Works of Nick Joaquin

BUGAY, CADORNA, LEGASPI,

LINAWAN, & OCHOA

PHILIPPHINE LITERATURE

MR. ALGENE MALTE DE GUZMAN,

M.A.E.L.T

By

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PREFACE

This is a compilation of works of the national artist Nick

Joaquin, this compilation is for the compliance of our project

in Philippine literature, nonetheless interested folks aside

from our professor are welcome to read and indulge in this

collection of poems and short stories.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

The House at Zapote Street……………………………………. 4

Six PM………………………………………………………….19

Anatomy of the Anti-Hero……………………………………...20

From Bye Bye Blackbird……………………………………….47

Song between Wars…………………………………………….49

Landscape Without Figures…………………………………….51

May Day Eve…………………………………………………...53

Innocence of Solomon………………………………………….63

Legend of The Dying Wanton (excerpt)………………………..65

Summer Solstice……………………………………………….66

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4

THE HOUSE AT ZAPOTE STREET

Dr. Leonardo Quitangon, a soft-spoken, mild-mannered, cool-tempered Caviteno,

was still fancy-free at 35 when he returned to Manila, after six years abroad.

Then, at the University of Santo Tomas, where he went to reach, he met Lydia

Cabading, a medical intern. He liked her quiet ways and began to date her

steadily. They went to the movies and to baketball games and he took her a

number of times to his house in Sta. Mesa, to meet his family.

Lydia was then only 23 and looked like a sweet unspoiled girl, but there was a

slight air of mystery about her. Leonardo and his brothers noticed that she

almost never spoke of her home life or her childhood; she seemed to have no gay

early memories to share with her lover, as sweethearts usually crave to do. And

whenever it looked as if she might have to stay out late, she would say: "I'll have

to tell my father first". And off she would go, wherever she was, to tell her father,

though it meant going all the way to Makati, Rizal, where she lived with her

parents in a new house on Zapote Street.

The Quitangons understood that she was an only child and that her parents

were, therefore, over-zealous in looking after her. Her father usually took her to

school and fetched her after classes, and had been known to threaten to arrest

young men who stared at her on the streets or pressed too close against her on

jeepneys. This high-handedness seemed natural enough, for Pablo Cabading,

Lydia's father was a member of the Manila Police Depatment.

After Lydia finished her internship, Leopardo Quitangon became a regular visitor

at the house on Zapote Street: he was helping her prepare for the board exams.

Her family seemed to like him. The mother Anunciacion, struck him as a mousy

woman unable to speak save at her husband's bidding. There was a foster son,

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a little boy the Cabadings had adopted. As for Pablo Cabading, he was a fine

strapping man, an Ilocano, who gave the impression of being taller than he was

and looked every inch an agent of the law: full of brawn and guts and force, and

smoldering with vitality. He was a natty dresser, liked youthful colors and styles,

decorated his house with pictures of himself and, at 50, looked younger than his

inarticulate wife, who was actually two years younger than he.

When Leonardo started frequenting the house on Zapote Street, Cabading told

him: ill be frank with you. None of Lydia's boy friends ever lasted ten minutes in

this house. I didn't like them and I told them so and made them get out." Then

he added laying a hand on the young doctor's shoulder:" But I like you. You are

a good man."

The rest of the household were two very young maids who spoke almost no

Tagalog, and two very fierce dogs, chained to the front door in the day time,

unchained in the front yard at night.

The house of Zapote Street is in the current architectural cliché: the hoity-toity

Philippine split-level suburban style—a half-story perched above the living area,

to which it is bound by the slope of the roof and which it overlooks from a balcony,

so that a person standing in the sala can see the doors of the bedrooms and

bathroom just above his head. The house is painted, as is also the current

fashion, in various pastel shades, a different color to every three or four planks.

The inevitable piazza curves around two sides of the house, which has a strip of

lawn and a low wall all around it. The Cabadings did not keep a car, but the

house provides for an eventual garage and driveway. This, and the furniture, the

shell lamps and the fancy bric-a-brac that clutters the narrow house indicate

that the Cabadings had not only risen high enough to justify their split-level

pretensions but were expecting to go higher.

Lydia took the board exams and passed them. The lovers asked her father's

permission to wed. Cabading laid down two conditions: that the wedding would

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ba a lavish one and that was to pay a downy of P5.000.00. The young doctor said

that he could afford the big wedding but the big dowry. Cabading shrugged his

shoulders; no dowry, no marriage.

Leonarado spent some frantic weeks scraping up cash and managed to gather

P3.000.00. Cabading agreed to reduce his price to that amount, then laid down

a final condition: after the wedding, Lydia and Leonardo must make their home

at the house on Zapote Street.

"I built this house for Lydia," said Cabading, "and I want her to live here even

when she's married. Besides, her mother couldn't bear to be separated from

Lydia, her only child."

There was nothing. Leonardo could do but consent.

Lydia and Leonardo were on September 10 last year, at the Cathedral of Manila,

with Mrs. Delfin Montano, wife of the Cavite governor, and Senator Ferdinand

Marcos as sponsors. The reception was at the Selecta. The status gods of

Suburdia were properly propitiated. Then the newlyweds went to live on Zapote

Street -- and Leonardo almost immediately realized why Lydia had been so

reticent and mysterious about her home life.

The cozy family group that charmed him in courtship days turned out to be

rather too cozy. The entire household revolved in submission around Pablo

Cabading. The daughter, mother, the foster-son, the maids and even the dogs

trembled when the lifted his voice. Cabading liked to brag that was a "killer": in

1946 he had shot dead two American soldiers he caught robbing a neighbor's

house in Quezon City.

Leonardo found himself within a family turned in on itself, self-enclosed and self-

sufficient — in a house that had no neighbors and no need for any. His brothers

say that he made more friends in the neighborhood within the couple of months

he stayed there than the Cabadings had made in a year. Pablo Cabading did not

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like what his to stray out of, and what was not his to stray into, his house. And

within that house he wanted to be the center of everything, even of his daughter's

honeymoon.

Whenever Leonardo and Lydia went to the movies or for a ride, Cabading insisted

on being taken along. If they seated him on the back scat while they sat together

in front, be raged and glowered. He wanted to sit in front with them.

When Leonardo came home from work, he must not tarry with Lydia in the

bedroom chatting: both of them must come down at once to the sala and talk

with their father. Leonardo explained that he was not much of a talking: "That's

why I fell in love with Lydia, because she's the quiet type too". No matter, said

Cabading. They didn't have to talk at all; he would do all the talking himself, so

long as they sat there in the sala before his eyes.

So, his compact family group sat around him at night, silent, while Cabading

talked and talked. But, finally, the talk had stop, the listeners had to rise and

retire - and it was this moment that Cabading seemed unable to bear. He couldn't

bear to see Lydia and Leonardo rise and go up together to their room. One night,

unable to bear it any longer he shouted, as they rose to retire:

"Lydia, you sleep with your mother tonight. She has a toothache." After a dead

look at her husband, Lydia obeyed. Leonardo went to bed alone.

The incident would be repeated: there would always be other reasons, besides

Mrs. Cabading's toothaches.

What horrified Leonardo was not merely what being done to him but his

increasing acquiesces. Had his spirit been so quickly broken? Was he, too, like

the rest of the household, being drawn to revolve, silently and obediently, around

the master of the house?

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Once, late at night, he suddenly showed up at his parents’ house in Sta. Mesa

and his brothers were shocked at the great in him within so short a time. He

looked terrified. What had happened? His car had broken down and he had had

it repaired and now he could not go home. But why not?

"You don't know my father-in-law," he groaned. "Everybody in that house must

be in by a certain hour. Otherwise, the gates are locked, the doors are locked,

the windows are locked. Nobody can get in anymore!”

A younger brother, Gene offered to accompany him home and explain to

Cabading what had happened. The two rode to Zapote and found the house dark

and locked up.

Says Gene: "That memory makes my blood boil -- my eldest brother fearfully

clanging and clanging the gate, and nobody to let him in. 1 wouldn't have waited

a second, but he waited five, ten, fifteen minutes, knocking at thai gate, begging

to be let in. I couldn't have it!"

In the end the two brothers rode back to Sta. Mesa, where Leonardo spent the

night. When he returned to the house on Zapote the next day, his father-in-law

greeted him with a sarcastic question: "Where were you? At a basketball game?"

Leonardo became anxious to take his wife away from that house. He talked it

over with her, then they went to tell her father. Said Cabading bluntly: "If she

goes with you, I'll shoot her head before your eyes."

His brothers urged him to buy a gun, but Leonardo felt in his pocket and said,

"I've got my rosary." Cried his brother Gene: "You can't fight a gun with a rosary!".

When Lydia took her oath as a physician, Cabading announced that only he and

his wife would accompany Lydia to the ceremony. I would not be fair, he said, to

let Leonardo, who had not borne the expenses of Lydia's education, to share that

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moment of glory too. Leonardo said that, if he would like them at least to use his

car. The offer was rejected. Cabading preferred to hire a taxi.

After about two months at the house on Zapote Street, Leonardo moved out,

alone. Her parents would not let Lydia go and she herself was too afraid to leave.

During the succeeding weeks, efforts to contact her proved futile. The house on

Zapote became even more closed to the outside world. If Lydia emerged from it

at all, she was always accompanied by her father, mother or foster-brother, or

by all three.

When her husband heard that she had started working at a hospital he went

there to see her but instead met her father coming to fetch her. The very next

day, Lydia was no longer working at the hospital.

Leonardo knew that she was with child and he was determined to bear all her

prenatal expenses. He went to Zapote one day when her father was out and

persuaded her to come out to the yard but could not make her make the money

he offered across the locked gate. "Just mail it," she cried and fled into the house.

He sent her a check by registered mail; it was promptly mailed back to him.

On Christmas Eve, Leonardo returned to the house on Zapote with a gift for his

wife, and stood knocking at the gate for so long the neighbors gathered at

windows to watch him. Finally, he was allowed to enter, present his gift to Lydia

and talk with her for a moment. She said that her father seemed agreeable to a

meeting with Leonardo's father, to discuss the young couple's problem. So the

elder Quitangon and two of his younger sons went to Zapote one evening. The

lights were on in Cabading house, but nobody responded to their knocking. Then

all the lights were turned off. As they stood wondering what to do, a servant girl

came and told them that the master was out. (Lydia would later tell them that

they had not been admitted because her father had not yet decided what she

was to say to them.)

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The last act of this curious drama began Sunday last week when Leonardo was

astounded to receive an early-morning phone call from his wife. She said she

could no longer bear to be parted from him and bade him pick her up at a certain

church, where she was with her foster brother. Leonardo rushed to the church,

picked up two, dropped the boy off at a street near Zapote, then sped with Lydia

to Maragondon, Cavite where the Quitangons have a house. He stopped at a

gasoline station to call up his brothers in Sta. Mesa, to tell them what he had

done and to warn them that Cabading would surely show up there. "Get Mother

out of the house," he told his brothers.

At about ten in the morning, a taxi stopped before the Quitangon house in Sta.

Mesa and Mrs. Cabading got out and began screaming at the gate: "Where's my

daughter? Where's my daughter?" Gene and Nonilo Quitangin went out to the

gate and invited her to come in. "No! No! All I want is my daughter!" she screamed.

Cabading, who was inside the waiting taxi, then got out and demanded that the

Quitangons produce Lydia. Vexed, Nonilo Quitangon cried: "Abah, what have we

do with where your daughter is? Anyway, she's with her husband." At that,

Cabading ran to the taxi, snatched a submachinegun from a box, and trained it

on Gene Quitangon. (Nonilo had run into the house to get a gun.)

"Produce my daughter at once or I'll shoot you all down!" shouted Cabading.

Gene, the gun's muzzle practically in his face, sought to pacify the older man:

"Why can't we talk this over quietly, like decent people, inside the house? Look,

we're creating a scandal in the neighborhood.."

Cabading lowered his gun. "I give you till midnight tonight to produce my

daughter," he growled. "If you don't, you better ask the PC to guard this house!"

Then he and his wife drove off in the taxi, just a moment before the mobile police

patrol the neighbors had called arrived. The police advised Gene to file a

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complaint with the fiscal's office. Instead, Gene decided to go to the house on

Zapote Street, hoping that "diplomacy" would work.

To his surprise, he was admitted at once by a smiling and very genial Cabading.

"You are a brave man," he told Gene, "and a lucky one", And he ordered a coke

brought for the visitor. Gene said that he was going to Cavite but could not

promise to "produce". Lydia by midnight: it was up to the couple to decide

whether they would come back.

It was about eight in the evening when Gene arrived in Maragondon. As his car

drove into the yard of this family's old house, Lydia and Leonardo

appeared at a window and frantically asked what had happened. "Nothing," said

Gene, and their faces lit up. "We're having our honeymoon at last," Lydia told

Gene as he entered the house. And the old air of dread, of mystery, did seem to

have lifted from her face. But it was there again when, after supper, he told them

what had happened in Sta. Mesa.

"I can't go back," she moaned. "He'll kill me! He'll kill me!"

"He has cooled down now," said Gene. "He seems to be a reasonable man after

all."

"Oh, you don't know him!" cried Lydia. "I've known him longer, and I've never,

never been happy!"

And the brothers at last had glimpses of the girlhood she had been so reticent

about. She told them of Cabading's baffling changes of temper, especially toward

her; how smiles and found words and caresses could abruptly turn into beatings

when his mood darkened.

Leonardo said that his father-in-law was an artista, "Remember how he used to

fan me when I supped there while I was courting Lydia?"

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(At about that time, in Sta. Mesa, Nonilo Quitanongon, on guard at the gate of

his family's house, saw Cabading drive past three times in a taxi.)

"I can't force you to go back," said Gene. "You'll have to decide that yourselves.

But what, actually, are you planning to do? You can't stay forever here in

Maragondon. What would you live on?"

The two said they would talk it over for a while in their room. Gene waited at the

supper table and when a long time had passed and they had not come back he

went to the room. Finding the door ajar, he looked in. Lydia and Leonardo were

on their knees on the floor, saying the rosary, Gene returned to the supper table.

After another long wait, the couple came out of the room.

Said Lydia: "We have prayed together and we have decided to die together.” We'll

go back with you, in the morning."

They we’re back in Manila early the next morning. Lydia and Leonardo went

straight to the house in Sta. Mesa, where all their relatives and friends warned

them not to go back to the house on Zapote Street, as they had decided to do.

Confused anew, they went to the Manila police headquarters to ask for advice,

but the advice given seemed drastic to them: summon Cabading and have it out

with him in front of his superior officer. Leonardo's father then offered to go to

Zapote with Gene and Nonilo, to try to reason with Cabading.

They found him in good humor, full of smiles and hearty greetings. He

reproached his balae for not visiting him before. "I did come once," drily remarked

the elder Quitangon, "but no one would open the gate." Cabading had his wife

called. She came into the room and sat down. "Was I in the house that night our

balae came?" her husband asked her. "No, you were out," she replied. Having

spoken her piece, she got up and left the room. (On their various visits to the

house on Zapote Street, the Quitangons noticed that Mrs. Cabading appeared

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only when summoned and vanished as soon as she had done whatever was

expected of her).

Cabading then announced that he no longer objected to Lydia's moving out of

the house to live with her husband in an apartment of their own. Overjoyed, the

Quitangons urged Cabading to go with them in Sta. Mesa, so that the newlyweds

could be reconciled with Lydia's parents. Cabading readily agreed.

When they arrived in Sta. Mesa, Lydia and Leonardo were sitting on a sofa in the

sala.

