, coming as they did from
+different parts and signaling to one another with a wink or a cough. It
+was the first time that he had ever seen these individuals on such
+an occasion, he who knew all the faces and features in the city. Men
+with dark faces, humped shoulders, uneasy and uncertain movements,
+poorly disguised, as though they had for the first time put on sack
+coats, slipped about among the shadows, shunning attention, instead
+of getting in the front rows where they could see well.
+
+"Detectives or thieves?" Camaroncocido asked himself and immediately
+shrugged his shoulders. "But what is it to me?"
+
+The lamp of a carriage that drove up lighted in passing a group of
+four or five of these individuals talking with a man who appeared to
+be an army officer.
+
+"Detectives! It must be a new corps," he muttered with his shrug
+of indifference. Soon, however, he noticed that the officer, after
+speaking to two or three more groups, approached a carriage and seemed
+to be talking vigorously with some person inside. Camaroncocido took
+a few steps forward and without surprise thought that he recognized
+the jeweler Simoun, while his sharp ears caught this short dialogue.
+
+"The signal will be a gunshot!"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Don't worry--it's the General who is ordering it, but be careful about
+saying so. If you follow my instructions, you'll get a promotion."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"So, be ready!"
+
+The voice ceased and a second later the carriage drove away. In spite
+of his indifference Camaroncocido could not but mutter, "Something's
+afoot--hands on pockets!"
+
+But feeling his own to be empty, he again shrugged his shoulders. What
+did it matter to him, even though the heavens should fall?
+
+So he continued his pacing about. On passing near two persons engaged
+in conversation, he caught what one of them, who had rosaries and
+scapularies around his neck, was saying in Tagalog: "The friars are
+more powerful than the General, don't be a fool! He'll go away and
+they'll stay here. So, if we do well, we'll get rich. The signal is
+a gunshot."
+
+"Hold hard, hold hard," murmured Camaroncocido, tightening his
+fingers. "On that side the General, on this Padre Salvi. Poor
+country! But what is it to me?"
+
+Again shrugging his shoulders and expectorating at the same time,
+two actions that with him were indications of supreme indifference,
+he continued his observations.
+
+Meanwhile, the carriages were arriving in dizzy streams, stopping
+directly before the door to set down the members of the select
+society. Although the weather was scarcely even cool, the ladies
+sported magnificent shawls, silk neckerchiefs, and even light
+cloaks. Among the escorts, some who were in frock coats with white
+ties wore overcoats, while others carried them on their arms to
+display the rich silk linings.
+
+In a group of spectators, Tadeo, he who was always taken ill the
+moment the professor appeared, was accompanied by a fellow townsman
+of his, the novice whom we saw suffer evil consequences from reading
+wrongly the Cartesian principle. This novice was very inquisitive and
+addicted to tiresome questions, and Tadeo was taking advantage of his
+ingenuousness and inexperience to relate to him the most stupendous
+lies. Every Spaniard that spoke to him, whether clerkling or underling,
+was presented as a leading merchant, a marquis, or a count, while on
+the other hand any one who passed him by was a greenhorn, a petty
+official, a nobody! When pedestrians failed him in keeping up the
+novice's astonishment, he resorted to the resplendent carriages that
+came up. Tadeo would bow politely, wave his hand in a friendly manner,
+and call out a familiar greeting.
+
+"Who's he?"
+
+"Bah!" was the negligent reply. "The Civil Governor, the Vice-Governor,
+Judge ----, Senora ----, all friends of mine!"
+
+The novice marveled and listened in fascination, taking care to keep
+on the left. Tadeo the friend of judges and governors!
+
+Tadeo named all the persons who arrived, when he did not know them
+inventing titles, biographies, and interesting sketches.
+
+"You see that tall gentleman with dark whiskers, somewhat squint-eyed,
+dressed in black--he's Judge A ----, an intimate friend of the wife of
+Colonel B ----. One day if it hadn't been for me they would have come
+to blows. Hello, here comes that Colonel! What if they should fight?"
+
+The novice held his breath, but the colonel and the judge shook hands
+cordially, the soldier, an old bachelor, inquiring about the health
+of the judge's family.
+
+"Ah, thank heaven!" breathed Tadeo. "I'm the one who made them
+friends."
+
+"What if they should invite us to go in?" asked the novice timidly.
+
+"Get out, boy! I never accept favors!" retorted Tadeo majestically. "I
+confer them, but disinterestedly."
+
+The novice bit his lip and felt smaller than ever, while he placed
+a respectful distance between himself and his fellow townsman.
+
+Tadeo resumed: "That is the musician H----; that one, the lawyer
+J----, who delivered as his own a speech printed in all the books and
+was congratulated and admired for it; Doctor K----, that man just
+getting out of a hansom, is a specialist in diseases of children,
+so he's called Herod; that's the banker L----, who can talk only of
+his money and his hoards; the poet M----, who is always dealing with
+the stars and _the beyond_. There goes the beautiful wife of N----,
+whom Padre Q----is accustomed to meet when he calls upon the absent
+husband; the Jewish merchant P----, who came to the islands with a
+thousand pesos and is now a millionaire. That fellow with the long
+beard is the physician R----, who has become rich by making invalids
+more than by curing them."
+
+"Making invalids?"
+
+"Yes, boy, in the examination of the conscripts. Attention! That
+finely dressed gentleman is not a physician but a homeopathist _sui
+generis_--he professes completely the _similis similibus_. The young
+cavalry captain with him is his chosen disciple. That man in a light
+suit with his hat tilted back is the government clerk whose maxim
+is never to be polite and who rages like a demon when he sees a hat
+on any one else's head--they say that he does it to ruin the German
+hatters. The man just arriving with his family is the wealthy merchant
+C----, who has an income of over a hundred thousand pesos. But what
+would you say if I should tell you that he still owes me four pesos,
+five reales, and twelve cuartos? But who would collect from a rich
+man like him?"
+
+"That gentleman in debt to you?"
+
+"Sure! One day I got him out of a bad fix. It was on a Friday at
+half-past six in the morning, I still remember, because I hadn't
+breakfasted. That lady who is followed by a duenna is the celebrated
+Pepay, the dancing girl, but she doesn't dance any more now that a
+very Catholic gentleman and a great friend of mine has--forbidden
+it. There's the death's-head Z----, who's surely following her to get
+her to dance again. He's a good fellow, and a great friend of mine,
+but has one defect--he's a Chinese mestizo and yet calls himself a
+Peninsular Spaniard. Sssh! Look at Ben-Zayb, him with the face of a
+friar, who's carrying a pencil and a roll of paper in his hand. He's
+the great writer, Ben-Zayb, a good friend of mine--he has talent!"
+
+"You don't say! And that little man with white whiskers?"
+
+"He's the official who has appointed his daughters, those three little
+girls, assistants in his department, so as to get their names on the
+pay-roll. He's a clever man, very clever! When he makes a mistake he
+blames it on somebody else, he buys things and pays for them out of
+the treasury. He's clever, very, very clever!"
+
+Tadeo was about to say more, but suddenly checked himself.
+
+"And that gentleman who has a fierce air and gazes at everybody over
+his shoulders?" inquired the novice, pointing to a man who nodded
+haughtily.
+
+But Tadeo did not answer. He was craning his neck to see Paulita
+Gomez, who was approaching with a friend, Dona Victorina, and Juanito
+Pelaez. The latter had presented her with a box and was more humped
+than ever.
+
+Carriage after carriage drove up; the actors and actresses arrived
+and entered by a separate door, followed by their friends and admirers.
+
+After Paulita had gone in, Tadeo resumed: "Those are the nieces of
+the rich Captain D----, those coming up in a landau; you see how
+pretty and healthy they are? Well, in a few years they'll be dead or
+crazy. Captain D---- is opposed to their marrying, and the insanity
+of the uncle is appearing in the nieces. That's the Senorita E----,
+the rich heiress whom the world and the conventos are disputing
+over. Hello, I know that fellow! It's Padre Irene, in disguise, with
+a false mustache. I recognize him by his nose. And he was so greatly
+opposed to this!"
+
+The scandalized novice watched a neatly cut coat disappear behind a
+group of ladies.
+
+"The Three Fates!" went on Tadeo, watching the arrival of three
+withered, bony, hollow-eyed, wide-mouthed, and shabbily dressed
+women. "They're called--"
+
+"Atropos?" ventured the novice, who wished to show that he also knew
+somebody, at least in mythology.
+
+"No, boy, they're called the Weary Waiters--old, censorious, and
+dull. They pretend to hate everybody--men, women, and children. But
+look how the Lord always places beside the evil a remedy, only that
+sometimes it comes late. There behind the Fates, the frights of
+the city, come those three girls, the pride of their friends, among
+whom I count myself. That thin young man with goggle-eyes, somewhat
+stooped, who is wildly gesticulating because he can't get tickets,
+is the chemist S----, author of many essays and scientific treatises,
+some of which are notable and have captured prizes. The Spaniards say
+of him, 'There's some hope for him, some hope for him.' The fellow who
+is soothing him with his Voltairian smile is the poet T----, a young
+man of talent, a great friend of mine, and, for the very reason that
+he has talent, he has thrown away his pen. That fellow who is trying to
+get in with the actors by the other door is the young physician U----,
+who has effected some remarkable cures--it's also said of him that he
+promises well. He's not such a scoundrel as Pelaez but he's cleverer
+and slyer still. I believe that he'd shake dice with death and win."
+
+"And that brown gentleman with a mustache like hog-bristles?"
+
+"Ah, that's the merchant F----, who forges everything, even his
+baptismal certificate. He wants to be a Spanish mestizo at any cost,
+and is making heroic efforts to forget his native language."
+
+"But his daughters are very white."
+
+"Yes, that's the reason rice has gone up in price, and yet they eat
+nothing but bread."
+
+The novice did not understand the connection between the price of
+rice and the whiteness of those girls, but he held his peace.
+
+"There goes the fellow that's engaged to one of them, that thin brown
+youth who is following them with a lingering movement and speaking with
+a protecting air to the three friends who are laughing at him. He's
+a martyr to his beliefs, to his consistency."
+
+The novice was filled with admiration and respect for the young man.
+
+"He has the look of a fool, and he is one," continued Tadeo. "He
+was born in San Pedro Makati and has inflicted many privations upon
+himself. He scarcely ever bathes or eats pork, because, according to
+him, the Spaniards don't do those things, and for the same reason he
+doesn't eat rice and dried fish, although he may be watering at the
+mouth and dying of hunger. Anything that comes from Europe, rotten
+or preserved, he considers divine--a month ago Basilio cured him of
+a severe attack of gastritis, for he had eaten a jar of mustard to
+prove that he's a European."
+
+At that moment the orchestra struck up a waltz.
+
+"You see that gentleman--that hypochondriac who goes along turning
+his head from side to side, seeking salutes? That's the celebrated
+governor of Pangasinan, a good man who loses his appetite whenever any
+Indian fails to salute him. He would have died if he hadn't issued the
+proclamation about salutes to which he owes his celebrity. Poor fellow,
+it's only been three days since he came from the province and look how
+thin he has become! Oh, here's the great man, the illustrious--open
+your eyes!"
+
+"Who? That man with knitted brows?"
+
+"Yes, that's Don Custodio, the liberal, Don Custodio. His brows are
+knit because he's meditating over some important project. If the
+ideas he has in his head were carried out, this would be a different
+world! Ah, here comes Makaraig, your housemate."
+
+It was in fact Makaraig, with Pecson, Sandoval, and Isagani. Upon
+seeing them, Tadeo advanced and spoke to them.
+
+"Aren't you coming in?" Makaraig asked him.
+
+"We haven't been able to get tickets."
+
+"Fortunately, we have a box," replied Makaraig. "Basilio couldn't
+come. Both of you, come in with us."
+
+Tadeo did not wait for the invitation to be repeated, but the novice,
+fearing that he would intrude, with the timidity natural to the
+provincial Indian, excused himself, nor could he be persuaded to enter.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+THE PERFORMANCE
+
+
+The interior of the theater presented a lively aspect. It was filled
+from top to bottom, with people standing in the corridors and in
+the aisles, fighting to withdraw a head from some hole where they
+had inserted it, or to shove an eye between a collar and an ear. The
+open boxes, occupied for the most part by ladies, looked like baskets
+of flowers, whose petals--the fans--shook in a light breeze, wherein
+hummed a thousand bees. However, just as there are flowers of strong
+or delicate fragrance, flowers that kill and flowers that console,
+so from our baskets were exhaled like emanations: there were to be
+heard dialogues, conversations, remarks that bit and stung. Three
+or four boxes, however, were still vacant, in spite of the lateness
+of the hour. The performance had been advertised for half-past eight
+and it was already a quarter to nine, but the curtain did not go up,
+as his Excellency had not yet arrived. The gallery-gods, impatient
+and uncomfortable in their seats, started a racket, clapping their
+hands and pounding the floor with their canes.
+
+"Boom--boom--boom! Ring up the curtain! Boom--boom--boom!"
+
+The artillerymen were not the least noisy. Emulators of Mars, as
+Ben-Zayb called them, they were not satisfied with this music; thinking
+themselves perhaps at a bullfight, they made remarks at the ladies who
+passed before them in words that are euphemistically called flowers
+in Madrid, although at times they seem more like foul weeds. Without
+heeding the furious looks of the husbands, they bandied from one to
+another the sentiments and longings inspired by so many beauties.
+
+In the reserved seats, where the ladies seemed to be afraid to venture,
+as few were to be seen there, a murmur of voices prevailed amid
+suppressed laughter and clouds of tobacco smoke. They discussed the
+merits of the players and talked scandal, wondering if his Excellency
+had quarreled with the friars, if his presence at such a show was
+a defiance or mere curiosity. Others gave no heed to these matters,
+but were engaged in attracting the attention of the ladies, throwing
+themselves into attitudes more or less interesting and statuesque,
+flashing diamond rings, especially when they thought themselves the
+foci of insistent opera-glasses, while yet another would address a
+respectful salute to this or that senora or senorita, at the same time
+lowering his head gravely to whisper to a neighbor, "How ridiculous
+she is! And such a bore!"
+
+The lady would respond with one of her most gracious smiles and an
+enchanting nod of her head, while murmuring to a friend sitting near,
+amid lazy flourishes of her fan, "How impudent he is! He's madly in
+love, my dear."
+
+Meanwhile, the noise increased. There remained only two vacant
+boxes, besides that of his Excellency, which was distinguished by
+its curtains of red velvet. The orchestra played another waltz, the
+audience protested, when fortunately there arose a charitable hero to
+distract their attention and relieve the manager, in the person of
+a man who had occupied a reserved seat and refused to give it up to
+its owner, the philosopher Don Primitivo. Finding his own arguments
+useless, Don Primitivo had appealed to an usher. "I don't care to,"
+the hero responded to the latter's protests, placidly puffing at his
+cigarette. The usher appealed to the manager. "I don't care to," was
+the response, as he settled back in the seat. The manager went away,
+while the artillerymen in the gallery began to sing out encouragement
+to the usurper.
+
+Our hero, now that he had attracted general attention, thought that
+to yield would be to lower himself, so he held on to the seat, while
+he repeated his answer to a pair of guards the manager had called
+in. These, in consideration of the rebel's rank, went in search of
+their corporal, while the whole house broke out into applause at the
+firmness of the hero, who remained seated like a Roman senator.
+
+Hisses were heard, and the inflexible gentleman turned angrily to see
+if they were meant for him, but the galloping of horses resounded
+and the stir increased. One might have said that a revolution had
+broken out, or at least a riot, but no, the orchestra had suspended
+the waltz and was playing the royal march: it was his Excellency, the
+Captain-General and Governor of the islands, who was entering. All
+eyes sought and followed him, then lost sight of him, until he
+finally appeared in his box. After looking all about him and making
+some persons happy with a lordly salute, he sat down, as though he
+were indeed the man for whom the chair was waiting. The artillerymen
+then became silent and the orchestra tore into the prelude.
+
+Our students occupied a box directly facing that of Pepay, the
+dancing girl. Her box was a present from Makaraig, who had already
+got on good terms with her in order to propitiate Don Custodio. Pepay
+had that very afternoon written a note to the illustrious arbiter,
+asking for an answer and appointing an interview in the theater. For
+this reason, Don Custodio, in spite of the active opposition he
+had manifested toward the French operetta, had gone to the theater,
+which action won him some caustic remarks on the part of Don Manuel,
+his ancient adversary in the sessions of the Ayuntamiento.
+
+"I've come to judge the operetta," he had replied in the tone of a
+Cato whose conscience was clear.
+
+So Makaraig was exchanging looks of intelligence with Pepay, who was
+giving him to understand that she had something to tell him. As the
+dancing girl's face wore a happy expression, the students augured
+that a favorable outcome was assured. Sandoval, who had just returned
+from making calls in other boxes, also assured them that the decision
+had been favorable, that that very afternoon the Superior Commission
+had considered and approved it. Every one was jubilant, even Pecson
+having laid aside his pessimism when he saw the smiling Pepay display
+a note. Sandoval and Makaraig congratulated one another, Isagani alone
+remaining cold and unsmiling. What had happened to this young man?
+
+Upon entering the theater, Isagani had caught sight of Paulita in a
+box, with Juanito Pelaez talking to her. He had turned pale, thinking
+that he must be mistaken. But no, it was she herself, she who greeted
+him with a gracious smile, while her beautiful eyes seemed to be
+asking pardon and promising explanations. The fact was that they had
+agreed upon Isagani's going first to the theater to see if the show
+contained anything improper for a young woman, but now he found her
+there, and in no other company than that of his rival. What passed in
+his mind is indescribable: wrath, jealousy, humiliation, resentment
+raged within him, and there were moments even when he wished that
+the theater would fall in; he had a violent desire to laugh aloud,
+to insult his sweetheart, to challenge his rival, to make a scene, but
+finally contented himself with sitting quiet and not looking at her at
+all. He was conscious of the beautiful plans Makaraig and Sandoval were
+making, but they sounded like distant echoes, while the notes of the
+waltz seemed sad and lugubrious, the whole audience stupid and foolish,
+and several times he had to make an effort to keep back the tears. Of
+the trouble stirred up by the hero who refused to give up the seat,
+of the arrival of the Captain-General, he was scarcely conscious. He
+stared toward the drop-curtain, on which was depicted a kind of
+gallery with sumptuous red hangings, affording a view of a garden in
+which a fountain played, yet how sad the gallery looked to him and how
+melancholy the painted landscape! A thousand vague recollections surged
+into his memory like distant echoes of music heard in the night, like
+songs of infancy, the murmur of lonely forests and gloomy rivulets,
+moonlit nights on the shore of the sea spread wide before his eyes. So
+the enamored youth considered himself very wretched and stared fixedly
+at the ceiling so that the tears should not fall from his eyes.
+
+A burst of applause drew him from these meditations. The curtain
+had just risen, and the merry chorus of peasants of Corneville was
+presented, all dressed in cotton caps, with heavy wooden sabots on
+their feet. Some six or seven girls, well-rouged on the lips and
+cheeks, with large black circles around their eyes to increase their
+brilliance, displayed white arms, fingers covered with diamonds,
+round and shapely limbs. While they were chanting the Norman phrase
+"_Allez, marchez! Allez, marchez!_" they smiled at their different
+admirers in the reserved seats with such openness that Don Custodio,
+after looking toward Pepay's box to assure himself that she was
+not doing the same thing with some other admirer, set down in his
+note-book this indecency, and to make sure of it lowered his head a
+little to see if the actresses were not showing their knees.
+
+"Oh, these Frenchwomen!" he muttered, while his imagination lost
+itself in considerations somewhat more elevated, as he made comparisons
+and projects.
+
+"_Quoi v'la tous les cancans d'la s'maine!_" sang Gertrude, a proud
+damsel, who was looking roguishly askance at the Captain-General.
+
+"We're going to have the cancan!" exclaimed Tadeo, the winner of the
+first prize in the French class, who had managed to make out this
+word. "Makaraig, they're going to dance the cancan!"
+
+He rubbed his hands gleefully. From the moment the curtain rose,
+Tadeo had been heedless of the music. He was looking only for the
+prurient, the indecent, the immoral in actions and dress, and with
+his scanty French was sharpening his ears to catch the obscenities
+that the austere guardians of the fatherland had foretold.
+
+Sandoval, pretending to know French, had converted himself into a
+kind of interpreter for his friends. He knew as much about it as
+Tadeo, but the published synopsis helped him and his fancy supplied
+the rest. "Yes," he said, "they're going to dance the cancan--she's
+going to lead it."
+
+Makaraig and Pecson redoubled their attention, smiling in anticipation,
+while Isagani looked away, mortified to think that Paulita should
+be present at such a show and reflecting that it was his duty to
+challenge Juanito Pelaez the next day.
+
+But the young men waited in vain. Serpolette came on, a charming girl,
+in her cotton cap, provoking and challenging. "_Hein, qui parle de
+Serpolette?_" she demanded of the gossips, with her arms akimbo in
+a combative attitude. Some one applauded, and after him all those in
+the reserved seats. Without changing her girlish attitude, Serpolette
+gazed at the person who had started the applause and paid him with a
+smile, displaying rows of little teeth that looked like a string of
+pearls in a case of red velvet.
+
+Tadeo followed her gaze and saw a man in a false mustache with an
+extraordinarily large nose. "By the monk's cowl!" he exclaimed. "It's
+Irene!"
+
+"Yes," corroborated Sandoval, "I saw him behind the scenes talking
+with the actresses."
+
+The truth was that Padre Irene, who was a melomaniac of the first
+degree and knew French well, had been sent to the theater by Padre
+Salvi as a sort of religious detective, or so at least he told
+the persons who recognized him. As a faithful critic, who should
+not be satisfied with viewing the piece from a distance, he wished
+to examine the actresses at first hand, so he had mingled in the
+groups of admirers and gallants, had penetrated into the greenroom,
+where was whispered and talked a French required by the situation,
+a _market French_, a language that is readily comprehensible for the
+vender when the buyer seems disposed to pay well.
+
+Serpolette was surrounded by two gallant officers, a sailor, and a
+lawyer, when she caught sight of him moving about, sticking the tip
+of his long nose into all the nooks and corners, as though with it
+he were ferreting out all the mysteries of the stage. She ceased her
+chatter, knitted her eyebrows, then raised them, opened her lips and
+with the vivacity of a _Parisienne_ left her admirers to hurl herself
+like a torpedo upon our critic.
+
+"_Tiens, tiens, Toutou! Mon lapin!_" she cried, catching Padre Irene's
+arm and shaking it merrily, while the air rang with her silvery laugh.
+
+"Tut, tut!" objected Padre Irene, endeavoring to conceal himself.
+
+"_Mais, comment! Toi ici, grosse bete! Et moi qui t'croyais--_"
+
+"_'Tais pas d'tapage, Lily! Il faut m'respecter! 'Suis ici l'Pape!_"
+
+With great difficulty Padre Irene made her listen to reason, for Lily
+was _enchantee_ to meet in Manila an old friend who reminded her of
+the _coulisses_ of the Grand Opera House. So it was that Padre Irene,
+fulfilling at the same time his duties as a friend and a critic, had
+initiated the applause to encourage her, for Serpolette deserved it.
+
+Meanwhile, the young men were waiting for the cancan. Pecson became
+all eyes, but there was everything except cancan. There was presented
+the scene in which, but for the timely arrival of the representatives
+of the law, the women would have come to blows and torn one another's
+hair out, incited thereto by the mischievous peasants, who, like our
+students, hoped to see something more than the cancan.
+
+
+    Scit, scit, scit, scit, scit, scit,
+    Disputez-vous, battez-vous,
+    Scit, scit, scit, scit, scit, scit,
+    Nous allons compter les coups.
+
+
+The music ceased, the men went away, the women returned, a few at
+a time, and started a conversation among themselves, of which our
+friends understood nothing. They were slandering some absent person.
+
+"They look like the Chinamen of the _pansiteria!_" whispered Pecson.
+
+"But, the cancan?" asked Makaraig.
+
+"They're talking about the most suitable place to dance it," gravely
+responded Sandoval.
+
+"They look like the Chinamen of the _pansiteria_," repeated Pecson
+in disgust.
+
+A lady accompanied by her husband entered at that moment and took her
+place in one of the two vacant boxes. She had the air of a queen and
+gazed disdainfully at the whole house, as if to say, "I've come later
+than all of you, you crowd of upstarts and provincials, I've come later
+than you!" There are persons who go to the theater like the contestants
+in a mule-race: the last one in, wins, and we know very sensible men
+who would ascend the scaffold rather than enter a theater before the
+first act. But the lady's triumph was of short duration--she caught
+sight of the other box that was still empty, and began to scold her
+better half, thus starting such a disturbance that many were annoyed.
+
+"Ssh! Ssh!"
+
+"The blockheads! As if they understood French!" remarked the lady,
+gazing with supreme disdain in all directions, finally fixing her
+attention on Juanito's box, whence she thought she had heard an
+impudent hiss.
+
+Juanito was in fact guilty, for he had been pretending to understand
+everything, holding himself up proudly and applauding at times as
+though nothing that was said escaped him, and this too without guiding
+himself by the actors' pantomime, because he scarcely looked toward
+the stage. The rogue had intentionally remarked to Paulita that,
+as there was so much more beautiful a woman close at hand, he did
+not care to strain his eyes looking beyond her. Paulita had blushed,
+covered her face with her fan, and glanced stealthily toward where
+Isagani, silent and morose, was abstractedly watching the show.
+
+Paulita felt nettled and jealous. Would Isagani fall in love with
+any of those alluring actresses? The thought put her in a bad humor,
+so she scarcely heard the praises that Dona Victorina was heaping
+upon her own favorite.
+
+Juanito was playing his part well: he shook his head at times in sign
+of disapproval, and then there could be heard coughs and murmurs in
+some parts, at other times he smiled in approbation, and a second later
+applause resounded. Dona Victorina was charmed, even conceiving some
+vague ideas of marrying the young man the day Don Tiburcio should
+die--Juanito knew French and De Espadana didn't! Then she began to
+flatter him, nor did he perceive the change in the drift of her talk,
+so occupied was he in watching a Catalan merchant who was sitting
+next to the Swiss consul. Having observed that they were conversing in
+French, Juanito was getting his inspiration from their countenances,
+and thus grandly giving the cue to those about him.
+
+Scene followed scene, character succeeded character, comic and
+ridiculous like the bailiff and Grenicheux, imposing and winsome like
+the marquis and Germaine. The audience laughed heartily at the slap
+delivered by Gaspard and intended for the coward Grenicheux, which was
+received by the grave bailiff, whose wig went flying through the air,
+producing disorder and confusion as the curtain dropped.
+
+"Where's the cancan?" inquired Tadeo.
+
+But the curtain rose again immediately, revealing a scene in a servant
+market, with three posts on which were affixed signs bearing the
+announcements: _servantes_, _cochers_, and _domestiques_. Juanito, to
+improve the opportunity, turned to Dona Victorina and said in a loud
+voice, so that Paulita might hear and he convinced of his learning:
+
+"_Servantes_ means servants, _domestiques_ domestics."
+
+"And in what way do the _servantes_ differ from the
+_domestiques_?" asked Paulita.
+
+Juanito was not found wanting. "_Domestiques_ are those that are
+domesticated--haven't you noticed that some of them have the air of
+savages? Those are the _servantes_."
+
+"That's right," added Dona Victorina, "some have very bad manners--and
+yet I thought that in Europe everybody was cultivated. But as it
+happens in France,--well, I see!"
+
+"Ssh! Ssh!"
+
+But what was Juanito's predicament when the time came for the opening
+of the market and the beginning of the sale, and the servants who were
+to be hired placed themselves beside the signs that indicated their
+class! The men, some ten or twelve rough characters in livery, carrying
+branches in their hands, took their place under the sign _domestiques_!
+
+"Those are the domestics," explained Juanito.
+
+"Really, they have the appearance of being only recently domesticated,"
+observed Dona Victorina. "Now let's have a look at the savages."
+
+Then the dozen girls headed by the lively and merry Serpolette, decked
+out in their best clothes, each wearing a big bouquet of flowers at
+the waist, laughing, smiling, fresh and attractive, placed themselves,
+to Juanito's great desperation, beside the post of the _servantes_.
+
+"How's this?" asked Paulita guilelessly. "Are those the savages that
+you spoke of?"
+
+"No," replied the imperturbable Juanito, "there's a mistake--they've
+got their places mixed--those coming behind--"
+
+"Those with the whips?"
+
+Juanito nodded assent, but he was rather perplexed and uneasy.
+
+"So those girls are the _cochers_?"
+
+Here Juanito was attacked by such a violent fit of coughing that some
+of the spectators became annoyed.
+
+"Put him out! Put the consumptive out!" called a voice.
+
+Consumptive! To be called a consumptive before Paulita! Juanito
+wanted to find the blackguard and make him swallow that
+"consumptive." Observing that the women were trying to hold him back,
+his bravado increased, and he became more conspicuously ferocious. But
+fortunately it was Don Custodio who had made the diagnosis, and he,
+fearful of attracting attention to himself, pretended to hear nothing,
+apparently busy with his criticism of the play.
+
+"If it weren't that I am with you," remarked Juanito, rolling his
+eyes like some dolls that are moved by clockwork, and to make the
+resemblance more real he stuck out his tongue occasionally.
+
+Thus that night he acquired in Dona Victorina's eyes the reputation
+of being brave and punctilious, so she decided in her heart that
+she would marry him just as soon as Don Tiburcio was out of the
+way. Paulita became sadder and sadder in thinking about how the girls
+called _cochers_ could occupy Isagani's attention, for the name had
+certain disagreeable associations that came from the slang of her
+convent school-days.
+
+At length the first act was concluded, the marquis taking away as
+servants Serpolette and Germaine, the representative of timid beauty
+in the troupe, and for coachman the stupid Grenicheux. A burst of
+applause brought them out again holding hands, those who five seconds
+before had been tormenting one another and were about to come to blows,
+bowing and smiling here and there to the gallant Manila public and
+exchanging knowing looks with various spectators.
+
+While there prevailed the passing tumult occasioned by those who
+crowded one another to get into the greenroom and felicitate the
+actresses and by those who were going to make calls on the ladies in
+the boxes, some expressed their opinions of the play and the players.
+
+"Undoubtedly, Serpolette is the best," said one with a knowing air.
+
+"I prefer Germaine, she's an ideal blonde."
+
+"But she hasn't any voice."
+
+"What do I care about the voice?"
+
+"Well, for shape, the tall one."
+
+"Pshaw," said Ben-Zayb, "not a one is worth a straw, not a one is
+an artist!"
+
+Ben-Zayb was the critic for _El Grito de la Integridad_, and his
+disdainful air gave him great importance in the eyes of those who
+were satisfied with so little.
+
+"Serpolette hasn't any voice, nor Germaine grace, nor is that
+music, nor is it art, nor is it anything!" he concluded with marked
+contempt. To set oneself up as a great critic there is nothing like
+appearing to be discontented with everything. Besides, the management
+had sent only two seats for the newspaper staff.
+
+In the boxes curiosity was aroused as to who could be the possessor
+of the empty one, for that person, would surpass every one in chic,
+since he would be the last to arrive. The rumor started somewhere
+that it belonged to Simoun, and was confirmed: no one had seen the
+jeweler in the reserved seats, the greenroom, or anywhere else.
+
+"Yet I saw him this afternoon with Mr. Jouay," some one said. "He
+presented a necklace to one of the actresses."
+
+"To which one?" asked some of the inquisitive ladies.
+
+"To the finest of all, the one who made eyes at his Excellency."
+
+This information was received with looks of intelligence, winks,
+exclamations of doubt, of confirmation, and half-uttered commentaries.
+
+"He's trying to play the Monte Cristo," remarked a lady who prided
+herself on being literary.
+
+"Or purveyor to the Palace!" added her escort, jealous of Simoun.
+
+In the students' box, Pecson, Sandoval, and Isagani had remained,
+while Tadeo had gone to engage Don Custodio in conversation about
+his projects, and Makaraig to hold an interview with Pepay.
+
+"In no way, as I have observed to you before, friend Isagani,"
+declared Sandoval with violent gestures and a sonorous voice, so
+that the ladies near the box, the daughters of the rich man who was
+in debt to Tadeo, might hear him, "in no way does the French language
+possess the rich sonorousness or the varied and elegant cadence of the
+Castilian tongue. I cannot conceive, I cannot imagine, I cannot form
+any idea of French orators, and I doubt that they have ever had any
+or can have any now in the strict construction of the term orator,
+because we must not confuse the name orator with the words babbler
+and charlatan, for these can exist in any country, in all the regions
+of the inhabited world, among the cold and curt Englishmen as among
+the lively and impressionable Frenchmen."
+
+Thus he delivered a magnificent review of the nations, with his
+poetical characterizations and most resounding epithets. Isagani nodded
+assent, with his thoughts fixed on Paulita, whom he had surprised
+gazing at him with an expressive look which contained a wealth of
+meaning. He tried to divine what those eyes were expressing--those
+eyes that were so eloquent and not at all deceptive.
+
+"Now you who are a poet, a slave to rhyme and meter, a son of the
+Muses," continued Sandoval, with an elegant wave of his hand, as
+though he were saluting, on the horizon, the Nine Sisters, "do you
+comprehend, can you conceive, how a language so harsh and unmusical
+as French can give birth to poets of such gigantic stature as our
+Garcilasos, our Herreras, our Esproncedas, our Calderons?"
+
+"Nevertheless," objected Pecson, "Victor Hugo--"
+
+"Victor Hugo, my friend Pecson, if Victor Hugo is a poet, it is
+because he owes it to Spain, because it is an established fact, it
+is a matter beyond all doubt, a thing admitted even by the Frenchmen
+themselves, so envious of Spain, that if Victor Hugo has genius, if
+he really is a poet, it is because his childhood was spent in Madrid;
+there he drank in his first impressions, there his brain was molded,
+there his imagination was colored, his heart modeled, and the most
+beautiful concepts of his mind born. And after all, who is Victor
+Hugo? Is he to be compared at all with our modern--"
+
+This peroration was cut short by the return of Makaraig with a
+despondent air and a bitter smile on his lips, carrying in his hand
+a note, which he offered silently to Sandoval, who read:
+
+
+    "MY DOVE: Your letter has reached me late, for I have already
+    handed in my decision, and it has been approved. However,
+    as if I had guessed your wish, I have decided the matter
+    according to the desires of your proteges. I'll be at the
+    theater and wait for you after the performance.