"Why have you done this?" her father chided her gently. "If you wanted to move

out, did you have to run away?" To Leonardo, he said: "And you - are angry with

me?" house by themselves. Gene Quitangon felt so felt elated he proposed a

celebration: "I'll throw a blow-out! Everybody is invited! This is on me!" So they

all went to Max's in Quezon City and had a very merry fried-chicken party. "Why,

this is a family reunion!" laughed Cabading. "This should be on me!" But Gene

would not let him pay the bill.

Early the next morning, Cabading called up the Sta. Mesa house to pay that his

wife had fallen ill. Would Lydia please visit her? Leonardo and Lydia went to

Zapote, found nothing the matter with her mother, and returned to Sta. Mesa.

After lunch, Leonardo left for his classes. Then Cabading called up again. Lydia's

mother refused to eat and kept asking for her daughter. Would Lydia please drop

in again at the house on Zapote? Gene and Nonilo Quitangon said they might as

well accompany Lydia there and start moving out her things.

When they arrived at the Zapote house, the Quitangon brothers were amused by

what they saw. Mrs. Cabading, her eyes closed, lay on the parlor sofa, a large

towel spread out beneath her. "She has been lying there all day," said Cabading,

"tossing restlessly, asking for you, Lydia." Gene noted that the towel was neatly

spread out and didn't look crumpled at all, and that Mrs. Cabading was

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obviously just pretending to be asleep. He smiled at the childishness of the

stratagem, but Lydia was past being amused. She wont straight to her room,

were they heard her pulling out drawers. While the Quitangons and Cabading

were conversing, the supposedly sick mother slipped out of the sofa and went

upstairs to Lydia's room.

Cabading told the Quitangons that he wanted Lydia and Leonardo to stay there;

at the house in Zapote. "I thought all that was settled last night," Gene groaned.

"I built this house for Lydia," persisted Cabading, "and this house is hers. If she

and her husband want to be alone, I and my wife will move out of here, turn this

house over to them." Gene wearily explained that Lydia and Leonardo preferred

the apartment they had already leased.

Suddenly the men heard the clatter of a drawer falling upstairs. Gene surmised

that it had fallen in a struggle between mother and daughter. "Excuse me," said

Cabading, rising. As he went upstairs, he said to the Quitangons, over his

shoulder, “Don't misunderstand me. I'm not going to 'coach' Lydia". He went into

Lydia's room and closed the door behind him.

After a long while, Lydia and her father came out of the room together and came

down to the sala together. Lydia was clasping a large crucifix. There was no

expression on her face when she told the Quitangon boys to go home. "But I

thought we were going to start moving your things out this afternoon,," said Gene.

She glanced at the crucifix and said it was one of the first things she wanted

taken to her new home. "Just tell Narding to fetch me," she said.

Back in Sta. Mesa, Gene and Nonilo had the painful task of telling Leonardo,

when he phoned, that Lydia was back in the house on Zapote. "Why did you

leave her there?" cried Leonardo. "He'll beat her up! I'm going to get her." Gene

told him not you go alone, to pass by the Sta. Mesa house first and pick up

Nonilo. Gene could not go along; he had to catch a bus for Subic, where he works.

15

When Leonardo arrived, Gene told him: "Don't force Lydia to go with you. If she

doesn't want to, leave at once. Do not, for any reason, be persuaded to stay there

too."

When his brother had left for Zapote, Gene realized that he was not sure he was

going to Subic. He left too worried. He knew he couldn't rest easy until he had

seen Lydia and Leonardo settled in their new home. The minutes quickly ticked

past as he debated with himself whether he should stay or catch that bus. Then,

at about a quarter to seven, the phone rang. It was Nonilo, in anguish.

"Something terrible has happened in Lydia's room! I heard four shots," he cried.

"Who are up there?"

"Lydia and Narding and the Cabadings."

"I'll be right over.

Gene sent a younger brother to inform the family lawyer and to alert the Makati

police. Then he drove like mad to Zapote. It was almost dark when he got there.

The house stood perfectly still, not a light on inside. He watched it from a

distance but could see no movement, Then a taxi drove up and out jumped

Nonilo. He had telephoned from a gasoline station. He related what had

happened.

He said that when he and Leonardo arrived at the Zapote house, Cabading

motioned Leonardo upstairs: "Lydia is in her room." Leonardo went up; Cabading

gave Nonilo a cup of coffee and chatted amiably with him. Nonilo saw Mrs.

Cabading go up to Lydia's room with a glass of milk. A while later, they heard a

woman scream, followed by sobbing. "There seems to be trouble up there," said

Cabading, and he went upstairs. Nonilo saw him enter Lydia's room, leaving the

door open. A few moments later, the door was closed. Then Nonilo heard three

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shots. He stood petrified, but when he heard a fourth shot he dashed out of the

house, ran to a gasoline station and called up Gene.

Nonilo pointed to the closed front gate; he was sure he had left it open when he

ran out. The brothers suspected that Cabading was lurking somewhere in the

darkness, with his gun.

Before them loomed the dark house, now so sinister and evil in their eyes. The

upper story that jutted forward, forming the house's chief facade, bore a curious

sign: Dra. Lydia C. Cabading, Lady Physician. (Apparently, Lydia continued- or

was made- to use her maiden name.) Above the sign was the garland of colored

lights that have been put up for Christmas and had not yet been removed. It was

an ice-cold night, the dark of the moon, but the two brothers shivered not from

the wind blowing down the lonely murky street but from pure horror of the house

that had so fatally thrust itself into their lives.

But the wind remembered when the sighs it heard here were only the sighing of

the ripe grain, when the cries it heard were only the crying of birds nesting in

the reeds, for all these new suburbs in Makati used to be grassland, riceland,

marshland, or pastoral solitudes where few cared to go, until the big city spilled

hither, replacing the uprooted reeds with split-levels, pushing noisy little streets

into the heart of the solitude, and collecting here from all over the country the

uprooted souls that now moan or giggle where once the carabao wallowed and

the frogs croaked day and night. In very new suburbs, one feels human sorrow

to be a grass intrusion on the labors of nature. Even barely two years ago, the

talahib still rose man-high on the plot of ground on Zapote Street where now

stands the relic of an ambiguous love.

As the Quitangon brothers shivered in the darkness, a police van arrived and

unloaded quite a large contingent of policemen. The Quitangons warned them

that Cabading had a submachinegun. The policemen crawled toward the front

gate and almost jumped when a young girl came running across the yard,

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shaking with terror and shrieking gibberish. She was one of the maids. She and

her companion and the foster son had fled from the house when they heard the

shooting and had been hiding in the yard. It was they who had closed the front

gate.

A policeman volunteered to enter the house through the back door; Gene said

he would try the front one. He peered in at a window and could detect no one in

the sala. He slipped a hand inside, opened the front door and entered, just as

the policeman came in from the kitchen. As they crept up the stairs they heard

a moaning in Lydia's room. They tried the door but it was blocked from inside.

"Push it, push it," wailed a woman's voice. The policeman pushed the door hard

and what was blocking it gave. He groped for the switch and turned light. As they

entered, he and Gene shuddered at what they saw.

The entire room was spattered with blood. On the floor, blocking the door, lay

Mrs. Cabading. She had been shot in the chest and stomach but was still alive.

The policeman tried to get a statement from her but all she could say was: "My

hand, my hand- it hurts!" She was lying across the legs of her daughter, who lay

on top of her husband's body. Lydia was still clutching an armful of clothes;

Leonardo was holding a clothes hanger. He had been shot in the breast; she, in

the heart. They had died instantly, together.

Sprawled face up on his daughter's bed, his mouth agape and his eyes bulging

open as though still staring in horror and the bright blood splashed on his face

lay Pablo Cabading.

"Oh, I cursed him!" cries Eugenio Quitangon with passion. "Oh, I cursed him as

he lay there dead, God forgive me! Yes, I cursed that dead man there on that bed,

for I had wanted to find him alive!"

From the position of the bodies and from Mrs. Cabading's statements later at the

hospital, it appears that Cabading shot Lydia while she was shielding her

18

husband, and Mrs. Cabading when she tried to shield Lydia. Then he turned the

gun on himself, and it's an indication of the man's uncommon strength and

power that, after the first shot, through the right side of the head, which must

have been mortal enough, he seems to have been able, as his hands dropped to

his breast, to fire at himself a second time. The violent spasm of agony must

have sent the gun - a .45 caliber pistol- flying from his hand. It was found at the

foot of the bed, near Mrs. Cabading's feet.

The drama of the jealous father had ended at about half-past six in the evening,

Tuesday last week.

The next day, hurrying commuters slowed down and a whispering crowd

gathered before 1074 Zapote Street, to watch the police and the reporters going

through the pretty little house that Pablo Cabading built for his Lydia.

19

SIX P.M.

Trouvere at night, grammarian in the morning,

ruefully architecting syllables--

but in the afternoon my ivory tower falls.

I take a place in the bus among people

returning

to love (domesticated) and the smell of onions

burning

and women reaping the washlines as the Angelus

tolls.

But I-- where am I bound?

My garden, my four walls

and you project strange shores upon my

yearning:

Atlantis? the Caribbeans? Or Cathay?

Conductor, do I get off at Sinai?

Apocalypse awaits me: urgent my sorrow

towards the undiscovered world that I

from warm responding flesh for a while shall

borrow:

conquistador tonight, clockouncher tomorrow.

20

ANATOMY OF THE ANTI-HERO

Paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all, but remark all these

roughnesses, pimples, warts, and everything as you see me. -- Oliver Cromwell

Two views of Rizal that scan the man behind the monument are clearly headed

for controversy. A startling anatomy of the hero is offered in "The First Filipino"

by León Maria Guerrero and in "Rizal from Within" by Ante Radaic.

The Guerrero book, in English, is a biography in the modern manner, where the

details are massed not for their scholarly but their emotional value, and the

delineation is by narrative, crafted,progressive and dramatic like a novel, and

just as readable, though the style is hardly Guerrero at his felicitous best.

The Radaic piece, in Spanish, is a psychoanalysis of Rizal, with emphasis on his

formative years, and has clinical fascination, though rather prolix and turgid in

the writing, its special quality evident in its sources, which range, not from

Retana to Blumentritt, as one would expect in a Rizal study, but from Rilke and

Dostoevsky to Proust and Joyce!

The Guerrero opus is magnum. It's a massive tome (over 500 pages), has 24

pages of bibliographical references, was unanimously awarded the first prize in

the biography contest during the Rizalcentennial. It was published by the

National Heroes Commission, has so far been received by what one editor calls

"a conspiracy of silence," but can be expected to find its way to the top of the

Rizal shelf and into every debate over the hero's personality.

The Radaic study is basically an extended essay, and a tentative one; the author

subtitled it "An Introduction to a Study of Rizal's Inferiority Complex." It's [end

of page 53] barely 70 pages long and is still in manuscript, awaiting translator

and publisher. It begins with an exposition of Adler's theories, concludes with a

letter of Kafka to his father. Radaic, a Yugoslavian exile, finished his study in

late 1963, just before his tragic death.

For epigraph, Guerrero uses the words of Cromwell quoted above and two lines

from Othello:

Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate

Nor set down aught in Malice.

21

Radaic's epigraph is from Alfred Adler:

"To be human is to feel inferior and to aspire to situations of superiority."

Guerrero sees Rizal as the first man to use the term Filipino in its present sense,

and he stresses the role in the Revolution -- which "was, in a sense, made in

Spain" -- of Rizal's class: the propertied bourgeoisie and the ilustrado though

they, and Rizal especially, might seem to condemn it. Guerrero paints a cruel

picture of Rizal sitting comfortably in a ship's cabin, sailing off to Europe in

September, 1896, while Bonifacio and his Katipuneros were being driven back

to the hills of Balara and the Propagandists crowded Fort Santiago: "Rizal was

vexed because he had heard that he was being blamed for the disturbances in

Manila." Rizal's trial, says Guerrero, presents us with a dilemma. Rizal

passionately defended himself from the charge that he was involved in or even

sympathized with the Revolution -- hardly an attitude we would honor him for.

"Was he innocent or guilty?" asks Guerrero. "If innocent, then why is he a hero?

If guilty, how can he be a martyr?"

Guerrero accepts the retraction as genuine: "That is a matter for handwriting

experts, and the weight of expert opinion is in favor of authenticity. It is nonsense

to say that the retraction does not prove Rizal's conversion; the language of the

document isunmistakable. It is a truism that the recantation of his religious

errors did not involve the repudiation of his political aims. We may also accept

that he was not too fervent a Mason. In fact Rizal himself stated that he had

ceased being a Mason in 1891. Why should it be so strange then for Rizal to

'abhor' Masonry as a society when he had in fact already left it four years before?

One whosesympathies are not engaged on either side must face the authenticity

of the instrument of retraction, on the one hand, and, on the other, the admitted

failure of the intellectual assault on Rizal's position, and can only wonder what

it was that happened to the decided rationalist who had promised to kneel and

pray for the grace of faith."

For Radaic, Rizal is "a mystery still to be revealed," a sphinx who, even in the

impulsive confessions of his youth, already knew what not to tell -- which is why,

says Radaic, not everything has yet been said about Rizal, including, perhaps,

the most importantfacts: "While gazing at pictures of that giant of small and

delicate body, many Filipinos must have felt as I did when I first came to know

about him, a few years ago, in Europe -- that behind the well-buttoned frock coat

was hidden a deep and delicate human problem." Radaic suspects that Rizal

suffered from complexes of inferiority (he terms them "complejos de Rizal") and

22

that these arose from a belief that he was physically defective. It's necessary,

says Radaic, to do for Rizal what Socrates did for philosophy, bringing it down

from heaven to earth, not to degrade it but to understand it better.

It's curious, but both Léon Maria Guerrero and Ante Radaic, in their personal

circumstances, approximate certain aspects of Rizal, so that one feels, at times,

that they are reading themselves into him. When Radaic, for instance, dwells on

Rizal's obsession with physical deficiency, one cannot but remember that Radaic,

too, was obsessed with physical deformity, being crippled: he had lost a foot in

an escape from a concentration camp.

Guerrero, a descendant of ilus- [end of page 54] trados, was bred by the Ateneo

and a home steeped in the old Filipino-Spanish traditions, and is thus perfectly

at home in the mind of Rizal. Hehas lived long abroad, has a cosmopolitan

outlook, and is at the same time a nationalist whose moth wings got rather

burned in that Asia-for-the-Asians flame.

Radaic, on the other hand, fled from his homeland, which groaned under a

tyranny, and became that archetype of modern man: the displaced person, the

stateless individual, which, to a certain extent, Rizal also was, when he rejected

the Spanish friar's concept of the Philippine state as "a double allegiance to Spain

and Church." In Madrid, at the university, from the Filipino girl who became his

wife, Radaic heard of Rizal and immediately felt arapport with the Philippine hero.

He became an ardent student of Rizal, did a thesis on him ("Rizal: Romántico-

Realista"), and came to the Philippines to marry, and to become a countryman

of his hero.He had just finished "Rizal Por Adentro" that night in January when

he climbed to the roof of the main building of Santo Tomás and jumped off.

Because Guerrero and Radaic seem, at certain points, to be reading themselves

into Rizal, to read their respective studies of him is to see the hero through the

prism of Guerrero's cosmopolitan intellect and the dark glass of Ante Radaic's

tragic sense of life.

Guerrero's Rizal

For Guerrero, Rizal is "the very embodiment of the intelligentsia and the petite

bourgeoisie":

23

"One gathers from Rizal's own account of his boyhood that he was brought up in

circumstances that even in the Philippines of our day would be considered

privileged. Rizal's father became one of the town's wealthiest men, the first to

build a stone house and buy another, keep a carriage, own a library, and send

his children to school in Manila. José himself had an aya, that is to say, a nanny

or personal servant, although he had five elder sisters who, in less affluent

circumstances, could have been expected to look after him. His father engaged

a private tutor for him. Later, he would study in private schools, go to the

university, finish his courses abroad. It was the classic method for producing a

middle-class intellectual, and it does much to explain the puzzling absence of

any real social consciousness in Rizal's apostolate so many years after Marx's

Manifesto or, for that matter, Leo XIII's Rerum Nova- [end of page 55] rum. Rizal's

nationalism was essentially rationalist, anti-racist, anti-clerical -- political rather

than social or economic."

Guerrero surmises that, even if born a peasant and in penury, Rizal would still

have made his mark: "His character, in a different environment, with a different

experience of the world, might have made him another Bonifacio." But, reared in

bourgeois ease, Rizal became a bourgeois idealist, putting his faith in reason and

the

liberal dogmas of the inevitability of progress, like any proper Victorian, and

preferring reform to revolution, and "revolution from above" to "revolution from

below." What he wanted to be -- what he might have been if the policy of the

ilustrados had prevailed – was representative for the Philippines in the Spanish

parliament. Reported Governor Carnicero from Dapitan in 1892: "One of Rizal's

ambitions is to become Deputy for the Philippines, for, once in the Cortes, he

says that he could expose whatever happens in the islands," And Guerrero's

laughing comment is: "Congressman Rizal, and a congressman dedicated to

making exposures, at that!" This ambition of Rizal must have been well-known

among theilustrados; one of their plans to spring him from jail in 1896 was to

get him elected to the Cortes; the governor-general would then have been forced

to release him so he could go to Spain and attend parliament.

As the Philippine representative in Madrid, says Guerrero, Rizal would have

worked for the expulsion of the friars, the sale of their estates to the new middle

class, the establishment of a certain measure of self-government in the islands

and more native participation in it; and this would have resulted in an

alternation in power between conservatives and liberals, this political

activitybeing, however, limited to the educated and the propertied. In other words,

24

the two political parties would have represented only one social class; the

bourgeoisie. If this is really what Rizal envisioned, then his dream has come to

pass, for the two political parties that alternate in power today are limited to the

educated and the propertied and actually represent only the middle class.

Yet there was a Bonifacio latent in Rizal, according to Guerrero, who calls him

"the reluctant revolutionary." El Filibusterismo in 1891 shows the hero divided.

Observes Guerrero:

"'Assimilation' has been rejected as a vain hope. 'Separatism,' or in plainer words,

independence, has been advocated almost openly. Rizal in the Filiis no longer

the loyal reformer; he is the 'subversive' separatist, making so little effort of

concealment that he arrogantly announces his purpose in the very title of his

novel, which means 'subversion.' No solution except independence! But how is

it to be achieved? At this point Rizal hesitates and draws back. The last chapters

of the Fili are heavily corrected, and it may not have been due only to Rizal's

desperate need to cut down his novel to match Ventura's money. The thought of

revolution in real life may have called up too many 'bloody apparitions.'"

So, Father Florentino is made to deny in the final apostrophe of the novel that

freedom must be won at the point of the sword: "What is the use of independence

if the slaves of today will be the tyrants of tomorrow?"

"What," asks Guerrero, "are we to conclude from this? In Rizal's mind the

Filipinos of his generation were not yet ready for revolution because they were

not yet ready for independence, and they were not ready for independence

because they were still unworthy of it."

The Hamlet split in Rizal between the will to act and the tendency to scruple

preceded the flagrant schizophrenia of El Fili- [end of page 56]busterismo. In

1887 he was saying that "peaceful struggle will always turn out to be a futile

dream because Spain will never learn the lesson of her former colonies in South

America." That was the Bonifacio in Rizal speaking. But Rizal the man of property

quickly added: "In the present circumstances, we do not desire a separation from

Spain; all that we ask is more attention, bettereducation, a higher quality of

government officials, one or two representatives in parliament, and more security

for ourselves and our fortunes." Four months later, he turned 26, and both sides

of him wrote: "I have no desire to take part in conspiracies which seem to me

premature and risky in the extreme. But if the government drives us to it, if there

25

remains no other hope than to seek our ruin in war, then I too shall advocate

violent means."

That sounds like a final statement: it was not. The following year, 1888, while

one side of him was crying, "It is too late; the Filipinos have already lost the

hopes they placed in Spain!" another side was murmuring that the happiness of

the Philippines must be obtained by "noble and just means" and that "if to make

my country happy I had to act vilely, I would refuse to do so."

Comments Guerrero: "We think of Rizal as a mild and gentle reformer who

shrank from the thought of separation from Spain, most of all a violent

revolution; it would seem that he appeared to hiscontemporaries, especially after

the publication of the openly subversive Fili, as a wild firebrand, as demagogic

as López-Jaena."

The question is: Who saw Rizal plain?

Guerrero wickedly relates that when firebrand López-Jaena thought of migrating

to Cuba, Rizal opined that López-Jaena should return to the Philippines and "let

himself be killed in support of his ideas." Home went López-Jaena, bravely

declaring himself "resigned to everything, ready to fight if necessary, ready to die

if need be." But after only four days in Manila he left in a hurry, fearing he would

"land in Bilibid or the Marianas." And Rizal himself, who had called Cuba "an

empty shell," would, when the Revolution broke out in the Philippines, enlist for

Cuban service, laying himself open to the charge that, by offering to serve the

Spanish government in Cuba, he was not only trying to flee from the struggle in

his own country but was making clear on which side of the struggle he stood.

Says Guerrero: "There can be no argument that he was against Bonifacio's

Revolution. Not only had he offered his 'unconditional' services to help suppress

it but he had indicted a manifestocondemning the Revolution." He called the idea

of revolution "highly absurd." The condemnatory manifesto was gratuitous; it

was not made to influence the court, he had been offering to make it even before

he was arrested. But the court was alert; it noted that Rizal condemned

Bonifacio's Revolution but not Bonifacio's aim of independence for the

Philippines.

"Rizal," says Guerrero, "believed in the gradual and natural evolution of the

Filipino Nation in the course of years and foresaw the international developments

that would make eventual independence an inevitable conclusion on which

metropolis and colony would peaceably agree." In short, in the life-long duel

26

between Rizal thesubversive and Rizal the progressive, the latter won in the end.

He had flirted, in his fiction, with revolution; but when faced by the fact of it, he

called it absurd and retreated to Reason, Reform,Evolution, Inevitable Progress,

and all the other Victorian catchwords. The malicious could say that his was the

retreat of a man with property to lose. Guerrero says that Rizal was "a nationalist

who did not recognize his Nation when it suddenly rosebefore him, a bloody

apparition in arms."

But it was he who, as the First Filipino, had most created the idea of that nation.

"Throughout the centuries," says Guerrero, "one tribe after another took up arms,

against the missionary friars or for them, in protest against a wine tax or against

forced labor, in the name of the old gods or in the name of the new Spanish

Constitution. Whether the revolt was long-lived like Dagohoy's, which lasted 85

years, or as short-lived as Novales's, who 'was outlawed at midnight, proclaimed

emperor at two o'clock in the morning, and shot at five in the evening, natives -

- allies, converts, merce- [end of page 57] naries -- fought against natives and

kept the archipelago Spanishand Christian. Malong proclaimed himself king of

the Ilokanos, and Apolinario de la Cruz, king of Tagalogs. No one proclaimed

himself a Filipino."

What Guerrero misses here is that the Filipino forces sent to subdue Malong the

Pangasinense or Almazán the Ilocano or De la Cruz the Tagalog were fighting

(whatever the Spaniards may have intended) to keep the Filipino one. They were

proclaiming themselves Filipino, and not merely Pangasinense or Ilocano or

Tagalog, as the American northerner sent to subdue the American Southerner

in the Civil War proclaimed the oneness of the American. The Filipino allies,

converts, mercenaries sent against the Filipino rebel may have kept the

archipelago Spanish and Christian, but they also kept it from falling apart again

into the numberless tribes it used to be, prevented the return of separate

kingdoms for Pangasinenses,Ilocanos and Tagalogs. The paradox is cruel, but

Rizal could proclaim himself a Filipino only because Dagohoy failed, and Novales

and Malong and Almazán and De la Cruz. Their success could have meant the

end of the idea of the Filipino. But each failure was more stone added to the

construction of the nation.

When Rizal arose, the Philippines had been Spanish and Christian long enough

to feel itself ready to be something else. The preliminary mold was necessary (as

our present difficulties with the "cultural minorities" indicate) but now the matrix

could be broken, the womb abandoned.

27

"It was Rizal," says Guerrero, "who taught his countryman (sic) that they could

be something else, Filipinos who were members of a Filipino Nation. He was the

first who sought to 'unite the whole archipelago' and envisioned a 'compact and

homogeneous society' of all the old tribal communities from Batanes to the Sulu

Sea, basedon common interests and 'mutual protection' rather than on the

Spanish friar's theory of double allegiance to Spain and Church.

"He would arouse a consciousness of national unity, of a common grievance and

common fate. He would work through his writings, overleaping the old barriers

of sea and mountain and native dialect, from Vigan to Dapitan. Without this new

middle class of which he was the exemplar, now national by grace of school, the

printing press, and [end of page 58] newly discovered interests in common, the

Kabite Revolution of 1896 might not have had greater significance than that of

1872. Instead, what might have been only one morepeasant revolution, what

might have been a Tagalog uprising to be crushed as before with levies from

Pampanga or the Ilokos or the Bisayas, was transformed into the revolution of a

new nation. It was Rizal who would persuade theprincipales, and with them, and

sometimes through them, the peasants and the artisans that they wereall equally

'Filipinos,' and in so doing would justify the opportunities of his privileged birth."

Radaic's Rizal

A Victorian hero is one's ultimate picture of Guerrero's "First Filipino." Ante

Radaic's "Rizal from Within" is, on the other hand, modern man - anxious,

nervous, insecure, ill at ease in his world,ridden with complexes, and afflicted

with feelings of inferiority and impotence.

The key image is of the child Rizal, as described by his sisters Narcisa and Maria

to Asunción López Bantug: "Jose was a very tiny child. And his head grew

disproportionately. When he began to walk by himself he often fell, his head

being too heavy for his frail body. Because of this, he needed an aya to look after

him."

Radaic believes that Rizal was aggrieved by his puny physique. Whether the hero

was really smaller than normal, the significant thing is that he thought he was,

during the impressionable years ofyouth. In his "Memorias de un estudiante",

written before he was 20, references to his size recur obsessively:

"The son of the teacher was a few years older than I and exceeded me in stature…

After (beating him in a fight) I gained fame among my classmates, possibly

because of my smallness … I did not daredescend into the river because it was

28

too deep for one my size… At first (the father at the Ateneo) did not want to admit

me, perhaps because of my feeble frame and scant height … Though I was 13

going on 14, I was still very small."

Other people are seen in relation to his height. His teacher in Biñan is "a tall

man"; his professor in Manila is "a man of lofty stature"; and most poignantly of

all, the young man presumed to besuitor of Segunda Katigbak, Rizal's first

inamorata, is "un hombre alto."

There's evidence that Rizal had reason to be self-conscious about his physique.

His brother Paciano decided against enrolling José as a border at the Ateneo

because (this is from Mrs. Bantug's account) he was timid and small for his age."

And Father Pastells of the Ateneo wrote that Rizal failed to be elected president

of the college sodality because of his "small stature."

His sisters recalled that he insisted on joining games -- like the popular game of

"giants" -- for which he was too weak and small: "He grew up pathetically

conscious of his short stature and fragile body, he made great effort to stretch

himself out in his games, and he was continually begging his father to help him

grow. His little body did not permit him to compete with boys his age but stronger

than he; so he withdrew into himself. Nevertheless, the tiny lad went on craving

to become big and strong. He persisted in playing the game of 'giants.' His Uncle

Manuel, seeing the boy's avidity for advice on body building and pitying his eager

envy of tougher boys, took him under his care. A strong man full of vitality, he

sought to part the boy from his books and to satisfy his craving to develop his

body. He made the boy skip, jump, run; and though this was atfirst hard for the

frail boy, he had so strong a will and such anxiety to improve himself that, at

last, the will won over the flesh. He became lighter and quicker of movement,

and his physique more lively, more robust, more vigorous, although it didn't grow

any bigger."

Comments Radaic: "Truly, the mystery of the body is great. It's as if every man

carried within himself an ideal or invisible image of the body, of his body; and

looking in the mirror, compares what hesees there, the visible image that

confronts him, with the invisible image he hopes to see mysteriously reflected

there. Feelings of inferiority al- [end of page 59] most always arise not from

aconfrontation of the I with the non-I but from our confrontation with the interior

image we carry of ourselves. We measure ourselves, not against anything outside

the sphere of the I, but against our own selves, or, rather, the ideal of ourselves

we propose to realize.

29

"Rizal, as adolescent, had in his mind a clear and vexing image of his puny

stature, an image not yet repressed into the subconscious; and it's not difficult

to understand the marks and imprints hislittle body stamped on his spiritual

character. Nature, as whimsical as fortune and as rarely just, had created this

little body as hovel for the spiritual beauty of a child whose ailing soul felt itself

to be an exile from a world infinitely purer. Because of an excess of spirit, Rizal

saw his body as inadequate, and this, in turn, influenced his complex

psychological structure."

Radaic's point is that Rizal's career was an effort to reduce the discrepancy

between the interior image he carried of himself and the image he saw in the

mirror. The discrepancy produced both aninferiority complex (Rizal withdrawing

into himself and his books because he could not compete with tougher boys) and

the determination to excel (Rizal fighting the bigger boy and taking up body

building and fencing). That he already carried, as a child, an image of himself as

a great man, is demonstrated by a childhood incident.

One day, while the young Rizal was modeling a figure of Napoleon (another dwarf

boy who went forth to make himself a big man) his sisters teased him, apparently

on his diminutiveness. Cried thechild to his sisters: "You can laugh at me, make

mock of me; but wait till I grow bigger. When I die, people will keep pictures and

statues of me!"

Radaic also notes that Rizal's writing an autobiography in his teens, though no

really extraordinary events marked his boyhood, issignificant. The adolescent

already felt that even the most humdrum happenings of his youth would have

future historical value, and should be recorded for posterity.

But, side by side with this image of greatness, was the actual image of the boy

who felt himself to be stunted, who was haunted by a sense of inadequacy. In

the horrid outside world of Biñan and Manila he ached aloud for the refuge of

the home in Calamba, the bosom of his mother; and one can theorize that he

would later turn thesechildhood refuges into intellectual ones: the safe home in

Calamba would become the untroubled paradise of the pre-hispanic archipelago;

the bosom of the mother would become the sweet warmth of the Mother Country.

In the Canto de Maria Clara, in fact, mother and Mother Country are

indistinguishable figures.

The nostalgia of Rizal, says Radaic, was a fear of the world:

30

"Well may Rizal have exclaimed with Sartre: 'I am condemned to be free.' In the

moments when the young Rizal had to show a certain responsibility, [end of page

60] an obligatory independence; inthose moments when he had perforce to face

the world, the world inspired him with veritable terror, a terror we would call

cosmic."

Radaic quotes the passage in the Memorias where Rizal describes his last night

at the Ateneo:

"At the thought that I would have to leave that refuge of peace, I fell into profound

melancholy. When I went to the dormitory and realized this would be the last

night I would pass in my peaceful alcove because, as I was told, the world waited

for me, I had a cruel foreboding. The moon that shone mournfully seemed to be

telling me that, at daybreak, another life awaited me. I could not sleep until one

o'clock. Morning came and I dressed; I prayed with fervor in the chapel and

commended my life to the Virgin, that she might protect me while I trod this

world that inspired me with such terror… At the critical moments of my life I

have always acted against my will, obeying other ends and powerful doubts."