+
+        "Your duckling,
+
+            "CUSTODINING."
+
+
+"How tender the man is!" exclaimed Tadeo with emotion.
+
+"Well?" said Sandoval. "I don't see anything wrong about this--quite
+the reverse!"
+
+"Yes," rejoined Makaraig with his bitter smile, "decided
+favorably! I've just seen Padre Irene."
+
+"What does Padre Irene say?" inquired Pecson.
+
+"The same as Don Custodio, and the rascal still had the audacity
+to congratulate me. The Commission, which has taken as its own the
+decision of the arbiter, approves the idea and felicitates the students
+on their patriotism and their thirst for knowledge--"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Only that, considering our duties--in short, it says that in order
+that the idea may not be lost, it concludes that the direction
+and execution of the plan should be placed in charge of one of
+the religious corporations, in case the Dominicans do not wish to
+incorporate the academy with the University."
+
+Exclamations of disappointment greeted the announcement. Isagani rose,
+but said nothing.
+
+"And in order that we may participate in the management of the
+academy," Makaraig went on, "we are intrusted with the collection
+of contributions and dues, with the obligation of turning them over
+to the treasurer whom the corporation may designate, which treasurer
+will issue us receipts."
+
+"Then we're tax-collectors!" remarked Tadeo.
+
+"Sandoval," said Pecson, "there's the gauntlet--take it up!"
+
+"Huh! That's not a gauntlet--from its odor it seems more like a sock."
+
+"The funniest, part of it," Makaraig added, "is that Padre Irene has
+advised us to celebrate the event with a banquet or a torchlight
+procession--a public demonstration of the students _en masse_ to
+render thanks to all the persons who have intervened in the affair."
+
+"Yes, after the blow, let's sing and give thanks. _Super flumina
+Babylonis sedimus_!"
+
+"Yes, a banquet like that of the convicts," said Tadeo.
+
+"A banquet at which we all wear mourning and deliver funeral orations,"
+added Sandoval.
+
+"A serenade with the Marseillaise and funeral marches," proposed
+Isagani.
+
+"No, gentlemen," observed Pecson with his clownish grin, "to celebrate
+the event there's nothing like a banquet in a _pansiteria_, served
+by the Chinamen without camisas. I insist, without camisas!"
+
+The sarcasm and grotesqueness of this idea won it ready acceptance,
+Sandoval being the first to applaud it, for he had long wished to see
+the interior of one of those establishments which at night appeared
+to be so merry and cheerful.
+
+Just as the orchestra struck up for the second act, the young men
+arose and left the theater, to the scandal of the whole house.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+A CORPSE
+
+
+Simoun had not, in fact, gone to the theater. Already, at seven o'clock
+in the evening, he had left his house looking worried and gloomy. His
+servants saw him return twice, accompanied by different individuals,
+and at eight o'clock Makaraig encountered him pacing along Calle
+Hospital near the nunnery of St. Clara, just when the bells of its
+church were ringing a funeral knell. At nine Camaroncocido saw him
+again, in the neighborhood of the theater, speak with a person who
+seemed to be a student, pay the latter's admission to the show,
+and again disappear among the shadows of the trees.
+
+"What is it to me?" again muttered Camaroncocido. "What do I get out
+of watching over the populace?"
+
+Basilio, as Makaraig said, had not gone to the show. The poor student,
+after returning from San Diego, whither he had gone to ransom Juli,
+his future bride, from her servitude, had turned again to his studies,
+spending his time in the hospital, in studying, or in nursing Capitan
+Tiago, whose affliction he was trying to cure.
+
+The invalid had become an intolerable character. During his bad spells,
+when he felt depressed from lack of opium, the doses of which Basilio
+was trying to reduce, he would scold, mistreat, and abuse the boy, who
+bore it resignedly, conscious that he was doing good to one to whom
+he owed so much, and yielded only in the last extremity. His vicious
+appetite satisfied, Capitan Tiago would fall into a good humor, become
+tender, and call him his son, tearfully recalling the youth's services,
+how well he administered the estates, and would even talk of making him
+his heir. Basilio would smile bitterly and reflect that in this world
+complaisance with vice is rewarded better than fulfilment of duty. Not
+a few times did he feel tempted to give free rein to the craving and
+conduct his benefactor to the grave by a path of flowers and smiling
+illusions rather than lengthen his life along a road of sacrifice.
+
+"What a fool I am!" he often said to himself. "People are stupid and
+then pay for it."
+
+But he would shake his head as he thought of Juli, of the wide
+future before him. He counted upon living without a stain on his
+conscience, so he continued the treatment prescribed, and bore
+everything patiently.
+
+Yet with all his care the sick man, except for short periods of
+improvement, grew worse. Basilio had planned gradually to reduce
+the amount of the dose, or at least not to let him injure himself
+by increasing it, but on returning from the hospital or some visit
+he would find his patient in the heavy slumber produced by the opium,
+driveling, pale as a corpse. The young man could not explain whence the
+drug came: the only two persons who visited the house were Simoun and
+Padre Irene, the former rarely, while the latter never ceased exhorting
+him to be severe and inexorable with the treatment, to take no notice
+of the invalid's ravings, for the main object was to save him.
+
+"Do your duty, young man," was Padre Irene's constant admonition. "Do
+your duty." Then he would deliver a sermon on this topic with such
+great conviction and enthusiasm that Basilio would begin to feel
+kindly toward the preacher. Besides, Padre Irene promised to get him a
+fine assignment, a good province, and even hinted at the possibility
+of having him appointed a professor. Without being carried away by
+illusions, Basilio pretended to believe in them and went on obeying
+the dictates of his own conscience.
+
+That night, while _Les Cloches de Corneville_ was being presented,
+Basilio was studying at an old table by the light of an oil-lamp, whose
+thick glass globe partly illuminated his melancholy features. An old
+skull, some human bones, and a few books carefully arranged covered
+the table, whereon there was also a pan of water with a sponge. The
+smell of opium that proceeded from the adjoining bedroom made the
+air heavy and inclined him to sleep, but he overcame the desire by
+bathing his temples and eyes from time to time, determined not to go
+to sleep until he had finished the book, which he had borrowed and
+must return as soon as possible. It was a volume of the _Medicina
+Legal y Toxicologia_ of Dr. Friata, the only book that the professor
+would use, and Basilio lacked money to buy a copy, since, under
+the pretext of its being forbidden by the censor in Manila and the
+necessity for bribing many government employees to get it in, the
+booksellers charged a high price for it.
+
+So absorbed wras the youth in his studies that he had not given any
+attention at all to some pamphlets that had been sent to him from
+some unknown source, pamphlets that treated of the Philippines, among
+which figured those that were attracting the greatest notice at the
+time because of their harsh and insulting manner of referring to the
+natives of the country. Basilio had no time to open them, and he was
+perhaps restrained also by the thought that there is nothing pleasant
+about receiving an insult or a provocation without having any means
+of replying or defending oneself. The censorship, in fact, permitted
+insults to the Filipinos but prohibited replies on their part.
+
+In the midst of the silence that reigned in the house, broken only by
+a feeble snore that issued now and then from the adjoining bedroom,
+Basilio heard light footfalls on the stairs, footfalls that soon
+crossed the hallway and approached the room where he was. Raising
+his head, he saw the door open and to his great surprise appeared
+the sinister figure of the jeweler Simoun, who since the scene in
+San Diego had not come to visit either himself or Capitan Tiago.
+
+"How is the sick man?" he inquired, throwing a rapid glance about the
+room and fixing his attention on the pamphlets, the leaves of which
+were still uncut.
+
+"The beating of his heart is scarcely perceptible, his pulse is very
+weak, his appetite entirely gone," replied Basilio in a low voice
+with a sad smile. "He sweats profusely in the early morning."
+
+Noticing that Simoun kept his face turned toward the pamphlets and
+fearing that he might reopen the subject of their conversation in
+the wood, he went on: "His system is saturated with poison. He may
+die any day, as though struck by lightning. The least irritation,
+any excitement may kill him."
+
+"Like the Philippines!" observed Simoun lugubriously.
+
+Basilio was unable to refrain from a gesture of impatience, but he
+was determined not to recur to the old subject, so he proceeded as if
+he had heard nothing: "What weakens him the most is the nightmares,
+his terrors--"
+
+"Like the government!" again interrupted Simoun.
+
+"Several nights ago he awoke in the dark and thought that he had
+gone blind. He raised a disturbance, lamenting and scolding me,
+saying that I had put his eyes out. When I entered his room with a
+light he mistook me for Padre Irene and called me his saviour."
+
+"Like the government, exactly!"
+
+"Last night," continued Basilio, paying no attention, "he got up
+begging for his favorite game-cock, the one that died three years
+ago, and I had to give him a chicken. Then he heaped blessings upon
+me and promised me many thousands--"
+
+At that instant a clock struck half-past ten. Simoun shuddered and
+stopped the youth with a gesture.
+
+"Basilio," he said in a low, tense voice, "listen to me carefully,
+for the moments are precious. I see that you haven't opened the
+pamphlets that I sent you. You're not interested in your country."
+
+The youth started to protest.
+
+"It's useless," went on Simoun dryly. "Within an hour the revolution
+is going to break out at a signal from me, and tomorrow there'll
+be no studies, there'll be no University, there'll be nothing but
+fighting and butchery. I have everything ready and my success is
+assured. When we triumph, all those who could have helped us and did
+not do so will be treated as enemies. Basilio, I've come to offer
+you death or a future!"
+
+"Death or a future!" the boy echoed, as though he did not understand.
+
+"With us or with the government," rejoined Simoun. "With your country
+or with your oppressors. Decide, for time presses! I've come to save
+you because of the memories that unite us!"
+
+"With my country or with the oppressors!" repeated Basilio in a low
+tone. The youth was stupefied. He gazed at the jeweler with eyes
+in which terror was reflected, he felt his limbs turn cold, while a
+thousand confused ideas whirled about in his mind. He saw the streets
+running blood, he heard the firing, he found himself among the dead and
+wounded, and by the peculiar force of his inclinations fancied himself
+in an operator's blouse, cutting off legs and extracting bullets.
+
+"The will of the government is in my hands," said Simoun. "I've
+diverted and wasted its feeble strength and resources on foolish
+expeditions, dazzling it with the plunder it might seize. Its heads
+are now in the theater, calm and unsuspecting, thinking of a night
+of pleasure, but not one shall again repose upon a pillow. I have
+men and regiments at my disposition: some I have led to believe that
+the uprising is ordered by the General; others that the friars are
+bringing it about; some I have bought with promises, with employments,
+with money; many, very many, are acting from revenge, because they are
+oppressed and see it as a matter of killing or being killed. Cabesang
+Tales is below, he has come with me here! Again I ask you--will you
+come with us or do you prefer to expose yourself to the resentment
+of my followers? In critical moments, to declare oneself neutral is
+to be exposed to the wrath of both the contending parties."
+
+Basilio rubbed his hand over his face several times, as if he were
+trying to wake from a nightmare. He felt that his brow was cold.
+
+"Decide!" repeated Simoun.
+
+"And what--what would I have to do?" asked the youth in a weak and
+broken voice.
+
+"A very simple thing," replied Simoun, his face lighting up with a
+ray of hope. "As I have to direct the movement, I cannot get away from
+the scene of action. I want you, while the attention of the whole city
+is directed elsewhere, at the head of a company to force the doors of
+the nunnery of St. Clara and take from there a person whom only you,
+besides myself and Capitan Tiago, can recognize. You'll run no risk
+at all."
+
+"Maria Clara!" exclaimed Basilio.
+
+"Yes, Maria Clara," repeated Simoun, and for the first time his voice
+became human and compassionate. "I want to save her; to save her I
+have wished to live, I have returned. I am starting the revolution,
+because only a revolution can open the doors of the nunneries."
+
+"Ay!" sighed Basilio, clasping his hands. "You've come late, too late!"
+
+"Why?" inquired Simoun with a frown.
+
+"Maria Clara is dead!"
+
+Simoun arose with a bound and stood over the youth. "She's dead?" he
+demanded in a terrible voice.
+
+"This afternoon, at six. By now she must be--"
+
+"It's a lie!" roared Simoun, pale and beside himself. "It's
+false! Maria Clara lives, Maria Clara must live! It's a cowardly
+excuse! She's not dead, and this night I'll free her or tomorrow
+you die!"
+
+Basilio shrugged his shoulders. "Several days ago she was taken ill
+and I went to the nunnery for news of her. Look, here is Padre Salvi's
+letter, brought by Padre Irene. Capitan Tiago wept all the evening,
+kissing his daughter's picture and begging her forgiveness, until at
+last he smoked an enormous quantity of opium. This evening her knell
+was tolled."
+
+"Ah!" exclaimed Simoun, pressing his hands to his head and standing
+motionless. He remembered to have actually heard the knell while he
+was pacing about in the vicinity of the nunnery.
+
+"Dead!" he murmured in a voice so low that it seemed to be a ghost
+whispering. "Dead! Dead without my having seen her, dead without
+knowing that I lived for her--dead!"
+
+Feeling a terrible storm, a tempest of whirlwind and thunder without
+a drop of water, sobs without tears, cries without words, rage in his
+breast and threaten to burst out like burning lava long repressed,
+he rushed precipitately from the room. Basilio heard him descend the
+stairs with unsteady tread, stepping heavily, he heard a stifled cry,
+a cry that seemed to presage death, so solemn, deep, and sad that
+he arose from his chair pale and trembling, but he could hear the
+footsteps die away and the noisy closing of the door to the street.
+
+"Poor fellow!" he murmured, while his eyes filled with tears. Heedless
+now of his studies, he let his gaze wander into space as he pondered
+over the fate of those two beings: he--young, rich, educated, master
+of his fortunes, with a brilliant future before him; she--fair as
+a dream, pure, full of faith and innocence, nurtured amid love and
+laughter, destined to a happy existence, to be adored in the family
+and respected in the world; and yet of those two beings, filled with
+love, with illusions and hopes, by a fatal destiny he wandered over
+the world, dragged ceaselessly through a whirl of blood and tears,
+sowing evil instead of doing good, undoing virtue and encouraging vice,
+while she was dying in the mysterious shadows of the cloister where
+she had sought peace and perhaps found suffering, where she entered
+pure and stainless and expired like a crushed flower!
+
+Sleep in peace, ill-starred daughter of my hapless fatherland! Bury
+in the grave the enchantments of youth, faded in their prime! When a
+people cannot offer its daughters a tranquil home under the protection
+of sacred liberty, when a man can only leave to his widow blushes,
+tears to his mother, and slavery to his children, you do well to
+condemn yourself to perpetual chastity, stifling within you the germ
+of a future generation accursed! Well for you that you have not
+to shudder in your grave, hearing the cries of those who groan in
+darkness, of those who feel that they have wings and yet are fettered,
+of those who are stifled from lack of liberty! Go, go with your poet's
+dreams into the regions of the infinite, spirit of woman dim-shadowed
+in the moonlight's beam, whispered in the bending arches of the
+bamboo-brakes! Happy she who dies lamented, she who leaves in the
+heart that loves her a pure picture, a sacred remembrance, unspotted
+by the base passions engendered by the years! Go, we shall remember
+you! In the clear air of our native land, under its azure sky, above
+the billows of the lake set amid sapphire hills and emerald shores,
+in the crystal streams shaded by the bamboos, bordered by flowers,
+enlivened by the beetles and butterflies with their uncertain and
+wavering flight as though playing with the air, in the silence of
+our forests, in the singing of our rivers, in the diamond showers of
+our waterfalls, in the resplendent light of our moon, in the sighs of
+the night breeze, in all that may call up the vision of the beloved,
+we must eternally see you as we dreamed of you, fair, beautiful,
+radiant with hope, pure as the light, yet still sad and melancholy
+in the contemplation of our woes!
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+DREAMS
+
+
+    Amor, que astro eres?
+
+
+On the following day, Thursday, at the hour of sunset, Isagani
+was walking along the beautiful promenade of Maria Cristina in the
+direction of the Malecon to keep an appointment which Paulita had that
+morning given him. The young man had no doubt that they were to talk
+about what had happened on the previous night, and as he was determined
+to ask for an explanation, and knew how proud and haughty she was,
+he foresaw an estrangement. In view of this eventuality he had brought
+with him the only two letters he had ever received from Paulita, two
+scraps of paper, whereon were merely a few hurriedly written lines
+with various blots, but in an even handwriting, things that did not
+prevent the enamored youth from preserving them with more solicitude
+than if they had been the autographs of Sappho and the Muse Polyhymnia.
+
+This decision to sacrifice his love on the altar of dignity, the
+consciousness of suffering in the discharge of duty, did not prevent
+a profound melancholy from taking possession of Isagani and brought
+back into his mind the beautiful days, and nights more beautiful
+still, when they had whispered sweet nothings through the flowered
+gratings of the entresol, nothings that to the youth took on such a
+character of seriousness and importance that they seemed to him the
+only matters worthy of meriting the attention of the most exalted human
+understanding. He recalled the walks on moonlit nights, the fair, the
+dark December mornings after the mass of Nativity, the holy water that
+he used to offer her, when she would thank him with a look charged
+with a whole epic of love, both of them trembling as their fingers
+touched. Heavy sighs, like small rockets, issued from his breast
+and brought back to him all the verses, all the sayings of poets and
+writers about the inconstancy of woman. Inwardly he cursed the creation
+of theaters, the French operetta, and vowed to get revenge on Pelaez at
+the first opportunity. Everything about him appeared under the saddest
+and somberest colors: the bay, deserted and solitary, seemed more
+solitary still on account of the few steamers that were anchored in
+it; the sun was dying behind Mariveles without poetry or enchantment,
+without the capricious and richly tinted clouds of happier evenings;
+the Anda monument, in bad taste, mean and squat, without style, without
+grandeur, looked like a lump of ice-cream or at best a chunk of cake;
+the people who were promenading along the Malecon, in spite of their
+complacent and contented air, appeared distant, haughty, and vain;
+mischievous and bad-mannered, the boys that played on the beach,
+skipping flat stones over the surface of the water or searching in
+the sand for mollusks and crustaceans which they caught for the mere
+fun of catching and killed without benefit to themselves; in short,
+even the eternal port works to which he had dedicated more than three
+odes, looked to him absurd, ridiculous child's play.
+
+The port, ah, the port of Manila, a bastard that since its conception
+had brought tears of humiliation and shame to all! If only after so
+many tears there were not being brought forth a useless abortion!
+
+Abstractedly he saluted two Jesuits, former teachers of his, and
+scarcely noticed a tandem in which an American rode and excited
+the envy of the gallants who were in calesas only. Near the Anda
+monument he heard Ben-Zayb talking with another person about
+Simoun, learning that the latter had on the previous night been
+taken suddenly ill, that he refused to see any one, even the very
+aides of the General. "Yes!" exclaimed Isagani with a bitter smile,
+"for him attentions because he is rich. The soldiers return from
+their expeditions sick and wounded, but no one visits them."
+
+Musing over these expeditions, over the fate of the poor soldiers,
+over the resistance offered by the islanders to the foreign yoke, he
+thought that, death for death, if that of the soldiers was glorious
+because they were obeying orders, that of the islanders was sublime
+because they were defending their homes. [49]
+
+"A strange destiny, that of some peoples!" he mused. "Because a
+traveler arrives at their shores, they lose their liberty and become
+subjects and slaves, not only of the traveler, not only of his heirs,
+but even of all his countrymen, and not for a generation, but for
+all time! A strange conception of justice! Such a state of affairs
+gives ample right to exterminate every foreigner as the most ferocious
+monster that the sea can cast up!"
+
+He reflected that those islanders, against whom his country was waging
+war, after all were guilty of no crime other than that of weakness. The
+travelers also arrived at the shores of other peoples, but finding
+them strong made no display of their strange pretension. With all
+their weakness the spectacle they presented seemed beautiful to him,
+and the names of the enemies, whom the newspapers did not fail to call
+cowards and traitors, appeared glorious to him, as they succumbed with
+glory amid the ruins of their crude fortifications, with greater glory
+even than the ancient Trojan heroes, for those islanders had carried
+away no Philippine Helen! In his poetic enthusiasm he thought of the
+young men of those islands who could cover themselves with glory in
+the eyes of their women, and in his amorous desperation he envied
+them because they could find a brilliant suicide.
+
+"Ah, I should like to die," he exclaimed, "be reduced to nothingness,
+leave to my native land a glorious name, perish in its cause, defending
+it from foreign invasion, and then let the sun afterwards illumine
+my corpse, like a motionless sentinel on the rocks of the sea!"
+
+The conflict with the Germans [50] came into his mind and he almost
+felt sorry that it had been adjusted: he would gladly have died for
+the Spanish-Filipino banner before submitting to the foreigner.
+
+"Because, after all," he mused, "with Spain we are united by firm
+bonds--the past, history, religion, language--"
+
+Language, yes, language! A sarcastic smile curled his lips. That very
+night they would hold a banquet in the _pansiteria_ to _celebrate_
+the demise of the academy of Castilian.
+
+"Ay!" he sighed, "provided the liberals in Spain are like those we
+have here, in a little while the mother country will be able to count
+the number of the faithful!"
+
+Slowly the night descended, and with it melancholy settled more heavily
+upon the heart of the young man, who had almost lost hope of seeing
+Paulita. The promenaders one by one left the Malecon for the Luneta,
+the music from which was borne to him in snatches of melodies on the
+fresh evening breeze; the sailors on a warship anchored in the river
+performed their evening drill, skipping about among the slender ropes
+like spiders; the boats one by one lighted their lamps, thus giving
+signs of life; while the beach,
+
+
+    Do el viento riza las calladas olas
+    Que con blando murmullo en la ribera
+    Se deslizan veloces por si solas. [51]
+
+
+as Alaejos says, exhaled in the distance thin, vapors that the moon,
+now at its full, gradually converted into mysterious transparent gauze.
+
+A distant sound became audible, a noise that rapidly
+approached. Isagani turned his head and his heart began to beat
+violently. A carriage was coming, drawn by white horses, the white
+horses that he would know among a hundred thousand. In the carriage
+rode Paulita and her friend of the night before, with Dona Victorina.
+
+Before the young man could take a step, Paulita had leaped to the
+ground with sylph-like agility and smiled at him with a smile full of
+conciliation. He smiled in return, and it seemed to him that all the
+clouds, all the black thoughts that before had beset him, vanished
+like smoke, the sky lighted up, the breeze sang, flowers covered the
+grass by the roadside. But unfortunately Dona Victorina was there and
+she pounced upon the young man to ask him for news of Don Tiburcio,
+since Isagani had undertaken to discover his hiding-place by inquiry
+among the students he knew.
+
+"No one has been able to tell me up to now," he answered, and he was
+telling the truth, for Don Tiburcio was really hidden in the house
+of the youth's own uncle, Padre Florentino.
+
+"Let him know," declared Dona Victorina furiously, "that I'll call in
+the Civil Guard. Alive or dead, I want to know where he is--because
+one has to wait ten years before marrying again."
+
+Isagani gazed at her in fright--Dona Victorina was thinking of
+remarrying! Who could the unfortunate be?
+
+"What do you think of Juanito Pelaez?" she asked him suddenly.
+
+Juanito! Isagani knew not what to reply. He was tempted to tell all
+the evil he knew of Pelaez, but a feeling of delicacy triumphed in his
+heart and he spoke well of his rival, for the very reason that he was
+such. Dona Victorina, entirely satisfied and becoming enthusiastic,
+then broke out into exaggerations of Pelaez's merits and was already
+going to make Isagani a confidant of her new passion when Paulita's
+friend came running to say that the former's fan had fallen among
+the stones of the beach, near the Malecon. Stratagem or accident, the
+fact is that this mischance gave an excuse for the friend to remain
+with the old woman, while Isagani might talk with Paulita. Moreover,
+it was a matter of rejoicing to Dona Victorina, since to get Juanito
+for herself she was favoring Isagani's love.
+
+Paulita had her plan ready. On thanking him she assumed the role of
+the offended party, showed resentment, and gave him to understand that
+she was surprised to meet him there when everybody was on the Luneta,
+even the French actresses.
+
+"You made the appointment for me, how could I be elsewhere?"
+
+"Yet last night you did not even notice that I was in the theater. I
+was watching you all the time and you never took your eyes off those
+_cochers_."
+
+So they exchanged parts: Isagani, who had come to demand explanations,
+found himself compelled to give them and considered himself very happy
+when Paulita said that she forgave him. In regard to her presence
+at the theater, he even had to thank her for that: forced by her
+aunt, she had decided to go in the hope of seeing him during the
+performance. Little she cared for Juanito Pelaez!
+
+"My aunt's the one who is in love with him," she said with a merry
+laugh.
+
+Then they both laughed, for the marriage of Pelaez with Dona Victorina
+made them really happy, and they saw it already an accomplished
+fact, until Isagani remembered that Don Tiburcio was still living and
+confided the secret to his sweetheart, after exacting her promise that
+she would tell no one. Paulita promised, with the mental reservation
+of relating it to her friend.
+
+This led the conversation to Isagani's town, surrounded by forests,
+situated on the shore of the sea which roared at the base of the
+high cliffs. Isagani's gaze lighted up when he spoke of that obscure
+spot, a flush of pride overspread his cheeks, his voice trembled,
+his poetic imagination glowed, his words poured forth burning,
+charged with enthusiasm, as if he were talking of love to his love,
+and he could not but exclaim:
+
+"Oh, in the solitude of my mountains I feel free, free as the air,
+as the light that shoots unbridled through space! A thousand cities, a
+thousand palaces, would I give for that spot in the Philippines, where,
+far from men, I could feel myself to have genuine liberty. There,
+face to face with nature, in the presence of the mysterious and the
+infinite, the forest and the sea, I think, speak, and work like a
+man who knows not tyrants."
+
+In the presence of such enthusiasm for his native place, an enthusiasm
+that she did not comprehend, for she was accustomed to hear her country
+spoken ill of, and sometimes joined in the chorus herself, Paulita
+manifested some jealousy, as usual making herself the offended party.
+
+But Isagani very quickly pacified her. "Yes," he said, "I loved it
+above all things before I knew you! It was my delight to wander through
+the thickets, to sleep in the shade of the trees, to seat myself upon
+a cliff to take in with my gaze the Pacific which rolled its blue
+waves before me, bringing to me echoes of songs learned on the shores
+of free America. Before knowing you, that sea was for me my world,
+my delight, my love, my dream! When it slept in calm with the sun
+shining overhead, it was my delight to gaze into the abyss hundreds
+of feet below me, seeking monsters in the forests of madrepores and
+coral that were revealed through the limpid blue, enormous serpents
+that the country folk say leave the forests to dwell in the sea, and
+there take on frightful forms. Evening, they say, is the time when
+the sirens appear, and I saw them between the waves--so great was
+my eagerness that once I thought I could discern them amid the foam,
+busy in their divine sports, I distinctly heard their songs, songs of
+liberty, and I made out the sounds of their silvery harps. Formerly
+I spent hours and hours watching the transformations in the clouds,
+or gazing at a solitary tree in the plain or a high rock, without
+knowing why, without being able to explain the vague feelings they
+awoke in me. My uncle used to preach long sermons to me, and fearing
+that I would become a hypochondriac, talked of placing me under
+a doctor's care. But I met you, I loved you, and during the last
+vacation it seemed that something was lacking there, the forest was
+gloomy, sad the river that glides through the shadows, dreary the sea,
+deserted the sky. Ah, if you should go there once, if your feet should
+press those paths, if you should stir the waters of the rivulet with
+your fingers, if you should gaze upon the sea, sit upon the cliff,
+or make the air ring with your melodious songs, my forest would be
+transformed into an Eden, the ripples of the brook would sing, light
+would burst from the dark leaves, into diamonds would be converted
+the dewdrops and into pearls the foam of the sea."
+
+But Paulita had heard that to reach Isagani's home it was necessary
+to cross mountains where little leeches abounded, and at the mere
+thought of them the little coward shivered convulsively. Humored and
+petted, she declared that she would travel only in a carriage or a
+railway train.
+
+Having now forgotten all his pessimism and seeing only thornless
+roses about him, Isagani answered, "Within a short time all the
+islands are going to be crossed with networks of iron rails.
+
+
+    "'Por donde rapidas
+    Y voladoras
+    Locomotoras
+    Corriendo iran,' [52]
+
+
+as some one said. Then the most beautiful spots of the islands will
+be accessible to all."
+
+"Then, but when? When I'm an old woman?"
+
+"Ah, you don't know what we can do in a few years," replied the
+youth. "You don't realize the energy and enthusiasm that are awakening
+in the country after the sleep of centuries. Spain heeds us; our young
+men in Madrid are working day and night, dedicating to the fatherland
+all their intelligence, all their time, all their strength. Generous
+voices there are mingled with ours, statesmen who realize that there
+is no better bond than community of thought and interest. Justice will
+be meted out to us, and everything points to a brilliant future for
+all. It's true that we've just met with a slight rebuff, we students,
+but victory is rolling along the whole line, it is in the consciousness
+of all! The traitorous repulse that we have suffered indicates the
+last gasp, the final convulsions of the dying. Tomorrow we shall be
+citizens of the Philippines, whose destiny will be a glorious one,
+because it will be in loving hands. Ah, yes, the future is ours! I
+see it rose-tinted, I see the movement that stirs the life of these
+regions so long dead, lethargic. I see towns arise along the railroads,
+and factories everywhere, edifices like that of Mandaloyan! I hear
+the steam hiss, the trains roar, the engines rattle! I see the smoke
+rise--their heavy breathing; I smell the oil--the sweat of monsters
+busy at incessant toil. This port, so slow and laborious of creation,
+this river where commerce is in its death agony, we shall see covered
+with masts, giving us an idea of the forests of Europe in winter. This
+pure air, and these stones, now so clean, will be crowded with coal,
+with boxes and barrels, the products of human industry, but let it
+not matter, for we shall move about rapidly in comfortable coaches to
+seek in the interior other air, other scenes on other shores, cooler
+temperatures on the slopes of the mountains. The warships of our navy
+will guard our coasts, the Spaniard and the Filipino will rival each
+other in zeal to repel all foreign invasion, to defend our homes, and
+let you bask in peace and smiles, loved and respected. Free from the
+system of exploitation, without hatred or distrust, the people will
+labor because then labor will cease to be a despicable thing, it will
+no longer be servile, imposed upon a slave. Then the Spaniard will
+not embitter his character with ridiculous pretensions of despotism,
+but with a frank look and a stout heart we shall extend our hands
+to one another, and commerce, industry, agriculture, the sciences,
+will develop under the mantle of liberty, with wise and just laws,
+as in prosperous England." [53]
+
+Paulita smiled dubiously and shook her head. "Dreams, dreams!" she
+sighed. "I've heard it said that you have many enemies. Aunt says
+that this country must always be enslaved."
+
+"Because your aunt is a fool, because she can't live without
+slaves! When she hasn't them she dreams of them in the future, and if
+they are not obtainable she forces them into her imagination. True
+it is that we have enemies, that there will be a struggle, but we
+shall conquer. The old system may convert the ruins of its castle
+into formless barricades, but we will take them singing hymns of
+liberty, in the light of the eyes of you women, to the applause
+of your lovely hands. But do not be uneasy--the struggle will be a
+pacific one. Enough that you spur us to zeal, that you awake in us
+noble and elevated thoughts and encourage us to constancy, to heroism,
+with your affection for our reward."
+
+Paulita preserved her enigmatic smile and seemed thoughtful, as she
+gazed toward the river, patting her cheek lightly with her fan. "But
+if you accomplish nothing?" she asked abstractedly.
+
+The question hurt Isagani. He fixed his eyes on his sweetheart,
+caught her lightly by the hand, and began: "Listen, if we accomplish
+nothing--"
+
+He paused in doubt, then resumed: "You know how I love you, how I
+adore you, you know that I feel myself a different creature when
+your gaze enfolds me, when I surprise in it the flash of love,
+but yet if we accomplish nothing, I would dream of another look of
+yours and would die happy, because the light of pride could burn
+in your eyes when you pointed to my corpse and said to the world:
+'My love died fighting for the rights of my fatherland!' "
+
+"Come home, child, you're going to catch cold," screeched Dona
+Victorina at that instant, and the voice brought them back to
+reality. It was time to return, and they kindly invited him to
+enter the carriage, an invitation which the young man did not give
+them cause to repeat. As it was Paulita's carriage, naturally Dona
+Victorina and the friend occupied the back seat, while the two lovers
+sat on the smaller one in front.
+
+To ride in the same carriage, to have her at his side, to breathe
+her perfume, to rub against the silk of her dress, to see her pensive
+with folded arms, lighted by the moon of the Philippines that lends to
+the meanest things idealism and enchantment, were all dreams beyond
+Isagani's hopes! What wretches they who were returning alone on foot
+and had to give way to the swift carriage! In the whole course of the
+drive, along the beach and down the length of La Sabana, across the
+Bridge of Spain, Isagani saw nothing but a sweet profile, gracefully
+set off by beautiful hair, ending in an arching neck that lost itself
+amid the gauzy pina. A diamond winked at him from the lobe of the
+little ear, like a star among silvery clouds. He heard faint echoes
+inquiring for Don Tiburcio de Espadana, the name of Juanito Pelaez,
+but they sounded to him like distant bells, the confused noises heard
+in a dream. It was necessary to tell him that they had reached Plaza
+Santa Cruz.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+SMILES AND TEARS
+
+
+The sala of the _Pansiteria Macanista de Buen Gusto_ [54] that
+night presented an extraordinary aspect. Fourteen young men of the
+principal islands of the archipelago, from the pure Indian (if there
+be pure ones) to the Peninsular Spaniard, were met to hold the banquet
+advised by Padre Irene in view of the happy solution of the affair
+about instruction in Castilian. They had engaged all the tables for
+themselves, ordered the lights to be increased, and had posted on the
+wall beside the landscapes and Chinese kakemonos this strange versicle:
+
+"GLORY TO CUSTODIO FOR HIS CLEVERNESS AND PANSIT ON EABTH TO THE
+YOUTHS OF GOOD WILL."