Alongside this and similar passages expressing terror, hesitancy, and a nostalgia

that "makes me see the past as fair, the present as sad," Radaic places Miguel

de Unamuno's judgment of Rizal:

"Rizal, the bold dreamer, strikes me as weak of will and irresolute for action and

life. His withdrawal, his timidity, proved a hundred times, his timorousness, are

no more than facets of his Hamlet disposition. To have been a practical

revolutionary he would have needed the simple mentality of an Andrés Bonifacio.

He was, I think, a faint-heart and a dubitator."

One remembers that the English meaning of filibuster is to delay; and El

Filibusterismo may more aptly be read, not as an act of subversion, as Guerrero

says, but as an acting out of Hamlet'sdelay. But Radaic's (and Unamuno's)

judgment of Rizal as fearful of the world of reality fits in with Guerrero's theory

that Rizal was devoid of any real social consciousness and feared to face, in the

end, the fact of revolution. His condemnation of the Revolution as "absurd" has

an uncanny echo in the "theater of the absurd" with which modern existentialists

condemn what they deem the crazyviolence of contemporary life. Radaic, whose

study of Rizal is spiked with quotations from the existentialists, from Kierkegaard

to Kafka to Sartre, would seem to be placing Rizal in that company --the modern

man aghast at the world he has made. Rizal, knowingly or unknowingly, created

31

a Nation and a Revolution, but did not, as Guerrero says, or would not, recognize

them when they rose beforehim, terrifying bloody apparitions. So, modern man,

confidently believing in the inevitable benefits of science and education and

progress, is at a loss to explain how such beneficial things could have produced

the dreadful world in which he nervously awaits an insane doom. Would Rizal,

who so admired the Germans and the Japanese for their dedication to science,

commerce, education and progress, have recognized the Germany of Belsen and

Dachau, the Japan of the Death March? Yet these bloody apparitions were

shaped by the very virtues he admired.

The analogous question would be: Would we have been able to predict the later

multitudinous Rizal who wrote the Memorias? Radaic thinks that the writing of

the memoirs, in the certainty that they would be read by posterity, was "already

the beginning of deformation":

"Whether instinctive or conscious, it was an effort to mask important and

intimate facts. His mind was enormously impressionable and given to self-

analysis and introversion. With such a mind, hecould appraise, hyperbolically,

his weak nature and small physique, active factors in the formation of his very

complex character. His physical inferiority complex, exacerbated by

psychological influences, can be detected in numberless manners of expression,

both direct and indirect -- when he speaks of his smallness, of the tallness of

others, of his yearnings and nostalgia for the past, of his insecurity and tragic

doubts of the future, of his boldness and his desire to rise above himself, and

[end of page 61] other protestations that seem distinct from fear."

But what are the "intimate facts" that the young Rizal would "mask"? Radaic

opines that one of the most important of them is sexual inadequacy, and he takes

for test case Rizal's first amorous affair:"el fenómeno Katigbak," as Radaic calls

it.

The usual interpretation of this affair, says Radaic, is that the young lover knew

how to behave with the strictest decorum and delicacy toward a girl already

engaged. Radaic smells a rat. He notes that it's Rizal who, when he first meets

Segunda Katigbak, presumes that "the tall man" with her is her novio. Rizal is

attracted to the girl, whom he described as "smallish" (bajita). He plays chess

with the man he keeps calling her novio and loses. "From time to time she looked

at me and I blushed." He vindicates himself, after losing at the chessboard, by

displaying his intellect, when the talk at the gathering turns to "novels and other

literary things."

32

In later meetings, Segunda makes it indubitably clear that she's interested in

Rizal. He feels flattered, he professes to be unworthy of any woman's love, and

he persists in taking it for granted that she is soon to be married, though she

herself puts his suppositions in doubt. "But I'm not getting married!" she tells

him pointblank, and in tears. "I forbade," he says, "my heart to love, because I

knew she was engaged. But I told myself: Perhaps she really loves me? Perhaps

her feelings for her fiancé are but the affections ofchildhood when her heart had

not yet opened her breast to true love?"

One perhaps followed another; she waited, giving one proof after another of her

feelings for him; but he told himself he would make no declaration until he had

seen "greater proofs" of her affection. Just what he expected the poor girl to do

to prove her love is so vague it's indecent; in other love affairs it's usually the

other side that's supposed to furnish the "greater proofs." There's no question

that, whether she was really engaged to be married or not, la Katigbak would

have eagerly forsworn previous vows and given herself to him. But he persisted

in his Hamlet hesitations, doubts and questions, until one suspects he was

manufacturing excuses -- protesting that, although she had conquered his heart,

his heart refused to surrender!

Observes Radaic: "Despite the certainty that he was loved, he went on

maintaining a Hamlet disposition, which strikes us as that of a faint-heart trying

to hide an incapacity to face the fleshly demands that love brings. In his manner

of love, more than in his manner of speech, each man reveals himself. But it was

finally impossible forRizal to go on with his deceptions and doubts, and he had

to admit, after seeking ever fresher proofs of affection, that Katigbak loved him

truly. He felt no relief over this, for the intensity of love, which he considered a

height unattainable by his poor energies, was to him an intolerable tyranny

troubling his nights and his sleep. The more sure he was that Katigbak loved

him, the more nervous he became."

Rizal saw the girl's love for him as "a yoke" -- "un yugo que ya va imponiendo

sobre mi."

Finally, the poor girl gave up. She returned to her home town, to marry her "tall

man." Rizal, on horseback, in Calamba, watched her ride past in a carriage. She

smiled at him and waved a handkerchief as she rode out of his life forever, leaving

33

he says, "a horrible void." Immediately after, he says, he visited on two successive

nights a girl in Calamba who was white of skin and seductive of eye, but

discontinued the visits at the order of his father.

This confession, says Radaic, may be no more than a desire to clothe, for future

readers of hisMemorias, the nakedness of the failure of his first attempt to love.

His later affairs of the heart followed the same pattern of vacillation and invented

impediment. He made Leonor Rivera wait eleven years, then cried that she had

betrayed him by preferring anEnglishman. He considered Nellie Bousted

"worthy" enough to be loved by him, but feared she might think he was after her

money. Much has been made of the number of women in his life, but the very

number is suspicious, hinting at emotional deficiency and the inability to sustain

a relationship. "The popular myth," says Guerrero. "is that Rizal could never love

wo- [end of page 62] man, he had given his whole heart to his country. In any

case, no woman was worthy of thehero; he had a higher fate." And noting that

Rizal does not come out too well from his love affairs, Guerrero reflects that "not

even the appealing theory that he was 'married to his country' can wholly

satisfy."

Radaic traces the generally unsatisfactory air of these love affairs to Rizal's

feeling of insecurity:

"In few fields of human conduct do complexes of inferiority play so great a role

as in the field of love, especially in the activities called sexual. Young men unsure

of themselves find sexual timidity the most difficult to overcome. There's no

complex of inferiority that does not imply a feeling of sexual deficiency, and one

of the common results of this is the 'attitude of vacillation' so ablydescribed by

Adler.

"Rizal, despite his efforts to overcome his complexes and free himself from the

anxieties caused by his small stature – experiences as painful for him as they

were beneficial to his country -- was to go on being a great neurotic, with all the

consequences that a pathogenic memory produces. With the years, the feelings

ofinferiority would oppress him less, but he would not be able to keep from

reviewing them continually, afflicted by the memory of hissufferings. In the

struggle he had received grievous wounds that were slow to scar. And though he

might at last succeed in repressing all such memories from his consciousness,

the psychic build of his character would by then carry an indelible stamp,

34

infused by a sense of physical inferiority, which was to impel him to evasive

actions, as in his later love affairs."

With the words "as they were beneficial to his country," Radaic comes to the meat

of his argument, which is that the wounds that crippled Rizal in spirit were

responsible for his greatness.Guerrero's view is that Rizal was brought up in

privileged circumstances, enjoying "the opportunities of his privileged birth." He

rose because, given his advan- [end of page 63] tages, it was but natural for him

to rise. Radaic sees it different: Rizal was underprivileged, was born heavily

handicapped. He rose because of his efforts to overcome his disadvantages, and

his rise wasunnatural and agonized. Given a choice, Rizal might well have been

willing to trade rank and fortune for a normal man's ability to accept the world

and adjust himself to it. The young Rizal'sdedication to athletics was an attempt

to make himself normal. He did not quite succeed, to our good fortune. The

mature Rizal's determination to excel in as many fields of endeavor as possible -

-science, art, medicine, literature -- was a compensation for his feeble physique;

he would show the world he was as capable, as tall, as the next man. He proved

he was very much taller, by rising above himself. If there had been no need to do

so, if he had been of normal height and with normal capacities, he might have

led a normal life, might have accepted the world as he found it and adjusted

himself to it. And the nation would have lost a hero.

Rizal's career illustrates the challenge-and-response theory of progress. Rizal

soared because his every response overshot the challenge. With each

achievement, whether in science or letters orscholarship, he added one more

cubit to his stature, until he need no longer decry himself as small. Even in that

most intimate incapacity that Radaic speaks of, Rizal managed to achieve a

measure of success. His last emotional involvement, with Josephine Bracken, is

no longer just an affair but is a mature relationship, amarriage.

Says Radaic:

"The fights Rizal mentions in his Memorias, with boys bigger than he, against

whom he thrust his little body as though to assure himself and show others he

was not so weak, are but compulsions tocompensate for his inferior build, as if

he would thus attain the physical height nature had denied him. His fights

express his complexes, are an aspect of his timorousness, a timorousness

turnedinside out.

35

"Tormented by eternal feelings of inferiority, Rizal made a career of ascension.

The struggle between his complexes and his ever more ambitious I lifted this

extraordinary man to the supreme heights ofperfection and human endeavor.

His career is that of the lesser sons in the fairy tales, who work wonders and win

princesses. A Rizal well formed of body might never have found in himself the

forceneeded to raise himself so high for the sake of his country." [end of page 64]

WHY WAS THE RIZAL HERO A CREOLE?

The Rizal novels, so morbid of matter but so comic in manner, defy canonization.

The Bible of the race won't toe today's line on the race. Like the Hebrew

scriptures, from which its priestly editors vainly tried to purge a mass of

polytheistic myth, the Rizal novels contain elements our stricter sensibilities

would purge away.

The figure of Maria Clara, for instance, continues to scandalize us. Why did Rizal

choose for heroine amestiza of shameful conception? The reply of the 1930s was

that Maria Clara was no heroine to Rizalbut an object of satire - a theory that

wreaks havoc on the meaning of satire, besides being refuted by the text of the

novels, which reveals a Rizal enraptured by his heroine. Today's iconoclasts have

got around the dilemma by simply rejecting Maria Clara. Rizal may have been,

at least during the writing, taken in by her; we are not. Whether she was a

heroine to him or not, she is no heroine to us; and all the folk notions of Maria

Clara as an ideal or as a symbol of the Mother Country, must be discarded. Thus

would we purify Rizal.

Said Rizal of his heroine:

"Poor girl, with your heart play gross hands that know not of its delicate fibers."

But having disposed of his outrageous heroine, we are still confronted by his

equally impossible hero, impossible because he offends our racial pride. Why

should the hero of the Great Filipino Novel be, not an Indio Filipino, but a

Spanish "Filipino," with the quotes expressing our misgivings? For Juan

Crisostomo Ibarra belonged to that class which alone bore the name Filipino in

those days but from which we would withhold the name Filipino today, though

most of the Philippine Creoles (and the Rizal hero is an example) had more native

than Spanish blood.

A Creole class in the pure sense of the term never existed in the Philippines. The

Spanish didn't come here in such numbers as to establish a large enough

36

community that could intermarry withinitself and keep the blood pure. What

were their most numerous progeny -- the friars' bastards -- inevitably vanished

into the native mass within a generation. But even the Spaniards who

didestablish families could keep them Creole for, at the most, three generations.

The exceptions are rare. The Rochas (Malacañang used to be their manor) [end

of page 65] are probably the most durable, dating back some two centuries; the

Téuses have endured about a century and a half but have sunk into obscurity;

the Elizaldes (of very mixed blood) go back only a century, or some four

generations. The commoner process was followed by such families as the

Legardas and the Aranetas, which now seem purely native principalia but

beganas Creole. This process was arrested and reversed by the great tribe that

may be called the Ayala in general, though it includes the Sorianos, Zobels,

Meliáns and Roxases. By the time of theRevolution, this Creole tribe was already

headed by an Indio, Don Pedro Roxas, and seemed on its way to becoming as

"native" as the Legardas and Aranetas; but succeeding generations restored the

tribe to Creole status with heavy infusions of European blood. "Tis said that the

sons of the tribe are sent to Europe as soon as they reach puberty and are not

allowed to come home until they havemarried "correctly" abroad.

Up to around midway of the 19th century, however, the Philippine Creoles had

no such scruples about blood purity and were distinguished as a class apart, as

"Filipinos," not so much by theamount of Spanish blood in their veins as by their

culture, position and wealth. So, a friar's bastard by a peasant girl might look

completely Spanish but would have no status as a Creole, while a manlike Ibarra,

already two mixed marriages away from a Spanish grandfather, would still be a

Creole because a landowner and gentleman. He was an Ibarra far more than he

was a Magsalin – andthere's significance in his Indio surname, which means to

pour, to transfer, to translate, for Ibarra was indeed a translation into Asia of

Europe, or, possibly the other way around.

The question is: Why did Rizal make this "translated Filipino" his hero? Was

Rizal trying to identify with the Creole? Are the illustrators right who give the tall,

hairy, high-nosed and red-cheeked Ibarra the smaller, smoother features of

Rizal?

A great writer is always writing abut his times, even when he seems to be writing

about something else; and Rizal's novels are historical parables, though we have

never quite related them to their particular period. We know the novels are

subversive, that they are about revolution, but we assume that Rizal meant the

Revolution of 1896, to which he was looking forward as a prophet; and we are

37

therefore dumbfounded that Rizal, when the Revolution came, chose to disown

it and to enlist on the side of Spain. We secretly suspect a failure of nerve in the

man who had so vigorouslyprophesied that Revolution.

But was Rizal prophesying? Might he not have been talking about another

revolution altogether, a revolution he was more sympathetic to? The novels were,

after all, written about a decade before 1896; and we know that the events [end

of page 66] that most influenced Rizal, that must have shaped those novels, were

the events with which he grew up, that impelled a change in name, the

translation from Mercado to Rizal - and from the Philippines to Europe.

The clue is in the dedication to El Filibusterismo:

"To the memory of the priests, Don Mariano Gómez, Don José Burgos and Don

Jacinto Zamora, executed on the gibbet of Bagumbayan on February 28, 1872."

Throughout the years he was growing up, Rizal was aware that a revolution was

going on in his country, a revolution inspired at first by the person, then by the

memory of Burgos the Creole, and in which the people most involved belonged

to the Creole class, for the Propaganda may be said to have begun, in the 1850s,

with Father Peláez, as a Creole campaign against the Peninsulars. Rizal alsoknew

that Spain was overthrown in America by the various uprisings of the Creoles

there (Bolivar, San Martin, Iturbide) -- that is, by the class that had the education,

money, talent and prestige toconduct a revolt with success. (The revolutions of

the Indios would come later, as with Juárez in Mexico.) During Rizal's youth, it

looked as if what had happened in America would happen in thePhilippines: the

Creoles were restive, were rising, were apparently headed for an open clash with

thePeninsulars. So, when Rizal wrote his novels, he was writing about an actual

movement, and writing to animate it. He was not looking forward to 1896; he

was looking back to 1872 and all its subsequent repercussions. He was

chronicling the Creole revolution in the Philippines.

The Creole

For 200 years -- through the 17th and 18th centuries -- the Philippine Creoles

were Filipino in the sense that their lives were entirely devoted to the service of

the country: to expanding orconsolidating the national frontiers and to protecting

them. Their great labor, their achievement, was keeping the Philippines

intactthrough two centuries when, it may be said, there was not a single day that

the islands were not under threat of invasion: by the Chinese, the Japanese, the

British, the Dutch. For two centuries the country was under constant siege. The

38

Dutch Wars, for instance – a crucial period in our history -- lasted fifty years. A

single slip in the vigilance and our history would have been different; therewould

be, to stress a point now invisible to us, no Philippines at all: we would be a

province today of Indonesia and nobody would be arguing about what a Filipino

is.

During those 200 years the Creole faltered only once, very briefly, with the British

invasion, but he quickly recovered balance. The conquering Americans of the

1900s would sneer at Spanish empire in the Philippines as inept, against all the

evidence of history; for if the prime duty of a mother country to a colony is to

protect it from invasion, then we'll have to admit that Spain, in its almost 400

years in the islands, acquitted itself with honor, especially when we remember

that within fifty years after the American occupation, the Philippines fell, and fell

unprotected, to aninvader, while the Americans looked the other way, toward

Europe. Another point: the Tagalogs and Pampangos who fought with the

Creoles to defend the islands during those centuries of siege, we now sneer at as

mercenaries"-- but is it mercenary to fight for one's country?

The labor of defense was so exhausting it partly explains why [end of page 67]

there are no really old Creole families in the Philippines. For his pains, the Creole

might be rewarded with an encomienda, which did not mean possessing the land

entrusted to his care but merely gave him the right to collect the tribute there

for the space of two generations: his own lifetime and that of his heir. The head

tribute was at first eight reales (or a peso), was later increased to ten reales, then

reduced to four. In return, the encomendero pledged himself, like a feudal lord,

to the defense of the folk under his care (which meant being ready at any moment

to be called to military service anywhere in the country) and also to their religious

instruction; but he was forbidden to stay within his encomienda or even to sleep

two consecutive nights there, to prevent him from turning into a little local tyrant.

The encomienda system lasted but briefly; and the Philippine Creole depended

more for subsistence on the Galleon trade and on mining. He worked the iron

mines of Antipolo when the Philippines still had a cannon foundry industry and,

later, the gold mines of Paracale. As a gentleman, manual labor was forbidden

him; he could enter only the Army, the Church and the Government. The Creoles

formed our first secular clergy, our first civil service. Only late in Spanish times,

with the relaxation of the restrictions on land-owning, did the Creole turn to

agriculture, dedicating himself to sugar culture in Negros and Pampanga, to

abaca culture in Bicolandia, to cattle culture in the various rancherias in the

North.

39

All this time the Creole-and the Philippine colony in general -- lived in isolation

from Spain, and the neglect fostered the autonomous spirit. The Creole was a

"Filipino", not a Spaniard. He controlled the government; Madrid was

represented only by thegovernor-general, who was so detested as a "foreigner"

he had to make an accounting of his stewardship before he could return to

Madrid. The voyage from Europe to the Philippines was so long and so expensive

and the mortality among passengers so high that only the hardiest of Spaniards

reached the islands, and once here they had to cast in their lot with the country

forever, since a return trip was next to impossible. The immigrating Spaniard,

therefore, broke with Spain forever when he came to the Philippines. If we further

consider that many of those who came here were Basques and Cataláns - - that

is, folk with a tradition of rebelliousness against the Madrid government-the

temper of the Philippine Creole becomes evident. Rizal made his Ibarra the

descendant of a Basque.

With the revolt of Spanish America and the opening of the Suez Canal, Madrid

came closer to Manila; and the quicker cheaper voyage now brought to the

Philippines, as Rizal's Teniente Guevara observed,"lo más perdido de la

peninsula." These peninsularparasites, however, considered themselves several

cuts above the "Filipino" -- that is, the Creole -- and began to crowd him out of

Army, Church and Government. The war between Creole andPeninsular had

begun.

This was during the first three quarters or so of the 19th century, when a

practically autonomous commonwealth found itself becoming a Spanish colony

in the strict sense of the world (sic). The previous centuries of Spain in the

Philippines had been years of Christianization, unification and development, but

only the final century, the 19th, was a period of hispanization; and how effective

it was is displayed by the fact that within less than a century the hispanization

campaign had produced Rizal and the ilustrados, men so steeped in Spanish and

European culture they seemed to have athousand years of that culture behind

them. The campaign to hispanize the islands was intensifying when the

Revolution broke out: the government was opening normal schools for the

training ofnative teachers to spread Spanish throughout the population.

Meanwhile, the Philippine Creole was rising, stirred into insurgence by the

example of a Mexican Creole of the Manila garrison. The Novales revolt in the

1820's planted the idea of separatism. WhenMexico, having successfully revolted,

seceded from Spain, the treaty between the two countries permitted the two

imperial provinces that were formerly ruled through Mexico, to choose between

40

joining Mexico or remaining with Spain. The Philippines thus got the chance to

break away from Spain in 1821, for the Philippines was one of thesetwo imperial

provinces dependent on Mexico, the other being Guatemala, which then

comprised most of Central America. Guatemala opted to join Mexico, but the

Philippine government -- or itsSpanish governor-general anyway -- chose to keep

the islands under Spain. However, the revolt of the Mexican Creole captain

Novales - who was proclaimed "emperor of the Philippines" one day and executed

on the cathedral square of Manila the next day -- shows that there was a segment

of Creole opinion in the Philippines that favoredjoining the Mexicans in their

independence. Local Creoles had heard that, in Mexico, a Creole [end of page 68]

(Iturbide) had been proclaimed "emperor," after a revolution that had, for one of

its aims, equality between Spaniards and Creoles.

The current of mutinous opinion swelled and, two decades after the Novales

revolt, erupted mysteriously in the Conspiracy of the Palmeros, an affair that

involved a Creole family so prominent (itwas related to the Azcárragas) all records

of what appears to have been a coup attempt have been suppressed -- though

the Rizal student should perk his ears here, for a family close to the rulers of

thestate it's trying to undermine suggests the figure of Simoun, the sinister

eminence behind the governor-general.

A decade later, in the 1850s, the Creole revolution becomes manifest in Father

Peláez, canon of the Manila Cathedral, who started the propaganda for the

Filipinization of the clergy. Peláez perished inthe Cathedral during the great

earthquake of 1863, but he left a disciple who would carry on his work: José

Burgos.

With Burgos, we are already in Rizal country. He and his mentor Peláez -- like

Rizal himself -- were what might be called "eventualists": they believed that, with

sufficient propaganda, reforms could be won eventually, autonomy could be

gained eventually, and the hated Peninsulars could be ejected without firing a

shot. Burgos is the Creole of the 1870s, resurgent if not yet insurgent: a Liberal

in the manner of Governor-General De La Torre; and already conscious of himself

as a Filipino distinct from the Spaniard. His counterpart in the secular sphere is

Antonio Regidor (implicated in the same Motin de Cavite that cost Burgos's life),

who replied to the Peninsular's disdain of the "Filipino" by showing, in his own

person, that a Filipino could be more cultured than a Peninsular. It was in this

spirit that the Philippine Creoles would vaunt that a Filipino, Ezpeleta, had risen

to the dignity of bishop and that another Filipino, Azcárraga, had become a

governmentminister in Madrid.

41

The fate of Burgos (the garrote) and of Regidor (exile) put an end to the idea of

eventualism. The Creoles that come after – mostly educated on the Continent

and affiliated with the Masonic Order --are already frankly filibusteros -- that is,

subversives – and their greatest spokesman is Marcelo H. del Pilar, the Creole

who undoubtedly possessed the most brilliant mastery of Spanish aFilipino ever

wielded but whose talent got deadened by journalistic deadlines. But the

extremest development of the Creole as filibusterowas Trinidad Pardo de Tavera,

a man who came to loathe both the Malay and the Spaniard in himself so

intensely he became the first of the sajonistas and, as a member of the Philippine

Commission of the 1900s, fought for the implantation of English inthe

Philippines, in a virulent desire to uproot all traces of Spanish culture from the

islands. For good or evil, Trinidad Pardo de Tavera, whom we hardly remember,

was one of the deciders of ourfate.

The Rizal novels probe these two phases of the Creole revolution. In the Noli Me

Tangere, we are still in the epoch of Peláez and Burgos, the eventualists; and

Ibarra, who believes that education and propaganda will eventually create a

climate of reform, follows the fate of Burgos even to the point of being, like Burgos,

implicated in an uprising he knows nothing about. But in El Filibusterismo, we

are already in the period of del Pilar and Pardo de Tavera; and the sinister

Simoun, white-locked and long-bearded, is no longer apropagandist but a

corrupter, and craves not only the fall of Spanish rule but the failure of the

hispanization movement.

Ibarra

The family of Rizal's hero traces the evolution from Spa- [end of page 69] niard

to Creole to Filipino. The great-grandfather still bears the original Basque name,

Eibarramendia, which his descendants abbreviate to Ibarra. Don Pedro

Eibarramendia is a Manila businessman; when his warehouse burns down he

accuses his bookkeeperof having started the fire and thus ruins not only the

hapless bookkeeper but all his descendants, the last of whom is the tragic Elias.

Don Pedro is a fearful figure, with his deep-sunken eyes,cavernous voice, and

"laughter without sound," and has apparently been in the country a long time,

for he speaks Tagalog well. He suddenly appears in San Diego, is fascinated by

a piece of deep woods in which are thermal waters, and buys up the woods with

textiles, jewels and some coin. Then he vanishes as suddenly as he has come.

Later, his rotting corpse is found hanging on a balite tree in the woods. Terrified,

42

those who sold him the woods throw his jewels into the river and his textiles into

the fire. The woods where he hanged himself become haunted.

A few months later, his son Saturnino appears in San Diego, claims the property,

settles in the village (where still roam deer and boar) and starts an indigo farm.

Don Saturnino is as gloomy as hisfather: taciturn, violent, at times cruel, but

very active and industrious; and he transforms San Diego from "a miserable heap

of huts" into a thriving town that attracts new settlers and theChinese.

In these two initial generations of Ibarras, contemporaneous with the early 1800s,

we see the Creole turning, after two centuries of constant warfare, from arms to

plow, from battlefield to farm and shop. Don Pedro and Don Saturnino have the

gloom of the frustrated, of warriors born too late for knight-errantry and forced

into grubbier tasks. One goes into business and ends up a suicide; the other

turns into a frontiersman, bringing the qualities of a soldier -- violence, cruelty,

vigor and zeal -- to the development of a farm at the edge of the jungle. Rizal is

fair: he sees the latter-day Creole as engaged in anotherconquista, this time of

the soil. As long as the Creole was merely defending the land as empire,the land

was his but he was not the land's. But when he began to work the land himself,

he became possessed by what, formerly, he hadmerely possessed. The change

shows in the third-generation Ibarra, Don Rafael, the hero's father, who is

already graduating from Creole to Filipino.

Don Rafael outrages the Peninsulars because, though of Spanish blood, he wears

the nativecamisa. He is loved by his tenants; he sends his only son to study in

Switzerland; he had been influenced by the Liberalism of the 1860s. He

subscribes to Madrid newspapers and keeps a picture of an "executed priest."

What gets him intotrouble is almost too blunt a projection of the clash between

the Creole and Peninsular. The Peninsularin this case exemplifies the worst of

the Spaniards that poured into the Philippines with the opening of the Suez

Canal: he is illiterate but has been made a tax collector, and the natives laugh

at him. When he punishes a child who is mocking him, he is knocked down by

Don Rafael, breaks his head on a stone and dies. Don Rafael is thrown into jail,

where he rots. When his son returns from Europe the old man has died in jail.

The fourth generation Ibarra, Juan Crisostomo, has a proper Victorian's faith in

education, science, propaganda and the excellences of Europe. He has inherited

a quarrel with the Peninsulares that he does not care to pursue, being a civilized

43

man. He has also, but unknowingly, inherited a quarrel with the Indios, which

provides the Noli Me Tangerewith its sardonic humor; for Ibarra's life is thrice

saved by Elias, who it turns out is a victim of the Ibarras, a victim of the Creole.

Rizal was making an ironic comment on the alliance between the Creole and

Indio; yet he makes Elias die to save Ibarra the Creole; and it's Ibarra, not Elias,

whobecomes the revolutionary.

He is forced to become one, though all he wanted to do was elevate the masses

by educating them. At times he even sounds [end of page 70] like a reactionary:

"To keep the Philippines, it's necessary that the friars stay; and in the union with

Spain lies the welfare of the country." Rizal repeats the Creole-vs.-Peninsular

theme by making Ibarra's rival forMaria Clara a Peninsular: the newcomer

Linares. And when tragedy befalls him, Ibarra the Creole finds the Peninsular

society of Manila ranged against him and decrying him precisely because of his

Spanish blood. "It always has to be the Creoles!" say the Peninsulars upon

hearing Ibarra's supposed uprising. "No Indio would understand revolution!"

In the accursed woods where his Spanish ancestor hanged himself, the

embittered Ibarra ceases to be a naïve Edmond Dantes and becomes a

malevolent Montecristo.

Simoun

Revenge was sweet, however, for the Montecristo of Dumas. The Simoun of Rizal

is unhappy even in revenge. He is one of the darkest creations of literature, a

man who believes salvation can come only from total corruption.

"I have inflamed greed," he says. "Injustices and abuses have multiplied. I have

fomented crime, and acts of cruelty, so that the people may become inured to

the idea of death. I have maintainedterror so that, fleeing from it, they may seize

any solution. I have paralyzed commerce so that the country, impoverished and

reduced to misery, may have nothing more to fear. I have spurred ambition, to

ruin the treasury; and not content with all this, to arouse a popular uprising, I

have hurt the nation in its rawest nerve, by making the vulture itself insult the

very carcass that feeds it!"Simoun is beyond any wish for reform, or autonomy,

or representation in the Cortes.

"I need your help," he tells Basilio, "to make the youth resist these insane

cravings for hispanization, for assimilation, for equality of rights. Instead of

44

aspiring to be a province, aspire to be a nation... so that not by right, nor custom,

nor language, may the Spaniard feel at home here, nor be regarded by the people

as a native, but always as an invader, as an alien."

And he offers Basilio "your death or your future; with the government or with us;

with your oppressors or with your country"; warning the boy that whoever

"declares himself neutral exposeshimself to the fury of both sides" -- the most

poignant line in the novel; though Rizal, when the moment of choice came, did

not exactly declare himself neutral.

But Basilio, even when finally converted to the revolution, shrinks from Simoun's

command to exterminate not only the counter-revolution but all who refuse to

rise up in arms:

"All! All! Indios, mestizos, Chinese, Spaniards. All whom you find without

courage, without spirit. It is necessary to renew the race! Coward fathers can

only beget slave children. What? You tremble? Youfear to sow death? What is to

be destroyed? An evil, a misery. Would you call that to destroy? I would call it to

create, to produce, to nourish, to give life!"

Unlike Montecristo, Simoun fails. Dying, he flees to the house beside the Pacific

where lives Father Florentino; and through Father Florentino, Rizal seems to

annul what he has been saying sopassionately, during the novel, through

Simoun. What had sounded like a savage sneering at reform becomes a

celebration of reforms, of spiritual self-renewal. Salvation cannot come from

corruption;garbage produces only toadstools. In Dumas, the last words had

been: Wait and hope. In Rizal, the last words are: Suffer and toil. And the jewels

with which Simoun had thought to fuel the holocaust,Father Florentino hurls

into the ocean, there to wait until a time "when men need you for a holy and high

purpose."