+
+In a country where everything grotesque is covered with a mantle
+of seriousness, where many rise by the force of wind and hot air,
+in a country where the deeply serious and sincere may do damage on
+issuing from the heart and may cause trouble, probably this was the
+best way to celebrate the ingenious inspiration of the illustrious
+Don Custodio. The mocked replied to the mockery with a laugh, to the
+governmental joke with a plate of _pansit_, and yet--!
+
+They laughed and jested, but it could be seen that the merriment
+was forced. The laughter had a certain nervous ring, eyes flashed,
+and in more than one of these a tear glistened. Nevertheless, these
+young men were cruel, they were unreasonable! It was not the first
+time that their most beautiful ideas had been so treated, that their
+hopes had been defrauded with big words and small actions: before
+this Don Custodio there had been many, very many others.
+
+In the center of the room under the red lanterns were placed four
+round tables, systematically arranged to form a square. Little wooden
+stools, equally round, served as seats. In the middle of each table,
+according to the practise of the establishment, were arranged four
+small colored plates with four pies on each one and four cups of tea,
+with the accompanying dishes, all of red porcelain. Before each seat
+was a bottle and two glittering wine-glasses.
+
+Sandoval was curious and gazed about scrutinizing everything, tasting
+the food, examining the pictures, reading the bill of fare. The
+others conversed on the topics of the day: about the French actresses,
+about the mysterious illness of Simoun, who, according to some, had
+been found wounded in the street, while others averred that he had
+attempted to commit suicide. As was natural, all lost themselves in
+conjectures. Tadeo gave his particular version, which according to him
+came from a reliable source: Simoun had been assaulted by some unknown
+person in the old Plaza Vivac, [55] the motive being revenge, in proof
+of which was the fact that Simoun himself refused to make the least
+explanation. From this they proceeded to talk of mysterious revenges,
+and naturally of monkish pranks, each one relating the exploits of
+the curate of his town.
+
+A notice in large black letters crowned the frieze of the room with
+this warning:
+
+
+    De esta fonda el cabecilla
+    Al publico advierte
+    Que nada dejen absolutamente
+    Sobre alguna mesa o silla. [56]
+
+
+"What a notice!" exclaimed Sandoval. "As if he might have confidence
+in the police, eh? And what verses! Don Tiburcio converted into a
+quatrain--two feet, one longer than the other, between two crutches! If
+Isagani sees them, he'll present them to his future aunt."
+
+"Here's Isagani!" called a voice from the stairway. The happy youth
+appeared radiant with joy, followed by two Chinese, without camisas,
+who carried on enormous waiters tureens that gave out an appetizing
+odor. Merry exclamations greeted them.
+
+Juanito Pelaez was missing, but the hour fixed had already passed, so
+they sat down happily to the tables. Juanito was always unconventional.
+
+"If in his place we had invited Basilio," said Tadeo, "we should have
+been better entertained. We might have got him drunk and drawn some
+secrets from him."
+
+"What, does the prudent Basilio possess secrets?"
+
+"I should say so!" replied Tadeo. "Of the most important kind. There
+are some enigmas to which he alone has the key: the boy who
+disappeared, the nun--"
+
+"Gentlemen, the _pansit lang-lang_ is the soup _par excellence_!" cried
+Makaraig. "As you will observe, Sandoval, it is composed of vermicelli,
+crabs or shrimps, egg paste, scraps of chicken, and I don't know
+what else. As first-fruits, let us offer the bones to Don Custodio,
+to see if he will project something with them."
+
+A burst of merry laughter greeted this sally.
+
+"If he should learn--"
+
+"He'd come a-running!" concluded Sandoval. "This is excellent
+soup--what is it called?"
+
+"_Pansit lang-lang_, that is, Chinese _pansit_, to distinguish it
+from that which is peculiar to this country."
+
+"Bah! That's a hard name to remember. In honor of Don Custodio,
+I christen it the _soup project_!"
+
+"Gentlemen," said Makaraig, who had prepared the menu, "there are
+three courses yet. Chinese stew made of pork--"
+
+"Which should be dedicated to Padre Irene."
+
+"Get out! Padre Irene doesn't eat pork, unless he turns his nose away,"
+whispered a young man from Iloilo to his neighbor.
+
+"Let him turn his nose away!"
+
+"Down with Padre Irene's nose," cried several at once.
+
+"Respect, gentlemen, more respect!" demanded Pecson with comic gravity.
+
+"The third course is a lobster pie--"
+
+"Which should be dedicated to the friars," suggested he of the Visayas.
+
+"For the lobsters' sake," added Sandoval.
+
+"Right, and call it friar pie!"
+
+The whole crowd took this up, repeating in concert, "Friar pie!"
+
+"I protest in the name of one of them," said Isagani.
+
+"And I, in the name of the lobsters," added Tadeo.
+
+"Respect, gentlemen, more respect!" again demanded Pecson with a
+full mouth.
+
+"The fourth is stewed _pansit_, which is dedicated--to the government
+and the country!"
+
+All turned toward Makaraig, who went on: "Until recently, gentlemen,
+the _pansit_ was believed to be Chinese or Japanese, but the
+fact is that, being unknown in China or Japan, it would seem to be
+Filipino, yet those who prepare it and get the benefit from it are the
+Chinese--the same, the very, very same that happens to the government
+and to the Philippines: they seem to be Chinese, but whether they
+are or not, the Holy Mother has her doctors--all eat and enjoy it,
+yet characterize it as disagreeable and loathsome, the same as with
+the country, the same as with the government. All live at its cost,
+all share in its feast, and afterwards there is no worse country than
+the Philippines, there is no government more imperfect. Let us then
+dedicate the _pansit_ to the country and to the government."
+
+"Agreed!" many exclaimed.
+
+"I protest!" cried Isagani.
+
+"Respect for the weaker, respect for the victims," called Pecson in
+a hollow voice, waving a chicken-bone in the air.
+
+"Let's dedicate the _pansit_ to Quiroga the Chinaman, one of the four
+powers of the Filipino world," proposed Isagani.
+
+"No, to his Black Eminence."
+
+"Silence!" cautioned one mysteriously. "There are people in the plaza
+watching us, and walls have ears."
+
+True it was that curious groups were standing by the windows, while
+the talk and laughter in the adjoining houses had ceased altogether, as
+if the people there were giving their attention to what was occurring
+at the banquet. There was something extraordinary about the silence.
+
+"Tadeo, deliver your speech," Makaraig whispered to him.
+
+It had been agreed that Sandoval, who possessed the most oratorical
+ability, should deliver the last toast as a summing up.
+
+Tadeo, lazy as ever, had prepared nothing, so he found himself in a
+quandary. While disposing of a long string of vermicelli, he meditated
+how to get out of the difficulty, until he recalled a speech learned
+in school and decided to plagiarize it, with adulterations.
+
+"Beloved brethren in project!" he began, gesticulating with two
+Chinese chop-sticks.
+
+"Brute! Keep that chop-stick out of my hair!" cried his neighbor.
+
+"Called by you to fill the void that has been left in--"
+
+"Plagiarism!" Sandoval interrupted him. "That speech was delivered
+by the president of our lyceum."
+
+"Called by your election," continued the imperturbable Tadeo, "to fill
+the void that has been left in my mind"--pointing to his stomach--"by
+a man famous for his Christian principles and for his inspirations
+and projects, worthy of some little remembrance, what can one like
+myself say of him, I who am very hungry, not having breakfasted?"
+
+"Have a neck, my friend!" called a neighbor, offering that portion
+of a chicken.
+
+"There is one course, gentlemen, the treasure of a people who are
+today a tale and a mockery in the world, wherein have thrust their
+hands the greatest gluttons of the western regions of the earth--"
+Here he pointed with his chopsticks to Sandoval, who was struggling
+with a refractory chicken-wing.
+
+"And eastern!" retorted the latter, describing a circle in the air
+with his spoon, in order to include all the banqueters.
+
+"No interruptions!"
+
+"I demand the floor!"
+
+"I demand pickles!" added Isagani.
+
+"Bring on the stew!"
+
+All echoed this request, so Tadeo sat down, contented with having
+got out of his quandary.
+
+The dish consecrated to Padre Irene did not appear to be extra good,
+as Sandoval cruelly demonstrated thus: "Shining with grease outside
+and with pork inside! Bring on the third course, the friar pie!"
+
+The pie was not yet ready, although the sizzling of the grease in the
+frying-pan could be heard. They took advantage of the delay to drink,
+begging Pecson to talk.
+
+Pecson crossed himself gravely and arose, restraining his clownish
+laugh with an effort, at the same time mimicking a certain Augustinian
+preacher, then famous, and beginning in a murmur, as though he were
+reading a text.
+
+"_Si tripa plena laudal Deum, tripa famelica laudabit fratres_--if
+the full stomach praises God, the hungry stomach will praise the
+friars. Words spoken by the Lord Custodio through the mouth of
+Ben-Zayb, in the journal _El Grito de la Integridad_, the second
+article, absurdity the one hundred and fifty-seventh.
+
+"Beloved brethren in Christ: Evil blows its foul breath over
+the verdant shores of Frailandia, commonly called the Philippine
+Archipelago. No day passes but the attack is renewed, but there
+is heard some sarcasm against the reverend, venerable, infallible
+corporations, defenseless and unsupported. Allow me, brethren, on
+this occasion to constitute myself a knight-errant to sally forth in
+defense of the unprotected, of the holy corporations that have reared
+us, thus again confirming the saving idea of the adage--a full stomach
+praises God, which is to say, a hungry stomach will praise the friars."
+
+"Bravo, bravo!"
+
+"Listen," said Isagani seriously, "I want you to understand that,
+speaking of friars, I respect one."
+
+Sandoval was getting merry, so he began to sing a shady couplet about
+the friars.
+
+"Hear me, brethren!" continued Pecson. "Turn your gaze toward the
+happy days of your infancy, endeavor to analyze the present and ask
+yourselves about the future. What do you find? Friars, friars, and
+friars! A friar baptized you, confirmed you, visited you in school
+with loving zeal; a friar heard your first secret; he was the first to
+bring you into communion with God, to set your feet upon the pathway
+of life; friars were your first and friars will be your last teachers;
+a friar it is who opens the hearts of your sweethearts, disposing
+them to heed your sighs; a friar marries you, makes you travel over
+different islands to afford you changes of climate and diversion; he
+will attend your death-bed, and even though you mount the scaffold,
+there will the friar be to accompany you with his prayers and tears,
+and you may rest assured that he will not desert you until he sees you
+thoroughly dead. Nor does his charity end there--dead, he will then
+endeavor to bury you with all pomp, he will fight that your corpse
+pass through the church to receive his supplications, and he will only
+rest satisfied when he can deliver you into the hands of the Creator,
+purified here on earth, thanks to temporal punishments, tortures, and
+humiliations. Learned in the doctrines of Christ, who closes heaven
+against the rich, they, our redeemers and genuine ministers of the
+Saviour, seek every means to lift away our sins and bear them far,
+far off, there where the accursed Chinese and Protestants dwell,
+to leave us this air, limpid, pure, healthful, in such a way that
+even should we so wish afterwards, we could not find a real to bring
+about our condemnation.
+
+"If, then, their existence is necessary to our happiness,
+if wheresoever we turn we must encounter their delicate hands,
+hungering for kisses, that every day smooth the marks of abuse from
+our countenances, why not adore them and fatten them--why demand their
+impolitic expulsion? Consider for a moment the immense void that
+their absence would leave in our social system. Tireless workers,
+they improve and propagate the races! Divided as we are, thanks
+to our jealousies and our susceptibilities, the friars unite us in
+a common lot, in a firm bond, so firm that many are unable to move
+their elbows. Take away the friar, gentlemen, and you will see how the
+Philippine edifice will totter; lacking robust shoulders and hairy
+limbs to sustain it, Philippine life will again become monotonous,
+without the merry note of the playful and gracious friar, without
+the booklets and sermons that split our sides with laughter, without
+the amusing contrast between grand pretensions and small brains,
+without the actual, daily representations of the tales of Boccaccio
+and La Fontaine! Without the girdles and scapularies, what would you
+have our women do in the future--save that money and perhaps become
+miserly and covetous? Without the masses, novenaries, and processions,
+where will you find games of _panguingui_ to entertain them in their
+hours of leisure? They would then have to devote themselves to their
+household duties and instead of reading diverting stories of miracles,
+we should then have to get them works that are not extant.
+
+"Take away the friar and heroism will disappear, the political virtues
+will fall under the control of the vulgar. Take him away and the Indian
+will cease to exist, for the friar is the Father, the Indian is the
+Word! The former is the sculptor, the latter the statue, because all
+that we are, think, or do, we owe to the friar--to his patience,
+his toil, his perseverance of three centuries to modify the form
+Nature gave us. The Philippines without the friar and without the
+Indian--what then would become of the unfortunate government in the
+hands of the Chinamen?"
+
+"It will eat lobster pie," suggested Isagani, whom Pecson's speech
+bored.
+
+"And that's what we ought to be doing. Enough of speeches!"
+
+As the Chinese who should have served the courses did not put in his
+appearance, one of the students arose and went to the rear, toward
+the balcony that overlooked the river. But he returned at once,
+making mysterious signs.
+
+"We're watched! I've seen Padre Sibyla's pet!"
+
+"Yes?" ejaculated Isagani, rising.
+
+"It's no use now. When he saw me he disappeared."
+
+Approaching the window he looked toward the plaza, then made signs to
+his companions to come nearer. They saw a young man leave the door of
+the _pansiteria_, gaze all about him, then with some unknown person
+enter a carriage that waited at the curb. It was Simoun's carriage.
+
+"Ah!" exclaimed Makaraig. "The slave of the Vice-Rector attended by
+the Master of the General!"
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+PASQUINADES
+
+
+Very early the next morning Basilio arose to go to the hospital. He
+had his plans made: to visit his patients, to go afterwards to the
+University to see about his licentiateship, and then have an interview
+with Makaraig about the expense this would entail, for he had used up
+the greater part of his savings in ransoming Juli and in securing a
+house where she and her grandfather might live, and he had not dared
+to apply to Capitan Tiago, fearing that such a move would be construed
+as an advance on the legacy so often promised him.
+
+Preoccupied with these thoughts, he paid no attention to the groups
+of students who were at such an early hour returning from the Walled
+City, as though the classrooms had been closed, nor did he even note
+the abstracted air of some of them, their whispered conversations,
+or the mysterious signals exchanged among them. So it was that when
+he reached San Juan de Dios and his friends asked him about the
+conspiracy, he gave a start, remembering what Simoun had planned,
+but which had miscarried, owing to the unexplained accident to the
+jeweler. Terrified, he asked in a trembling voice, at the same time
+endeavoring to feign ignorance, "Ah, yes, what conspiracy?"
+
+"It's been discovered," replied one, "and it seems that many are
+implicated in it."
+
+With an effort Basilio controlled himself. "Many implicated?" he
+echoed, trying to learn something from the looks of the others. "Who?"
+
+"Students, a lot of students."
+
+Basilio did not think it prudent to ask more, fearing that he would
+give himself away, so on the pretext of visiting his patients he left
+the group. One of the clinical professors met him and placing his hand
+mysteriously on the youth's shoulder--the professor was a friend of
+his--asked him in a low voice, "Were you at that supper last night?"
+
+In his excited frame of mind Basilio thought the professor had
+said _night before last_, which was the time of his interview with
+Simoun. He tried to explain. "I assure you," he stammered, "that as
+Capitan Tiago was worse--and besides I had to finish that book--"
+
+"You did well not to attend it," said the professor. "But you're a
+member of the students' association?"
+
+"I pay my dues."
+
+"Well then, a piece of advice: go home at once and destroy any papers
+you have that may compromise you."
+
+Basilio shrugged his shoulders--he had no papers, nothing more than
+his clinical notes.
+
+"Has Senor Simoun--"
+
+"Simoun has nothing to do with the affair, thank God!" interrupted
+the physician. "He was opportunely wounded by some unknown hand and
+is now confined to his bed. No, other hands are concerned in this,
+but hands no less terrible."
+
+Basilio drew a breath of relief. Simoun was the only one who could
+compromise him, although he thought of Cabesang Tales.
+
+"Are there tulisanes--"
+
+"No, man, nothing more than students."
+
+Basilio recovered his serenity. "What has happened then?" he made
+bold to ask.
+
+"Seditious pasquinades have been found; didn't you know about them?"
+
+"Where?"
+
+"In the University."
+
+"Nothing more than that?"
+
+"Whew! What more do you want?" asked the professor, almost in
+a rage. "The pasquinades are attributed to the students of the
+association--but, keep quiet!"
+
+The professor of pathology came along, a man who had more the look
+of a sacristan than of a physician. Appointed by the powerful mandate
+of the Vice-Rector, without other merit than unconditional servility
+to the corporation, he passed for a spy and an informer in the eyes
+of the rest of the faculty.
+
+The first professor returned his greeting coldly, and winked to
+Basilio, as he said to him, "Now I know that Capitan Tiago smells like
+a corpse--the crows and vultures have been gathering around him." So
+saying, he went inside.
+
+Somewhat calmed, Basilio now ventured to inquire for more details,
+but all that he could learn was that pasquinades had been found on
+the doors of the University, and that the Vice-Rector had ordered
+them to be taken down and sent to the Civil Government. It was said
+that they were filled with threats of assassination, invasion, and
+other braggadocio.
+
+The students made their comments on the affair. Their information
+came from the janitor, who had it from a servant in Santo Tomas,
+who had it from an usher. They prognosticated future suspensions and
+imprisonments, even indicating who were to be the victims--naturally
+the members of the association.
+
+Basilio then recalled Simoun's words: "The day in which they can get
+rid of you, you will not complete your course."
+
+"Could he have known anything?" he asked himself. "We'll see who is
+the most powerful."
+
+Recovering his serenity, he went on toward the University, to learn
+what attitude it behooved him to take and at the same time to see
+about his licentiateship. He passed along Calle Legazpi, then down
+through Beaterio, and upon arriving at the corner of this street
+and Calle Solana saw that something important must indeed have
+happened. Instead of the former lively, chattering groups on the
+sidewalks were to be seen civil-guards making the students move on,
+and these latter issuing from the University silent, some gloomy,
+some agitated, to stand off at a distance or make their way home.
+
+The first acquaintance he met was Sandoval, but Basilio called to him
+in vain. He seemed to have been smitten deaf. "Effect of fear on the
+gastro-intestinal juices," thought Basilio.
+
+Later he met Tadeo, who wore a Christmas face--at last that eternal
+holiday seemed to be realized.
+
+"What has happened, Tadeo?"
+
+"We'll have no school, at least for a week, old
+man! Sublime! Magnificent!" He rubbed his hands in glee.
+
+"But what has happened?"
+
+"They're going to arrest all of us in the association."
+
+"And are you glad of that?"
+
+"There'll be no school, there'll be no school!" He moved away almost
+bursting with joy.
+
+Basilio saw Juanito Pelaez approaching, pale and suspicious. This
+time his hump had reached its maximum, so great was his haste to get
+away. He had been one of the most active promoters of the association
+while things were running smoothly.
+
+"Eh, Pelaez, what's happened?"
+
+"Nothing, I know nothing. I didn't have anything to do with it,"
+he responded nervously. "I was always telling you that these things
+were quixotisms. It's the truth, you know I've said so to you?"
+
+Basilio did not remember whether he had said so or not, but to humor
+him replied, "Yes, man, but what's happened?"
+
+"It's the truth, isn't it? Look, you're a witness: I've always been
+opposed--you're a witness, don't forget it!"
+
+"Yes, man, but what's going on?"
+
+"Listen, you're a witness! I've never had anything to do with the
+members of the association, except to give them advice. You're not
+going to deny it now. Be careful, won't you?"
+
+"No, no, I won't deny it, but for goodness' sake, what has happened?"
+
+But Juanito was already far away. He had caught a glimpse of a guard
+approaching and feared arrest.
+
+Basilio then went on toward the University to see if perhaps the
+secretary's office might be open and if he could glean any further
+news. The office was closed, but there was an extraordinary commotion
+in the building. Hurrying up and down the stairways were friars, army
+officers, private persons, old lawyers and doctors, there doubtless
+to offer their services to the endangered cause.
+
+At a distance he saw his friend Isagani, pale and agitated, but radiant
+with youthful ardor, haranguing some fellow students with his voice
+raised as though he cared little that he be heard by everybody.
+
+"It seems preposterous, gentlemen, it seems unreal, that an incident so
+insignificant should scatter us and send us into flight like sparrows
+at whom a scarecrow has been shaken! But is this the first time that
+students have gone to prison for the sake of liberty? Where are those
+who have died, those who have been shot? Would you apostatize now?"
+
+"But who can the fool be that wrote such pasquinades?" demanded an
+indignant listener.
+
+"What does that matter to us?" rejoined Isagani. "We don't have
+to find out, let them find out! Before we know how they are drawn
+up, we have no need to make any show of agreement at a time like
+this. There where the danger is, there must we hasten, because honor
+is there! If what the pasquinades say is compatible with our dignity
+and our feelings, be he who he may that wrote them, he has done well,
+and we ought to be grateful to him and hasten to add our signatures
+to his! If they are unworthy of us, our conduct and our consciences
+will in themselves protest and defend us from every accusation!"
+
+Upon hearing such talk, Basilio, although he liked Isagani very
+much, turned and left. He had to go to Makaraig's house to see about
+the loan.
+
+Near the house of the wealthy student he observed whisperings and
+mysterious signals among the neighbors, but not comprehending what
+they meant, continued serenely on his way and entered the doorway. Two
+guards advanced and asked him what he wanted. Basilio realized that
+he had made a bad move, but he could not now retreat.
+
+"I've come to see my friend Makaraig," he replied calmly.
+
+The guards looked at each other. "Wait here," one of them said to
+him. "Wait till the corporal comes down."
+
+Basilio bit his lips and Simoun's words again recurred to him. Had
+they come to arrest Makaraig?--was his thought, but he dared not give
+it utterance. He did not have to wait long, for in a few moments
+Makaraig came down, talking pleasantly with the corporal. The two
+were preceded by a warrant officer.
+
+"What, you too, Basilio?" he asked.
+
+"I came to see you--"
+
+"Noble conduct!" exclaimed Makaraig laughing. "In time of calm,
+you avoid us."
+
+The corporal asked Basilio his name, then scanned a list. "Medical
+student, Calle Anloague?" he asked.
+
+Basilio bit his lip.
+
+"You've saved us a trip," added the corporal, placing his hand on
+the youth's shoulder. "You're under arrest!"
+
+"What, I also?"
+
+Makaraig burst out into laughter.
+
+"Don't worry, friend. Let's get into the carriage, while I tell you
+about the supper last night."
+
+With a graceful gesture, as though he were in his own house, he
+invited the warrant officer and the corporal to enter the carriage
+that waited at the door.
+
+"To the Civil Government!" he ordered the cochero.
+
+Now that Basilio had again regained his composure, he told Makaraig
+the object of his visit. The rich student did not wait for him to
+finish, but seized his hand. "Count on me, count on me, and to the
+festivities celebrating our graduation we'll invite these gentlemen,"
+he said, indicating the corporal and the warrant officer.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+THE FRIAR AND THE FILIPINO
+
+
+    Vox populi, vox Dei
+
+
+We left Isagani haranguing his friends. In the midst of his enthusiasm
+an usher approached him to say that Padre Fernandez, one of the higher
+professors, wished to talk with him.
+
+Isagani's face fell. Padre Fernandez was a person greatly respected
+by him, being the _one_ always excepted by him whenever the friars
+were attacked.
+
+"What does Padre Fernandez want?" he inquired.
+
+The usher shrugged his shoulders and Isagani reluctantly followed him.
+
+Padre Fernandez, the friar whom we met in Los Banos, was waiting
+in his cell, grave and sad, with his brows knitted as if he were
+in deep thought. He arose as Isagani entered, shook hands with him,
+and closed the door. Then he began to pace from one end of the room
+to the other. Isagani stood waiting for him to speak.
+
+"Senor Isagani," he began at length with some emotion, "from the
+window I've heard you speaking, for though I am a consumptive I have
+good ears, and I want to talk with you. I have always liked the young
+men who express themselves clearly and have their own way of thinking
+and acting, no matter that their ideas may differ from mine. You
+young men, from what I have heard, had a supper last night. Don't
+excuse yourself--"
+
+"I don't intend to excuse myself!" interrupted Isagani.
+
+"So much the better--it shows that you accept the consequences of your
+actions. Besides, you would do ill in retracting, and I don't blame
+you, I take no notice of what may have been said there last night,
+I don't accuse you, because after all you're free to say of the
+Dominicans what seems best to you, you are not a pupil of ours--only
+this year have we had the pleasure of having you, and we shall
+probably not have you longer. Don't think that I'm going to invoke
+considerations of gratitude; no, I'm not going to waste my time in
+stupid vulgarisms. I've had you summoned here because I believe that
+you are one of the few students who act from conviction, and, as I
+like men of conviction, I'm going to explain myself to Senor Isagani."
+
+Padre Fernandez paused, then continued his walk with bowed head,
+his gaze riveted on the floor.
+
+"You may sit down, if you wish," he remarked. "It's a habit of mine
+to walk about while talking, because my ideas come better then."
+
+Isagani remained standing, with his head erect, waiting for the
+professor to get to the point of the matter.
+
+"For more than eight years I have been a professor here," resumed
+Padre Fernandez, still continuing to pace back and forth, "and in
+that time I've known and dealt with more than twenty-five hundred
+students. I've taught them, I've tried to educate them, I've tried to
+inculcate in them principles of justice and of dignity, and yet in
+these days when there is so much murmuring against us I've not seen
+one who has the temerity to maintain his accusations when he finds
+himself in the presence of a friar, not even aloud in the presence
+of any numbers. Young men there are who behind our backs calumniate
+us and before us kiss our hands, with a base smile begging kind looks
+from us! Bah! What do you wish that we should do with such creatures?"
+
+"The fault is not all theirs, Padre," replied Isagani. "The fault
+lies partly with those who have taught them to be hypocrites,
+with those who have tyrannized over freedom of thought and freedom
+of speech. Here every independent thought, every word that is not an
+echo of the will of those in power, is characterized as filibusterism,
+and you know well enough what that means. A fool would he be who to
+please himself would say aloud what he thinks, who would lay himself
+liable to suffer persecution!"
+
+"What persecution have you had to suffer?" asked Padre Fernandez,
+raising his head. "Haven't I let you express yourself freely in my
+class? Nevertheless, you are an exception that, if what you say is
+true, I must correct, so as to make the rule as general as possible
+and thus avoid setting a bad example."
+
+Isagani smiled. "I thank you, but I will not discuss with you whether
+I am an exception. I will accept your qualification so that you
+may accept mine: you also are an exception, and as here we are not
+going to talk about exceptions, nor plead for ourselves, at least,
+I mean, _I'm not_, I beg of my _professor_ to change the course of
+the conversation."
+
+In spite of his liberal principles, Padre Fernandez raised his head
+and stared in surprise at Isagani. That young man was more independent
+than he had thought--although he called him _professor_, in reality
+he was dealing with him as an equal, since he allowed himself to
+offer suggestions. Like a wise diplomat, Padre Fernandez not only
+recognized the fact but even took his stand upon it.
+
+"Good enough!" he said. "But don't look upon me as your professor. I'm
+a friar and you are a Filipino student, nothing more nor less! Now
+I ask you--what do the Filipino students want of us?"
+
+The question came as a surprise; Isagani was not prepared for it. It
+was a thrust made suddenly while they were preparing their defense,
+as they say in fencing. Thus startled, Isagani responded with a
+violent stand, like a beginner defending himself.
+
+"That you do your duty!" he exclaimed.
+
+Fray Fernandez straightened up--that reply sounded to him like a
+cannon-shot. "That we do our duty!" he repeated, holding himself
+erect. "Don't we, then, do our duty? What duties do you ascribe to us?"
+
+"Those which you voluntarily placed upon yourselves on joining
+the order, and those which afterwards, once in it, you have been
+willing to assume. But, as a Filipino student, I don't think myself
+called upon to examine your conduct with reference to your statutes,
+to Catholicism, to the government, to the Filipino people, and to
+humanity in general--those are questions that you have to settle
+with your founders, with the Pope, with the government, with the
+whole people, and with God. As a Filipino student, I will confine
+myself to your duties toward us. The friars in general, being the
+local supervisors of education in the provinces, and the Dominicans
+in particular, by monopolizing in their hands all the studies of the
+Filipino youth, have assumed the obligation to its eight millions
+of inhabitants, to Spain, and to humanity, of which we form a part,
+of steadily bettering the young plant, morally and physically,
+of training it toward its happiness, of creating a people honest,
+prosperous, intelligent, virtuous, noble, and loyal. Now I ask you
+in my turn--have the friars fulfilled that obligation of theirs?"
+
+"We're fulfilling--"
+
+"Ah, Padre Fernandez," interrupted Isagani, "you with your hand on
+_your_ heart can say that you are fulfilling it, but with your hand
+on the heart of your order, on the heart of all the orders, you cannot
+say that without deceiving yourself. Ah, Padre Fernandez, when I find
+myself in the presence of a person whom I esteem and respect, I prefer
+to be the accused rather than the accuser, I prefer to defend myself
+rather than take the offensive. But now that we have entered upon
+the discussion, let us carry it to the end! How do they fulfill their
+obligation, those who look after education in the towns? By hindering
+it! And those who here monopolize education, those who try to mold the
+mind of youth, to the exclusion of all others whomsoever, how do they
+carry out their mission? By curtailing knowledge as much as possible,
+by extinguishing all ardor and enthusiasm, by trampling on all dignity,
+the soul's only refuge, by inculcating in us worn-out ideas, rancid
+beliefs, false principles incompatible with a life of progress! Ah,
+yes, when it is a question of feeding convicts, of providing for the
+maintenance of criminals, the government calls for bids in order
+to find the purveyor who offers the best means of subsistence,
+he who at least will not let them perish from hunger, but when it
+is a question of morally feeding a whole people, of nourishing the
+intellect of youth, the healthiest part, that which is later to be the
+country and the all, the government not only does not ask for any bid,
+but restricts the power to that very body which makes a boast of not
+desiring education, of wishing no advancement. What should we say if
+the purveyor for the prisons, after securing the contract by intrigue,
+should then leave the prisoners to languish in want, giving them only
+what is stale and rancid, excusing himself afterwards by saying that
+it is not convenient for the prisoners to enjoy good health, because
+good health brings merry thoughts, because merriment improves the man,
+and the man ought not to be improved, because it is to the purveyor's
+interest that there be many criminals? What should we say if afterwards
+the government and the purveyor should agree between themselves that
+of the ten or twelve cuartos which one received for each criminal,
+the other should receive five?"
+
+Padre Fernandek bit his lip. "Those are grave charges," he said,
+"and you are overstepping the limits of our agreement."
+
+"No, Padre, not if I continue to deal with the student question. The
+friars--and I do not say, you friars, since I do not confuse you
+with the common herd--the friars of all the orders have constituted
+themselves our mental purveyors, yet they say and shamelessly proclaim
+that it is not expedient for us to become enlightened, because some
+day we shall declare ourselves free! That is just the same as not
+wishing the prisoner to be well-fed so that he may improve and get out
+of prison. Liberty is to man what education is to the intelligence,
+and the friars' unwillingness that we have it is the origin of our
+discontent."
+
+"Instruction is given only to those who deserve it," rejoined Padre
+Fernandez dryly. "To give it to men without character and without
+morality is to prostitute it."
+
+"Why are there men without character and without morality?"
+
+The Dominican shrugged his shoulders. "Defects that they imbibe with
+their mothers' milk, that they breathe in the bosom of the family--how
+do I know?"
+
+"Ah, no, Padre Fernandez!" exclaimed the young man impetuously. "You
+have not dared to go into the subject deeply, you have not wished
+to gaze into the depths from fear of finding yourself there in the
+darkness of your brethren. What we are, you have made us. A people
+tyrannized over is forced to be hypocritical; a people denied the
+truth must resort to lies; and he who makes himself a tyrant breeds
+slaves. There is no morality, you say, so let it be--even though
+statistics can refute you in that here are not committed crimes
+like those among other peoples, blinded by the fumes of their
+moralizers. But, without attempting now to analyze what it is that
+forms the character and how far the education received determines
+morality, I will agree with you that we are defective. Who is to
+blame for that? You who for three centuries and a half have had in
+your hands our education, or we who submit to everything? If after
+three centuries and a half the artist has been able to produce only
+a caricature, stupid indeed he must be!"
+
+"Or bad enough the material he works upon."
+
+"Stupider still then, when, knowing it to be bad, he does not give
+it up, but goes on wasting time. Not only is he stupid, but he is
+a cheat and a robber, because he knows that his work is useless,
+yet continues to draw his salary. Not only is he stupid and a thief,
+he is a villain in that he prevents any other workman from trying
+his skill to see if he might not produce something worth while! The
+deadly jealousy of the incompetent!"
+
+The reply was sharp and Padre Fernandez felt himself caught. To his
+gaze Isagani appeared gigantic, invincible, convincing, and for the
+first time in his life he felt beaten by a Filipino student. He
+repented of having provoked the argument, but it was too late to
+turn back. In this quandary, finding himself confronted with such
+a formidable adversary, he sought a strong shield and laid hold of
+the government.
+
+"You impute all the faults to us, because you see only us, who are
+near," he said in a less haughty tone. "It's natural and doesn't
+surprise me. A person hates the soldier or policeman who arrests him
+and not the judge who sends him to prison. You and we are both dancing
+to the same measure of music--if at the same note you lift your foot in
+unison with us, don't blame us for it, it's the music that is directing
+our movements. Do you think that we friars have no consciences and
+that we do not desire what is right? Do you believe that we do not
+think about you, that we do not heed our duty, that we only eat to
+live, and live to rule? Would that it were so! But we, like you,
+follow the cadence, finding ourselves between Scylla and Charybdis:
+either you reject us or the government rejects us. The government
+commands, and he who commands, commands,--and must be obeyed!"
+
+"From which it may be inferred," remarked Isagani with a bitter smile,
+"that the government wishes our demoralization."
+
+"Oh, no, I didn't mean that! What I meant to say is that there are
+beliefs, there are theories, there are laws, which, dictated with
+the best intention, produce the most deplorable consequences. I'll
+explain myself better by citing an example. To stamp out a small
+evil, there are dictated many laws that cause greater evils still:
+'_corruptissima in republica plurimae leges,_' said Tacitus. To
+prevent one case of fraud, there are provided a million and a half
+preventive or humiliating regulations, which produce the immediate
+effect of awakening in the public the desire to elude and mock
+such regulations. To make a people criminal, there's nothing more
+needed than to doubt its virtue. Enact a law, not only here, but
+even in Spain, and you will see how the means of evading it will be
+sought, and this is for the very reason that the legislators have
+overlooked the fact that the more an object is hidden, the more a
+sight of it is desired. Why are rascality and astuteness regarded
+as great qualities in the Spanish people, when there is no other so
+noble, so proud, so chivalrous as it? Because our legislators, with
+the best intentions, have doubted its nobility, wounded its pride,
+challenged its chivalry! Do you wish to open in Spain a road among the
+rocks? Then place there an imperative notice forbidding the passage,
+and the people, in order to protest against the order, will leave the
+highway to clamber over the rocks. The day on which some legislator in
+Spain forbids virtue and commands vice, then all will become virtuous!"
+
+The Dominican paused for a brief space, then resumed: "But you may
+say that we are getting away from the subject, so I'll return to
+it. What I can say to you, to convince you, is that the vices from
+which you suffer ought to be ascribed by you neither to us nor to the
+government. They are due to the imperfect organization of our social
+system: _qui multum probat, nihil probat_, one loses himself through
+excessive caution, lacking what is necessary and having too much of
+what is superfluous."
+
+"If you admit those defects in your social system," replied Isagani,
+"why then do you undertake to regulate alien societies, instead of
+first devoting your attention to yourselves?"
+
+"We're getting away from the subject, young man. The theory in
+accomplished facts must be accepted."
+
+"So let it be! I accept it because it is an accomplished fact, but
+I will further ask: why, if your social organization is defective,
+do you not change it or at least give heed to the cry of those who
+are injured by it?"
+
+"We're still far away. Let's talk about what the students want from
+the friars."
+
+"From the moment when the friars hide themselves behind the government,
+the students have to turn to it."
+
+This statement was true and there appeared no means of ignoring it.
+
+"I'm not the government and I can't answer for its acts. What do
+the students wish us to do for them within the limits by which we
+are confined?"
+
+"Not to oppose the emancipation of education but to favor it."
+
+The Dominican shook his head. "Without stating my own opinion, that
+is asking us to commit suicide," he said.
+
+"On the contrary, it is asking you for room to pass in order not to
+trample upon and crush you."
+
+"Ahem!" coughed Padre Fernandez, stopping and remaining
+thoughtful. "Begin by asking something that does not cost so much,
+something that any one of us can grant without abatement of dignity
+or privilege, for if we can reach an understanding and dwell in peace,
+why this hatred, why this distrust?"
+
+"Then let's get down to details."
+
+"Yes, because if we disturb the foundation, we'll bring down the
+whole edifice."
+
+"Then let's get down to details, let's leave the region of abstract
+principles," rejoined Isagani with a smile, "and _also without stating
+my own opinion,_"--the youth accented these words--"the students
+would desist from their attitude and soften certain asperities if
+the professors would try to treat them better than they have up to
+the present. That is in their hands."
+
+"What?" demanded the Dominican. "Have the students any complaint to
+make about my conduct?"
+
+"Padre, we agreed from the start not to talk of yourself or of myself,
+we're speaking generally. The students, besides getting no great
+benefit out of the years spent in the classes, often leave there
+remnants of their dignity, if not the whole of it."
+
+Padre Fernandez again bit his lip. "No one forces them to study--the
+fields are uncultivated," he observed dryly.
+
+"Yes, there is something that impels them to study," replied Isagani
+in the same tone, looking the Dominican full in the face. "Besides
+the duty of every one to seek his own perfection, there is the desire
+innate in man to cultivate his intellect, a desire the more powerful
+here in that it is repressed. He who gives his gold and his life to the
+State has the right to require of it opporttmity better to get that
+gold and better to care for his life. Yes, Padre, there is something
+that impels them, and that something is the government itself. It is
+you yourselves who pitilessly ridicule the uncultured Indian and deny
+him his rights, on the ground that he is ignorant. You strip him and
+then scoff at his nakedness."
+
+Padre Fernandez did not reply, but continued to pace about feverishly,
+as though very much agitated.
+
+"You say that the fields are not cultivated," resumed Isagani in a
+changed tone, after a brief pause. "Let's not enter upon an analysis
+of the reason for this, because we should get far away. But you,
+Padre Fernandez, you, a teacher, you, a learned man, do you wish a
+people of peons and laborers? In your opinion, is the laborer the
+perfect state at which man may arrive in his development? Or is it
+that you wish knowledge for yourself and labor for the rest?"
+
+"No, I want knowledge for him who deserves it, for him who knows how
+to use it," was the reply. "When the students demonstrate that they
+love it, when young men of conviction appear, young men who know how
+to maintain their dignity and make it respected, then there will be
+knowledge, then there will be considerate professors! If there are
+now professors who resort to abuse, it is because there are pupils
+who submit to it."
+
+"When there are professors, there will be students!"
+
+"Begin by reforming yourselves, you who have need of change, and we
+will follow."
+
+"Yes," said Isagani with a bitter laugh, "let us begin it, because
+the difficulty is on our side. Well you know what is expected of
+a pupil who stands before a professor--you yourself, with all your
+love of justice, with all your kind sentiments, have been restraining
+yourself by a great effort while I have been telling you bitter truths,
+you yourself, Padre Fernandez! What good has been secured by him among
+us who has tried to inculcate other ideas? What evils have not fallen
+upon you because you have tried to be just and perform your duty?"
+
+"Senor Isagani," said the Dominican, extending his hand, "although it
+may seem that nothing practical has resulted from this conversation,
+yet something has been gained. I'll talk to my brethren about what
+you have told me and I hope that something can be done. Only I fear
+that they won't believe in your existence."
+
+"I fear the same," returned Isagani, shaking the Dominican's hand. "I
+fear that my friends will not believe in your existence, as you have
+revealed yourself to me today." [57]
+
+Considering the interview at an end, the young man took his leave.
+
+Padre Fernandez opened the door and followed him with his gaze until
+he disappeared around a corner in the corridor. For some time he
+listened to the retreating footsteps, then went back into his cell
+and waited for the youth to appear in the street.
+
+He saw him and actually heard him say to a friend who asked where he
+was going: "To the Civil Government! I'm going to see the pasquinades
+and join the others!"
+
+His startled friend stared at him as one would look at a person who
+is about to commit suicide, then moved away from him hurriedly.
+
+"Poor boy!" murmured Padre Fernandez, feeling his eyes moisten. "I
+grudge you to the Jesuits who educated you."
+
+But Padre Fernandez was completely mistaken; the Jesuits repudiated
+Isagani [58] when that afternoon they learned that he had been
+arrested, saying that he would compromise them. "That young man has
+thrown himself away, he's going to do us harm! Let it be understood
+that he didn't get those ideas here."
+
+Nor were the Jesuits wrong. No! Those ideas come only from God through
+the medium of Nature.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+TATAKUT
+
+
+With prophetic inspiration Ben-Zayb had been for some days past
+maintaining in his newspaper that education was disastrous, very
+disastrous for the Philippine Islands, and now in view of the events of
+that Friday of pasquinades, the writer crowed and chanted his triumph,
+leaving belittled and overwhelmed his adversary _Horatius_, who in
+the _Pirotecnia_ had dared to ridicule him in the following manner:
+
+
+    From our contemporary, _El Grito_:
+
+    "Education is disastrous, very disastrous, for the Philippine
+    Islands."
+
+    Admitted.
+
+    For some time _El Grito_ has pretended to represent the
+    Filipino people--_ergo_, as Fray Ibanez would say, if he
+    knew Latin.
+
+    But Fray Ibanez turns Mussulman when he writes, and we know
+    how the Mussulmans dealt with education. _In witness whereof_,
+    as a royal preacher said, the Alexandrian library!
+
+
+Now he was right, he, Ben-Zayb! He was the only one in the islands
+who thought, the only one who foresaw events!
+
+Truly, the news that seditious pasquinades had been found on the
+doors of the University not only took away the appetite from many
+and disturbed the digestion of others, but it even rendered the
+phlegmatic Chinese uneasy, so that they no longer dared to sit in
+their shops with one leg drawn up as usual, from fear of losing time
+in extending it in order to put themselves into flight. At eight
+o'clock in the morning, although the sun continued on its course and
+his Excellency, the Captain-General, did not appear at the head of
+his victorious cohorts, still the excitement had increased. The friars
+who were accustomed to frequent Quiroga's bazaar did not put in their
+appearance, and this symptom presaged terrific cataclysms. If the
+sun had risen a square and the saints appeared only in pantaloons,
+Quiroga would not have been so greatly alarmed, for he would have
+taken the sun for a gaming-table and the sacred images for gamblers
+who had lost their camisas, but for the friars not to come, precisely
+when some novelties had just arrived for them!
+
+By means of a provincial friend of his, Quiroga forbade entrance into
+his gaming-houses to every Indian who was not an old acquaintance,
+as the future Chinese consul feared that they might get possession of
+the sums that the wretches lost there. After arranging his bazaar in
+such a way that he could close it quickly in case of need, he had a
+policeman accompany him for the short distance that separated his house
+from Simoun's. Quiroga thought this occasion the most propitious for
+making use of the rifles and cartridges that he had in his warehouse,
+in the way the jeweler had pointed out; so that on the following
+days there would be searches made, and then--how many prisoners, how
+many terrified people would give up their savings! It was the game of
+the old carbineers, in slipping contraband cigars and tobacco-leaves
+under a house, in order to pretend a search and force the unfortunate
+owner to bribery or fines, only now the art had been perfected and,
+the tobacco monopoly abolished, resort was had to the prohibited arms.
+
+But Simoun refused to see any one and sent word to the Chinese that
+he should leave things as they were, whereupon he went to see Don
+Custodio to inquire whether he should fortify his bazaar, but neither
+would Don Custodio receive him, being at the time engaged in the study
+of a project for defense in case of a siege. He thought of Ben-Zayb
+as a source of information, but finding the writer armed to the teeth
+and using two loaded revolvers for paper-weights, took his leave in
+the shortest possible time, to shut himself up in his house and take
+to his bed under pretense of illness.
+
+At four in the afternoon the talk was no longer of simple
+pasquinades. There were whispered rumors of an understanding between
+the students and the outlaws of San Mateo, it was certain that in the
+_pansiteria_ they had conspired to surprise the city, there was talk
+of German ships outside the bay to support the movement, of a band
+of young men who under the pretext of protesting and demonstrating
+their Hispanism had gone to the Palace to place themselves at the
+General's orders but had been arrested because it was discovered that
+they were armed. Providence had saved his Excellency, preventing him
+from receiving those precocious criminals, as he was at the time in
+conference with the Provincials, the Vice-Rector, and with Padre Irene,
+Padre Salvi's representative. There was considerable truth in these
+rumors, if we have to believe Padre Irene, who in the afternoon went
+to visit Capitan Tiago. According to him, certain persons had advised
+his Excellency to improve the opportunity in order to inspire terror
+and administer a lasting lesson to the filibusters.
+
+"A number shot," one had advised, "some two dozen reformers deported
+at once, in the silence of the night, would extinguish forever the
+flames of discontent."
+
+"No," rejoined another, who had a kind heart, "sufficient that the
+soldiers parade through the streets, a troop of cavalry, for example,
+with drawn sabers--sufficient to drag along some cannon, that's
+enough! The people are timid and will all retire into their houses."
+
+"No, no," insinuated another. "This is the opportunity to get rid of
+the enemy. It's not sufficient that they retire into their houses, they
+should be made to come out, like evil humors by means of plasters. If
+they are inclined to start riots, they should be stirred up by secret
+agitators. I am of the opinion that the troops should be resting on
+their arms and appearing careless and indifferent, so the people may be
+emboldened, and then in case of any disturbance--out on them, action!"
+
+"The end justifies the means," remarked another. "Our end is our
+holy religion and the integrity of the fatherland. Proclaim a state
+of siege, and in case of the least disturbance, arrest all the rich
+and educated, and--clean up the country!"
+
+"If I hadn't got there in time to counsel moderation," added Padre
+Irene, speaking to Capitan Tiago, "it's certain that blood would
+now be flowing through the streets. I thought of you, Capitan--The
+partizans of force couldn't do much with the General, and they missed
+Simoun. Ah, if Simoun had not been taken ill--"
+
+With the arrest of Basilio and the search made later among his books
+and papers, Capitan Tiago had become much worse. Now Padre Irene had
+come to augment his terror with hair-raising tales. Ineffable fear
+seized upon the wretch, manifesting itself first by a light shiver,
+which was rapidly accentuated, until he was unable to speak. With his
+eyes bulging and his brow covered with sweat, he caught Padre Irene's
+arm and tried to rise, but could not, and then, uttering two groans,
+fell heavily back upon the pillow. His eyes were wide open and he
+was slavering--but he was dead. The terrified Padre Irene fled, and,
+as the dying man had caught hold of him, in his flight he dragged the
+corpse from the bed, leaving it sprawling in the middle of the room.
+
+By night the terror had reached a climax. Several incidents had
+occurred to make the timorous believe in the presence of secret
+agitators.
+
+During a baptism some cuartos were thrown to the boys and naturally
+there was a scramble at the door of the church. It happened that at
+the time there was passing a bold soldier, who, somewhat preoccupied,
+mistook the uproar for a gathering of filibusters and hurled himself,
+sword in hand, upon the boys. He went into the church, and had he not
+become entangled in the curtains suspended from the choir he would
+not have left a single head on shoulders. It was but the matter of a
+moment for the timorous to witness this and take to flight, spreading
+the news that the revolution had begun. The few shops that had been
+kept open were now hastily closed, there being Chinese who even left
+bolts of cloth outside, and not a few women lost their slippers in
+their flight through the streets. Fortunately, there was only one
+person wounded and a few bruised, among them the soldier himself,
+who suffered a fall fighting with the curtain, which smelt to him of
+filibusterism. Such prowess gained him great renown, and a renown
+so pure that it is to be wished all fame could be acquired in like
+manner--mothers would then weep less and earth would be more populous!
+
+In a suburb the inhabitants caught two unknown individuals burying
+arms under a house, whereupon a tumult arose and the people pursued
+the strangers in order to kill them and turn their bodies over to the
+authorities, but some one pacified the excited crowd by telling them
+that it would be sufficient to hand over the _corpora delictorum_,
+which proved to be some old shotguns that would surely have killed
+the first person who tried to fire them.
+
+"All right," exclaimed one braggart, "if they want us to rebel,
+let's go ahead!" But he was cuffed and kicked into silence, the women
+pinching him as though he had been the owner of the shotguns.
+
+In Ermita the affair was more serious, even though there was less
+excitement, and that when there were shots fired. A certain cautious
+government employee, armed to the teeth, saw at nightfall an object
+near his house, and taking it for nothing less than a student, fired
+at it twice with a revolver. The object proved to be a policeman,
+and they buried him--_pax Christi! Mutis!_
+
+In Dulumbayan various shots also resounded, from which there resulted
+the death of a poor old deaf man, who had not heard the sentinel's
+_quien vive_, and of a hog that had heard it and had not answered
+_Espana_! The old man was buried with difficulty, since there was no
+money to pay for the obsequies, but the hog was eaten.
+
+In Manila, [59] in a confectionery near the University much frequented
+by the students, the arrests were thus commented upon.
+
+"And have they arrested Tadeo?" [60] asked the proprietess.
+
+"_Aba_!" answered a student who lived in Parian, "he's already shot!"
+
+"Shot! _Naku_! He hasn't paid what he owes me."
+
+"Ay, don't mention that or you'll be taken for an accomplice. I've
+already burnt the book [61] you lent me. There might be a search and
+it would be found. Be careful!"
+
+"Did you say that Isagani is a prisoner?"
+
+"Crazy fool, too, that Isagani," replied the indignant student. "They
+didn't try to catch him, but he went and surrendered. Let him bust
+himself--he'll surely be shot."
+
+The senora shrugged her shoulders. "He doesn't owe me anything. And
+what about Paulita?"
+
+"She won't lack a husband. Sure, she'll cry a little, and then marry
+a Spaniard."
+
+The night was one of the gloomiest. In the houses the rosary was
+recited and pious women dedicated paternosters and requiems to each
+of the souls of their relatives and friends. By eight o'clock hardly
+a pedestrian could be seen--only from time to time was heard the
+galloping of a horse against whose sides a saber clanked noisily,
+then the whistles of the watchmen, and carriages that whirled along
+at full speed, as though pursued by mobs of filibusters.
+
+Yet terror did not reign everywhere. In the house of the silversmith,
+where Placido Penitente boarded, the events were commented upon and
+discussed with some freedom.
+
+"I don't believe in the pasquinades," declared a workman, lank and
+withered from operating the blowpipe. "To me it looks like Padre
+Salvi's doings."
+
+"Ahem, ahem!" coughed the silversmith, a very prudent man, who did not
+dare to stop the conversation from fear that he would be considered
+a coward. The good man had to content himself with coughing, winking
+to his helper, and gazing toward the street, as if to say, "They may
+be watching us!"
+
+"On account of the operetta," added another workman.
+
+"Aha!" exclaimed one who had a foolish face, "I told you so!"
+
+"Ahem!" rejoined a clerk, in a tone of compassion, "the affair of
+the pasquinades is true, Chichoy, and I can give you the explanation."
+
+Then he added mysteriously, "It's a trick of the Chinaman Quiroga's!"
+
+"Ahem, ahem!" again coughed the silversmith, shifting his quid of
+buyo from one cheek to the other.
+
+"Believe me, Chichoy, of Quiroga the Chinaman! I heard it in the
+office."
+
+"_Naku_, it's certain then," exclaimed the simpleton, believing it
+at once.
+
+"Quiroga," explained the clerk, "has a hundred thousand pesos in
+Mexican silver out in the bay. How is he to get it in? Very easily. Fix
+up the pasquinades, availing himself of the question of the students,
+and, while every-body is excited, grease the officials' palms, and
+in the cases come!"
+
+"Just it! Just it!" cried the credulous fool, striking the table
+with his fist. "Just it! That's why Quiroga did it! That's why--"
+But he had to relapse into silence as he really did not know what to
+say about Quiroga.
+
+"And we must pay the damages?" asked the indignant Chichoy.
+
+"Ahem, ahem, a-h-hem!" coughed the silversmith, hearing steps in
+the street.
+
+The footsteps approached and all in the shop fell silent.
+
+"St. Pascual Bailon is a great saint," declared the silversmith
+hypocritically, in a loud voice, at the same time winking to the
+others. "St. Pascual Bailon--"
+
+At that moment there appeared the face of Placido Penitente, who was
+accompanied by the pyrotechnician that we saw receiving orders from
+Simoun. The newcomers were surrounded and importuned for news.
+
+"I haven't been able to talk with the prisoners," explained
+Placido. "There are some thirty of them."
+
+"Be on your guard," cautioned the pyrotechnician, exchanging a
+knowing look with Placido. "They say that to-night there's going to
+be a massacre."
+
+"Aha! Thunder!" exclaimed Chichoy, looking about for a weapon. Seeing
+none, he caught up his blowpipe.
+
+The silversmith sat down, trembling in every limb. The credulous
+simpleton already saw himself beheaded and wept in anticipation over
+the fate of his family.
+
+"No," contradicted the clerk, "there's not going to be any
+massacre. The adviser of"--he made a mysterious gesture--"is
+fortunately sick."
+
+"Simoun!"
+
+"Ahem, ahem, a-h-hem!"
+
+Placido and the pyrotechnician exchanged another look.
+
+"If he hadn't got sick--"
+
+"It would look like a revolution," added the pyrotechnician
+negligently, as he lighted a cigarette in the lamp chimney. "And what
+should we do then?"
+
+"Then we'd start a real one, now that they're going to massacre
+us anyhow--"
+
+The violent fit of coughing that seized the silversmith prevented
+the rest of this speech from being heard, but Chichoy must have been
+saying terrible things, to judge from his murderous gestures with
+the blowpipe and the face of a Japanese tragedian that he put on.
+
+"Rather say that he's playing off sick because he's afraid to go
+out. As may be seen--"
+
+The silversmith was attacked by another fit of coughing so severe
+that he finally asked all to retire.
+
+"Nevertheless, get ready," warned the pyrotechnician. "If they want
+to force us to kill or be killed--"
+
+Another fit of coughing on the part of the poor silversmith prevented
+further conversation, so the workmen and apprentices retired to their
+homes, carrying with them hammers and saws, and other implements,
+more or less cutting, more or less bruising, disposed to sell their
+lives dearly. Placido and the pyrotechnician went out again.
+
+"Prudence, prudence!" cautioned the silversmith in a tearful voice.
+
+"You'll take care of my widow and orphans!" begged the credulous
+simpleton in a still more tearful voice, for he already saw himself
+riddled with bullets and buried.
+
+That night the guards at the city gates were replaced with Peninsular
+artillerymen, and on the following morning as the sun rose, Ben-Zayb,
+who had ventured to take a morning stroll to examine the condition of
+the fortifications, found on the glacis near the Luneta the corpse
+of a native girl, half-naked and abandoned. Ben-Zayb was horrified,
+but after touching it with his cane and gazing toward the gates
+proceeded on his way, musing over a sentimental tale he might base
+upon the incident.
+
+However, no allusion to it appeared in the newspapers on the following
+days, engrossed as they were with the falls and slippings caused by
+banana-peels. In the dearth of news Ben-Zayb had to comment at length
+on a cyclone that had destroyed in America whole towns, causing the
+death of more than two thousand persons. Among other beautiful things
+he said:
+
+
+    "_The sentiment of charity_, MORE PREVALENT IN CATHOLIC
+    COUNTRIES THAN IN OTHERS, and the thought of Him who,
+    influenced by that same feeling, sacrificed himself for
+    _humanity, moves (sic)_ us to compassion over the misfortunes
+    of our kind and to render thanks that _in this country_,
+    so scourged by cyclones, there are not enacted scenes so
+    desolating as that which the inhabitants of the United States
+    mus have witnessed!"
+
+
+_Horatius_ did not miss the opportunity, and, also without mentioning
+the dead, or the murdered native girl, or the assaults, answered him
+in his _Pirotecnia_:
+
+
+    "After such great charity and such great humanity, Fray
+    Ibanez--I mean, Ben-Zayb--brings himself to pray for the
+    Philippines.
+
+    But he is understood.
+
+    Because he is not Catholic, and the sentiment of charity is
+    most prevalent," etc. [62]
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+EXIT CAPITAN TIAGO
+
+
+    Talis vita, finis ita
+
+
+Capitan Tiago had a good end--that is, a quite exceptional
+funeral. True it is that the curate of the parish had ventured
+the observation to Padre Irene that Capitan Tiago had died without
+confession, but the good priest, smiling sardonically, had rubbed
+the tip of his nose and answered:
+
+"Why say that to me? If we had to deny the obsequies to all who
+die without confession, we should forget the _De profundis_! These
+restrictions, as you well know, are enforced when the impenitent is
+also insolvent. But Capitan Tiago--out on you! You've buried infidel
+Chinamen, and with a requiem mass!"
+
+Capitan Tiago had named Padre Irene as his executor and willed his
+property in part to St. Clara, part to the Pope, to the Archbishop, the
+religious corporations, leaving twenty pesos for the matriculation of
+poor students. This last clause had been dictated at the suggestion of
+Padre Irene, in his capacity as protector of studious youths. Capitan
+Tiago had annulled a legacy of twenty-five pesos that he had left
+to Basilio, in view of the ungrateful conduct of the boy during the
+last few days, but Padre Irene had restored it and announced that he
+would take it upon his own purse and conscience.
+
+In the dead man's house, where were assembled on the following day many
+old friends and acquaintances, considerable comment was indulged in
+over a miracle. It was reported that, at the very moment when he was
+dying, the soul of Capitan Tiago had appeared to the nuns surrounded
+by a brilliant light. God had saved him, thanks to the pious legacies,
+and to the numerous masses he had paid for. The story was commented
+upon, it was recounted vividly, it took on particulars, and was
+doubted by no one. The appearance of Capitan Tiago was minutely
+described--of course the frock coat, the cheek bulged out by the
+quid of buyo, without omitting the game-cock and the opium-pipe. The
+senior sacristan, who was present, gravely affirmed these facts with
+his head and reflected that, after death, he would appear with his
+cup of white _taju_, for without that refreshing breakfast he could
+not comprehend happiness either on earth or in heaven.
+
+On this subject, because of their inability to discuss the events
+of the preceding day and because there were gamblers present, many
+strange speculations were developed. They made conjectures as to
+whether Capitan Tiago would invite St. Peter to a _soltada_, whether
+they would place bets, whether the game-cocks were immortal, whether
+invulnerable, and in this case who would be the referee, who would win,
+and so on: discussions quite to the taste of those who found sciences,
+theories, and systems, based on a text which they esteem infallible,
+revealed or dogmatic. Moreover, there were cited passages from novenas,
+books of miracles, sayings of the curates, descriptions of heaven,
+and other embroidery. Don Primitivo, the philosopher, was in his
+glory quoting opinions of the theologians.
+
+"Because no one can lose," he stated with great authority. "To
+lose would cause hard feelings and in heaven there can't be any
+hard feelings."
+
+"But some one has to win," rejoined the gambler Aristorenas. "The
+fun lies in winning!"
+
+"Well, both win, that's easy!"
+
+This idea of both winning could not be admitted by Aristorenas,
+for he had passed his life in the cockpit and had always seen one
+cock lose and the other win--at best, there was a tie. Vainly Don
+Primitivo argued in Latin. Aristorenas shook his head, and that too
+when Don Primitivo's Latin was easy to understand, for he talked of _an
+gallus talisainus, acuto tari armatus, an gallus beati Petri bulikus
+sasabungus sit_, [63] and so on, until at length he decided to resort
+to the argument which many use to convince and silence their opponents.
+
+"You're going to be damned, friend Martin, you're falling into
+heresy! _Cave ne cadas!_ I'm not going to play monte with you any more,
+and we'll not set up a bank together. You deny the omnipotence of
+God, _peccatum mortale!_ You deny the existence of the Holy Trinity--
+three are one and one is three! Take care! You indirectly deny that
+two natures, two understandings, and two wills can have only one
+memory! Be careful! _Quicumque non crederit anathema sit!_"
+
+Martin Aristorenas shrank away pale and trembling, while Quiroga,
+who had listened with great attention to the argument, with marked
+deference offered the philosopher a magnificent cigar, at the same time
+asking in his caressing voice: "Surely, one can make a contract for a
+cockpit with Kilisto, [64] ha? When I die, I'll be the contractor, ha?"
+
+Among the others, they talked more of the deceased; at least they
+discussed what kind of clothing to put on him. Capitan Tinong proposed
+a Franciscan habit--and fortunately, he had one, old, threadbare, and
+patched, a precious object which, according to the friar who gave it to
+him as alms in exchange for thirty-six pesos, would preserve the corpse
+from the flames of hell and which reckoned in its support various pious
+anecdotes taken from the books distributed by the curates. Although he
+held this relic in great esteem, Capitan Tinong was disposed to part
+with it for the sake of his intimate friend, whom he had not been able
+to visit during his illness. But a tailor objected, with good reason,
+that since the nuns had seen Capitan Tiago ascending to heaven in a
+frock coat, in a frock coat he should be dressed here on earth, nor
+was there any necessity for preservatives and fire-proof garments. The
+deceased had attended balls and fiestas in a frock coat, and nothing
+else would be expected of him in the skies--and, wonderful to relate,
+the tailor accidentally happened to have one ready, which he would part
+with for thirty-two pesos, four cheaper than the Franciscan habit,
+because he didn't want to make any profit on Capitan Tiago, who had
+been his customer in life and would now be his patron in heaven. But
+Padre Irene, trustee and executor, rejected both proposals and ordered
+that the Capitan be dressed in one of his old suits of clothes,
+remarking with holy unction that God paid no attention to clothing.
+
+The obsequies were, therefore, of the very first class. There were
+responsories in the house, and in the street three friars officiated,
+as though one were not sufficient for such a great soul. All the
+rites and ceremonies possible were performed, and it is reported
+that there were even _extras_, as in the benefits for actors. It was
+indeed a delight: loads of incense were burned, there were plenty
+of Latin chants, large quantities of holy water were expended, and
+Padre Irene, out of regard for his old friend, sang the _Dies Irae_
+in a falsetto voice from the choir, while the neighbors suffered real
+headaches from so much knell-ringing.
+
+Dona Patrocinio, the ancient rival of Capitan Tiago in religiosity,
+actually wanted to die on the next day, so that she might order even
+more sumptuous obsequies. The pious old lady could not bear the thought
+that he, whom she had long considered vanquished forever, should in
+dying come forward again with so much pomp. Yes, she desired to die,
+and it seemed that she could hear the exclamations of the people at
+the funeral: "This indeed is what you call a funeral! This indeed is
+to know how to die, Dona Patrocinio!"
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+JULI
+
+
+The death of Capitan Tiago and Basilio's imprisonment were soon
+reported in the province, and to the honor of the simple inhabitants
+of San Diego, let it be recorded that the latter was the incident more
+regretted and almost the only one discussed. As was to be expected,
+the report took on different forms, sad and startling details were
+given, what could not be understood was explained, the gaps being
+filled by conjectures, which soon passed for accomplished facts,
+and the phantoms thus created terrified their own creators.
+
+In the town of Tiani it was reported that at least, at the very
+least, the young man was going to be deported and would very
+probably be murdered on the journey. The timorous and pessimistic
+were not satisfied with this but even talked about executions and
+courts-martial--January was a fatal month; in January the Cavite affair
+had occurred, and _they_ [65] even though curates, had been garroted,
+so a poor Basilio without protectors or friends--
+
+"I told him so!" sighed the Justice of the Peace, as if he had at
+some time given advice to Basilio. "I told him so."
+
+"It was to be expected," commented Sister Penchang. "He would go
+into the church and when he saw that the holy water was somewhat
+dirty he wouldn't cross himself with it. He talked about germs and
+disease, _aba_, it's the chastisement of God! He deserved it, and he
+got it! As though the holy water could transmit diseases! Quite the
+contrary, _aba!_"
+
+She then related how she had cured herself of indigestion by moistening
+her stomach with holy water, at the same time reciting the _Sanctus
+Deus_, and she recommended the remedy to those present when they should
+suffer from dysentery, or an epidemic occurred, only that then they
+must pray in Spanish:
+
+
+    Santo Dios,
+    Santo fuerte,
+    Santo inmortal,
+    iLibranos, Senor, de la peste
+    Y de todo mal! [66]
+
+
+"It's an infallible remedy, but you must apply the holy water to the
+part affected," she concluded.
+
+But there were many persons who did not believe in these things,
+nor did they attribute Basilio's imprisonment to the chastisement of
+God. Nor did they take any stock in insurrections and pasquinades,
+knowing the prudent and ultra-pacific character of the boy, but
+preferred to ascribe it to revenge on the part of the friars, because
+of his having rescued from servitude Juli, the daughter of a tulisan
+who was the mortal enemy of a certain powerful corporation. As they
+had quite a poor idea of the morality of that same corporation and
+could recall cases of petty revenge, their conjecture was believed
+to have more probability and justification.
+
+"What a good thing I did when I drove her from my house!" said Sister
+Penchang. "I don't want to have any trouble with the friars, so I
+urged her to find the money."
+
+The truth was, however, that she regretted Juli's liberty, for Juli
+prayed and fasted for her, and if she had stayed a longer time, would
+also have done penance. Why, if the curates pray for us and Christ
+died for our sins, couldn't Juli do the same for Sister Penchang?
+
+When the news reached the hut where the poor Juli and her grandfather
+lived, the girl had to have it repeated to her. She stared at Sister
+Bali, who was telling it, as though without comprehension, without
+ability to collect her thoughts. Her ears buzzed, she felt a sinking
+at the heart and had a vague presentiment that this event would have
+a disastrous influence on her own future. Yet she tried to seize upon
+a ray of hope, she smiled, thinking that Sister Bali was joking with
+her, a rather strong joke, to be sure, but she forgave her beforehand
+if she would acknowledge that it was such. But Sister Bali made a
+cross with one of her thumbs and a forefinger, and kissed it, to prove
+that she was telling the truth. Then the smile faded forever from the
+girl's lips, she turned pale, frightfully pale, she felt her strength
+leave her and for the first time in her life she lost consciousness,
+falling into a swoon.
+
+When by dint of blows, pinches, dashes of water, crosses, and the
+application of sacred palms, the girl recovered and remembered the
+situation, silent tears sprang from her eyes, drop by drop, without
+sobs, without laments, without complaints! She thought about Basilio,
+who had had no other protector than Capitan Tiago, and who now, with
+the Capitan dead, was left completely unprotected and in prison. In
+the Philippines it is a well-known fact that patrons are needed for
+everything, from the time one is christened until one dies, in order
+to get justice, to secure a passport, or to develop an industry. As
+it was said that his imprisonment was due to revenge on account of
+herself and her father, the girl's sorrow turned to desperation. Now
+it was her duty to liberate him, as he had done in rescuing her from
+servitude, and the inner voice which suggested the idea offered to
+her imagination a horrible means.
+
+"Padre Camorra, the curate," whispered the voice. Juli gnawed at her
+lips and became lost in gloomy meditation.
+
+As a result of her father's crime, her grandfather had been arrested in
+the hope that by such means the son could be made to appear. The only
+one who could get him his liberty was Padre Camorra, and Padre Camorra
+had shown himself to be poorly satisfied with her words of gratitude,
+having with his usual frankness asked for some sacrifices--since which
+time Juli had tried to avoid meeting him. But the curate made her kiss
+his hand, he twitched her nose and patted her cheeks, he joked with
+her, winking and laughing, and laughing he pinched her. Juli was also
+the cause of the beating the good curate had administered to some young
+men who were going about the village serenading the girls. Malicious
+ones, seeing her pass sad and dejected, would remark so that she
+might hear: "If she only wished it, Cabesang Tales would be pardoned."
+
+Juli reached her home, gloomy and with wandering looks. She had
+changed greatly, having lost her merriment, and no one ever saw her
+smile again. She scarcely spoke and seemed to be afraid to look at
+her own face. One day she was seen in the town with a big spot of
+soot on her forehead, she who used to go so trim and neat. Once she
+asked Sister Bali if the people who committed suicide went to hell.