This final chapter is beautiful [end of page 71] but unsatisfactory. The Noli Me

Tangere had mocked the naiveté of the reformist, the futility of collaboration; El

Filibusterismo should, therefore, have unequivocally justified revolution -- but it

takes back in the final chapter what it pushed forward in the preceding ones.

What had happened?

The Creole revolution had flopped.

A few decades before, Sinibaldo de Mas had predicted the impasse:

45

"Among the whites born in the colony, there arise local interests opposed to those

of the mother country and which end by arousing the desire for independence.

A Filipino Spaniard may be called aSpaniard but he has never been to Spain and

has neither friends nor relatives there. He has spent his infancy in the

Philippines; there he has enjoyed the games of childhood and known his first

loves;there he has domiciled his soul. The Philippines is his native land. But the

Filipinos (that is, the Creoles) are continually snubbed. Their resentment when

a boat from Cádiz arrives in Manila withalcaldes mayores or military and finance

officers is so obvious one must close one's eyes and even at times one's ears to

avoid noticing it.

"However, much as the Spanish officials may suppose the Filipino Spaniards to

be disloyal and desperate, it was not possible for me to believe that it would ever

occur to them to rise up and arm the natives (because the Creoles are) much less

loved than the Europeans by the Indios, without the support of the friars,

without capital, and too weak a minority to subdue the more than 200,000 rich,

active and intelligent Chinese mestizos and the three and a half million natives.

In case of a break, the Spanish population rooted in the country stands to lose

most; the Europeans can return to Spain, but the Filipino Spaniards will be

uprooted, lose all and have to search for another homeland. Yet can these

individuals in question be deemed stupid and blind if they favor separation from

Spain when we repeatedly read in the history of popular uprisings that the most

eminent men believe they can guide a revolution according to their plans, never

suspecting for a moment that they will fall victims of the revolting masses that

they incite to revolt?"

That indeed was what more or less happened. As the insurgent Creoles were

joined by the rising native ilustrados, initiative passed from one to the other; and

the Creole got cold feet with the thought of what might happen to him if the Indio

should rise up in arms. For the Creole might think [end of page 73] his

insurgence the revolt ofFilipinos against the Peninsulars; but to the Indio, it was

merely a quarrel between one set of Spaniards and another set of Spaniards. And

while the two sets quarreled, the Indio snatched back his land. So, in Europe,

while king and bishop squabbled, the bourgeois slipped through and seized

power.

But the abortive Creole revolution did create a climate of subversion; to that

extent, Simoun had succeeded. There's a clear line of development from 1872 to

1896, as we acknowledge byaccepting Burgos as a national hero. But what

happened in America did not happen here. An actual Creole revolt did not break

46

out; the Indio beat the Creole to the draw; and when the hour of reckoning came

the Creole sided with the hatedPeninsulars -- though he later somewhat

redeemed himself by joining the second phase of theRevolution, the war against

the Americans. When that, too, collapsed, the Creole returned to the side of the

imperialist: the Partido Federalista was the Creole party. The failure of that party

removed the Creole from the mainstream of the national life --though, ironically,

the very failure led to the realization of the old Creole dream: it was a Quezon

that took possession of Malacañang.

The modern descendants of the Creoles have had no one fate. The very rich ones,

who were, in the 1870s, becoming more and more Filipino have, today, become

more and more Spanish. The poorer ones have had, as Sinibaldo de Mas

predicted, to search for a new homeland, Australia being the current goal of their

exodus. Others, as a modern Creole observes, emigrate to San Lorenzo Village:

"Go to the Rizal Theater any night and you'd think you were in a foreign country."

But there's another segment that seems to be reviving what might be called the

Spirit of '72 and which may be studied in an Emmanuel Peláez or Manuel

Manahan, tentative Hamletish figures that baffle us with their scruples, their

militancies, their enigmatic "honor." Are they Ibarra or Simoun? Are they

resuming an unfinished revolution of their own, the revolt of the Creole?

The jewels of Simoun wait in the sea.

47

From Bye Bye Blackbird

A death in the family. Relatives

you haven’t seen since the last

death in the family reappear

like furniture from your past

reassembled for a movie about it;

reassembling now only as props:

footlight (as it were) and backdrops,

to celebrate not a death but the family

here having one of its final stops,

here it continues where it stops.

No one is here as a person,

only as the correct representative

of his branch of the line. Only

the man that’s dead is here as himself,

is discussed as such. “Rather lonely,

his last days.” “Well, he was on the shelf

all of these years.” “He was renting

that crummy apartment?” “No, just a part

of it, the upstairs.” “Collapsed, alone

with his cats—whom someone should be representing.

They were so dear to him.” “From the start

48

of the stroke, unconscious.” “Four o’clock dawn.”

“Died like his father, cerebral hemorrhage.”

The crowd wake was a lively tone.

49

Song Between wars

Wombed in the wounds of war

grow golden boys and girls

whose green hearts are

peacocks perched upon apes

and pigs that feed on pearls

or sour grapes.

But we are old–we are only

a point, a pause

in the earth’s decay–we are

lonely

but no day dies

in the eyes we dare not close

lest we flock with flies.

Bankrupt by war,

let us mine the honey

that’s ored in udders that are

this lad, that lass,

because they are molten money

and their bones are cash.

Imperial their coin still is

when other currencies are

50

imperilled; when peace

is for every man and woman

a labyrinth; and war

the bull that’s human.

War is the Minotaur

and we are the waters

bearing for him to devour

the young, the beautiful–

our sons and daughters:

the tax we pay to the Bull.

The maze we made they shall

travel,

its winding ways unwind

and the riddle unravel

till they come to the end of

the thread:

the labyrinth behind

and the Beast ahead.

51

LANDSCAPE WITHOUT FIGURES

How looms the landscape of the future

where even man will be vile:

big shot and small fry, straw man, moocher--

all transferred underground to file

the Age of Airline and Airwaves

among the neolithic caves.

The trend being steadily underground

(bomb-shelter, catacomb, foxhole

and fathomings ever more profound),

man may outmimic mouse and mole

and find his live limbs eagerly

intruding on Persephone.

The quodams angels of the air

turned earthworms anguishing to locate

some hollow at the globe's core where

the flag poles do not penetrate,

will bless the Devil for a berth

within the bowels of the earth.

52

The Future's rapping at the door

and rattling the venetian blind

while flat upon the bathroom floor

the Grass of Fashion fumes to find

she can no longer, like the starfish,

survive upon the glittering surface.

As diplomats debate, debate,

and fear prepares more and more fiery

explosions to illuminate

mankind's eventual hegira,

your sad eyes, staring, make this room

the memory's viaticum.

A stone heart's in the stricken flesh

that craves a miner's axes-- unless

Christ, with his customary stealth,

comes cleaving through the heart's

material

the twin caves of his birth and

burial.

53

May Day Eve

The old people had ordered that the dancing should stop at ten o’clock but it was

almost midnight before the carriages came filing up the departing guests, while

the girls who were staying were promptly herded upstairs to the bedrooms, the

young men gathering around to wish them a good night and lamenting their

ascent with mock signs and moaning, proclaiming themselves disconsolate but

straightway going off to finish the punch and the brandy though they were quite

drunk already and simply bursting with wild spirits, merriment, arrogance and

audacity, for they were young bucks newly arrived from Europe; the ball had

been in their honor; and they had waltzed and polka-ed and bragged and

swaggered and flirted all night and where in no mood to sleep yet--no, caramba,

not on this moist tropic eve! not on this mystic May eve! --with the night still

young and so seductive that it was madness not to go out, not to go forth---and

serenade the neighbors! cried one; and swim in the Pasid! cried another; and

gather fireflies! cried a third—whereupon there arose a great clamor for coats

and capes, for hats and canes, and they were a couple of street-lamps flickered

and a last carriage rattled away upon the cobbles while the blind black houses

muttered hush-hush, their tile roofs looming like sinister chessboards against a

wile sky murky with clouds, save where an evil young moon prowled about in a

corner or where a murderous wind whirled, whistling and whining, smelling now

of the sea and now of the summer orchards and wafting unbearable childhood

fragrances or ripe guavas to the young men trooping so uproariously down the

street that the girls who were desiring upstairs in the bedrooms catered

screaming to the windows, crowded giggling at the windows, but were soon

sighing amorously over those young men bawling below; over those wicked young

men and their handsome apparel, their proud flashing eyes, and their elegant

mustaches so black and vivid in the moonlight that the girls were quite ravished

with love, and began crying to one another how carefree were men but how awful

to be a girl and what a horrid, horrid world it was, till old Anastasia plucked

54

them off by the ear or the pigtail and chases them off to bed---while from up the

street came the clackety-clack of the watchman’s boots on the cobble and the

clang-clang of his lantern against his knee, and the mighty roll of his great voice

booming through the night, "Guardia serno-o-o! A las doce han dado-o-o.

And it was May again, said the old Anastasia. It was the first day of May and

witches were abroad in the night, she said--for it was a night of divination, and

night of lovers, and those who cared might peer into a mirror and would there

behold the face of whoever it was they were fated to marry, said the old Anastasia

as she hobble about picking up the piled crinolines and folding up shawls and

raking slippers in corner while the girls climbing into four great poster-beds that

overwhelmed the room began shrieking with terror, scrambling over each other

and imploring the old woman not to frighten them.

"Enough, enough, Anastasia! We want to sleep!"

"Go scare the boys instead, you old witch!"

"She is not a witch, she is a maga. She is a maga. She was born of Christmas

Eve!"

"St. Anastasia, virgin and martyr."

"Huh? Impossible! She has conquered seven husbands! Are you a virgin,

Anastasia?"

"No, but I am seven times a martyr because of you girls!"

"Let her prophesy, let her prophesy! Whom will I marry, old gypsy? Come, tell

me."

"You may learn in a mirror if you are not afraid."

"I am not afraid, I will go," cried the young cousin Agueda, jumping up in bed.

55

"Girls, girls---we are making too much noise! My mother will hear and will come

and pinch us all. Agueda, lie down! And you Anastasia, I command you to shut

your mouth and go away!""Your mother told me to stay here all night, my grand

lady!"

"And I will not lie down!" cried the rebellious Agueda, leaping to the floor. "Stay,

old woman. Tell me what I have to do."

"Tell her! Tell her!" chimed the other girls.

The old woman dropped the clothes she had gathered and approached and fixed

her eyes on the girl. "You must take a candle," she instructed, "and go into a

room that is dark and that has a mirror in it and you must be alone in the room.

Go up to the mirror and close your eyes and shy:

Mirror, mirror, show to me him whose woman I will be. If all goes right, just

above your left shoulder will appear the face of the man you will marry." A silence.

Then: "And hat if all does not go right?" asked Agueda. "Ah, then the Lord have

mercy on you!" "Why." "Because you may see--the Devil!"

The girls screamed and clutched one another, shivering. "But what nonsense!"

cried Agueda. "This is the year 1847. There are no devil anymore!" Nevertheless

she had turned pale. "But where could I go, hugh? Yes, I know! Down to the sala.

It has that big mirror and no one is there now." "No, Agueda, no! It is a mortal

sin! You will see the devil!" "I do not care! I am not afraid! I will go!" "Oh, you

wicked girl! Oh, you mad girl!" "If you do not come to bed, Agueda, I will call my

mother." "And if you do I will tell her who came to visit you at the convent last

March. Come, old woman---give me that candle. I go." "Oh girls---give me that

candle, I go."

But Agueda had already slipped outside; was already tiptoeing across the hall;

her feet bare and her dark hair falling down her shoulders and streaming in the

wind as she fled down the stairs, the lighted candle sputtering in one hand while

56

with the other she pulled up her white gown from her ankles. She paused

breathless in the doorway to the sala and her heart failed her. She tried to

imagine the room filled again with lights, laughter, whirling couples, and the jolly

jerky music of the fiddlers. But, oh, it was a dark den, a weird cavern for the

windows had been closed and the furniture stacked up against the walls. She

crossed herself and stepped inside.

The mirror hung on the wall before her; a big antique mirror with a gold frame

carved into leaves and flowers and mysterious curlicues. She saw herself

approaching fearfully in it: a small while ghost that the darkness bodied forth--

-but not willingly, not completely, for her eyes and hair were so dark that the

face approaching in the mirror seemed only a mask that floated forward; a bright

mask with two holes gaping in it, blown forward by the white cloud of her gown.

But when she stood before the mirror she lifted the candle level with her chin

and the dead mask bloomed into her living face.

She closed her eyes and whispered the incantation. When she had finished such

a terror took hold of her that she felt unable to move, unable to open her eyes

and thought she would stand there forever, enchanted. But she heard a step

behind her, and a smothered giggle, and instantly opened her eyes.

"And what did you see, Mama? Oh, what was it?" But Dona Agueda had forgotten

the little girl on her lap: she was staring pass the curly head nestling at her

breast and seeing herself in the big mirror hanging in the room. It was the same

room and the same mirror out the face she now saw in it was an old face---a

hard, bitter, vengeful face, framed in graying hair, and so sadly altered, so sadly

different from that other face like a white mask, that fresh young face like a pure

mask than she had brought before this mirror one wild May Day midnight years

and years ago.... "But what was it Mama? Oh please go on! What did you see?"

Dona Agueda looked down at her daughter but her face did not soften though

her eyes filled with tears. "I saw the devil." she said bitterly. The child blanched.

57

"The devil, Mama? Oh... Oh..." "Yes, my love. I opened my eyes and there in the

mirror, smiling at me over my left shoulder, was the face of the devil." "Oh, my

poor little Mama! And were you very frightened?" "You can imagine. And that is

why good little girls do not look into mirrors except when their mothers tell them.

You must stop this naughty habit, darling, of admiring yourself in every mirror

you pass- or you may see something frightful some day." "But the devil, Mama--

-what did he look like?" "Well, let me see... he has curly hair and a scar on his

cheek---" "Like the scar of Papa?" "Well, yes. But this of the devil was a scar of

sin, while that of your Papa is a scar of honor. Or so he says." "Go on about the

devil." "Well, he had mustaches." "Like those of Papa?" "Oh, no. Those of your

Papa are dirty and graying and smell horribly of tobacco, while these of the devil

were very black and elegant--oh, how elegant!" "And did he speak to you, Mama?"

"Yes… Yes, he spoke to me," said Dona Agueda. And bowing her graying head;

she wept.

"Charms like yours have no need for a candle, fair one," he had said, smiling at

her in the mirror and stepping back to give her a low mocking bow. She had

whirled around and glared at him and he had burst into laughter. "But I

remember you!" he cried. "You are Agueda, whom I left a mere infant and came

home to find a tremendous beauty, and I danced a waltz with you but you would

not give me the polka." "Let me pass," she muttered fiercely, for he was barring

the way. "But I want to dance the polka with you, fair one," he said. So they stood

before the mirror; their panting breath the only sound in the dark room; the

candle shining between them and flinging their shadows to the wall. And young

Badoy Montiya (who had crept home very drunk to pass out quietly in bed)

suddenly found himself cold sober and very much awake and ready for anything.

His eyes sparkled and the scar on his face gleamed scarlet. "Let me pass!" she

cried again, in a voice of fury, but he grasped her by the wrist. "No," he smiled.

"Not until we have danced." "Go to the devil!" "What a temper has my serrana!"

"I am not your serrana!" "Whose, then? Someone I know? Someone I have

58

offended grievously? Because you treat me, you treat all my friends like your

mortal enemies." "And why not?" she demanded, jerking her wrist away and

flashing her teeth in his face. "Oh, how I detest you, you pompous young men!

You go to Europe and you come back elegant lords and we poor girls are too tame

to please you. We have no grace like the Parisiennes, we have no fire like the

Sevillians, and we have no salt, no salt, no salt! Aie, how you weary me, how you

bore me, you fastidious men!" "Come, come---how do you know about us?"

"I was not admiring myself, sir!" "You were admiring the moon perhaps?" "Oh!"

she gasped, and burst into tears. The candle dropped from her hand and she

covered her face and sobbed piteously. The candle had gone out and they stood

in darkness, and young Badoy was conscience-stricken. "Oh, do not cry, little

one!" Oh, please forgive me! Please do not cry! But what a brute I am! I was drunk,

little one, I was drunk and knew not what I said." He groped and found her hand

and touched it to his lips. She shuddered in her white gown. "Let me go," she

moaned, and tugged feebly. "No. Say you forgive me first. Say you forgive me,

Agueda." But instead she pulled his hand to her mouth and bit it - bit so sharply

in the knuckles that he cried with pain and lashed cut with his other hand--

lashed out and hit the air, for she was gone, she had fled, and he heard the

rustling of her skirts up the stairs as he furiously sucked his bleeding fingers.

Cruel thoughts raced through his head: he would go and tell his mother and

make her turn the savage girl out of the house--or he would go himself to the

girl’s room and drag her out of bed and slap, slap, slap her silly face! But at the

same time he was thinking that they were all going to Antipolo in the morning

and was already planning how he would maneuver himself into the same boat

with her. Oh, he would have his revenge, he would make her pay, that little

harlot! She should suffer for this, he thought greedily, licking his bleeding

knuckles. But---Judas! He remembered her bare shoulders: gold in her

candlelight and delicately furred. He saw the mobile insolence of her neck, and

her taut breasts steady in the fluid gown. Son of a Turk, but she was quite

59

enchanting! How could she think she had no fire or grace? And no salt? An

arroba she had of it!

"... No lack of salt in the chrism At the moment of thy baptism!" He sang aloud

in the dark room and suddenly realized that he had fallen madly in love with her.

He ached intensely to see her again---at once! ---to touch her hands and her

hair; to hear her harsh voice. He ran to the window and flung open the casements

and the beauty of the night struck him back like a blow. It was May, it was

summer, and he was young---young! ---and deliriously in love. Such a happiness

welled up within him that the tears spurted from his eyes. But he did not forgive

her--no! He would still make her pay, he would still have his revenge, he thought

viciously, and kissed his wounded fingers. But what a night it had been! "I will

never forge this night! he thought aloud in an awed voice, standing by the window

in the dark room, the tears in his eyes and the wind in his hair and his bleeding

knuckles pressed to his mouth.

But, alas, the heart forgets; the heart is distracted; and May time passes;

summer lends; the storms break over the rot-tipe orchards and the heart grows

old; while the hours, the days, the months, and the years pile up and pile up, till

the mind becomes too crowded, too confused: dust gathers in it; cobwebs

multiply; the walls darken and fall into ruin and decay; the memory

perished...and there came a time when Don Badoy Montiya walked home

through a May Day midnight without remembering, without even caring to

remember; being merely concerned in feeling his way across the street with his

cane; his eyes having grown quite dim and his legs uncertain--for he was old; he

was over sixty; he was a very stopped and shivered old man with white hair and

mustaches coming home from a secret meeting of conspirators; his mind still

resounding with the speeches and his patriot heart still exultant as he picked

his way up the steps to the front door and inside into the slumbering darkness

of the house; wholly unconscious of the May night, till on his way down the hall,

chancing to glance into the sala, he shuddered, he stopped, his blood ran cold--

60

for he had seen a face in the mirror there---a ghostly candlelight face with the

eyes closed and the lips moving, a face that he suddenly felt he had been there

before though it was a full minutes before the lost memory came flowing, came

tiding back, so overflooding the actual moment and so swiftly washing away the

piled hours and days and months and years that he was left suddenly young

again; he was a gay young buck again, lately came from Europe; he had been

dancing all night; he was very drunk; he s stepped in the doorway; he saw a face

in the dark; he called out...and the lad standing before the mirror (for it was a

lad in a night go jumped with fright and almost dropped his candle, but looking

around and seeing the old man, laughed out with relief and came running.

"Oh Grandpa, how you frightened me. Don Badoy had turned very pale. "So it

was you, you young bandit! And what is all this, hey? What are you doing down

here at this hour?" "Nothing, Grandpa. I was only... I am only ..." "Yes, you are

the great Señor only and how delighted I am to make your acquaintance, Señor

Only! But if I break this cane on your head you maga wish you were someone

else, Sir!" "It was just foolishness, Grandpa. They told me I would see my wife."

"Wife? What wife?" "Mine. The boys at school said I would see her if I looked in a

mirror tonight and said: Mirror, mirror show to me her whose lover I will be.

Don Badoy cackled ruefully. He took the boy by the hair, pulled him along into

the room, sat down on a chair, and drew the boy between his knees. "Now, put

your cane down the floor, son, and let us talk this over. So you want your wife

already, hey? You want to see her in advance, hey? But so you know that these

are wicked games and that wicked boys who play them are in danger of seeing

horrors?"

"Well, the boys did warn me I might see a witch instead."

"Exactly! A witch so horrible you may die of fright. And she will be witch you, she

will torture you, she will eat

61

your heart and drink your blood!"

"Oh, come now Grandpa. This is 1890. There are no witches anymore."

"Oh-ho, my young Voltaire! And what if I tell you that I myself have seen a witch.

"You? Where?

"Right in this room land right in that mirror," said the old man, and his playful

voice had turned savage.

"When, Grandpa?"

"Not so long ago. When I was a bit older than you. Oh, I was a vain fellow and

though I was feeling very sick that night and merely wanted to lie down

somewhere and die I could not pass that doorway of course without stopping to

see in the mirror what I looked like when dying. But when I poked my head in

what should I see in the mirror but...but..."

"The witch?"

"Exactly!"

"And then she bewitch you, Grandpa!"

"She bewitched me and she tortured me. l She ate my heart and drank my blood."

said the old man bitterly.

"Oh, my poor little Grandpa! Why have you never told me! And she very horrible?

"Horrible? God, no--- she was the most beautiful creature I have ever seen! Her

eyes were somewhat like yours but her hair was like black waters and her golden

shoulders were bare. My God, she was enchanting! But I should have known---I

should have known even then---the dark and fatal creature she was!"

A silence. Then: "What a horrid mirror this is, Grandpa," whispered the boy.

62

"What makes you slay that, hey?"

"Well, you saw this witch in it. And Mama once told me that Grandma once told

her that Grandma once saw the devil in this mirror. Was it of the scare that

Grandma died?"

Don Badoy started. For a moment he had forgotten that she was dead, that she

had perished---the poor Agueda; that they were at peace at last, the two of them,

her tired body at rest; her broken body set free at last from the brutal pranks of

the earth---from the trap of a May night; from the snare of summer; from the

terrible silver nets of the moon. She had been a mere heap of white hair and

bones in the end: a whimpering withered consumptive, lashing out with her cruel

tongue; her eye like live coals; her face like ashes... Now, nothing--- nothing save

a name on a stone; save a stone in a graveyard---nothing! was left of the young

girl who had flamed so vividly in a mirror one wild May Day midnight, long, long

ago.

And remembering how she had sobbed so piteously; remembering how she had

bitten his hand and fled and how he had sung aloud in the dark room and

surprised his heart in the instant of falling in love: such a grief tore up his throat

and eyes that he felt ashamed before the boy; pushed the boy away; stood up

and looked out----looked out upon the medieval shadows of the foul street where

a couple of street-lamps flickered and a last carriage was rattling away upon the

cobbles, while the blind black houses muttered hush-hush, their tiled roofs

looming like sinister chessboards against a wild sky murky with clouds, save

where an evil old moon prowled about in a corner or where a murderous wind

whirled, whistling and whining, smelling now of the sea and now of the summer

orchards and wafting unbearable the window; the bowed old man sobbing so

bitterly at the window; the tears streaming down his cheeks and the wind in his

hair and one hand pressed to his mouth---while from up the street came the

clackety-clack of the watchman’s boots on the cobbles, and the clang-clang of

63

his lantern against his knee, and the mighty roll of his voice booming through

the night: "Guardia sereno-o-o! A las doce han dado-o-o!"

The Innocence of Solomon

Sheba, Sheba, open your eyes!

the apes defile the ivory temple,

the peacocks chant dark blasphemies;

but I take your body for mine to trample,

I laugh where once I bent the knees.

Yea, I take your mouth for mine to crumple,

drunk with the wisdom of your flesh.

But wisdom never was content

and flesh when ripened falls at last:

what will I have when the seasons mint

your golden breasts into golden dust?

Let me arise and follow the river

back to its source. I would bathe my bones

among the chaste rivulets that quiver

out of the clean primeval stones.

Yea, bathe me again in the early vision

64

my soul tongued forth before your mouth

made of a kiss a fierce contrition,

salting the waters of my youth!

Sheba, Sheba, close my eyes!

The apes have ravished the inner temple,

the peacocks rend the sacred veil

and on the manna feast their fill—

but chaliced drowsily in your ample

arms, with its brief bliss that dies,

my own deep sepulchre I seal.

65

An Excerpt From

THE LEGEND OF THE DYING WANTON

There lived in Manila in the year 1613 a certain Doña Ana de Vera, one of the

principal ladies of the country at that time and a woman of great piety. This Doña

Ana and her son, who was an official of the government, were from Madrid. At

the court and Villa they had enjoyed the patronage of Don Juan de Silva, in

whose retinue – on de Silva’s appointment as governo-general – they had come

to the Philippines. Señor Vera had tried to dissuade his mother from coming

along – she was over fifty and rather fragile of health – but Doña Ana had

mockingly feared he would degenerate into a savage in three days if she were not

there to keep house for him. So, across two oceans and half the world she had

come, one of the many spirited women who, hard on the heels of te

conquistadores, sailed forth with kettle and skillet, with fan and mantilla,

devoutly resolved that even in the heathen of the wilderness the rites of the alter

of the hearth should be performed with as much elegance as the court itself.

Now there was stationed at Manila at that time a wild young soldier named

Currito Lopez who was as evil as Doña Ana was good. This Currito was a lost

soul, his every action being so public a scandal even decent people knew who he

was and shunned him like a leper. Riding around the city in her carriage, Doña

Ana often saw him in the streets; swaggering insolently if sober, reeling and

howling if drunk – but his swart bearded face of a Lucifer never struck her with

terror. Alone, perhaps, in all the city, she knew another side of this man’s

character.

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SUMMER SOLSTICE

THE MORETAS WERE spending St. John’s Day with the children’s grandfather,

whose feast day it was. Doña Lupeng awoke feeling faint with the heat, a sound

of screaming in her ears. In the dining room the three boys already attired in

their holiday suits, were at breakfast, and came crowding around her, talking all

at once.

“How long you have slept, Mama!”

“We thought you were never getting up!”

“Do we leave at once, huh? Are we going now?”

“Hush, hush I implore you! Now look: your father has a headache, and so have

I. So be quiet this instant—or no one goes to Grandfather.”

Though it was only seven by the clock the house was already a furnace, the

windows dilating with the harsh light and the air already burning with the

immense, intense fever of noon.

She found the children’s nurse working in the kitchen. “And why is it you who

are preparing breakfast? Where is Amada?” But without waiting for an answer

she went to the backdoor and opened it, and the screaming in her ears became

wild screaming in the stables across the yard. “Oh my God!” she groaned and,

grasping her skirts, hurried across the yard.

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In the stables Entoy, the driver, apparently deaf to the screams, was hitching the

pair of piebald ponies to the coach.

“Not the closed coach, Entoy! The open carriage!” shouted Doña Lupeng as she

came up.

“But the dust, señora—“

“I know, but better to be dirty than to be boiled alive. And what ails your wife,

eh? Have you been beating her again?”

“Oh no, señora: I have not touched her.”

“Then why is she screaming? Is she ill?”

“I do not think so. But how do I know? You can go and see for yourself, señora.

She is up there.”

When Doña Lupeng entered the room, the big half-naked woman sprawled

across the bamboo bed stopped screaming. Doña Lupeng was shocked.

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“What is this Amada? Why are you still in bed at this hour? And in such a

posture! Come, get up at once. You should be ashamed!”

But the woman on the bed merely stared. Her sweat-beaded brows contracted,

as if in an effort to understand. Then her face relax her mouth sagged open

humorously and, rolling over on her back and spreading out her big soft arms

and legs, she began noiselessly quaking with laughter—the mute mirth jerking

in her throat; the moist pile of her flesh quivering like brown jelly. Saliva dribbled

from the corners of her mouth.

Doña Lupeng blushed, looking around helplessly, and seeing that Entoy had

followed and was leaning in the doorway, watching stolidly, she blushed again.

The room reeked hotly of intimate odors. She averted her eyes from the laughing

woman on the bed, in whose nakedness she seemed so to participate that she

was ashamed to look directly at the man in the doorway.

“Tell me, Entoy: has she had been to the Tadtarin?”

“Yes, señora. Last night.”

“But I forbade her to go! And I forbade you to let her go!”

“I could do nothing.”

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“Why, you beat her at the least pretext!”

“But now I dare not touch her.”

“Oh, and why not?”

“It is the day of St. John: the spirit is in her.”

“But, man—“

“It is true, señora. The spirit is in her. She is the Tadtarin. She must do as she

pleases. Otherwise, the grain would not grow, the trees would bear no fruit, the

rivers would give no fish, and the animals would die.”

“Naku, I did no know your wife was so powerful, Entoy.”

“At such times she is not my wife: she is the wife of the river, she is the wife of

the crocodile, she is the wife of the moon.”

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“BUT HOW CAN they still believe such things?” demanded Doña Lupeng of her

husband as they drove in the open carriage through the pastoral countryside

that was the arrabal of Paco in the 1850’s.

Don Paeng darted a sidelong glance at his wife, by which he intimated that the

subject was not a proper one for the children, who were sitting opposite, facing

their parents.

Don Paeng, drowsily stroking his moustaches, his eyes closed against the hot

light, merely shrugged.

“And you should have seen that Entoy,” continued his wife. “You know how the

brute treats her: she cannot say a word but he thrashes her. But this morning

he stood as meek as a lamb while she screamed and screamed. He seemed

actually in awe of her, do you know—actually afraid of her!”

“Oh, look, boys—here comes the St. John!” cried Doña Lupeng, and she sprang

up in the swaying carriage, propping one hand on her husband’s shoulder wile

the other she held up her silk parasol.

And “Here come the men with their St. John!” cried voices up and down the

countryside. People in wet clothes dripping with well-water, ditch-water and

river-water came running across the hot woods and fields and meadows,

brandishing cans of water, wetting each other uproariously, and shouting San

Juan! San Juan! as they ran to meet the procession.