+
+"Surely!" replied that woman, and proceeded to describe the place as
+though she had been there.
+
+Upon Basilio's imprisonment, the simple and grateful relatives had
+planned to make all kinds of sacrifices to save the young man, but
+as they could collect among themselves no more than thirty pesos,
+Sister Bali, as usual, thought of a better plan.
+
+"What we must do is to get some advice from the town clerk," she
+said. To these poor people, the town clerk was what the Delphic oracle
+was to the ancient Greeks.
+
+"By giving him a real and a cigar," she continued, "he'll tell you
+all the laws so that your head bursts listening to him. If you have
+a peso, he'll save you, even though you may be at the foot of the
+scaffold. When my friend Simon was put in jail and flogged for not
+being able to give evidence about a robbery perpetrated near his
+house, _aba_, for two reales and a half and a string of garlics,
+the town clerk got him out. And I saw Simon myself when he could
+scarcely walk and he had to stay in bed at least a month. Ay, his
+flesh rotted as a result and he died!"
+
+Sister Bali's advice was accepted and she herself volunteered to
+interview the town clerk. Juli gave her four reales and added some
+strips of jerked venison her grand-father had got, for Tandang Selo
+had again devoted himself to hunting.
+
+But the town clerk could do nothing--the prisoner was in Manila,
+and his power did not extend that far. "If at least he were at the
+capital, then--" he ventured, to make a show of his authority, which
+he knew very well did not extend beyond the boundaries of Tiani, but
+he had to maintain his prestige and keep the jerked venison. "But I
+can give you a good piece of advice, and it is that you go with Juli
+to see the Justice of the Peace. But it's very necessary that Juli go."
+
+The Justice of the Peace was a very rough fellow, but if he should
+see Juli he might conduct himself less rudely--this is wherein lay
+the wisdom of the advice.
+
+With great gravity the honorable Justice listened to Sister Bali,
+who did the talking, but not without staring from time to time at
+the girl, who hung her head with shame. People would say that she
+was greatly interested in Basilio, people who did not remember her
+debt of gratitude, nor that his imprisonment, according to report,
+was on her account.
+
+After belching three or four times, for his Honor had that ugly habit,
+he said that the only person who could save Basilio was Padre Camorra,
+_in case he should care to do so_. Here he stared meaningly at the
+girl and advised her to deal with the curate in person.
+
+"You know what influence he has,--he got your grand-father out of
+jail. A report from him is enough to deport a new-born babe or save
+from death a man with the noose about his neck."
+
+Juli said nothing, but Sister Bali took this advice as though she
+had read it in a novena, and was ready to accompany the girl to the
+convento. It so happened that she was just going there to get as alms
+a scapulary in exchange for four full reales.
+
+But Juli shook her head and was unwilling to go to the convento. Sister
+Bali thought she could guess the reason--Padre Camorra was reputed
+to be very fond of the women and was very frolicsome--so she tried
+to reassure her. "You've nothing to fear if I go with you. Haven't
+you read in the booklet _Tandang Basio_, given you by the curate,
+that the girls should go to the convento, even without the knowledge
+of their elders, to relate what is going on at home? _Aba_, that book
+is printed with the permission of the Archbishop!"
+
+Juli became impatient and wished to cut short such talk, so she begged
+the pious woman to go if she wished, but his Honor observed with a
+belch that the supplications of a youthful face were more moving than
+those of an old one, the sky poured its dew over the fresh flowers
+in greater abundance than over the withered ones. The metaphor was
+fiendishly beautiful.
+
+Juli did not reply and the two left the house. In the street the
+girl firmly refused to go to the convento and they returned to their
+village. Sister Bali, who felt offended at this lack of confidence
+in herself, on the way home relieved her feelings by administering
+a long preachment to the girl.
+
+The truth was that the girl could not take that step without damning
+herself in her own eyes, besides being cursed of men and cursed
+of God! It had been intimated to her several times, whether with
+reason or not, that if she would make that sacrifice her father would
+be pardoned, and yet she had refused, in spite of the cries of her
+conscience reminding her of her filial duty. Now must she make it for
+Basilio, her sweetheart? That would be to fall to the sound of mockery
+and laughter from all creation. Basilio himself would despise her! No,
+never! She would first hang herself or leap from some precipice. At
+any rate, she was already damned for being a wicked daughter.
+
+The poor girl had besides to endure all the reproaches of her
+relatives, who, knowing nothing of what had passed between her and
+Padre Camovra, laughed at her fears. Would Padre Camorra fix his
+attention upon a country girl when there were so many others in the
+town? Hero the good women cited names of unmarried girls, rich and
+beautiful, who had been more or less unfortunate. Meanwhile, if they
+should shoot Basilio?
+
+Juli covered her ears and stared wildly about, as if seeking a voice
+that might plead for her, but she saw only her grandfather, who was
+dumb and had his gaze fixed on his hunting-spear.
+
+That night she scarcely slept at all. Dreams and nightmares, some
+funereal, some bloody, danced before her sight and woke her often,
+bathed in cold perspiration. She fancied that she heard shots, she
+imagined that she saw her father, that father who had done so much
+for her, fighting in the forests, hunted like a wild beast because
+she had refused to save him. The figure of her father was transformed
+and she recognized Basilio, dying, with looks of reproach at her. The
+wretched girl arose, prayed, wept, called upon her mother, upon death,
+and there was even a moment when, overcome with terror, if it had
+not been night-time, she would have run straight to the convento,
+let happen what would.
+
+With the coming of day the sad presentiments and the terrors of
+darkness were partly dissipated. The light inspired hopes in her. But
+the news of the afternoon was terrible, for there was talk of persons
+shot, so the next night was for the girl frightful. In her desperation
+she decided to give herself up as soon as day dawned and then kill
+herself afterwards--anything, rather than enditre such tortures! But
+the dawn brought new hope and she would not go to church or even
+leave the house. She was afraid she would yield.
+
+So passed several days in praying and cursing, in calling upon God
+and wishing for death. The day gave her a slight respite and she
+trusted in some miracle. The reports that came from Manila, although
+they reached there magnified, said that of the prisoners some had
+secured their liberty, thanks to patrons and influence. Some one
+had to be sacrificed--who would it be? Juli shuddered and returned
+home biting her finger-nails. Then came the night with its terrors,
+which took on double proportions and seemed to be converted into
+realities. Juli feared to fall asleep, for her slumbers were a
+continuous nightmare. Looks of reproach would flash across her eyelids
+just as soon as they were closed, complaints and laments pierced
+her ears. She saw her father wandering about hungry, without rest or
+repose; she saw Basilio dying in the road, pierced by two bullets,
+just as she had seen the corpse of that neighbor who had been killed
+while in the charge of the Civil Guard. She saw the bonds that cut
+into the flesh, she saw the blood pouring from the mouth, she heard
+Basilio calling to her, "Save me! Save me! You alone can save me!" Then
+a burst of laughter would resound and she would turn her eyes to see
+her father gazing at her with eyes full of reproach. Juli would wake
+up, sit up on her _petate_, and draw her hands across her forehead
+to arrange her hair--cold sweat, like the sweat of death, moistened it!
+
+"Mother, mother!" she sobbed.
+
+Meanwhile, they who were so carelessly disposing of people's fates,
+he who commanded the legal murders, he who violated justice and made
+use of the law to maintain himself by force, slept in peace.
+
+At last a traveler arrived from Manila and reported that all
+the prisoners had been set free, all except Basilio, who had no
+protector. It was reported in Manila, added the traveler, that the
+young man would be deported to the Carolines, having been forced to
+sign a petition beforehand, in which he declared that he asked it
+voluntarily. [67] The traveler had seen the very steamer that was
+going to take him away.
+
+This report put an end to all the girl's hesitation. Besides, her mind
+was already quite weak from so many nights of watching and horrible
+dreams. Pale and with unsteady eyes, she sought out Sister Bali and,
+in a voice that was cause for alarm, told her that she was ready,
+asking her to accompany her. Sister Bali thereupon rejoiced and tried
+to soothe her, but Juli paid no attention to her, apparently intent
+only upon hurrying to the convento. She had decked herself out in her
+finest clothes, and even pretended to be quite gay, talking a great
+deal, although in a rather incoherent way.
+
+So they set out. Juli went ahead, becoming impatient that her companion
+lagged behind. But as they neared the town, her nervous energy began
+gradually to abate, she fell silent and wavered in her resolution,
+lessened her pace and soon dropped behind, so that Sister Bali had
+to encourage her.
+
+"We'll get there late," she remonstrated.
+
+Juli now followed, pale, with downcast eyes, which she was afraid to
+raise. She felt that the whole world was staring at her and pointing
+its finger at her. A vile name whistled in her ears, but still she
+disregarded it and continued on her way. Nevertheless, when they came
+in sight of the convento, she stopped and began to tremble.
+
+"Let's go home, let's go home," she begged, holding her companion back.
+
+Sister Bali had to take her by the arm and half drag her along,
+reassuring her and telling her about the books of the friars. She
+would not desert her, so there was nothing to fear. Padre Camorra
+had other things in mind--Juli was only a poor country girl.
+
+But upon arriving at the door of the convento, Juli firmly refused
+to go in, catching hold of the wall.
+
+"No, no," she pleaded in terror. "No, no, no! Have pity!"
+
+"But what a fool--"
+
+Sister Bali pushed her gently along, Juli, pallid and with wild
+features, offering resistance. The expression of her face said that
+she saw death before her.
+
+"All right, let's go back, if you don't want to!" at length the good
+woman exclaimed in irritation, as she did not believe there was any
+real danger. Padre Camorra, in spite of all his reputation, would
+dare do nothing before her.
+
+"Let them carry poor Basilio into exile, let them shoot him on the
+way, saying that he tried to escape," she added. "When he's dead,
+then remorse will come. But as for myself, I owe him no favors,
+so he can't reproach me!"
+
+That was the decisive stroke. In the face of that reproach, with wrath
+and desperation mingled, like one who rushes to suicide, Juli closed
+her eyes in order not to see the abyss into which she was hurling
+herself and resolutely entered the convento. A sigh that sounded
+like the rattle of death escaped from her lips. Sister Bali followed,
+telling her how to act.
+
+That night comments were mysteriously whispered about certain events
+which had occurred that afternoon. A girl had leaped from a window
+of the convento, falling upon some stones and killing herself. Almost
+at the same time another woman had rushed out of the convento to run
+through the streets shouting and screaming like a lunatic. The prudent
+townsfolk dared not utter any names and many mothers pinched their
+daughters for letting slip expressions that might compromise them.
+
+Later, very much later, at twilight, an old man came from a village
+and stood calling at the door of the convento, which was closed and
+guarded by sacristans. The old man beat the door with his fists and
+with his head, while he littered cries stifled and inarticulate, like
+those of a dumb person, until he was at length driven away by blows and
+shoves. Then he made his way to the gobernadorcillo's house, but was
+told that the gobernadorcillo was not there, he was at the convento;
+he went to the Justice of the Peace, but neither was the Justice of
+the Peace at home--he had been summoned to the convento; he went to
+the teniente-mayor, but he too was at the convento; he directed his
+steps to the barracks, but the lieutenant of the Civil Guard was at
+the convento. The old man then returned to his village, weeping like a
+child. His wails were heard in the middle of the night, causing men to
+bite their lips and women to clasp their hands, while the dogs slunk
+fearfully back into the houses with their tails between their legs.
+
+"Ah, God, God!" said a poor woman, lean from fasting, "in Thy presence
+there is no rich, no poor, no white, no black--Thou wilt grant us
+justice!"
+
+"Yes," rejoined her husband, "just so that God they preach is not a
+pure invention, a fraud! They themselves are the first not to believe
+in Him."
+
+At eight o'clock in the evening it was rumored that more than
+seven friars, proceeding from neighboring towns, were assembled in
+the convento to hold a conference. On the following day, Tandang
+Selo disappeared forever from the village, carrying with him his
+hunting-spear.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+THE HIGH OFFICIAL
+
+
+    L'Espagne et sa, vertu, l'Espagne et sa grandeur
+    Tout s'en va!--Victor Hugo
+
+
+The newspapers of Manila were so engrossed in accounts of a notorious
+murder committed in Europe, in panegyrics and puffs for various
+preachers in the city, in the constantly increasing success of the
+French operetta, that they could scarcely devote space to the crimes
+perpetrated in the provinces by a band of tulisanes headed by a fierce
+and terrible leader who was called _Matanglawin._ [68] Only when the
+object of the attack was a convento or a Spaniard there then appeared
+long articles giving frightful details and asking for martial law,
+energetic measures, and so on. So it was that they could take no notice
+of what had occurred in the town of Tiani, nor was there the slightest
+hint or allusion to it. In private circles something was whispered,
+but so confused, so vague, and so little consistent, that not even
+the name of the victim was known, while those who showed the greatest
+interest forgot it quickly, trusting that the affair had been settled
+in some way with the wronged family. The only one who knew anything
+certain was Padre Camorra, who had to leave the town, to be transferred
+to another or to remain for some time in the convento in Manila.
+
+"Poor Padre Camorra!" exclaimed Ben-Zayb in a fit of generosity. "He
+was so jolly and had such a good heart!"
+
+It was true that the students had recovered their liberty, thanks to
+the exertions of their relatives, who did not hesitate at expense,
+gifts, or any sacrifice whatsoever. The first to see himself free, as
+was to be expected, was Makaraig, and the last Isagani, because Padre
+Florentine did not reach Manila until a week after the events. So
+many acts of clemency secured for the General the title of clement
+and merciful, which Ben-Zayb hastened to add to his long list of
+adjectives.
+
+The only one who did not obtain his liberty was Basilio, since he was
+also accused of having in his possession prohibited books. We don't
+know whether this referred to his text-book on legal medicine or to
+the pamphlets that were found, dealing with the Philippines, or both
+together--the fact is that it was said that prohibited literature
+was being secretly sold, and upon the unfortunate boy fell all the
+weight of the rod of justice.
+
+It was reported that his Excellency had been thus advised: "It's
+necessary that there be some one, so that the prestige of authority
+may be sustained and that it may not be said that we made a great fuss
+over nothing. Authority before everything. It's necessary that some
+one be made an example of. Let there be just one, one who, according
+to Padre Irene, was the servant of Capitan Tiago--there'll be no one
+to enter a complaint--"
+
+"Servant and student?" asked his Excellency. "That fellow, then! Let
+it be he!"
+
+"Your Excellency will pardon me," observed the high official, who
+happened to be present, "but I've been told that this boy is a medical
+student and his teachers speak well of him. If he remains a prisoner
+he'll lose a year, and as this year he finishes--"
+
+The high official's interference in behalf of Basilio, instead
+of helping, harmed him. For some time there had been between this
+official and his Excellency strained relations and bad feelings,
+augmented by frequent clashes.
+
+"Yes? So much the greater reason that he should be kept prisoner;
+a year longer in his studies, instead of injuring him, will do good,
+not only to himself but to all who afterwards fall into his hands. One
+doesn't become a bad physician by extensive practise. So much the
+more reason that he should remain! Soon the filibustering reformers
+will say that we are not looking out for the country!" concluded his
+Excellency with a sarcastic laugh.
+
+The high official realized that he had made a false move and took
+Basilio's case to heart. "But it seems to me that this young man is
+the most innocent of all," he rejoined rather timidly.
+
+"Books have been seized in his possession," observed the secretary.
+
+"Yes, works on medicine and pamphlets written by Peninsulars, with
+the leaves uncut, and besides, what does that signify? Moreover,
+this young man was not present at the banquet in the _pansiteria_,
+he hasn't mixed up in anything. As I've said, he's the most innocent--"
+
+"So much the better!" exclaimed his Excellency jocosely. "In that
+way the punishment will prove more salutary and exemplary, since it
+inspires greater terror. To govern is to act in this way, my dear
+sir, as it is often expedient to sacrifice the welfare of one to the
+welfare of many. But I'm doing more--from the welfare of one will
+result the welfare of all, the principle of endangered authority is
+preserved, prestige is respected and maintained. By this act of mine
+I'm correcting my own and other people's faults."
+
+The high official restrained himself with an effort and, disregarding
+the allusion, decided to take another tack. "But doesn't your
+Excellency fear the--responsibility?"
+
+"What have I to fear?" rejoined the General impatiently. "Haven't
+I discretionary powers? Can't I do what I please for the better
+government of these islands? What have I to fear? Can some
+menial perhaps arraign me before the tribunals and exact from me
+responsibility? Even though he had the means, he would have to consult
+the Ministry first, and the Minister--"
+
+He waved his hand and burst out into laughter.
+
+"The Minister who appointed me, the devil knows where he is, and
+he will feel honored in being able to welcome me when I return. The
+present one, I don't even think of him, and the devil take him too! The
+one that relieves him will find himself in so many difficulties with
+his new duties that he won't be able to fool with trifles. I, my dear
+sir, have nothing over me but my conscience, I act according to my
+conscience, and my conscience is satisfied, so I don't care a straw
+for the opinions of this one and that. My conscience, my dear sir,
+my conscience!"
+
+"Yes, General, but the country--"
+
+"Tut, tut, tut, tut! The country--what have I to do Avith the
+country? Have I perhaps contracted any obligations to it? Do I owe
+my office to it? Was it the country that elected me?"
+
+A brief pause ensued, during which the high official stood with bowed
+head. Then, as if reaching a decision, he raised it to stare fixedly
+at the General. Pale and trembling, he said with repressed energy:
+"That doesn't matter, General, that doesn't matter at all! Your
+Excellency has not been chosen by the Filipino people, but by Spain,
+all the more reason why you should treat the Filipinos well so that
+they may not be able to reproach Spain. The greater reason, General,
+the greater reason! Your Excellency, by coming here, has contracted
+the obligation to govern justly, to seek the welfare--"
+
+"Am I not doing it?" interrupted his Excellency in exasperation,
+taking a step forward. "Haven't I told you that I am getting from the
+good of one the good of all? Are you now going to give me lessons? If
+you don't understand my actions, how am I to blame? Do I compel you
+to share my responsibility?"
+
+"Certainly not," replied the high official, drawing himself up
+proudly. "Your Excellency does not compel me, your Excellency cannot
+compel me, _me,_ to share _your_ responsibility. I understand mine in
+quite another way, and because I have it, I'm going to speak--I've held
+my peace a long time. Oh, your Excellency needn't make those gestures,
+because the fact that I've come here in this or that capacity doesn't
+mean that I have given up my rights, that I have been reduced to the
+part of a slave, without voice or dignity.
+
+"I don't want Spain to lose this beautiful empire, these eight
+millions of patient and submissive subjects, who live on hopes and
+delusions, but neither do I wish to soil my hands in their barbarous
+exploitation. I don't wish it ever to be said that, the slave-trade
+abolished, Spain has continued to cloak it with her banner and
+perfect it under a wealth of specious institutions. No, to be great
+Spain does not have to be a tyrant, Spain is sufficient unto herself,
+Spain was greater when she had only her own territory, wrested from
+the clutches of the Moor. I too am a Spaniard, but before being a
+Spaniard I am a man, and before Spain and above Spain is her honor,
+the lofty principles of morality, the eternal principles of immutable
+justice! Ah, you are surprised that I think thus, because you have no
+idea of the grandeur of the Spanish name, no, you haven't any idea of
+it, you identify it with persons and interests. To you the Spaniard may
+be a pirate, he may be a murderer, a hypocrite, a cheat, anything,
+just so he keep what he has--but to me the Spaniard should lose
+everything, empire, power, wealth, everything, before his honor! Ah,
+my dear sir, we protest when we read that might is placed before right,
+yet we applaud when in practise we see might play the hypocrite in
+not only perverting right but even in using it as a tool in order to
+gain control. For the very reason that I love Spain, I'm speaking now,
+and I defy your frown!
+
+"I don't wish that the coming ages accuse Spain of being the stepmother
+of the nations, the vampire of races, the tyrant of small islands,
+since it would be a horrible mockery of the noble principles of our
+ancient kings. How are we carrying out their sacred legacy? They
+promised to these islands protection and justice, and we are playing
+with the lives and liberties of the inhabitants; they promised
+civilization, and^we are curtailing it, fearful that they may aspire
+to a nobler existence; they promised them light, and we cover their
+eyes that they may not witness our orgies; they promised to teach them
+virtue and we are encouraging their vice. Instead of peace, wealth,
+and justice, confusion reigns, commerce languishes, and skepticism
+is fostered among the masses.
+
+"Let us put ourselves in the place of the Filipinos and ask ourselves
+what we would do in their place. Ah, in your silence I read their
+right to rebel, and if matters do not mend they will rebel some day,
+and justice will be on their side, with them will go the sympathy
+of all honest men, of every patriot in the world! When a people is
+denied light, home, liberty, and justice--things that are essential
+to life, and therefore man's patrimony--that people has the right to
+treat him who so despoils it as we would the robber who intercepts us
+on the highway. There are no distinctions, there are no exceptions,
+nothing but a fact, a right, an aggression, and every honest man who
+does not place himself on the side of the wronged makes himself an
+accomplice and stains his conscience.
+
+"True, I am not a soldier, and the years are cooling the little fire
+in my blood, but just as I would risk being torn to pieces to defend
+the integrity of Spain against any foreign invader or against an
+unjustified disloyalty in her provinces, so I also assure you that I
+would place myself beside the oppressed Filipinos, because I would
+prefer to fall in the cause of the outraged rights of humanity to
+triumphing with the selfish interests of a nation, even when that
+nation be called as it is called--Spain!"
+
+"Do you know when the mail-boat leaves?" inquired his Excellency
+coldly, when the high official had finished speaking.
+
+The latter stared at him fixedly, then dropped his head and silently
+left the palace.
+
+Outside he found his carriage awaiting him. "Some day when you declare
+yourselves independent," he said somewhat abstractedly to the native
+lackey who opened the carriage-door for him, "remember that there
+were not lacking in Spain hearts that beat for you and struggled for
+your rights!"
+
+"Where, sir?" asked the lackey, who had understood nothing of this
+and was inquiring whither they should go.
+
+Two hours later the high official handed in his resignation and
+announced his intention of returning to Spain by the next mail-steamer.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+EFFECT OF THE PASQUINADES
+
+
+As a result of the events narrated, many mothers ordered their sons
+immediately to leave off their studies and devote themselves to
+idleness or to agriculture. When the examinations came, suspensions
+were plentiful, and he was a rare exception who finished the course,
+if he had belonged to the famous association, to which no one paid
+any more attention. Pecson, Tadeo, and Juanito Pelaez were all alike
+suspended--the first receiving his dismissal with his foolish grin
+and declaring his intention of becoming an officer in some court,
+while Tadeo, with his eternal holiday realized at last, paid for an
+illumination and made a bonfire of his books. Nor did the others get
+off much better, and at length they too had to abandon their studies,
+to the great satisfaction of their mothers, who always fancy their sons
+hanged if they should come to understand what the books teach. Juanito
+Pelaez alone took the blow ill, since it forced him to leave school for
+his father's store, with whom he was thenceforward to be associated
+in the business: the rascal found the store much less entertaining,
+but after some time his friends again noticed his hump appear,
+a symptom that his good humor was returning. The rich Makaraig,
+in view of the catastrophe, took good care not to expose himself,
+and having secured a passport by means of money set out in haste for
+Europe. It was said that his Excellency, the Captain-General, in his
+desire to do good by good means, and careful of the interests of the
+Filipinos, hindered the departure of every one who could not first
+prove substantially that he had the money to spend and could live in
+idleness in European cities. Among our acquaintances those who got off
+best were Isagani and Sandoval: the former passed in the subject he
+studied under Padre Fernandez and was suspended in the others, while
+the latter was able to confuse the examining-board with his oratory.
+
+Basilio was the only one who did not pass in any subject, who was
+not suspended, and who did not go to Europe, for he remained in
+Bilibid prison, subjected every three days to examinations, almost
+always the same in principle, without other variation than a change of
+inquisitors, since it seemed that in the presence of such great guilt
+all gave up or fell away in horror. And while the documents moldered
+or were shifted about, while the stamped papers increased like the
+plasters of an ignorant physician on the body of a hypochondriac,
+Basilio became informed of all the details of what had happened
+in Tiani, of the death of Juli and the disappearance of Tandang
+Selo. Sinong, the abused cochero, who had driven him to San Diego,
+happened to be in Manila at that time and called to give him all
+the news.
+
+Meanwhile, Simoun had recovered his health, or so at least the
+newspapers said. Ben-Zayb rendered thanks to "the Omnipotent who
+watches over such a precious life," and manifested the hope that the
+Highest would some day reveal the malefactor, whose crime remained
+unpunished, thanks to the charity of the victim, who was too closely
+following the words of the Great Martyr: _Father, forgive them, for
+they know not what they do._ These and other things Ben-Zayb said in
+print, while by mouth he was inquiring whether there was any truth in
+the rumor that the opulent jeweler was going to give a grand fiesta,
+a banquet such as had never before been seen, in part to celebrate
+his recovery and in part as a farewell to the country in which he had
+increased his fortune. It was whispered as certain that Simoun, who
+would have to leave with the Captain-General, whose command expired
+in May, was making every effort to secure from Madrid an extension,
+and that he was advising his Excellency to start a campaign in order to
+have an excuse for remaining, but it was further reported that for the
+first time his Excellency had disregarded the advice of his favorite,
+making it a point of honor not to retain for a single additional day
+the power that had been conferred upon him, a rumor which encouraged
+belief that the fiesta announced would take place; very soon. For
+the rest, Simoun remained unfathomable, since he had become very
+uncommunicative, showed himself seldom, and smiled mysteriously when
+the rumored fiesta was mentioned.
+
+"Come, Senor Sindbad," Ben-Zayb had once rallied him, "dazzle us with
+something Yankee! You owe something to this country."
+
+"Doubtless!" was Simoun's response, with a dry smile.
+
+"You'll throw the house wide open, eh?"
+
+"Maybe, but as I have no house--"
+
+"You ought to have secured Capitan Tiago's, which Senor Pelaez got
+for nothing."
+
+Simoun became silent, and from that time on he was often seen in the
+store of Don Timoteo Pelaez, with whom it was said he had entered
+into partnership. Some weeks afterward, in the month of April, it was
+rumored that Juanito Pelaez, Don Timoteo's son, was going to marry
+Paulita Gomez, the girl coveted by Spaniards and foreigners.
+
+"Some men are lucky!" exclaimed other envious merchants. "To buy a
+house for nothing, sell his consignment of galvanized iron well,
+get into partnership with a Simoun, and marry his son to a rich
+heiress--just say if those aren't strokes of luck that all honorable
+men don't have!"
+
+"If you only knew whence came that luck of Senor Pelaez's!" another
+responded, in a tone which indicated that the speaker did know. "It's
+also assured that there'll be a fiesta and on a grand scale," was
+added with mystery.
+
+It was really true that Paulita was going to marry Juanito Pelaez. Her
+love for Isagani had gradually waned, like all first loves based
+on poetry and sentiment. The events of the pasquinades and the
+imprisonment of the youth had shorn him of all his charms. To whom
+would it have occurred to seek danger, to desire to share the fate
+of his comrades, to surrender himself, when every one was hiding and
+denying any complicity in the affair? It was quixotic, it was madness
+that no sensible person in Manila could pardon, and Juanito was quite
+right in ridiculing him, representing what a sorry figure he cut when
+he went to the Civil Government. Naturally, the brilliant Paulita
+could no longer love a young man who so erroneously understood social
+matters and whom all condemned. Then she began to reflect. Juanito was
+clever, capable, gay, shrewd, the son of a rich merchant of Manila,
+and a Spanish mestizo besides--if Don Timoteo was to be believed,
+a full-blooded Spaniard. On the other hand, Isagani was a provincial
+native who dreamed of forests infested with leeches, he was of doubtful
+family, with a priest for an uncle, who would perhaps be an enemy to
+luxury and balls, of which she was very fond. One beautiful morning
+therefore it occurred to her that she had been a downright fool to
+prefer him to his rival, and from that time on Pelaez's hump steadily
+increased. Unconsciously, yet rigorously, Paulita was obeying the
+law discovered by Darwin, that the female surrenders herself to the
+fittest male, to him who knows how to adapt himself to the medium in
+which he lives, and to live in Manila there was no other like Pelaez,
+who from his infancy had had chicanery at his finger-tips. Lent passed
+with its Holy Week, its array of processions and pompous displays,
+without other novelty than a mysterious mutiny among the artillerymen,
+the cause of which was never disclosed. The houses of light materials
+were torn down in the presence of a troop of cavalry, ready to fall
+upon the owners in case they should offer resistance. There was a
+great deal of weeping and many lamentations, but the affair did not
+get beyond that. The curious, among them Simoun, went to see those
+who were left homeless, walking about indifferently and assuring each
+other that thenceforward they could sleep in peace.
+
+Towards the end of April, all the fears being now forgotten, Manila
+was engrossed with one topic: the fiesta that Don Timoteo Pelaez was
+going to celebrate at the wedding of his son, for which the General
+had graciously and condescendingly agreed to be the patron. Simoun
+was reported to have arranged the matter. The ceremony would
+be solemnized two days before the departure of the General, who
+would honor the house and make a present to the bridegroom. It was
+whispered that the jeweler would pour out cascades of diamonds and
+throw away handfuls of pearls in honor of his partner's son, thus,
+since he could hold no fiesta of his own, as he was a bachelor and
+had no house, improving the opportunity to dazzle the Filipino people
+with a memorable farewell. All Manila prepared to be invited, and
+never did uneasiness take stronger hold of the mind than in view of
+the thought of not being among those bidden. Friendship with Simoun
+became a matter of dispute, and many husbands were forced by their
+wives to purchase bars of steel and sheets of galvanized iron in
+order to make friends with Don Timoteo Pelaez.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+LA ULTIMA RAZON [69]
+
+
+At last the great day arrived. During the morning Simoun had not left
+his house, busied as he was in packing his arms and his jewels. His
+fabulous wealth was already locked up in the big steel chest with its
+canvas cover, there remaining only a few cases containing bracelets
+and pins, doubtless gifts that he meant to make. He was going to leave
+with the Captain-General, who cared in no way to lengthen his stay,
+fearful of what people would say. Malicious ones insinuated that Simoun
+did not dare remain alone, since without the General's support he did
+not care to expose himself to the vengeance of the many wretches he
+had exploited, all the more reason for which was the fact that the
+General who was coming was reported to be a model of rectitude and
+might make him disgorge his gains. The superstitious Indians, on the
+other hand, believed that Simoun was the devil who did not wish to
+separate himself from his prey. The pessimists winked maliciously and
+said, "The field laid waste, the locust leaves for other parts!" Only
+a few, a very few, smiled and said nothing.
+
+In the afternoon Simoun had given orders to his servant that if there
+appeared a young man calling himself Basilio he should be admitted
+at once. Then he shut himself up in his room and seemed to become
+lost in deep thought. Since his illness the jeweler's countenance had
+become harder and gloomier, while the wrinkles between his eyebrows
+had deepened greatly. He did not hold himself so erect as formerly,
+and his head was bowed.
+
+So absorbed was he in his meditations that he did not hear a knock
+at the door, and it had to be repeated. He shuddered and called out,
+"Come in!"
+
+It was Basilio, but how altered! If the change that had taken place
+in Simoun during those two months was great, in the young student it
+was frightful. His cheeks were hollow, his hair unkempt, his clothing
+disordered. The tender melancholy had disappeared from his eyes,
+and in its place glittered a dark light, so that it might be said
+that he had died and his corpse had revived, horrified with what it
+had seen in eternity. If not crime, then the shadow of crime, had
+fixed itself upon his whole appearance. Simoun himself was startled
+and felt pity for the wretch.
+
+Without any greeting Basilio slowly advanced into the room, and in
+a voice that made the jeweler shudder said to him, "Senor Simoun,
+I've been a wicked son and a bad brother--I've overlooked the murder
+of one and the tortures of the other, and God has chastised me! Now
+there remains to me only one desire, and it is to return evil for evil,
+crime for crime, violence for violence!"
+
+Simoun listened in silence, while Basilio continued; "Four months ago
+you talked to me about your plans. I refused to take part in them,
+but I did wrong, you have been right. Three months and a half ago
+the revolution was on the point of breaking out, but I did not then
+care to participate in it, and the movement failed. In payment for
+my conduct I've been arrested and owe my liberty to your efforts
+only. You are right and now I've come to say to you: put a weapon
+in my hand and let the revolution come! I am ready to serve you,
+along with all the rest of the unfortunates."
+
+The cloud that had darkened Simoun's brow suddenly disappeared, a ray
+of triumph darted from his eyes, and like one who has found what he
+sought he exclaimed: "I'm right, yes, I'm right! Right and Justice
+are on my side, because my cause is that of the persecuted. Thanks,
+young man, thanks! You've come to clear away my doubts, to end my
+hesitation."
+
+He had risen and his face was beaming. The zeal that had animated him
+when four months before he had explained his plans to Basilio in the
+wood of his ancestors reappeared in his countenance like a red sunset
+after a cloudy day.
+
+"Yes," he resumed, "the movement failed and many have deserted me
+because they saw me disheartened and wavering at the supreme moment. I
+still cherished something in my heart, I was not the master of all
+my feelings, I still loved! Now everything is dead in me, no longer
+is there even a corpse sacred enough for me to respect its sleep. No
+longer will there be any vacillation, for you yourself, an idealistic
+youth, a gentle dove, understand the necessity and come to spur me to
+action. Somewhat late you have opened your eyes, for between you and
+me together we might have executed marvelous plans, I above in the
+higher circles spreading death amid perfume and gold, brutalizing the
+vicious and corrupting or paralyzing the few good, and you below among
+the people, among the young men, stirring them to life amid blood and
+tears. Our task, instead of being bloody and barbarous, would have
+been holy, perfect, artistic, and surely success would have crowned
+our efforts. But no intelligence would support me, I encountered fear
+or effeminacy among the enlightened classes, selfishness among the
+rich, simplicity among the youth, and only in the mountains, in the
+waste places, among the outcasts, have I found my men. But no matter
+now! If we can't get a finished statue, rounded out in all its details,
+of the rough block we work upon let those to come take charge!"
+
+Seizing the arm of Basilio, who was listening without comprehending
+all he said, he led him to the laboratory where he kept his chemical
+mixtures. Upon the table was placed a large case made of dark shagreen,
+similar to those that hold the silver plate exchanged as gifts among
+the rich and powerful. Opening this, Simoun revealed to sight, upon
+a bottom of red satin, a lamp of very peculiar shape, Its body was in
+the form of a pomegranate as large as a man's head, with fissures in
+it exposing to view the seeds inside, which were fashioned of enormous
+carnelians. The covering was of oxidized gold in exact imitation of
+the wrinkles on the fruit.
+
+Simoun took it out with great care and, removing the burner,
+exposed to view the interior of the tank, which was lined with
+steel two centimeters in thickness and which had a capacity of over a
+liter. Basilio questioned him with his eyes, for as yet he comprehended
+nothing. Without entering upon explanations, Simoun carefully took from
+a cabinet a flask and showed the young man the formula written upon it.
+
+"Nitro-glycerin!" murmured Basilio, stepping backward and instinctively
+thrusting his hands behind him. "Nitro-glycerin! Dynamite!" Beginning
+now to understand, he felt his hair stand on end.
+
+"Yes, nitro-glycerin!" repeated Simoun slowly, with his cold smile and
+a look of delight at the glass flask. "It's also something more than
+nitro-glycerin--it's concentrated tears, repressed hatred, wrongs,
+injustice, outrage. It's the last resort of the weak, force against
+force, violence against violence. A moment ago I was hesitating,
+but you have come and decided me. This night the most dangerous
+tyrants will be blown to pieces, the irresponsible rulers that hide
+themselves behind God and the State, whose abuses remain unpunished
+because no one can bring them to justice. This night the Philippines
+will hear the explosion that will convert into rubbish the formless
+monument whose decay I have fostered."
+
+Basilio was so terrified that his lips worked without producing any
+sound, his tongue was paralyzed, his throat parched. For the first
+time he was looking at the powerful liquid which he had heard talked
+of as a thing distilled in gloom by gloomy men, in open war against
+society. Now he had it before him, transparent and slightly yellowish,
+poured with great caution into the artistic pomegranate. Simoun looked
+to him like the jinnee of the _Arabian Nights_ that sprang from the
+sea, he took on gigantic proportions, his head touched the sky, he
+made the house tremble and shook the whole city with a shrug of his
+shoulders. The pomegranate assumed the form of a colossal sphere,
+the fissures became hellish grins whence escaped names and glowing
+cinders. For the first time in his life Basilio was overcome with
+fright and completely lost his composure.
+
+Simoun, meanwhile, screwed on solidly a curious and complicated
+mechanism, put in place a glass chimney, then the bomb, and crowned
+the whole with an elegant shade. Then he moved away some distance to
+contemplate the effect, inclining his head now to one side, now to
+the other, thus better to appreciate its magnificent appearance.
+
+Noticing that Basilio was watching him with questioning and suspicious
+eyes, he said, "Tonight there will be a fiesta and this lamp will
+be placed in a little dining-kiosk that I've had constructed for
+the purpose. The lamp will give a brilliant light, bright enough to
+suffice for the illumination of the whole place by itself, but at
+the end of twenty minutes the light will fade, and then when some
+one tries to turn up the wick a cap of fulminate of mercury will
+explode, the pomegranate will blow up and with it the dining-room,
+in the roof and floor of which I have concealed sacks of powder,
+so that no one shall escape."
+
+There wras a moment's silence, while Simoun stared at his mechanism
+and Basilio scarcely breathed.
+
+"So my assistance is not needed," observed the young man.
+
+"No, you have another mission to fulfill," replied Simoun
+thoughtfully. "At nine the mechanism will have exploded and the report
+will have been heard in the country round, in the mountains, in the
+caves. The uprising that I had arranged with the artillerymen was
+a failure from lack of plan and timeliness, but this time it won't
+be so. Upon hearing the explosion, the wretched and the oppressed,
+those who wander about pursued by force, will sally forth armed to
+join Cabesang Tales in Santa Mesa, whence they will fall upon the city,
+[70] while the soldiers, whom I have made to believe that the General
+is shamming an insurrection in order to remain, will issue from their
+barracks ready to fire upon whomsoever I may designate. Meanwhile,
+the cowed populace, thinking that the hour of massacre has come,
+will rush out prepared to kill or be killed, and as they have neither
+arms nor organization, you with some others will put yourself at
+their head and direct them to the warehouses of Quiroga, where I
+keep my rifles. Cabesang Tales and I will join one another in the
+city and take possession of it, while you in the suburbs will seize
+the bridges and throw up barricades, and then be ready to come to
+our aid to butcher not only those opposing the revolution but also
+every man who refuses to take up arms and join us."
+
+"All?" stammered Basilio in a choking voice.
+
+"All!" repeated Simoun in a sinister tone. "All--Indians, mestizos,
+Chinese, Spaniards, all who are found to be without courage, without
+energy. The race must be renewed! Cowardly fathers will only breed
+slavish sons, and it wouldn't be worth while to destroy and then try to
+rebuild with rotten materials. What, do you shudder? Do you tremble,
+do you fear to scatter death? What is death? What does a hecatomb of
+twenty thousand wretches signify? Twenty thousand miseries less, and
+millions of wretches saved from birth! The most timid ruler does not
+hesitate to dictate a law that produces misery and lingering death
+for thousands and thousands of prosperous and industrious subjects,
+happy perchance, merely to satisfy a caprice, a whim, his pride,
+and yet you shudder because in one night are to be ended forever the
+mental tortures of many helots, because a vitiated and paralytic people
+has to die to give place to another, young, active, full of energy!
+
+"What is death? Nothingness, or a dream? Can its specters be compared
+to the reality of the agonies of a whole miserable generation? The
+needful thing is to destroy the evil, to kill the dragon and
+bathe the new people in the blood, in order to make it strong and
+invulnerable. What else is the inexorable law of Nature, the law of
+strife in which the weak has to succumb so that the vitiated species
+be not perpetuated and creation thus travel backwards? Away then with
+effeminate scruples! Fulfill the eternal laws, foster them, and then
+the earth will be so much the more fecund the more it is fertilized
+with blood, and the thrones the more solid the more they rest upon
+crimes and corpses. Let there be no hesitation, no doubtings! What is
+the pain of death? A momentary sensation, perhaps confused, perhaps
+agreeable, like the transition from waking to sleep. What is it that
+is being destroyed? Evil, suffering--feeble weeds, in order to set in
+their place luxuriant plants. Do you call that destruction? I should
+call it creating, producing, nourishing, vivifying!"
+
+Such bloody sophisms, uttered with conviction and coolness, overwhelmed
+the youth, weakened as he was by more than three months in prison
+and blinded by his passion for revenge, so he was not in a mood to
+analyze the moral basis of the matter. Instead of replying that the
+worst and cowardliest of men is always something more than a plant,
+because he has a soul and an intelligence, which, however vitiated
+and brutalized they may be, can be redeemed; instead of replying that
+man has no right to dispose of one life for the benefit of another,
+that the right to life is inherent in every individual like the right
+to liberty and to light; instead of replying that if it is an abuse on
+the part of governments to punish in a culprit the faults and crimes
+to which they have driven him by their own negligence or stupidity,
+how much more so would it be in a man, however great and however
+unfortunate he might be, to punish in a wretched people the faults of
+its governments and its ancestors; instead of declaring that God alone
+can use such methods, that God can destroy because He can create,
+God who holds in His hands recompense, eternity, and the future,
+to justify His acts, and man never; instead of these reflections,
+Basilio merely interposed a cant reflection.
+
+"What will the world say at the sight of such butchery?"
+
+"The world will applaud, as usual, conceding the right of
+the strongest, the most violent!" replied Simoun with his cruel
+smile. "Europe applauded when the western nations sacrificed millions
+of Indians in America, and not by any means to found nations much more
+moral or more pacific: there is the North with its egotistic liberty,
+its lynch-law, its political frauds--the South with its turbulent
+republics, its barbarous revolutions, civil wars, pronunciamientos,
+as in its mother Spain! Europe applauded when the powerful Portugal
+despoiled the Moluccas, it applauds while England is destroying the
+primitive races in the Pacific to make room for its emigrants. Europe
+will applaud as the end of a drama, the close of a tragedy, is
+applauded, for the vulgar do not fix their attention on principles,
+they look only at results. Commit the crime well, and you will be
+admired and have more partizans than if you had carried out virtuous
+actions with modesty and timidity."
+
+"Exactly," rejoined the youth, "what does it matter to me, after all,
+whether they praise or censure, when this world takes no care of the
+oppressed, of the poor, and of weak womankind? What obligations have
+I to recognize toward society when it has recognized none toward me?"
+
+"That's what I like to hear," declared the tempter triumphantly. He
+took a revolver from a case and gave it to Basilio, saying, "At
+ten o'clock wait for me in front of the church of St. Sebastian to
+receive my final instructions. Ah, at nine you must be far, very far
+from Calle Anloague."
+
+Basilio examined the weapon, loaded it, and placed it in the inside
+pocket of his coat, then took his leave with a curt, "I'll see
+you later."
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+THE WEDDING
+
+
+Once in the street, Basilio began to consider how he might spend the
+time until the fatal hour arrived, for it was then not later than seven
+o'clock. It was the vacation period and all the students were back in
+their towns, Isagani being the only one who had not cared to leave,
+but he had disappeared that morning and no one knew his whereabouts--so
+Basilio had been informed when after leaving the prison he had gone
+to visit his friend and ask him for lodging. The young man did not
+know where to go, for he had no money, nothing but the revolver. The
+memory of the lamp filled his imagination, the great catastrophe that
+would occur within two hours. Pondering over this, he seemed to see
+the men who passed before his eyes walking without heads, and he felt a
+thrill of ferocious joy in telling himself that, hungry and destitute,
+he that night was going to be dreaded, that from a poor student and
+servant, perhaps the sun would see him transformed into some one
+terrible and sinister, standing upon pyramids of corpses, dictating
+laws to all those who were passing before his gaze now in magnificent
+carriages. He laughed like one condemned to death and patted the butt
+of the revolver. The boxes of cartridges were also in his pockets.
+
+A question suddenly occurred to him--where would the drama begin? In
+his bewilderment he had not thought of asking Simoun, but the
+latter had warned him to keep away from Calle Anloague. Then came a
+suspicion: that afternoon, upon leaving the prison, he had proceeded
+to the former house of Capitan Tiago to get his few personal effects
+and had found it transformed, prepared for a fiesta--the wedding of
+Juanito Pelaez! Simoun had spoken of a fiesta.
+
+At this moment he noticed passing in front of him a long line of
+carriages filled with ladies and gentlemen, conversing in a lively
+manner, and he even thought he could make out big bouquets of flowers,
+but he gave the detail no thought. The carriages were going toward
+Calle Rosario and in meeting those that came down off the Bridge
+of Spain had to move along slowly and stop frequently. In one he
+saw Juanito Pelaez at the side of a woman dressed in white with a
+transparent veil, in whom he recognized Paulita Gomez.
+
+"Paulita!" he ejaculated in surprise, realizing that it was indeed
+she, in a bridal gown, along with Juanito Pelaez, as though they
+were just coming from the church. "Poor Isagani!" he murmured,
+"what can have become of him?"
+
+He thought for a while about his friend, a great and generous soul,
+and mentally asked himself if it would not be well to tell him about
+the plan, then answered himself that Isagani would never take part
+in such a butchery. They had not treated Isagani as they had him.
+
+Then he thought that had there been no imprisonment, he would have
+been betrothed, or a husband, at this time, a licentiate in medicine,
+living and working in some corner of his province. The ghost of
+Juli, crushed in her fall, crossed his mind, and dark flames of
+hatred lighted his eyes; again he caressed the butt of the revolver,
+regretting that the terrible hour had not yet come. Just then he saw
+Simoun come out of the door of his house, carrying in his hands the
+case containing the lamp, carefully wrapped up, and enter a carriage,
+which then followed those bearing the bridal party. In order not to
+lose track of Simoun, Basilio took a good look at the cochero and
+with astonishment recognized in him the wretch who had driven him to
+San Diego, Sinong, the fellow maltreated by the Civil Guard, the same
+who had come to the prison to tell him about the occurrences in Tiani.
+
+Conjecturing that Calle Anloague was to be the scene of action, thither
+the youth directed his steps, hurrying forward and getting ahead of
+the carriages, which were, in fact, all moving toward the former house
+of Capitan Tiago--there they were assembling in search of a ball,
+but actually to dance in the air! Basilio smiled when he noticed the
+pairs of civil-guards who formed the escort, and from their number he
+could guess the importance of the fiesta and the guests. The house
+overflowed with people and poured floods of light from its windows,
+the entrance was carpeted and strewn with flowers. Upstairs there,
+perhaps in his former solitary room, an orchestra was playing lively
+airs, which did not completely drown the confused tumult of talk
+and laughter.
+
+Don Timoteo Pelaez was reaching the pinnacle of fortune, and the
+reality surpassed his dreams. He was, at last, marrying his son to
+the rich Gomez heiress, and, thanks to the money Simoun had lent him,
+he had royally furnished that big house, purchased for half its value,
+and was giving in it a splendid fiesta, with the foremost divinities
+of the Manila Olympus for his guests, to gild him with the light of
+their prestige. Since that morning there had been recurring to him,
+with the persistence of a popular song, some vague phrases that he had
+read in the communion service. "Now has the fortunate hour come! Now
+draws nigh the happy moment! Soon there will be fulfilled in you the
+admirable words of Simoun--'I live, and yet not I alone, but the
+Captain-General liveth in me.'" The Captain-General the patron of
+his son! True, he had not attended the ceremony, where Don Custodio
+had represented him, but he would come to dine, he would bring a
+wedding-gift, a lamp which not even Aladdin's--between you and me,
+Simoun was presenting the lamp. Timoteo, what more could you desire?
+
+The transformation that Capitan Tiago's house had undergone was
+considerable--it had been richly repapered, while the smoke and
+the smell of opium had been completely eradicated. The immense
+sala, widened still more by the colossal mirrors that infinitely
+multiplied the lights of the chandeliers, was carpeted throughout,
+for the salons of Europe had carpets, and even though the floor
+was of wide boards brilliantly polished, a carpet it must have too,
+since nothing should be lacking. The rich furniture of Capitan Tiago
+had disappeared and in its place was to be seen another kind, in the
+style of Louis XV. Heavy curtains of red velvet, trimmed with gold,
+with the initials of the bridal couple worked on them, and upheld by
+garlands of artificial orange-blossoms, hung as portieres and swept
+the floor with their wide fringes, likewise of gold. In the corners
+appeared enormous Japanese vases, alternating with those of Sevres
+of a clear dark-blue, placed upon square pedestals of carved wood.
+
+The only decorations not in good taste were the screaming chromos
+which Don Timoteo had substituted for the old drawings and pictures
+of saints of Capitan Tiago. Simoun had been unable to dissuade him,
+for the merchant did not want oil-paintings--some one might ascribe
+them to Filipino artists! He, a patron of Filipino artists, never! On
+that point depended his peace of mind and perhaps his life, and he
+knew how to get along in the Philippines! It is true that he had heard
+foreign painters mentioned--Raphael, Murillo, Velasquez--but he did
+not know their addresses, and then they might prove to be somewhat
+seditious. With the chromos he ran no risk, as the Filipinos did not
+make them, they came cheaper, the effect was the same, if not better,
+the colors brighter and the execution very fine. Don't say that Don
+Timoteo did not know how to comport himself in the Philippines!
+
+The large hallway was decorated with flowers, having been converted
+into a dining-room, with a long table for thirty persons in the center,
+and around the sides, pushed against the walls, other smaller ones for
+two or three persons each. Bouquets of flowers, pyramids of fruits
+among ribbons and lights, covered their centers. The groom's place
+was designated by a bunch of roses and the bride's by another of
+orange-blossoms and tuberoses. In the presence of so much finery and
+flowers one could imagine that nymphs in gauzy garments and Cupids
+with iridescent wings were going to serve nectar and ambrosia to
+aerial guests, to the sound of lyres and Aeolian harps.
+
+But the table for the greater gods was not there, being placed
+yonder in the middle of the wide azotea within a magnificent kiosk
+constructed especially for the occasion. A lattice of gilded wood
+over which clambered fragrant vines screened the interior from the
+eyes of the vulgar without impeding the free circulation of air to
+preserve the coolness necessary at that season. A raised platform
+lifted the table above the level of the others at which the ordinary
+mortals were going to dine and an arch decorated by the best artists
+would protect the august heads from the jealous gaze of the stars.
+
+On this table were laid only seven plates. The dishes were of solid
+silver, the cloth and napkins of the finest linen, the wines the
+most costly and exquisite. Don Timoteo had sought the most rare and
+expensive in everything, nor would he have hesitated at crime had he
+been assured that the Captain-General liked to eat human flesh.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+THE FIESTA
+
+
+    "Danzar sobre un volcan."
+
+
+By seven in the evening the guests had begun to arrive: first, the
+lesser divinities, petty government officials, clerks, and merchants,
+with the most ceremonious greetings and the gravest airs at the start,
+as if they were parvenus, for so much light, so many decorations,
+and so much glassware had some effect. Afterwards, they began to
+be more at ease, shaking their fists playfully, with pats on the
+shoulders, and even familiar slaps on the back. Some, it is true,
+adopted a rather disdainful air, to let it be seen that they were
+accustomed to better things--of course they were! There was one goddess
+who yawned, for she found everything vulgar and even remarked that
+she was ravenously hungry, while another quarreled with her god,
+threatening to box his ears.
+
+Don Timoteo bowed here and bowed there, scattered his best smiles,
+tightened his belt, stepped backward, turned halfway round, then
+completely around, and so on again and again, until one goddess could
+not refrain from remarking to her neighbor, under cover of her fan:
+"My dear, how important the old man is! Doesn't he look like a
+jumping-jack?"
+
+Later came the bridal couple, escorted by Dona Victorina and the rest
+of the party. Congratulations, hand-shakings, patronizing pats for the
+groom: for the bride, insistent stares and anatomical observations
+on the part of the men, with analyses of her gown, her toilette,
+speculations as to her health and strength on the part of the women.
+
+"Cupid and Psyche appearing on Olympus," thought Ben-Zayb,
+making a mental note of the comparison to spring it at some better
+opportunity. The groom had in fact the mischievous features of the god
+of love, and with a little good-will his hump, which the severity of
+his frock coat did not altogether conceal, could be taken for a quiver.
+
+Don Timoteo began to feel his belt squeezing him, the corns on his
+feet began to ache, his neck became tired, but still the General
+had not come. The greater gods, among them Padre Irene and Padre
+Salvi, had already arrived, it was true, but the chief thunderer was
+still lacking. The poor man became uneasy, nervous; his heart beat
+violently, but still he had to bow and smile; he sat down, he arose,
+failed to hear what was said to him, did not say what he meant. In
+the meantime, an amateur god made remarks to him about his chromos,
+criticizing them with the statement that they spoiled the walls.
+
+"Spoil the walls!" repeated Don Timoteo, with a smile and a desire
+to choke him. "But they were made in Europe and are the most costly
+I could get in Manila! Spoil the walls!" Don Timoteo swore to himself
+that on the very next day he would present for payment all the chits
+that the critic had signed in his store.
+
+Whistles resounded, the galloping of horses was heard--at last! "The
+General! The Captain-General!"
+
+Pale with emotion, Don Timoteo, dissembling the pain of his corns
+and accompanied by his son and some of the greater gods, descended
+to receive the Mighty Jove. The pain at his belt vanished before
+the doubts that now assailed him: should he frame a smile or affect
+gravity; should he extend his hand or wait for the General to offer
+his? _Carambas!_ Why had nothing of this occurred to him before,
+so that he might have consulted his good friend Simoun?
+
+To conceal his agitation, he whispered to his son in a low, shaky
+voice, "Have you a speech prepared?"
+
+"Speeches are no longer in vogue, papa, especially on such an occasion
+as this."
+
+Jupiter arrived in the company of Juno, who was converted into a tower
+of artificial lights--with diamonds in her hair, diamonds around her
+neck, on her arms, on her shoulders, she was literally covered with
+diamonds. She was arrayed in a magnificent silk gown having a long
+train decorated with embossed flowers.
+
+His Excellency literally took possession of the house, as Don Timoteo
+stammeringly begged him to do. [71] The orchestra played the royal
+march while the divine couple majestically ascended the carpeted
+stairway.
+
+Nor was his Excellency's gravity altogether affected. Perhaps for the
+first time since his arrival in the islands he felt sad, a strain
+of melancholy tinged his thoughts. This was the last triumph of
+his three years of government, and within two days he would descend
+forever from such an exalted height. What was he leaving behind? His
+Excellency did not care to turn his head backwards, but preferred to
+look ahead, to gaze into the future. Although he was carrying away a
+fortune, large sums to his credit were awaiting him in European banks,
+and he had residences, yet he had injured many, he had made enemies
+at the Court, the high official was waiting for him there. Other
+Generals had enriched themselves as rapidly as he, and now they were
+ruined. Why not stay longer, as Simoun had advised him to do? No,
+good taste before everything else. The bows, moreover, were not now
+so profound as before, he noticed insistent stares and even looks of
+dislike, but still he replied affably and even attempted to smile.
+
+"It's plain that the sun is setting," observed Padre Irene in
+Ben-Zayb's ear. "Many now stare him in the face."
+
+The devil with the curate--that was just what he was going to remark!
+
+"My dear," murmured into the ear of a neighbor the lady who had
+referred to Don Timoteo as a jumping-jack, "did you ever see such
+a skirt?"
+
+"Ugh, the curtains from the Palace!"
+
+"You don't say! But it's true! They're carrying everything away. You'll
+see how they make wraps out of the carpets."
+
+"That only goes to show that she has talent and taste," observed her
+husband, reproving her with a look. "Women should be economical." This
+poor god was still suffering from the dressmaker's bill.
+
+"My dear, give me curtains at twelve pesos a yard, and you'll see if
+I put on these rags!" retorted the goddess in pique. "Heavens! You
+can talk when you have done something fine like that to give you
+the right!"
+
+Meanwhile, Basilio stood before the house, lost in the throng
+of curious spectators, counting those who alighted from their
+carriages. When he looked upon so many persons, happy and confident,
+when he saw the bride and groom followed by their train of fresh
+and innocent little girls, and reflected that they were going
+to meet there a horrible death, he was sorry and felt his hatred
+waning within him. He wanted to save so many innocents, he thought
+of notifying the police, but a carriage drove up to set down Padre
+Salvi and Padre Irene, both beaming with content, and like a passing
+cloud his good intentions vanished. "What does it matter to me?" he
+asked himself. "Let the righteous suffer with the sinners."
+
+Then he added, to silence his scruples: "I'm not an informer, I mustn't
+abuse the confidence he has placed in me. I owe him, _him_ more than
+I do _them_: he dug my mother's grave, they killed her! What have
+I to do with them? I did everything possible to be good and useful,
+I tried to forgive and forget, I suffered every imposition, and only
+asked that they leave me in peace. I got in no one's way. What have
+they done to me? Let their mangled limbs fly through the air! We've
+suffered enough."
+
+Then he saw Simoun alight with the terrible lamp in his hands, saw him
+cross the entrance with bowed head, as though deep in thought. Basilio
+felt his heart beat fainter, his feet and hands turn cold, while the
+black silhouette of the jeweler assumed fantastic shapes enveloped in
+flames. There at the foot of the stairway Simoun checked his steps,
+as if in doubt, and Basilio held his breath. But the hesitation was
+transient--Simoun raised his head, resolutely ascended the stairway,
+and disappeared.
+
+It then seemed to the student that the house was going to blow up at
+any moment, and that walls, lamps, guests, roof, windows, orchestra,
+would be hurtling through the air like a handful of coals in the midst
+of an infernal explosion. He gazed about him and fancied that he saw
+corpses in place of idle spectators, he saw them torn to shreds, it
+seemed to him that the air was filled with flames, but his calmer self
+triumphed over this transient hallucination, which was due somewhat
+to his hunger.
+
+"Until he comes out, there's no danger," he said to himself. "The
+Captain-General hasn't arrived yet."
+
+He tried to appear calm and control the convulsive trembling in his
+limbs, endeavoring to divert his thoughts to other things. Something
+within was ridiculing him, saying, "If you tremble now, before the
+supreme moment, how will you conduct yourself when you see blood
+flowing, houses burning, and bullets whistling?"
+
+His Excellency arrived, but the young man paid no attention to
+him. He was watching the face of Simoun, who was among those that
+descended to receive him, and he read in that implacable countenance
+the sentence of death for all those men, so that fresh terror seized
+upon him. He felt cold, he leaned against the wall, and, with his
+eyes fixed on the windows and his ears cocked, tried to guess what
+might be happening. In the sala he saw the crowd surround Simoun
+to look at the lamp, he heard congratulations and exclamations of
+admiration--the words "dining-room," "novelty," were repeated many
+times--he saw the General smile and conjectured that the novelty
+was to be exhibited that very night, by the jeweler's arrangement,
+on the table whereat his Excellency was to dine. Simoun disappeared,
+followed by a crowd of admirers.
+
+At that supreme moment his good angel triumphed, he forgot his hatreds,
+he forgot Juli, he wanted to save the innocent. Come what might, he
+would cross the street and try to enter. But Basilio had forgotten
+that he was miserably dressed. The porter stopped him and accosted
+him roughly, and finally, upon his insisting, threatened to call
+the police.
+
+Just then Simoun came down, slightly pale, and the porter turned
+from Basilio to salute the jeweler as though he had been a saint
+passing. Basilio realized from the expression of Simoun's face that he
+was leaving the fated house forever, that the lamp was lighted. _Alea
+jacta est!_ Seized by the instinct of self-preservation, he thought
+then of saving himself. It might occur to any of the guests through
+curiosity to tamper with the wick and then would come the explosion
+to overwhelm them all. Still he heard Simoun say to the cochero,
+"The Escolta, hurry!"
+
+Terrified, dreading that he might at any moment hear the awful
+explosion, Basilio hurried as fast as his legs would carry him to get
+away from the accursed spot, but his legs seemed to lack the necessary
+agility, his feet slipped on the sidewalk as though they were moving
+but not advancing. The people he met blocked the way, and before he had
+gone twenty steps he thought that at least five minutes had elapsed.
+
+Some distance away he stumbled against a young man who was standing
+with his head thrown back, gazing fixedly at the house, and in him
+he recognized Isagani. "What are you doing here?" he demanded. "Come
+away!"
+
+Isagani stared at him vaguely, smiled sadly, and again turned his gaze
+toward the open balconies, across which was revealed the ethereal
+silhouette of the bride clinging to the groom's arm as they moved
+slowly out of sight.
+
+"Come, Isagani, let's get away from that house. Come!" Basilio urged
+in a hoarse voice, catching his friend by the arm.
+
+Isagani gently shook himself free and continued to stare with the
+same sad smile upon his lips.
+
+"For God's sake, let's get away from here!"
+
+"Why should I go away? Tomorrow it will not be she."
+
+There was so much sorrow in those words that Basilio for a moment
+forgot his own terror. "Do you want to die?" he demanded.
+
+Isagani shrugged his shoulders and continued to gaze toward the house.
+
+Basilio again tried to drag him away. "Isagani, Isagani, listen
+to me! Let's not waste any time! That house is mined, it's going
+to blow up at any moment, by the least imprudent act, the least
+curiosity! Isagani, all will perish in its ruins."
+
+"In its ruins?" echoed Isagani, as if trying to understand, but
+without removing his gaze from the window.
+
+"Yes, in its ruins, yes, Isagani! For God's sake, come! I'll explain
+afterwards. Come! One who has been more unfortunate than either you
+or I has doomed them all. Do you see that white, clear light, like an
+electric lamp, shining from the azotea? It's the light of death! A
+lamp charged with dynamite, in a mined dining-room, will burst and
+not a rat will escape alive. Come!"
+
+"No," answered Isagani, shaking his head sadly. "I want to stay here,
+I want to see her for the last time. Tomorrow, you see, she will be
+something different."
+
+"Let fate have its way!" Basilio then exclaimed, hurrying away.
+
+Isagani watched his friend rush away with a precipitation that
+indicated real terror, but continued to stare toward the charmed
+window, like the cavalier of Toggenburg waiting for his sweetheart
+to appear, as Schiller tells. Now the sala was deserted, all having
+repaired to the dining-rooms, and it occurred to Isagani that Basilio's
+fears may have been well-founded. He recalled the terrified countenance
+of him who was always so calm and composed, and it set him to thinking.
+
+Suddenly an idea appeared clear in his imagination--the house was
+going to blow up and Paulita was there, Paulita was going to die a
+frightful death. In the presence of this idea everything was forgotten:
+jealousy, suffering, mental torture, and the generous youth thought
+only of his love. Without reflecting, without hesitation, he ran
+toward the house, and thanks to his stylish clothes and determined
+mien, easily secured admittance.
+
+While these short scenes were occurring in the street, in the
+dining-kiosk of the greater gods there was passed from hand to hand
+a piece of parchment on which were written in red ink these fateful
+words:
+
+
+    _Mene, Tekel, Phares_ [72]
+    _Juan Crisostomo Ibarra_
+
+
+"Juan Crisostomo Ibarra? Who is he?" asked his Excellency, handing
+the paper to his neighbor.
+
+"A joke in very bad taste!" exclaimed Don Custodio. "To sign the name
+of a filibuster dead more than ten years!"
+
+"A filibuster!"
+
+"It's a seditious joke!"
+
+"There being ladies present--"
+
+Padre Irene looked around for the joker and saw Padre Salvi, who was
+seated at the right of the Countess, turn as white as his napkin,
+while he stared at the mysterious words with bulging eyes. The scene
+of the sphinx recurred to him.
+
+"What's the matter, Padre Salvi?" he asked. "Do you recognize your
+friend's signature?"
+
+Padre Salvi did not reply. He made an effort to speak and without being
+conscious of what he was doing wiped his forehead with his napkin.
+
+"What has happened to your Reverence?"
+
+"It is his very handwriting!" was the whispered reply in a scarcely
+perceptible voice. "It's the very handwriting of Ibarra." Leaning
+against the back of his chair, he let his arms fall as though all
+strength had deserted him.
+
+Uneasiness became converted into fright, they all stared at one another
+without uttering a single word. His Excellency started to rise, but
+apprehending that such a move would be ascribed to fear, controlled
+himself and looked about him. There were no soldiers present, even
+the waiters were unknown to him.
+
+"Let's go on eating, gentlemen," he exclaimed, "and pay no attention
+to the joke." But his voice, instead of reassuring, increased the
+general uneasiness, for it trembled.
+
+"I don't suppose that that _Mene, Tekel, Phares_, means that we're
+to be assassinated tonight?" speculated Don Custodio.
+
+All remained motionless, but when he added, "Yet they might poison us,"
+they leaped up from their chairs.
+
+The light, meanwhile, had begun slowly to fade. "The lamp is going
+out," observed the General uneasily. "Will you turn up the wick,
+Padre Irene?"
+
+But at that instant, with the swiftness of a flash of lightning,
+a figure rushed in, overturning a chair and knocking a servant down,
+and in the midst of the general surprise seized the lamp, rushed to
+the azotea, and threw it into the river. The whole thing happened in
+a second and the dining-kiosk was left in darkness.
+
+The lamp had already struck the water before the servants could cry
+out, "Thief, thief!" and rush toward the azotea. "A revolver!" cried
+one of them. "A revolver, quick! After the thief!"
+
+But the figure, more agile than they, had already mounted the
+balustrade and before a light could be brought, precipitated itself
+into the river, striking the water with a loud splash.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+BEN-ZAYB'S AFFLICTIONS
+
+
+Immediately upon hearing of the incident, after lights had been brought
+and the scarcely dignified attitudes of the startled gods revealed,
+Ben-Zayb, filled with holy indignation, and with the approval of the
+press-censor secured beforehand, hastened home--an entresol where
+he lived in a mess with others--to write an article that would be
+the sublimest ever penned under the skies of the Philippines. The
+Captain-General would leave disconsolate if he did not first enjoy
+his dithyrambs, and this Ben-Zayb, in his kindness of heart, could
+not allow. Hence he sacrificed the dinner and ball, nor did he sleep
+that night.
+
+Sonorous exclamations of horror, of indignation, to fancy that
+the world was smashing to pieces and the stars, the eternal stars,
+were clashing together! Then a mysterious introduction, filled with
+allusions, veiled hints, then an account of the affair, and the
+final peroration. He multiplied the flourishes and exhausted all his
+euphemisms in describing the drooping shoulders and the tardy baptism
+of salad his Excellency had received on his Olympian brow, he eulogized
+the agility with which the General had recovered a vertical position,
+placing his head where his legs had been, and vice versa, then intoned
+a hymn to Providence for having so solicitously guarded those sacred
+bones. The paragraph turned out to be so perfect that his Excellency
+appeared as a hero, and fell higher, as Victor Hugo said.
+
+He wrote, erased, added, and polished, so that, without wanting
+in veracity--this was his special merit as a journalist--the whole
+would be an epic, grand for the seven gods, cowardly and base for
+the unknown thief, "who had executed himself, terror-stricken, and
+in the very act convinced of the enormity of his crime."
+
+He explained Padre Irene's act of plunging under the table as
+"an impulse of innate valor, which the habit of a God of peace
+and gentleness, worn throughout a whole life, had been unable to
+extinguish," for Padre Irene had tried to hurl himself upon the
+thief and had taken a straight course along the submensal route. In
+passing, he spoke of submarine passages, mentioned a project of Don
+Custodio's, called attention to the liberal education and wide travels
+of the priest. Padre Salvi's swoon was the excessive sorrow that took
+possession of the virtuous Franciscan to see the little fruit borne
+among the Indians by his pious sermons, while the immobility and
+fright of the other guests, among them the Countess, who "sustained"
+Padre Salvi (she grabbed him), were the serenity and sang-froid of
+heroes, inured to danger in the performance of their duties, beside
+whom the Roman senators surprised by the Gallic invaders were nervous
+schoolgirls frightened at painted cockroaches.
+
+Afterwards, to form a contrast, the picture of the thief: fear,
+madness, confusion, the fierce look, the distorted features,
+and--force of moral superiority in the race--his religious awe to
+see assembled there such august personages! Here came in opportunely
+a long imprecation, a harangue, a diatribe against the perversion of
+good customs, hence the necessity of a permanent military tribunal,
+"a declaration of martial law within the limits already so declared,
+special legislation, energetic and repressive, because it is in
+every way needful, it is of imperative importance to impress upon the
+malefactors and criminals that if the heart is generous and paternal
+for those who are submissive and obedient to the law, the hand is
+strong, firm, inexorable, hard, and severe for those who against all
+reason fail to respect it and who insult the sacred institutions of the
+fatherland. Yes, gentlemen, this is demanded not only for the welfare
+of these islands, not only for the welfare of all mankind, but also
+in the name of Spain, the honor of the Spanish name, the prestige of
+the Iberian people, because before all things else Spaniards we are,
+and the flag of Spain," etc.
+
+He terminated the article with this farewell: "Go in peace, gallant
+warrior, you who with expert hand have guided the destinies of
+this country in such calamitous times! Go in peace to breathe the
+balmy breezes of Manzanares! [73] We shall remain here like faithful
+sentinels to venerate your memory, to admire your wise dispositions,
+to avenge the infamous attempt upon your splendid gift, which we
+will recover even if we have to dry up the seas! Such a precious
+relic will be for this country an eternal monument to your splendor,
+your presence of mind, your gallantry!"
+
+In this rather confused way he concluded the article and before
+dawn sent it to the printing-office, of course with the censor's
+permit. Then he went to sleep like Napoleon, after he had arranged
+the plan for the battle of Jena.
+
+But at dawn he was awakened to have the sheets of copy returned with
+a note from the editor saying that his Excellency had positively
+and severely forbidden any mention of the affair, and had further
+ordered the denial of any versions and comments that might get abroad,
+discrediting them as exaggerated rumors.
+
+To Ben-Zayb this blow was the murder of a beautiful and sturdy child,
+born and nurtured with such great pain and fatigue. Where now hurl the
+Catilinarian pride, the splendid exhibition of warlike crime-avenging
+materials? And to think that within a month or two he was going to
+leave the Philippines, and the article could not be published in Spain,
+since how could he say those things about the criminals of Madrid,
+where other ideas prevailed, where extenuating circumstances were
+sought, where facts were weighed, where there were juries, and so
+on? Articles such as his were like certain poisonous rums that are
+manufactured in Europe, good enough to be sold among the negroes,
+_good for negroes_, [74] with the difference that if the negroes did
+not drink them they would not be destroyed, while Ben-Zayb's articles,
+whether the Filipinos read them or not, had their effect.
+
+"If only some other crime might be committed today or tomorrow,"
+he mused.
+
+With the thought of that child dead before seeing the light, those
+frozen buds, and feeling his eyes fill with tears, he dressed himself
+to call upon the editor. But the editor shrugged his shoulders; his
+Excellency had forbidden it because if it should be divulged that seven
+of the greater gods had let themselves be surprised and robbed by a
+nobody, while they brandished knives and forks, that would endanger
+the integrity of the fatherland! So he had ordered that no search be
+made for the lamp or the thief, and had recommended to his successors
+that they should not run the risk of dining in any private house,
+without being surrounded by halberdiers and guards. As those who knew
+anything about the events that night in Don Timoteo's house were for
+the most part military officials and government employees, it was
+not difficult to suppress the affair in public, for it concerned the
+integrity of the fatherland. Before this name Ben-Zayb bowed his head
+heroically, thinking about Abraham, Guzman El Bueno, [75] or at least,
+Brutus and other heroes of antiquity.
+
+Such a sacrifice could not remain unrewarded, the gods of journalism
+being pleased with Abraham Ben-Zayb. Almost upon the hour came
+the reporting angel bearing the sacrificial lamb in the shape of
+an assault committed at a country-house on the Pasig, where certain
+friars were spending the heated season. Here was his opportunity and
+Ben-Zayb praised his gods.
+
+"The robbers got over two thousand pesos, leaving badly wounded one
+friar and two servants. The curate defended himself as well as he
+could behind a chair, which was smashed in his hands."
+
+"Wait, wait!" said Ben-Zayb, taking notes. "Forty or fifty
+outlaws traitorously--revolvers, bolos, shotguns, pistols--lion at
+bay--chair--splinters flying--barbarously wounded--ten thousand pesos!"
+
+So great was his enthusiasm that he was not content with mere reports,
+but proceeded in person to the scene of the crime, composing on the
+road a Homeric description of the fight. A harangue in the mouth of
+the leader? A scornful defiance on the part of the priest? All the
+metaphors and similes applied to his Excellency, Padre Irene, and
+Padre Salvi would exactly fit the wounded friar and the description
+of the thief would serve for each of the outlaws. The imprecation
+could be expanded, since he could talk of religion, of the faith,
+of charity, of the ringing of bells, of what the Indians owed to
+the friars, he could get sentimental and melt into Castelarian [76]
+epigrams and lyric periods. The senoritas of the city would read the
+article and murmur, "Ben-Zayb, bold as a lion and tender as a lamb!"
+
+But when he reached the scene, to his great astonishment he learned
+that the wounded friar was no other than Padre Camorra, sentenced by
+his Provincial to expiate in the pleasant country-house on the banks
+of the Pasig his pranks in Tiani. He had a slight scratch on his hand
+and a bruise on his head received from flattening himself out on the
+floor. The robbers numbered three or four, armed only with bolos,
+the sum stolen fifty pesos!
+
+"It won't do!" exclaimed Ben-Zayb. "Shut up! You don't know what
+you're talking about."
+
+"How don't I know, _punales?_"
+
+"Don't be a fool--the robbers must have numbered more."
+
+"You ink-slinger--"
+
+So they had quite an altercation. What chiefly concerned Ben-Zayb
+was not to throw away the article, to give importance to the affair,
+so that he could use the peroration.
+
+But a fearful rumor cut short their dispute. The robbers caught
+had made some important revelations. One of the outlaws under
+_Matanglawin_ (Cabesang Tales) had made an appointment with them to
+join his band in Santa Mesa, thence to sack the conventos and houses
+of the wealthy. They would be guided by a Spaniard, tall and sunburnt,
+with white hair, who said that he was acting under the orders of the
+General, whose great friend he was, and they had been further assured
+that the artillery and various regiments would join them, wherefore
+they were to entertain no fear at all. The tulisanes would be pardoned
+and have a third part of the booty assigned to them. The signal was
+to have been a cannon-shot, but having waited for it in vain the
+tulisanes, thinking themselves deceived, separated, some going back
+to their homes, some returning to the mountains vowing vengeance on
+the Spaniard, who had thus failed twice to keep his word. Then they,
+the robbers caught, had decided to do something on their own account,
+attacking the country-house that they found closest at hand, resolving
+religiously to give two-thirds of the booty to the Spaniard with
+white hair, if perchance he should call upon them for it.
+
+The description being recognized as that of Simoun, the declaration
+was received as an absurdity and the robber subjected to all kinds
+of tortures, including the electric machine, for his impious
+blasphemy. But news of the disappearance of the jeweler having
+attracted the attention of the whole Escolta, and the sacks of powder
+and great quantities of cartridges having been discovered in his
+house, the story began to wear an appearance of truth. Mystery began
+to enwrap the affair, enveloping it in clouds; there were whispered
+conversations, coughs, suspicious looks, suggestive comments, and
+trite second-hand remarks. Those who were on the inside were unable
+to get over their astonishment, they put on long faces, turned pale,
+and but little was wanting for many persons to lose their minds in
+realizing certain things that had before passed unnoticed.
+
+"We've had a narrow escape! Who would have said--"
+
+In the afternoon Ben-Zayb, his pockets filled with revolvers and
+cartridges, went to see Don Custodio, whom he found hard at work over
+a project against American jewelers. In a hushed voice he whispered
+between the palms of his hands into the journalist's ear mysterious
+words.
+
+"Really?" questioned Ben-Zayb, slapping his hand on his pocket and
+paling visibly.
+
+"Wherever he may be found--" The sentence was completed with an
+expressive pantomime. Don Custodio raised both arms to the height of
+his face, with the right more bent than the left, turned the palms
+of his hands toward the floor, closed one eye, and made two movements
+in advance. "Ssh! Ssh!" he hissed.
+
+"And the diamonds?" inquired Ben-Zayb.
+
+"If they find him--" He went through another pantomime with the
+fingers of his right hand, spreading them out and clenching them
+together like the closing of a fan, clutching out with them somewhat
+in the manner of the wings of a wind-mill sweeping imaginary objects
+toward itself with practised skill. Ben-Zayb responded with another
+pantomime, opening his eyes wide, arching his eyebrows and sucking in
+his breath eagerly as though nutritious air had just been discovered.
+
+"Sssh!"
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+THE MYSTERY
+
+
+    Todo se sabe
+
+
+Notwithstanding so many precautions, rumors reached the public,
+even though quite changed and mutilated. On the following night
+they were the theme of comment in the house of Orenda, a rich jewel
+merchant in the industrious district of Santa Cruz, and the numerous
+friends of the family gave attention to nothing else. They were not
+indulging in cards, or playing the piano, while little Tinay, the
+youngest of the girls, became bored playing _chongka_ by herself,
+without being able to understand the interest awakened by assaults,
+conspiracies, and sacks of powder, when there were in the seven holes
+so many beautiful cowries that seemed to be winking at her in unison
+and smiled with their tiny mouths half-opened, begging to be carried
+up to the _home_. Even Isagani, who, when he came, always used to
+play with her and allow himself to be beautifully cheated, did not
+come at her call, for Isagani was gloomily and silently listening to
+something Chichoy the silversmith was relating. Momoy, the betrothed
+of Sensia, the eldest of the daughters--a pretty and vivacious girl,
+rather given to joking--had left the window where he was accustomed
+to spend his evenings in amorous discourse, and this action seemed to
+be very annoying to the lory whose cage hung from the eaves there,
+the lory endeared to the house from its ability to greet everybody
+in the morning with marvelous phrases of love. Capitana Loleng,
+the energetic and intelligent Capitana Loleng, had her account-book
+open before her, but she neither read nor wrote in it, nor was her
+attention fixed on the trays of loose pearls, nor on the diamonds--she
+had completely forgotten herself and was all ears. Her husband himself,
+the great Capitan Toringoy,--a transformation of the name Domingo,--the
+happiest man in the district, without other occupation than to dress
+well, eat, loaf, and gossip, while his whole family worked and toiled,
+had not gone to join his coterie, but was listening between fear and
+emotion to the hair-raising news of the lank Chichoy.
+
+Nor was reason for all this lacking. Chichoy had gone to deliver some
+work for Don Timoteo Pelaez, a pair of earrings for the bride, at the
+very time when they were tearing down the kiosk that on the previous
+night had served as a dining-room for the foremost officials. Here
+Chichoy turned pale and his hair stood on end.
+
+"_Naku_!" he exclaimed, "sacks and sacks of powder, sacks of powder
+under the floor, in the roof, under the table, under the chairs,
+everywhere! It's lucky none of the workmen were smoking."
+
+"Who put those sacks of powder there?" asked Capitana Loleng, who was
+brave and did not turn pale, as did the enamored Momoy. But Momoy had
+attended the wedding, so his posthumous emotion can be appreciated:
+he had been near the kiosk.
+
+"That's what no one can explain," replied Chichoy. "Who would have any
+interest in breaking up the fiesta? There couldn't have been more than
+one, as the celebrated lawyer Senor Pasta who was there on a visit
+declared--either an enemy of Don Timoteo's or a rival of Juanito's."
+
+The Orenda girls turned instinctively toward Isagani, who smiled
+silently.
+
+"Hide yourself," Capitana Loleng advised him. "They may accuse
+you. Hide!"
+
+Again Isagani smiled but said nothing.
+
+"Don Timoteo," continued Chichoy, "did not know to whom to attribute
+the deed. He himself superintended the work, he and his friend Simoun,
+and nobody else. The house was thrown into an uproar, the lieutenant
+of the guard came, and after enjoining secrecy upon everybody, they
+sent me away. But--"
+
+"But--but--" stammered the trembling Momoy.
+
+"_Naku!_" ejaculated Sensia, gazing at her fiance and trembling
+sympathetically to remember that he had been at the fiesta. "This
+young man--If the house had blown up--" She stared at her sweetheart
+passionately and admired his courage.
+
+"If it had blown up--"
+
+"No one in the whole of Calle Anloague would have been left alive,"
+concluded Capitan Toringoy, feigning valor and indifference in the
+presence of his family.
+
+"I left in consternation," resumed Chichoy, "thinking about how, if a
+mere spark, a cigarette had fallen, if a lamp had been overturned, at
+the present moment we should have neither a General, nor an Archbishop,
+nor any one, not even a government clerk! All who were at the fiesta
+last night--annihilated!"
+
+"_Virgen Santisima!_ This young man--"
+
+"_'Susmariosep!_" exclaimed Capitana Loleng. "All our debtors were
+there, _'Susmariosep!_ And we have a house near there! Who could it
+have been?"
+
+"Now you may know about it," added Chichoy in a whisper, "but you
+must keep it a secret. This afternoon I met a friend, a clerk in an
+office, and in talking about the affair, he gave me the clue to the
+mystery--he had it from some government employees. Who do you suppose
+put the sacks of powder there?"
+
+Many shrugged their shoulders, while Capitan Toringoy merely looked
+askance at Isagani.
+
+"The friars?"
+
+"Quiroga the Chinaman?"
+
+"Some student?"
+
+"Makaraig?"
+
+Capitan Toringoy coughed and glanced at Isagani, while Chichoy shook
+his head and smiled.
+
+"The jeweler Simoun."
+
+"Simoun!!"
+
+The profound silence of amazement followed these words. Simoun, the
+evil genius of the Captain-General, the rich trader to whose house
+they had gone to buy unset gems, Simoun, who had received the Orenda
+girls with great courtesy and had paid them fine compliments! For
+the very reason that the story seemed absurd it was believed. "_Credo
+quia absurdum,_" said St. Augustine.
+
+"But wasn't Simoun at the fiesta last night?" asked Sensia.
+
+"Yes," said Momoy. "But now I remember! He left the house just as we
+were sitting down to the dinner. He went to get his wedding-gift."
+
+"But wasn't he a friend of the General's? Wasn't he a partner of
+Don Timoteo's?"
+
+"Yes, he made himself a partner in order to strike the blow and kill
+all the Spaniards."
+
+"Aha!" cried Sensia. "Now I understand!"
+
+"What?"
+
+"You didn't want to believe Aunt Tentay. Simoun is the devil and he
+has bought up the souls of all the Spaniards. Aunt Tentay said so!"
+
+Capitana Loleng crossed herself and looked uneasily toward the jewels,
+fearing to see them turn into live coals, while Capitan Toringoy took
+off the ring which had come from Simoun.
+
+"Simoun has disappeared without leaving any traces," added
+Chichoy. "The Civil Guard is searching for him."
+
+"Yes," observed Sensia, crossing herself, "searching for the devil."
+
+Now many things were explained: Simoun's fabulous wealth and the
+peculiar smell in his house, the smell of sulphur. Binday, another
+of the daughters, a frank and lovely girl, remembered having seen
+blue flames in the jeweler's house one afternoon when she and her
+mother had gone there to buy jewels. Isagani listened attentively,
+but said nothing.
+
+"So, last night--" ventured Momoy.
+
+"Last night?" echoed Sensia, between curiosity and fear.
+
+Momoy hesitated, but the face Sensia put on banished his fear. "Last
+night, while we were eating, there was a disturbance, the light in
+the General's dining-room went out. They say that some unknown person
+stole the lamp that was presented by Simoun."
+
+"A thief? One of the Black Hand?"
+
+Isagani arose to walk back and forth.
+
+"Didn't they catch him?"
+
+"He jumped into the river before anybody recognized him. Some say he
+was a Spaniard, some a Chinaman, and others an Indian."
+
+"It's believed that with the lamp," added Chichoy, "he was going to
+set fire to the house, then the powder--"
+
+Momoy again shuddered but noticing that Sensia was watching him tried
+to control himself. "What a pity!" he exclaimed with an effort. "How
+wickedly the thief acted. Everybody would have been killed."
+
+Sensia stared at him in fright, the women crossed themselves, while
+Capitan Toringoy, who was afraid of politics, made a move to go away.
+
+Momoy turned to Isagani, who observed with an enigmatic smile: "It's
+always wicked to take what doesn't belong to you. If that thief had
+known what it was all about and had been able to reflect, surely he
+wouldn't have done as he did."
+
+Then, after a pause, he added, "For nothing in the world would I want
+to be in his place!"
+
+So they continued their comments and conjectures until an hour later,
+when Isagani bade the family farewell, to return forever to his
+uncle's side.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+FATALITY
+
+
+_Matanglawin_ was the terror of Luzon. His band had as lief appear
+in one province where it was least expected as make a descent upon
+another that was preparing to resist it. It burned a sugar-mill in
+Batangas and destroyed the crops, on the following day it murdered the
+Justice of the Peace of Tiani, and on the next took possession of the
+town of Cavite, carrying off the arms from the town hall. The central
+provinces, from Tayabas to Pangasinan, suffered from his depredations,
+and his bloody name extended from Albay in the south to Kagayan in
+the north. The towns, disarmed through mistrust on the part of a
+weak government, fell easy prey into his hands--at his approach the
+fields were abandoned by the farmers, the herds were scattered, while
+a trail of blood and fire marked his passage. _Matanglawin_ laughed at
+the severe measures ordered by the government against the tulisanes,
+since from them only the people in the outlying villages suffered,
+being captured and maltreated if they resisted the band, and if they
+made peace with it being flogged and deported by the government,
+provided they completed the journey and did not meet with a fatal
+accident on the way. Thanks to these terrible alternatives many of
+the country folk decided to enlist under his command.
+
+As a result of this reign of terror, trade among the towns, already
+languishing, died out completely. The rich dared not travel, and
+the poor feared to be arrested by the Civil Guard, which, being
+under obligation to pursue the tulisanes, often seized the first
+person encountered and subjected him to unspeakable tortures. In its
+impotence, the government put on a show of energy toward the persons
+whom it suspected, in order that by force of cruelty the people should
+not realize its weakness--the fear that prompted such measures.
+
+A string of these hapless suspects, some six or seven, with their
+arms tied behind them, bound together like a bunch of human meat,
+was one afternoon marching through the excessive heat along a road
+that skirted a mountain, escorted by ten or twelve guards armed with
+rifles. Their bayonets gleamed in the sun, the barrels of their rifles
+became hot, and even the sage-leaves in their helmets scarcely served
+to temper the effect of the deadly May sun.
+
+Deprived of the use of their arms and pressed close against one
+another to save rope, the prisoners moved along almost uncovered and
+unshod, he being the best off who had a handkerchief twisted around
+his head. Panting, suffering, covered with dust which perspiration
+converted into mud, they felt their brains melting, they saw lights
+dancing before them, red spots floating in the air. Exhaustion and
+dejection were pictured in their faces, desperation, wrath, something
+indescribable, the look of one who dies cursing, of a man who is
+weary of life, who hates himself, who blasphemes against God. The
+strongest lowered their heads to rub their faces against the dusky
+backs of those in front of them and thus wipe away the sweat that
+was blinding them. Many were limping, but if any one of them happened
+to fall and thus delay the march he would hear a curse as a soldier
+ran up brandishing a branch torn from a tree and forced him to rise
+by striking about in all directions. The string then started to run,
+dragging, rolling in the dust, the fallen one, who howled and begged
+to be killed; but perchance he succeeded in getting on his feet and
+then went along crying like a child and cursing the hour he was born.
+
+The human cluster halted at times while the guards drank, and then
+the prisoners continued on their way with parched mouths, darkened
+brains, and hearts full of curses. Thirst was for these wretches the
+least of their troubles.
+
+"Move on, you sons of ----!" cried a soldier, again refreshed,
+hurling the insult common among the lower classes of Filipinos.
+
+The branch whistled and fell on any shoulder whatsoever, the nearest
+one, or at times upon a face to leave a welt at first white, then red,
+and later dirty with the dust of the road.
+
+"Move on, you cowards!" at times a voice yelled in Spanish, deepening
+its tone.
+
+"Cowards!" repeated the mountain echoes.
+
+Then the cowards quickened their pace under a sky of red-hot iron,
+over a burning road, lashed by the knotty branch which was worn
+into shreds on their livid skins. A Siberian winter would perhaps be
+tenderer than the May sun of the Philippines.
+
+Yet, among the soldiers there was one who looked with disapproving
+eyes upon so much wanton cruelty, as he marched along silently
+with his brows knit in disgust. At length, seeing that the guard,
+not satisfied with the branch, was kicking the prisoners that fell,
+he could no longer restrain himself but cried out impatiently, "Here,
+Mautang, let them alone!"
+
+Mautang turned toward him in surprise. "What's it to you, Carolino?" he
+asked.
+
+"To me, nothing, but it hurts me," replied Carolino. "They're men
+like ourselves."
+
+"It's plain that you're new to the business!" retorted Mautang with
+a compassionate smile. "How did you treat the prisoners in the war?"
+
+"With more consideration, surely!" answered Carolino.
+
+Mautang remained silent for a moment and then, apparently having
+discovered the reason, calmly rejoined, "Ah, it's because they are
+enemies and fight us, while these--these are our own countrymen."
+
+Then drawing nearer to Carolino he whispered, "How stupid you
+are! They're treated so in order that they may attempt to resist or
+to escape, and then--bang!"
+
+Carolino made no reply.
+
+One of the prisoners then begged that they let him stop for a moment.
+
+"This is a dangerous place," answered the corporal, gazing uneasily
+toward the mountain. "Move on!"
+
+"Move on!" echoed Mautang and his lash whistled.
+
+The prisoner twisted himself around to stare at him with reproachful
+eyes. "You are more cruel than the Spaniard himself," he said.
+
+Mautang replied with more blows, when suddenly a bullet whistled,
+followed by a loud report. Mautang dropped his rifle, uttered an
+oath, and clutching at his breast with both hands fell spinning into
+a heap. The prisoner saw him writhing in the dust with blood spurting
+from his mouth.
+
+"Halt!" called the corporal, suddenly turning pale.
+
+The soldiers stopped and stared about them. A wisp of smoke rose from
+a thicket on the height above. Another bullet sang to its accompanying
+report and the corporal, wounded in the thigh, doubled over vomiting
+curses. The column was attacked by men hidden among the rocks above.
+
+Sullen with rage the corporal motioned toward the string of prisoners
+and laconically ordered, "Fire!"
+
+The wretches fell upon their knees, filled with consternation. As
+they could not lift their hands, they begged for mercy by kissing
+the dust or bowing their heads--one talked of his children, another
+of his mother who would be left unprotected, one promised money,
+another called upon God--but the muzzles were quickly lowered and a
+hideous volley silenced them all.
+
+Then began the sharpshooting against those who were behind the rocks
+above, over which a light cloud of smoke began to hover. To judge from
+the scarcity of their shots, the invisible enemies could not have
+more than three rifles. As they advanced firing, the guards sought
+cover behind tree-trunks or crouched down as they attempted to scale
+the height. Splintered rocks leaped up, broken twigs fell from trees,
+patches of earth were torn up, and the first guard who attempted the
+ascent rolled back with a bullet through his shoulder.
+
+The hidden enemy had the advantage of position, but the valiant
+guards, who did not know how to flee, were on the point of retiring,
+for they had paused, unwilling to advance; that fight against the
+invisible unnerved them. Smoke and rocks alone could be seen--not a
+voice was heard, not a shadow appeared; they seemed to be fighting
+with the mountain.
+
+"Shoot, Carolino! What are you aiming at?" called the corporal.
+
+At that instant a man appeared upon a rock, making signs with his
+rifle.
+
+"Shoot him!" ordered the corporal with a foul oath.
+
+Three guards obeyed the order, but the man continued standing there,
+calling out at the top of his voice something unintelligible.
+
+Carolino paused, thinking that he recognized something familiar about
+that figure, which stood out plainly in the sunlight. But the corporal
+threatened to tie him up if he did not fire, so Carolino took aim and
+the report of his rifle was heard. The man on the rock spun around
+and disappeared with a cry that left Carolino horror-stricken.
+
+Then followed a rustling in the bushes, indicating that those within
+were scattering in all directions, so the soldiers boldly advanced,
+now that there was no more resistance. Another man appeared upon the
+rock, waving a spear, and they fired at him. He sank down slowly,
+catching at the branch of a tree, but with another volley fell face
+downwards on the rock.
+
+The guards climbed on nimbly, with bayonets fixed ready for a
+hand-to-hand fight. Carolino alone moved forward reluctantly, with
+a wandering, gloomy look, the cry of the man struck by his bullet
+still ringing in his ears. The first to reach the spot found an old
+man dying, stretched out on the rock. He plunged his bayonet into
+the body, but the old man did not even wink, his eyes being fixed
+on Carolino with an indescribable gaze, while with his bony hand he
+pointed to something behind the rock.
+
+The soldiers turned to see Caroline frightfully pale, his mouth
+hanging open, with a look in which glimmered the last spark of reason,
+for Carolino, who was no other than Tano, Cabesang Tales' son, and
+who had just returned from the Carolines, recognized in the dying
+man his grandfather, Tandang Selo. No longer able to speak, the old
+man's dying eyes uttered a whole poem of grief--and then a corpse,
+he still continued to point to something behind the rock.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+
+In his solitary retreat on the shore of the sea, whose mobile surface
+was visible through the open, windows, extending outward until it
+mingled with the horizon, Padre Florentino was relieving the monotony
+by playing on his harmonium sad and melancholy tunes, to which the
+sonorous roar of the surf and the sighing of the treetops of the
+neighboring wood served as accompaniments. Notes long, full, mournful
+as a prayer, yet still vigorous, escaped from the old instrument. Padre
+Florentino, who was an accomplished musician, was improvising, and,
+as he was alone, gave free rein to the sadness in his heart.
+
+For the truth was that the old man was very sad. His good friend, Don
+Tiburcio de Espadana, had just left him, fleeing from the persecution
+of his wife. That morning he had received a note from the lieutenant
+of the Civil Guard, which ran thus:
+
+
+    MY DEAR CHAPLAIN,--I have just received from the commandant
+    a telegram that says, "Spaniard hidden house Padre Florentino
+    capture forward alive dead." As the telegram is quite explicit,
+    warn your friend not to be there when I come to arrest him
+    at eight tonight.
+
+    Affectionately,
+
+    PEREZ
+
+    Burn this note.
+
+
+"T-that V-victorina!" Don Tiburcio had stammered. "S-she's c-capable
+of having me s-shot!"
+
+Padre Florentino was unable to reassure him. Vainly he pointed
+out to him that the word _cojera_ should have read _cogera_,
+[77] and that the hidden Spaniard could not be Don  Tiburcio,
+but the jeweler Simoun, who two days before had arrived, wounded
+and a fugitive, begging for shelter. But Don Tiburcio would not be
+convinced--_cojera_ was his own lameness, his personal description,
+and it was an intrigue of Victorina's to get him back alive or dead,
+as Isagani had written from Manila. So the poor Ulysses had left the
+priest's house to conceal himself in the hut of a woodcutter.
+
+No doubt was entertained by Padre Florentino that the Spaniard wanted
+was the jeweler Simoun, who had arrived mysteriously, himself carrying
+the jewel-chest, bleeding, morose, and exhausted. With the free and
+cordial Filipino hospitality, the priest had taken him in, without
+asking indiscreet questions, and as news of the events in Manila had
+not yet reached his ears he was unable to understand the situation
+clearly. The only conjecture that occurred to him was that the General,
+the jeweler's friend and protector, being gone, probably his enemies,
+the victims of wrong and abuse, were now rising and calling for
+vengeance, and that the acting Governor was pursuing him to make him
+disgorge the wealth he had accumulated--hence his flight. But whence
+came his wounds? Had he tried to commit suicide? Were they the result
+of personal revenge? Or were they merely caused by an accident, as
+Simoun claimed? Had they been received in escaping from the force
+that was pursuing him?
+
+This last conjecture was the one that seemed to have the greatest
+appearance of probability, being further strengthened by the telegram
+received and Simoun's decided unwillingness from the start to be
+treated by the doctor from the capital. The jeweler submitted only
+to the ministrations of Don Tiburcio, and even to them with marked
+distrust. In this situation Padre Florentino was asking himself what
+line of conduct he should pursue when the Civil Guard came to arrest
+Simoun. His condition would not permit his removal, much less a long
+journey--but the telegram said alive or dead.
+
+Padre Florentine ceased playing and approached the window to gaze
+out at the sea, whose desolate surface was without a ship, without
+a sail--it gave him no suggestion. A solitary islet outlined
+in the distance spoke only of solitude and made the space more
+lonely. Infinity is at times despairingly mute.
+
+The old man was trying to analyze the sad and ironical smile with
+which Simoun had received the news that he was to be arrested. What did
+that smile mean? And that other smile, still sadder and more ironical,
+with which he received the news that they would not come before eight
+at night? What did all this mystery signify? Why did Simoun refuse
+to hide? There came into his mind the celebrated saying of St. John
+Chrysostom when he was defending the eunuch Eutropius: "Never was a
+better time than this to say--Vanity of vanities and all is vanity!"
+
+Yes, that Simoun, so rich, so powerful, so feared a week ago, and
+now more unfortunate than Eutropius, was seeking refuge, not at the
+altars of a church, but in the miserable house of a poor native priest,
+hidden in the forest, on the solitary seashore! Vanity of vanities
+and all is vanity! That man would within a few hours be a prisoner,
+dragged from the bed where he lay, without respect for his condition,
+without consideration for his wounds--dead or alive his enemies
+demanded him! How could he save him? Where could he find the moving
+accents of the bishop of Constantinople? What weight would his weak
+words have, the words of a native priest, whose own humiliation this
+same Simoun had in his better days seemed to applaud and encourage?
+
+But Padre Florentine no longer recalled the indifferent reception that
+two months before the jeweler had accorded to him when he had tried
+to interest him in favor of Isagani, then a prisoner on account of
+his imprudent chivalry; he forgot the activity Simoun had displayed in
+urging Paulita's marriage, which had plunged Isagani into the fearful
+misanthropy that was worrying his uncle. He forgot all these things
+and thought only of the sick man's plight and his own obligations as
+a host, until his senses reeled. Where must he hide him to avoid his
+falling into the clutches of the authorities? But the person chiefly
+concerned was not worrying, he was smiling.
+
+While he was pondering over these things, the old man was approached by
+a servant who said that the sick man wished to speak with him, so he
+went into the next room, a clean and well-ventilated apartment with a
+floor of wide boards smoothed and polished, and simply furnished with
+big, heavy armchairs of ancient design, without varnish or paint. At
+one end there was a large kamagon bed with its four posts to support
+the canopy, and beside it a table covered with bottles, lint, and
+bandages. A praying-desk at the feet of a Christ and a scanty library
+led to the suspicion that it was the priest's own bedroom, given up to
+his guest according to the Filipino custom of offering to the stranger
+the best table, the best room, and the best bed in the house. Upon
+seeing the windows opened wide to admit freely the healthful sea-breeze
+and the echoes of its eternal lament, no one in the Philippines would
+have said that a sick person was to be found there, since it is the
+custom to close all the windows and stop up all the cracks just as
+soon as any one catches a cold or gets an insignificant headache.
+
+Padre Florentine looked toward the bed and was astonished to
+see that the sick man's face had lost its tranquil and ironical
+expression. Hidden grief seemed to knit his brows, anxiety was depicted
+in his looks, his lips were curled in a smile of pain.
+
+"Are you suffering, Senor Simoun?" asked the priest solicitously,
+going to his side.
+
+"Some! But in a little while I shall cease to suffer," he replied
+with a shake of his head.
+
+Padre Florentine clasped his hands in fright, suspecting that he
+understood the terrible truth. "My God, what have you done? What have
+you taken?" He reached toward the bottles.
+
+"It's useless now! There's no remedy at all!" answered Simoun with a
+pained smile. "What did you expect me to do? Before the clock strikes
+eight--alive or dead--dead, yes, but alive, no!"
+
+"My God, what have you done?"
+
+"Be calm!" urged the sick man with a wave of his hand. "What's done
+is done. I must not fall into anybody's hands--my secret would
+be torn from me. Don't get excited, don't lose your head, it's
+useless! Listen--the night is coming on and there's no time to be
+lost. I must tell you my secret, and intrust to you my last request,
+I must lay my life open before you. At the supreme moment I want to
+lighten myself of a load, I want to clear up a doubt of mine. You
+who believe so firmly in God--I want you to tell me if there is a God!"
+
+"But an antidote, Senor Simoun! I have ether, chloroform--"
+
+The priest began to search for a flask, until Simoun cried impatiently,
+"Useless, it's useless! Don't waste time! I'll go away with my secret!"
+
+The bewildered priest fell down at his desk and prayed at the feet
+of the Christ, hiding his face in his hands. Then he arose serious
+and grave, as if he had received from his God all the force, all
+the dignity, all the authority of the Judge of consciences. Moving
+a chair to the head of the bed he prepared to listen.
+
+At the first words Simoun murmured, when he told his real name,
+the old priest started back and gazed at him in terror, whereat
+the sick man smiled bitterly. Taken by surprise, the priest was not
+master of himself, but he soon recovered, and covering his face with
+a handkerchief again bent over to listen.
+
+Simoun related his sorrowful story: how, thirteen years before, he
+had returned from Europe filled with hopes and smiling illusions,
+having come back to marry a girl whom he loved, disposed to do good
+and forgive all who had wronged him, just so they would let him live
+in peace. But it was not so. A mysterious hand involved him in the
+confusion of an uprising planned by his enemies. Name, fortune, love,
+future, liberty, all were lost, and he escaped only through the heroism
+of a friend. Then he swore vengeance. With the wealth of his family,
+which had been buried in a wood, he had fled, had gone to foreign
+lands and engaged in trade. He took part in the war in Cuba, aiding
+first one side and then another, but always profiting. There he made
+the acquaintance of the General, then a major, whose good-will he won
+first by loans of money, and afterwards he made a friend of him by
+the knowledge of criminal secrets. With his money he had been able to
+secure the General's appointment and, once in the Philippines, he had
+used him as a blind tool and incited him to all kinds of injustice,
+availing himself of his insatiable lust for gold.
+
+The confession was long and tedious, but during the whole of it the
+confessor made no further sign of surprise and rarely interrupted the
+sick man. It was night when Padre Florentino, wiping the perspiration
+from his face, arose and began to meditate. Mysterious darkness
+flooded the room, so that the moonbeams entering through the window
+filled it with vague lights and vaporous reflections.
+
+Into the midst of the silence the priest's voice broke sad and
+deliberate, but consoling: "God will forgive you, Senor--Simoun,"
+he said. "He knows that we are fallible, He has seen that you have
+suffered, and in ordaining that the chastisement for your faults
+should come as death from the very ones you have instigated to crime,
+we can see His infinite mercy. He has frustrated your plans one by
+one, the best conceived, first by the death of Maria Clara, then by
+a lack of preparation, then in some mysterious way. Let us bow to
+His will and render Him thanks!"
+
+"According to you, then," feebly responded the sick man, "His will
+is that these islands--"
+
+"Should continue in the condition in which they suffer?" finished
+the priest, seeing that the other hesitated. "I don't know, sir,
+I can't read the thought of the Inscrutable. I know that He has not
+abandoned those peoples who in their supreme moments have trusted in
+Him and made Him the Judge of their cause, I know that His arm has
+never failed when, justice long trampled upon and every recourse gone,
+the oppressed have taken up the sword to fight for home and wife and
+children, for their inalienable rights, which, as the German poet says,
+shine ever there above, unextinguished and inextinguishable, like
+the eternal stars themselves. No, God is justice, He cannot abandon
+His cause, the cause of liberty, without which no justice is possible."
+
+"Why then has He denied me His aid?" asked the sick man in a voice
+charged with bitter complaint.
+
+"Because you chose means that He could not sanction," was the
+severe reply. "The glory of saving a country is not for him who has
+contributed to its ruin. You have believed that what crime and iniquity
+have defiled and deformed, another crime and another iniquity can
+purify and redeem. Wrong! Hate never produces anything but monsters
+and crime criminals! Love alone realizes wonderful works, virtue
+alone can save! No, if our country has ever to be free, it will not
+be through vice and crime, it will not be so by corrupting its sons,
+deceiving some and bribing others, no! Redemption presupposes virtue,
+virtue sacrifice, and sacrifice love!"
+
+"Well, I accept your explanation," rejoined the sick man, after
+a pause. "I have been mistaken, but, because I have been mistaken,
+will that God deny liberty to a people and yet save many who are much
+worse criminals than I am? What is my mistake compared to the crimes
+of our rulers? Why has that God to give more heed to my iniquity than
+to the cries of so many innocents? Why has He not stricken me down
+and then made the people triumph? Why does He let so many worthy and
+just ones suffer and look complacently upon their tortures?"
+
+"The just and the worthy must suffer in order that their ideas may be
+known and extended! You must shake or shatter the vase to spread its
+perfume, you must smite the rock to get the spark! There is something
+providential in the persecutions of tyrants, Senor Simoun!"
+
+"I knew it," murmured the sick man, "and therefore I encouraged
+the tyranny."
+
+"Yes, my friend, but more corrupt influences than anything else
+were spread. You fostered the social rottenness without sowing an
+idea. From this fermentation of vices loathing alone could spring,
+and if anything were born overnight it would be at best a mushroom,
+for mushrooms only can spring spontaneously from filth. True it
+is that the vices of the government are fatal to it, they cause
+its death, but they kill also the society in whose bosom they are
+developed. An immoral government presupposes a demoralized people,
+a conscienceless administration, greedy and servile citizens in the
+settled parts, outlaws and brigands in the mountains. Like master,
+like slave! Like government, like country!"
+
+A brief pause ensued, broken at length by the sick man's voice. "Then,
+what can be done?"
+
+"Suffer and work!"
+
+"Suffer--work!" echoed the sick man bitterly. "Ah, it's easy to say
+that, when you are not suffering, when the work is rewarded. If your
+God demands such great sacrifices from man, man who can scarcely
+count upon the present and doubts the future, if you had seen what
+I have, the miserable, the wretched, suffering unspeakable tortures
+for crimes they have not committed, murdered to cover up the faults
+and incapacity of others, poor fathers of families torn from their
+homes to work to no purpose upon highways that are destroyed each day
+and seem only to serve for sinking families into want. Ah, to suffer,
+to work, is the will of God! Convince them that their murder is their
+salvation, that their work is the prosperity of the home! To suffer,
+to work! What God is that?"
+
+"A very just God, Senor Simoun," replied the priest. "A God who
+chastises our lack of faith, our vices, the little esteem in which
+we hold dignity and the civic virtues. We tolerate vice, we make
+ourselves its accomplices, at times we applaud it, and it is just,
+very just that we suffer the consequences, that our children suffer
+them. It is the God of liberty, Senor Simoun, who obliges us to
+love it, by making the yoke heavy for us--a God of mercy, of equity,
+who while He chastises us, betters us and only grants prosperity to
+him who has merited it through his efforts. The school of suffering
+tempers, the arena of combat strengthens the soul.
+
+"I do not mean to say that our liberty will be secured at the sword's
+point, for the sword plays but little part in modern affairs, but that
+we must secure it by making ourselves worthy of it, by exalting the
+intelligence and the dignity of the individual, by loving justice,
+right, and greatness, even to the extent of dying for them,--and when
+a people reaches that height God will provide a weapon, the idols
+will be shattered, the tyranny will crumble like a house of cards
+and liberty will shine out like the first dawn.
+
+"Our ills we owe to ourselves alone, so let us blame no one. If Spain
+should see that we were less complaisant with tyranny and more disposed
+to struggle and suffer for our rights, Spain would be the first to
+grant us liberty, because when the fruit of the womb reaches maturity
+woe unto the mother who would stifle it! So, while the Filipino people
+has not sufficient energy to proclaim, with head erect and bosom bared,
+its rights to social life, and to guarantee it with its sacrifices,
+with its own blood; while we see our countrymen in private life ashamed
+within themselves, hear the voice of conscience roar in rebellion and
+protest, yet in public life keep silence or even echo the words of
+him who abuses them in order to mock the abused; while we see them
+wrap themselves up in their egotism and with a forced smile praise
+the most iniquitous actions, begging with their eyes a portion of
+the booty--why grant them liberty? With Spain or without Spain they
+would always be the same, and perhaps worse! Why independence, if the
+slaves of today will be the tyrants of tomorrow? And that they will
+be such is not to be doubted, for he who submits to tyranny loves it.
+
+"Senor Simoun, when our people is unprepared, when it enters the fight
+through fraud and force, without a clear understanding of what it is
+doing, the wisest attempts will fail, and better that they do fail,
+since why commit the wife to the husband if he does not sufficiently
+love her, if he is not ready to die for her?"
+
+Padre Florentino felt the sick man catch and press his hand, so he
+became silent, hoping that the other might speak, but he merely felt
+a stronger pressure of the hand, heard a sigh, and then profound
+silence reigned in the room. Only the sea, whose waves were rippled
+by the night breeze, as though awaking from the heat of the day,
+sent its hoarse roar, its eternal chant, as it rolled against the
+jagged rocks. The moon, now free from the sun's rivalry, peacefully
+commanded the sky, and the trees of the forest bent down toward one
+another, telling their ancient legends in mysterious murmurs borne
+on the wings of the wind.
+
+The sick man said nothing, so Padre Florentino, deeply thoughtful,
+murmured: "Where are the youth who will consecrate their golden hours,
+their illusions, and their enthusiasm to the welfare of their native
+land? Where are the youth who will generously pour out their blood to
+wash away so much shame, so much crime, so much abomination? Pure and
+spotless must the victim be that the sacrifice may be acceptable! Where
+are you, youth, who will embody in yourselves the vigor of life that
+has left our veins, the purity of ideas that has been contaminated
+in our brains, the fire of enthusiasm that has been quenched in our
+hearts? We await you, O youth! Come, for we await you!"
+
+Feeling his eyes moisten he withdrew his hand from that of the sick
+man, arose, and went to the window to gaze out upon the wide surface
+of the sea. He was drawn from his meditation by gentle raps at the
+door. It was the servant asking if he should bring a light.
+
+When the priest returned to the sick man and looked at him in the
+light of the lamp, motionless, his eyes closed, the hand that had
+pressed his lying open and extended along the edge of the bed,
+he thought for a moment that he was sleeping, but noticing that he
+was not breathing touched him gently, and then realized that he was
+dead. His body had already commenced to turn cold. The priest fell
+upon his knees and prayed.
+
+When he arose and contemplated the corpse, in whose features were
+depicted the deepest grief, the tragedy of a whole wasted life which
+he was carrying over there beyond death, the old man shuddered and
+murmured, "God have mercy on those who turned him from the straight
+path!"
+
+While the servants summoned by him fell upon their knees and prayed
+for the dead man, curious and bewildered as they gazed toward the
+bed, reciting requiem after requiem, Padre Florentino took from a
+cabinet the celebrated steel chest that contained Simoun's fabulous
+wealth. He hesitated for a moment, then resolutely descended the
+stairs and made his way to the cliff where Isagani was accustomed to
+sit and gaze into the depths of the sea.
+
+Padre Florentino looked down at his feet. There below he saw the dark
+billows of the Pacific beating into the hollows of the cliff, producing
+sonorous thunder, at the same time that, smitten by the moonbeams,
+the waves and foam glittered like sparks of fire, like handfuls of
+diamonds hurled into the air by some jinnee of the abyss. He gazed
+about him. He was alone. The solitary coast was lost in the distance
+amid the dim cloud that the moonbeams played through, until it mingled
+with the horizon. The forest murmured unintelligible sounds.
+
+Then the old man, with an effort of his herculean arms, hurled the
+chest into space, throwing it toward the sea. It whirled over and over
+several times and descended rapidly in a slight curve, reflecting the
+moonlight on its polished surface. The old man saw the drops of water
+fly and heard a loud splash as the abyss closed over and swallowed up
+the treasure. He waited for a few moments to see if the depths would
+restore anything, but the wave rolled on as mysteriously as before,
+without adding a fold to its rippling surface, as though into the
+immensity of the sea a pebble only had been dropped.
+
+"May Nature guard you in her deep abysses among the pearls and corals
+of her eternal seas," then said the priest, solemnly extending his
+hands. "When for some holy and sublime purpose man may need you, God
+will in his wisdom draw you from the bosom of the waves. Meanwhile,
+there you will not work woe, you will not distort justice, you will
+not foment avarice!"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+GLOSSARY
+
+
+_aba:_ A Tagalog exclamation of wonder, surprise, etc., often used
+to introduce or emphasize a contradictory statement.
+
+_alcalde:_ Governor of a province or district, with both executive
+and judicial authority.
+
+_Ayuntamiento:_ A city corporation or council, and by extension
+the building in which it has its offices; specifically, in Manila,
+the capitol.
+
+_balete:_ The Philippine banyan, a tree sacred in Malay folk-lore.
+
+_banka:_ A dugout canoe with bamboo supports or outriggers.
+
+_batalan:_ The platform of split bamboo attached to a _nipa_ house.
+
+_batikulin:_ A variety of easily-turned wood, used in carving.
+
+_bibinka:_ A sweetmeat made of sugar or molasses and rice-flour,
+commonly sold in the small shops.
+
+_buyera:_ A woman who prepares and sells the _buyo_.
+
+_buyo:_ The masticatory prepared by wrapping a piece of areca-nut
+with a little shell-lime in a betel-leaf--the _pan_ of British India.
+
+_cabesang:_ Title of a _cabeza de barangay;_ given by courtesy to
+his wife also.
+
+_cabeza de barangay:_ Headman and tax-collector for a group of about
+fifty families, for whose "tribute" he was personally responsible.
+
+_calesa:_ A two-wheeled chaise with folding top.
+
+_calle:_ Street (Spanish).
+
+_camisa:_ 1. A loose, collarless shirt of transparent material worn
+by men outside the trousers. 2. A thin, transparent waist with flowing
+sleeves, worn by women.
+
+_capitan:_ "Captain," a title used in addressing or referring to a
+gobernadorcillo, or a former occupant of that office.
+
+_carambas:_ A Spanish exclamation denoting surprise or displeasure.
+
+_carbineer:_ Internal-revenue guard.
+
+_carromata:_ A small two-wheeled vehicle with a fixed top.
+
+_casco:_ A flat-bottomed freight barge.
+
+_cayman:_ The Philippine crocodile.
+
+_cedula:_ Certificate of registration and receipt for poll-tax.
+
+_chongka:_ A child's game played with pebbles or cowry-shells.
+
+_cigarrera:_ A woman working in a cigar or cigarette factory.
+
+_Civil Guard:_ Internal quasi-military police force of Spanish officers
+and native soldiers.
+
+_cochero:_ Carriage driver, coachman.
+
+_cuarto:_ A copper coin, one hundred and sixty of which were equal
+in value to a silver peso.
+
+_filibuster:_ A native of the Philippines who was accused of advocating
+their separation from Spain.
+
+_filibusterism:_ See _filibuster_.
+
+_gobernadorcillo:_ "Petty governor," the principal municipal
+official--also, in Manila, the head of a commercial guild.
+
+_gumamela:_ The hibiscus, common as a garden shrub in the Philippines.
+
+_Indian:_ The Spanish designation for the Christianized Malay of the
+Philippines was _indio_ (Indian), a term used rather contemptuously,
+the name _Filipino_ being generally applied in a restricted sense to
+the children of Spaniards born in the Islands.
+
+_kalan:_ The small, portable, open, clay fireplace commonly used
+in cooking.
+
+_kalikut:_ A short section of bamboo for preparing the _buyo_;
+a primitive betel-box.
+
+_kamagon:_ A tree of the ebony family, from which fine cabinet-wood
+is obtained. Its fruit is the _mabolo_, or date-plum.
+
+_lanete:_ A variety of timber used in carving.
+
+_linintikan:_ A Tagalog exclamation of disgust or contempt--"thunder!"
+
+_Malacanang:_ The palace of the Captain-General: from the vernacular
+name of the place where it stands, "fishermen's resort."
+
+_Malecon:_ A drive along the bay shore of Manila, opposite the
+Walled City.
+
+_Mestizo:_ A person of mixed Filipino and Spanish blood; sometimes
+applied also to a person of mixed Filipino and Chinese blood.
+
+_naku:_ A Tagalog exclamation of surprise, wonder, etc.
+
+_narra:_ The Philippine mahogany.
+
+_nipa:_ Swamp palm, with the imbricated leaves of which the roofs
+and sides of the common native houses are constructed.
+
+_novena:_ A devotion consisting of prayers recited for nine consecutive
+days, asking for some special favor; also, a booklet of these prayers.
+
+_panguingui:_ A complicated card-game, generally for small stakes,
+played with a monte deck.
+
+_panguinguera:_ A woman addicted to _panguingui_, this being chiefly
+a feminine diversion in the Philippines.
+
+_pansit:_ A soup made of Chinese vermicelli.
+
+_pansiteria:_ A shop where _pansit_ is prepared and sold.
+
+_panuelo:_ A starched neckerchief folded stiffly over the shoulders,
+fastened in front and falling in a point behind: the most distinctive
+portion of the customary dress of Filipino women.
+
+_peso:_ A silver coin, either the Spanish peso or the Mexican dollar,
+about the size of an American dollar and of approximately half
+its value.
+
+_petate:_ Sleeping-mat woven from palm leaves.
+
+_pina:_ Fine cloth made from pineapple-leaf fibers.
+
+_Provincial:_ The head of a religious order in the Philippines.
+
+_punales:_ "Daggers!"
+
+_querida:_ A paramour, mistress: from the Spanish "beloved."
+
+_real:_ One-eighth of a peso, twenty cuartos.
+
+_sala:_ The principal room in the more pretentious Philippine houses.
+
+_salakot:_ Wide hat of palm or bamboo, distinctively Filipino.
+
+_sampaguita:_ The Arabian jasmine: a small, white, very fragrant
+flower, extensively cultivated, and worn in chaplets and rosaries by
+women and girls--the typical Philippine flower.
+
+_sipa_: A game played with a hollow ball of plaited bamboo or rattan,
+by boys standing in a circle, who by kicking it with their heels
+endeavor to keep it from striking the ground.
+
+_soltada_: A bout between fighting-cocks.
+
+_'Susmariosep_: A common exclamation: contraction of the Spanish,
+_Jesus, Maria, y Jose_, the Holy Family.
+
+_tabi_: The cry used by carriage drivers to warn pedestrians.
+
+_tabu_: A utensil fashioned from half of a coconut shell.
+
+_taju_: A thick beverage prepared from bean-meal and syrup.
+
+_tampipi_: A telescopic basket of woven palm, bamboo, or rattan.
+
+_Tandang_: A title of respect for an old man: from the Tagalog term
+for "old."
+
+_tapis_: A piece of dark cloth or lace, often richly worked or
+embroidered, worn at the waist somewhat in the fashion of an apron;
+a distinctive portion of the native women's attire, especially among
+the Tagalogs.
+
+_tatakut_: The Tagalog term for "fear."
+
+_teniente-mayor_: "Senior lieutenant," the senior member of the town
+council and substitute for the gobernadorcillo.
+
+_tertiary sister_: A member of a lay society affiliated with a regular
+monastic order.
+
+_tienda_: A shop or stall for the sale of merchandise.
+
+_tikbalang_: An evil spirit, capable of assuming various forms, but
+said to appear usually as a tall black man with disproportionately
+long legs: the "bogey man" of Tagalog children.
+
+_tulisan_: Outlaw, bandit. Under the old regime in the Philippines the
+_tulisanes_ were those who, on account of real or fancied grievances
+against the authorities, or from fear of punishment for crime,
+or from an instinctive desire to return to primitive simplicity,
+foreswore life in the towns "under the bell," and made their homes
+in the mountains or other remote places. Gathered in small bands with
+such arms as they could secure, they sustained themselves by highway
+robbery and the levying of black-mail from the country folk.
+
+
+
+
+NOTES
+
+
+[1] The Spanish designation for the Christianized Malay of the
+Philippines was _indio_ (Indian), a term used rather contemptuously,
+the name _filipino_ being generally applied in a restricted sense to
+the children of Spaniards born in the Islands.--Tr.
+
+[2] Now generally known as the Mariquina.--Tr.
+
+[3] This bridge, constructed in Lukban under the supervision of
+a Franciscan friar, was jocularly referred to as the _Puente de
+Capricho,_ being apparently an ignorant blunder in the right direction,
+since it was declared in an official report made by Spanish engineers
+in 1852 to conform to no known principle of scientific construction,
+and yet proved to be strong and durable.--Tr.
+
+[4] Don Custodio's gesture indicates money.--Tr.
+
+[5] Duck eggs, that are allowed to advance well into the duckling
+stage, then boiled and eaten. The senora is sneering at a custom
+among some of her own people.--Tr.
+
+[6] The Jesuit College in Manila, established in 1859.--Tr.
+
+[7] Natives of Spain; to distinguish them from the Filipinos, _i.e.,_
+descendants of Spaniards born in the Philippines. See Glossary:
+"Indian."--Tr.
+
+[8] It was a common saying among the old Filipinos that the Spaniards
+(white men) were fire (activity), while they themselves were water
+(passivity).--Tr.
+
+[9] The "liberal" demonstrations in Manila, and the mutiny in the
+Cavite Arsenal, resulting in the garroting of the three native
+priests to whom this work was dedicated: the first of a series of
+fatal mistakes, culminating in the execution of the author, that cost
+Spain the loyalty of the Filipinos.--Tr.
+
+[10] Archbishop of Manila from 1767 to 1787.--Tr.
+
+[11] "Between this island (Talim) and Halahala point extends a strait
+a mile wide and a league long, which the Indians call 'Kinabutasan,'
+a name that in their language means 'place that was cleft open';
+from which it is inferred that in other times the island was joined
+to the mainland and was separated from it by some severe earthquake,
+thus leaving this strait: of this there is an old tradition among
+the Indians."--Fray Martinez de Zuniga's _Estadismo_ (1803).
+
+[12] The reference is to the novel _Noli Me Tangere_ (_The Social
+Cancer_), the author's first work, of which, the present is in a way
+a continuation.--Tr.
+
+[13] This legend is still current among the Tagalogs. It circulates
+in various forms, the commonest being that the king was so confined
+for defying the lightning; and it takes no great stretch of the
+imagination to fancy in this idea a reference to the firearms used
+by the Spanish conquerors. Quite recently (January 1909), when the
+nearly extinct volcano of Banahao shook itself and scattered a few
+tons of mud over the surrounding landscape, the people thereabout
+recalled this old legend, saying that it was their King Bernardo
+making another effort to get that right foot loose.--Tr.
+
+[14] The reference is to _Noli Me Tangere,_ in which Sinang appears.
+
+[15] The Dominican school of secondary instruction in Manila.--Tr.
+
+[16] "The studies of secondary instruction given in Santo Tomas,
+in the college of San Juan de Letran, and of San Jose, and in the
+private schools, had the defects inherent in the plan of instruction
+which the friars developed in the Philippines. It suited their plans
+that scientific and literary knowledge should not become general nor
+very extensive, for which reason they took but little interest in the
+study of those subjects or in the quality of the instruction. Their
+educational establishments were places of luxury for the children of
+wealthy and well-to-do families rather than establishments in which
+to perfect and develop the minds of the Filipino youth. It is true
+they were careful to give them a religious education, tending to make
+them respect the omnipotent power (_sic_) of the monastic corporations.
+
+"The intellectual powers were made dormant by devoting a greater
+part of the time to the study of Latin, to which they attached an
+extraordinary importance, for the purpose of discouraging pupils
+from studying the exact and experimental sciences and from gaining
+a knowledge of true literary studies.
+
+"The philosophic system explained was naturally the scholastic one,
+with an exceedingly refined and subtile logic, and with deficient
+ideas upon physics. By the study of Latin, and their philosophic
+systems, they converted their pupils into automatic machines rather
+than into practical men prepared to battle with life."--_Census of
+the Philippine Islands (Washington, 1905), Volume III, pp. 601, 602._
+
+[17] The nature of this booklet, in Tagalog, is made clear in several
+passages. It was issued by the Franciscans, but proved too outspoken
+for even Latin refinement, and was suppressed by the Order itself.--Tr.
+
+[18] The rectory or parish house.
+
+[19] Friends of the author, who suffered in Weyler's expedition,
+mentioned below.--Tr.
+
+[20] The Dominican corporation, at whose instigation Captain-General
+Valeriano Weyler sent a battery of artillery to Kalamba to destroy
+the property of tenants who were contesting in the courts the
+friars' titles to land there. The author's family were the largest
+sufferers.--Tr.
+
+[21] A relative of the author, whose body was dragged from the tomb and
+thrown to the dogs, on the pretext that he had died without receiving
+final absolution.--Tr.
+
+[22] Under the Spanish regime the government paid no attention to
+education, the schools (!) being under the control of the religious
+orders and the friar-curates of the towns.--Tr.
+
+[23] The cockpits are farmed out annually by the local governments,
+the terms "contract," and "contractor," having now been softened into
+"license" and "licensee."--Tr.
+
+[24] The "Municipal School for Girls" was founded by the municipality
+of Manila in 1864.... The institution was in charge of the Sisters
+of Charity.--_Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. III, p. 615_.
+
+[25] Now known as Plaza Espana.--Tr.
+
+[26] Patroness of the Dominican Order. She was formally and sumptuously
+recrowned a queen of the skies in 1907.--Tr.
+
+[27] A burlesque on an association of students known as the _Milicia
+Angelica_, organized by the Dominicans to strengthen their hold on
+the people. The name used is significant, "carbineers" being the
+local revenue officers, notorious in their later days for graft
+and abuse.--Tr.
+
+[28] "Tinamaan ng lintik!"--a Tagalog exclamation of anger,
+disappointment, or dismay, regarded as a very strong expression,
+equivalent to profanity. Literally, "May the lightning strike
+you!"--Tr.
+
+[29] "To lie about the stars is a safe kind of lying."--Tr.
+
+[30] Throughout this chapter the professor uses the familiar _tu_
+in addressing the students, thus giving his remarks a contemptuous
+tone.--Tr.
+
+[31] The professor speaks these words in vulgar dialect.
+
+[32] To confuse the letters _p_ and _f_ in speaking Spanish was a
+common error among uneducated Filipinos.--Tr.
+
+[33] _No cristianos_, not Christians, _i.e_., savages.--Tr.
+
+[34] The patron saint of Spain, St. James.--Tr.
+
+[35] Houses of bamboo and nipa, such as form the homes of the masses
+of the natives.--Tr.
+
+[36] "In this paragraph Rizal alludes to an incident that had
+very serious results. There was annually celebrated in Binondo a
+certain religious festival, principally at the expense of the Chinese
+mestizos. The latter finally petitioned that their gobernadorcillo be
+given the presidency of it, and this was granted, thanks to the fact
+that the parish priest (the Dominican, Fray Jose Hevia Campomanes)
+held to the opinion that the presidency belonged to those who paid
+the most. The Tagalogs protested, alleging their better right to it,
+as the genuine sons of the country, not to mention the historical
+precedent, but the friar, who was looking after his own interests,
+did not yield. General Terrero (Governor, 1885-1888), at the advice
+of his liberal councilors, finally had the parish priest removed and
+for the time being decided the affair in favor of the Tagalogs. The
+matter reached the Colonial Office (_Ministerio de Ultramar_) and
+the Minister was not even content merely to settle it in the way the
+friars desired, but made amends to Padre Hevia by appointing him a
+bishop."--_W. E. Retana, who was a journalist in Manila at the time,
+in a note to this chapter._
+
+Childish and ridiculous as this may appear now, it was far from being
+so at the time, especially in view of the supreme contempt with which
+the pugnacious Tagalog looks down upon the meek and complaisant Chinese
+and the mortal antipathy that exists between the two races.--Tr.
+
+[37] It is regrettable that Quiroga's picturesque butchery of Spanish
+and Tagalog--the dialect of the Manila Chinese--cannot be reproduced
+here. Only the thought can be given. There is the same difficulty
+with _r's, d's_, and _l's_ that the Chinese show in English.--Tr.
+
+[38] Up to the outbreak of the insurrection in 1896, the only genuinely
+Spanish troops in the islands were a few hundred artillerymen, the
+rest being natives, with Spanish officers.--Tr.
+
+[39] Abaka is the fiber obtained from the leaves of the _Musa textilis_
+and is known commercially as Manila hemp. As it is exclusively a
+product of the Philippines, it may be taken here to symbolize the
+country.--Tr.
+
+[40] Yet Ben-Zayb was not very much mistaken. The three legs of the
+table have grooves in them in which slide the mirrors hidden below
+the platform and covered by the squares of the carpet. By placing
+the box upon the table a spring is pressed and the mirrors rise
+gently. The cloth is then removed, with care to raise it instead of
+letting it slide off, and then there is the ordinary table of the
+talking heads. The table is connected with the bottom of the box. The
+exhibition ended, the prestidigitator again covers the table, presses
+another spring, and the mirrors descend.--_Author's note._
+
+[41] The Malay method of kissing is quite different from the
+Occidental. The mouth is placed close to the object and a deep breath
+taken, often without actually touching the object, being more of a
+sniff than a kiss.--Tr.
+
+[42] Now Calle Tetuan, Santa Cruz. The other names are still in
+use.--Tr.
+
+[43] The _Sociedad Economica de Amigos del Pais_ for the encouragement
+of agricultural and industrial development, was established by Basco
+de Vargas in 1780.--Tr.
+
+[44] Funds managed by the government for making loans and supporting
+charitable enterprises.--Tr.
+
+[45] The names are fictitious burlesques.--Tr.
+
+[46] "Boiled Shrimp"--Tr.
+
+[47] "Uncle Frank."--Tr.
+
+[48] Messageries Maritimes, a French line of steamers in the Oriental
+trade.--Tr.
+
+[49] Referring to the expeditions--_Mision Espanola Catolica_--to the
+Caroline and Pelew Islands from 1886 to 1895, headed by the Capuchin
+Fathers, which brought misery and disaster upon the natives of those
+islands, unprofitable losses and sufferings to the Filipino soldiers
+engaged in them, discredit to Spain, and decorations of merit to a
+number of Spanish officers.--Tr.
+
+[50] Over the possession of the Caroline and Pelew Islands. The
+expeditions referred to in the previous note were largely inspired
+by German activity with regard to those islands, which had always
+been claimed by Spain, who sold her claim to them to Germany after
+the loss of the Philippines.--Tr.
+
+[51] "Where the wind wrinkles the silent waves, that rapidly break,
+    of their own movement, with a gentle murmur on the shore."--Tr.
+
+[52] "Where rapid and winged engines will rush in flight."--Tr.
+
+[53] There is something almost uncanny about the general accuracy of
+the prophecy in these lines, the economic part of which is now so
+well on the way to realization, although the writer of them would
+doubtless have been a very much surprised individual had he also
+foreseen how it would come about. But one of his own expressions was
+"fire and steel to the cancer," and it surely got them.
+
+On the very day that this passage was translated and this note written,
+the first commercial liner was tied up at the new docks, which have
+destroyed the Malecon but raised Manila to the front rank of Oriental
+seaports, and the final revision is made at Baguio, Mountain Province,
+amid the "cooler temperatures on the slopes of the mountains." As for
+the political portion, it is difficult even now to contemplate calmly
+the blundering fatuity of that bigoted medieval brand of "patriotism"
+which led the decrepit Philippine government to play the Ancient
+Mariner and shoot the Albatross that brought this message.--Tr.
+
+[54] These establishments are still a notable feature of native
+life in Manila. Whether the author adopted a title already common or
+popularized one of his own invention, the fact is that they are now
+invariably known by the name used here. The use of _macanista_ was due
+to the presence in Manila of a large number of Chinese from Macao.--Tr.
+
+[55] Originally, Plaza San Gabriel, from the Dominican mission for the
+Chinese established there; later, as it became a commercial center,
+Plaza Vivac; and now known as Plaza Cervantes, being the financial
+center of Manila.--Tr.
+
+[56] "The manager of this restaurant warns the public to leave
+absolutely nothing on any table or chair."--Tr.
+
+[57] "We do not believe in the verisimilitude of this dialogue,
+fabricated by the author in order to refute the arguments of the
+friars, whose pride was so great that it would not permit any
+Isagani to tell them these truths face to face. The _invention_ of
+Padre Fernandez as a Dominican professor is a stroke of generosity
+on Rizal's part, in conceding that there could have existed _any_
+friar capable of talking frankly with an _Indian_."--_W. E. Retana,
+in note to this chapter in the edition published by him at Barcelona
+in 1908_. Retana ought to know of what he is writing, for he was in
+the employ of the friars for several years and later in Spain wrote
+extensively for the journal supported by them to defend their position
+in the Philippines. He has also been charged with having strongly urged
+Rizal's execution in 1896. Since 1898, however, he has doubled about,
+or, perhaps more aptly, performed a journalistic somersault--having
+written a diffuse biography and other works dealing with Rizal. He
+is strong in unassorted facts, but his comments, when not inane and
+wearisome, approach a maudlin wail over "spilt milk," so the above
+is given at its face value only.--Tr.
+
+[58] Quite suggestive of, and perhaps inspired by, the author's own
+experience.--Tr.
+
+[59] The Walled City, the original Manila, is still known to the
+Spaniards and older natives exclusively as such, the other districts
+being referred to by their distinctive names.--Tr.
+
+[60] Nearly all the dialogue in this chapter is in the mongrel
+Spanish-Tagalog "market language," which cannot be reproduced in
+English.--Tr.
+
+[61] Doubtless a reference to the author's first work, _Noli Me
+Tangere_, which was tabooed by the authorities.--Tr.
+
+[62] Such inanities as these are still a feature of Manila
+journalism.--Tr.
+
+[63] "Whether there would be a _talisain_ cock, armed with a sharp
+gaff, whether the blessed Peter's fighting-cock would be a _bulik_--"
+
+_Talisain_ and _bulik_ are distinguishing terms in the vernacular for
+fighting-cocks, _tari_ and _sasabungin_ the Tagalog terms for "gaff"
+and "game-cock," respectively.
+
+The Tagalog terminology of the cockpit and monkish Latin certainly
+make a fearful and wonderful mixture--nor did the author have to
+resort to his imagination to get samples of it.--Tr.
+
+[64] This is Quiroga's pronunciation of _Christo_.--Tr.
+
+[65] The native priests Burgos, Gomez, and Zamora, charged with
+complicity in the uprising of 1872, and executed.--Tr.
+
+[66] This versicle, found in the booklets of prayer, is common on the
+scapularies, which, during the late insurrection, were easily converted
+into the _anting-anting_, or amulets, worn by the fanatics.--Tr.
+
+[67] This practise--secretly compelling suspects to sign a request
+to be transferred to some other island--was by no means a figment of
+the author's imagination, but was extensively practised to anticipate
+any legal difficulties that might arise.--Tr.
+
+[68] "Hawk-Eye."--Tr.
+
+[69] Ultima Razon de Reyes: the last argument of
+kings--force. (Expression attributed to Calderon de la Barca, the
+great Spanish dramatist.)--Tr.
+
+[70] Curiously enough, and by what must have been more than a mere
+coincidence, this route through Santa Mesa from San Juan del Monte was
+the one taken by an armed party in their attempt to enter the city at
+the outbreak of the Katipunan rebellion on the morning of August 30,
+1896. (Foreman's _The Philippine Islands_, Chap. XXVI.)
+
+It was also on the bridge connecting these two places that the first
+shot in the insurrection against American sovereignty was fired on
+the night of February 4, 1899.--Tr.
+
+[71] Spanish etiquette requires a host to welcome his guest with the
+conventional phrase: "The house belongs to you."--Tr.
+
+[72] The handwriting on the wall at Belshazzar's feast, foretelling
+the destruction of Babylon. Daniel, v, 25-28.--Tr.
+
+[73] A town in Ciudad Real province, Spain.--Tr.
+
+[74] The italicized words are in English in the original.--Tr.
+
+[75] A Spanish hero, whose chief exploit was the capture of Gibraltar
+from the Moors in 1308.--Tr.
+
+[76] Emilio Castelar (1832-1899), generally regarded as the greatest
+of Spanish orators.--Tr.
+
+[77] In the original the message reads: "Espanol escondido casa Padre
+Florentino cojera remitira vivo muerto." Don Tiburcio understands
+_cojera_ as referring to himself; there is a play upon the Spanish
+words _cojera_, lameness, and _cogera_, a form of the verb _coger_,
+to seize or capture--_j_ and _g_ in these two words having the same
+sound, that of the English _h_.--Tr.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Reign of Greed, by Jose Rizal
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