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Up the road, stirring a cloud of dust, and gaily bedrenched by the crowds

gathered along the wayside, a concourse of young men clad only in soggy

trousers were carrying aloft an image of the Precursor. Their teeth flashed white

in their laughing faces and their hot bodies glowed crimson as they pranced past,

shrouded in fiery dust, singing and shouting and waving their arms: the St. John

riding swiftly above the sea of dark heads and glittering in the noon sun—a fine,

blonde, heroic St. John: very male, very arrogant: the Lord of Summerindeed;

the Lord of Light and Heat—erect and godly virile above the prone and female

earth—while the worshippers danced and the dust thickened and the animals

reared and roared and the merciless fires came raining down form the skies—

the relentlessly upon field and river and town and winding road, and upon the

joyous throng of young men against whose uproar a couple of seminarians in

muddy cassocks vainly intoned the hymn of the noon god:

That we, thy servants, in chorus

May praise thee, our tongues restore us…

But Doña Lupeng, standing in the stopped carriage, looking very young and

elegant in her white frock, under the twirling parasol, stared down on the passing

male horde with increasing annoyance. The insolent man-smell of their bodies

rose all about her—wave upon wave of it—enveloping her, assaulting her senses,

till she felt faint with it and pressed a handkerchief to her nose. And as she

glanced at her husband and saw with what a smug smile he was watching the

revelers, her annoyance deepened. When he bade her sit down because all eyes

were turned on her, she pretended not to hear; stood up even straighter, as if to

defy those rude creatures flaunting their manhood in the sun.

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And she wondered peevishly what the braggarts were being so cocky about? For

this arrogance, this pride, this bluff male health of theirs was (she told herself)

founded on the impregnable virtue of generations of good women. The boobies

were so sure of themselves because they had always been sure of their wives.

“All the sisters being virtuous, all the brothers are brave,” thought Doña Lupeng,

with a bitterness that rather surprised her. Women had built it up: this poise of

the male. Ah, and women could destroy it, too! She recalled, vindictively, this

morning’s scene at the stables: Amada naked and screaming in bed whiled from

the doorway her lord and master looked on in meek silence. And was it not the

mystery of a woman in her flowers that had restored the tongue of that old

Hebrew prophet?

“Look, Lupeng, they have all passed now,” Don Paeng was saying, “Do you mean

to stand all the way?”

She looked around in surprise and hastily sat down. The children tittered, and

the carriage started.

“Has the heat gone to your head, woman?” asked Don Paeng, smiling. The

children burst frankly into laughter.

Their mother colored and hung her head. She was beginning to feel ashamed of

the thoughts that had filled her mind. They seemed improper—almost obscene—

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and the discovery of such depths of wickedness in herself appalled her. She

moved closer to her husband to share the parasol with him.

“And did you see our young cousin Guido?” he asked.

“Oh, was he in that crowd?”

“A European education does not seem to have spoiled his taste for country

pleasures.”

“I did not see him.”

“He waved and waved.”

“The poor boy. He will feel hurt. But truly, Paeng. I did not see him.”

“Well, that is always a woman’s privilege.”

BUT WHEN THAT afternoon, at the grandfather’s, the young Guido presented

himself, properly attired and brushed and scented, Doña Lupeng was so

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charming and gracious with him that he was enchanted and gazed after her all

afternoon with enamored eyes.

This was the time when our young men were all going to Europe and bringing

back with them, not the Age of Victoria, but the Age of Byron. The young Guido

knew nothing of Darwin and evolution; he knew everything about Napoleon and

the Revolution. When Doña Lupeng expressed surprise at his presence that

morning in the St. John’s crowd, he laughed in her face.

“But I adore these old fiestas of ours! They are so romantic! Last night, do you

know, we walked all the way through the woods, I and some boys, to see the

procession of the Tadtarin.”

“And was that romantic too?” asked Doña Lupeng.

“It was weird. It made my flesh crawl. All those women in such a mystic frenzy!

And she who was the Tadtarin last night—she was a figure right out of a

flamenco!”

“I fear to disenchant you, Guido—but that woman happens to be our cook.”

“She is beautiful.”

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“Our Amada beautiful? But she is old and fat!”

“She is beautiful—as that old tree you are leaning on is beautiful,” calmly

insisted the young man, mocking her with his eyes.

They were out in the buzzing orchard, among the ripe mangoes; Doña Lupeng

seated on the grass, her legs tucked beneath her, and the young man sprawled

flat on his belly, gazing up at her, his face moist with sweat. The children were

chasing dragonflies. The sun stood still in the west. The long day refused to end.

From the house came the sudden roaring laughter of the men playing cards.

“Beautiful! Romantic! Adorable! Are those the only words you learned in Europe?”

cried Doña Lupeng, feeling very annoyed with this young man whose eyes adored

her one moment and mocked her the next.

“Ah, I also learned to open my eyes over there—to see the holiness and the

mystery of what is vulgar.”

“And what is so holy and mysterious about—about the Tadtarin, for instance?”

“I do not know. I can only feel it. And it frightens me. Those rituals come to us

from the earliest dawn of the world. And the dominant figure is not the male but

the female.”

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“But they are in honor of St. John.”

“What has your St. John to do with them? Those women worship a more ancient

lord. Why, do you know that no man may join those rites unless he first puts on

some article of women’s apparel and—“

“And what did you put on, Guido?”

“How sharp you are! Oh, I made such love to a toothless old hag there that she

pulled off her stocking for me. And I pulled it on, over my arm, like a glove. How

your husband would have despised me!”

“But what on earth does it mean?”

“I think it is to remind us men that once upon a time you women were supreme

and we men were the slaves.”

“But surely there have always been kings?”

“Oh, no. The queen came before the king, and the priestess before the priest, and

the moon before the sun.”

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“The moon?”

“—who is the Lord of the women.”

“Why?”

“Because the tides of women, like the tides of the sea, are tides of the moon.

Because the first blood -But what is the matter, Lupe? Oh, have I offended you?”

“Is this how they talk to decent women in Europe?”

“They do not talk to women, they pray to them—as men did in the dawn of the

world.”

“Oh, you are mad! mad!”

“Why are you so afraid, Lupe?”

“I afraid? And of whom? My dear boy, you still have your mother’s milk in your

mouth. I only wish you to remember that I am a married woman.”

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“I remember that you are a woman, yes. A beautiful woman. And why not? Did

you turn into some dreadful monster when you married? Did you stop being a

woman? Did you stop being beautiful? Then why should my eyes not tell you

what you are—just because you are married?”

“Ah, this is too much now!” cried Doña Lupeng, and she rose to her feet.

“Do not go, I implore you! Have pity on me!”

“No more of your comedy, Guido! And besides—where have those children gone

to! I must go after them.”

As she lifted her skirts to walk away, the young man, propping up his elbows,

dragged himself forward on the ground and solemnly kissed the tips of her shoes.

She stared down in sudden horror, transfixed—and he felt her violent shudder.

She backed away slowly, still staring; then turned and fled toward the house.

ON THE WAY home that evening Don Paeng noticed that his wife was in a mood.

They were alone in the carriage: the children were staying overnight at their

grandfather’s. The heat had not subsided. It was heat without gradations: that

knew no twilights and no dawns; that was still there, after the sun had set; that

would be there already, before the sun had risen.

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“Has young Guido been annoying you?” asked Don Paeng.

“Yes! All afternoon.”

“These young men today—what a disgrace they are! I felt embarrassed as a man

to see him following you about with those eyes of a whipped dog.”

She glanced at him coldly. “And was that all you felt, Paeng? embarrassed—as a

man?”

“A good husband has constant confidence in the good sense of his wife,” he

pronounced grandly, and smiled at her.

But she drew away; huddled herself in the other corner. “He kissed my feet,” she

told him disdainfully, her eyes on his face.

He frowned and made a gesture of distaste. “Do you see? They have the instincts,

the style of the canalla! To kiss a woman’s feet, to follow her like a dog, to adore

her like a slave –”

“Is it so shameful for a man to adore women?”

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“A gentleman loves and respects Woman. The cads and lunatics—they ‘adore’

the women.”

“But maybe we do not want to be loved and respected—but to be adored.”

But when they reached home she did not lie down but wandered listlessly

through the empty house. When Don Paeng, having bathed and changed, came

down from the bedroom, he found her in the dark parlour seated at the harp and

plucking out a tune, still in her white frock and shoes.

“How can you bear those hot clothes, Lupeng? And why the darkness? Order

someone to bring light in here.”

“There is no one, they have all gone to see the Tadtarin.”

“A pack of loafers we are feeding!”

She had risen and gone to the window. He approached and stood behind her,

grasped her elbows and, stooping, kissed the nape of her neck. But she stood

still, not responding, and he released her sulkily. She turned around to face him.

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“Listen, Paeng. I want to see it, too. The Tadtarin, I mean. I have not seen it since

I was a little girl. And tonight is the last night.”

“You must be crazy! Only low people go there. And I thought you had a headache?”

He was still sulking.

“But I want to go! My head aches worse in the house. For a favor, Paeng.”

“I told you: No! go and take those clothes off. But, woman, whatever has got into

you!” he strode off to the table, opened the box of cigars, took one, banged the

lid shut, bit off an end of the cigar, and glared about for a light.

She was still standing by the window and her chin was up.

“Very well, if you do want to come, do not come—but I am going.”

“I warn you, Lupe; do not provoke me!”

“I will go with Amada. Entoy can take us. You cannot forbid me, Paeng. There is

nothing wrong with it. I am not a child.”

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But standing very straight in her white frock, her eyes shining in the dark and

her chin thrust up, she looked so young, so fragile, that his heart was touched.

He sighed, smiled ruefully, and shrugged his shoulders.

“Yes, the heat ahs touched you in the head, Lupeng. And since you are so set on

it—very well, let us go. Come, have the coach ordered!”

THE CULT OF the Tadtarin is celebrated on three days: the feast of St. John and

the two preceding days. On the first night, a young girl heads the procession; on

the second, a mature woman; and on the third, a very old woman who dies and

comes to life again. In these processions, as in those of Pakil and Obando,

everyone dances.

Around the tiny plaza in front of the barrio chapel, quite a stream of carriages

was flowing leisurely. The Moretas were constantly being hailed from the other

vehicles. The plaza itself and the sidewalks were filled with chattering, strolling,

profusely sweating people. More people were crowded on the balconies and

windows of the houses. The moon had not yet risen; the black night smoldered;

in the windless sky the lightning’s abruptly branching fire seemed the nerves of

the tortured air made visible.

“Here they come now!” cried the people on the balconies.

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And “Here come the women with their St. John!” cried the people on the

sidewalks, surging forth on the street. The carriages halted and their occupants

descended. The plaza rang with the shouts of people and the neighing of horses—

and with another keener sound: a sound as of sea-waves steadily rolling nearer.

The crowd parted, and up the street came the prancing, screaming, writhing

women, their eyes wild, black shawls flying around their shoulders, and their

long hair streaming and covered with leaves and flowers. But the Tadtarin, a

small old woman with white hair, walked with calm dignity in the midst of the

female tumult, a wand in one hand, a bunch of seedling in the other. Behind her,

a group of girls bore aloft a little black image of the Baptist—a crude, primitive,

grotesque image, its big-eyed head too big for its puny naked torso, bobbing and

swaying above the hysterical female horde and looking at once so comical and

so pathetic that Don Paeng, watching with his wife on the sidewalk, was outraged.

The image seemed to be crying for help, to be struggling to escape—a St. John

indeed in the hands of the Herodias; a doomed captive these witches were

subjecting first to their derision; a gross and brutal caricature of his sex.

Don Paeng flushed hotly: he felt that all those women had personally insulted

him. He turned to his wife, to take her away—but she was watching greedily,

taut and breathless, her head thrust forward and her eyes bulging, the teeth

bared in the slack mouth, and the sweat gleaning on her face. Don Paeng was

horrified. He grasped her arm—but just then a flash of lightning blazed and the

screaming women fell silent: the Tadtarin was about to die.

The old woman closed her eyes and bowed her head and sank slowly to her knees.

A pallet was brought and set on the ground and she was laid in it and her face

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covered with a shroud. Her hands still clutched the wand and the seedlings. The

women drew away, leaving her in a cleared space. They covered their heads with

their black shawls and began wailing softly, unhumanly—a hushed, animal

keening.

Overhead the sky was brightening, silver light defined the rooftops. When the

moon rose and flooded with hot brilliance the moveless crowded square, the

black-shawled women stopped wailing and a girl approached and unshrouded

the Tadtarin, who opened her eyes and sat up, her face lifted to the moonlight.

She rose to her feet and extended the wand and the seedlings and the women

joined in a mighty shout. They pulled off and waved their shawls and whirled

and began dancing again—laughing and dancing with such joyous exciting

abandon that the people in the square and on the sidewalk, and even those on

the balconies, were soon laughing and dancing, too. Girls broke away from their

parents and wives from their husbands to join in the orgy.

“Come, let us go now,” said Don Paeng to his wife. She was shaking with

fascination; tears trembled on her lashes; but she nodded meekly and allowed

herself to be led away. But suddenly she pulled free from his grasp, darted off,

and ran into the crowd of dancing women.

She flung her hands to her hair and whirled and her hair came undone. Then,

planting her arms akimbo, she began to trip a nimble measure, an indistinctive

folk-movement. She tossed her head back and her arched throat bloomed whitely.

Her eyes brimmed with moonlight, and her mouth with laughter.

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Don Paeng ran after her, shouting her name, but she laughed and shook her

head and darted deeper into the dense maze of procession, which was moving

again, towards the chapel. He followed her, shouting; she eluded him, laughing—

and through the thick of the female horde they lost and found and lost each

other again—she, dancing and he pursuing—till, carried along by the tide, they

were both swallowed up into the hot, packed, turbulent darkness of the chapel.

Inside poured the entire procession, and Don Paeng, finding himself trapped

tight among milling female bodies, struggled with sudden panic to fight his way

out. Angry voices rose all about him in the stifling darkness.

“Hoy you are crushing my feet!”

“And let go of my shawl, my shawl!”

“Stop pushing, shameless one, or I kick you!”

“Let me pass, let me pass, you harlots!” cried Don Paeng.

“Abah, it is a man!”

“How dare he come in here?”

“Break his head!”

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“Throw the animal out!”

”Throw him out! Throw him out!” shrieked the voices, and Don Paeng found

himself surrounded by a swarm of gleaming eyes.

Terror possessed him and he struck out savagely with both fists, with all his

strength—but they closed in as savagely: solid walls of flesh that crushed upon

him and pinned his arms helpless, while unseen hands struck and struck his

face, and ravaged his hair and clothes, and clawed at his flesh, as—kicked and

buffeted, his eyes blind and his torn mouth salty with blood—he was pushed

down, down to his knees, and half-shoved, half-dragged to the doorway and

rolled out to the street. He picked himself up at once and walked away with a

dignity that forbade the crowd gathered outside to laugh or to pity. Entoy came

running to meet him.

“But what has happened to you, Don Paeng?”

“Nothing. Where is the coach?”

“Just over there, sir. But you are wounded in the face!”

“No, these are only scratches. Go and get the señora. We are going home.”

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When she entered the coach and saw his bruised face and torn clothing, she

smiled coolly.

“What a sight you are, man! What have you done with yourself?”

And when he did not answer: “Why, have they pulled out his tongue too?” she

wondered aloud.

AND WHEN THEY are home and stood facing each other in the bedroom, she

was still as light-hearted.

“What are you going to do, Rafael?”

“I am going to give you a whipping.”

“But why?”

“Because you have behaved tonight like a lewd woman.”

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“How I behaved tonight is what I am. If you call that lewd, then I was always a

lewd woman and a whipping will not change me—though you whipped me till I

died.”

“I want this madness to die in you.”

“No, you want me to pay for your bruises.”

He flushed darkly. “How can you say that, Lupe?”

“Because it is true. You have been whipped by the women and now you think to

avenge yourself by whipping me.”

His shoulders sagged and his face dulled. “If you can think that of me –”

“You could think me a lewd woman!”

“Oh, how do I know what to think of you? I was sure I knew you as I knew myself.

But now you are as distant and strange to me as a female Turk in Africa.”

“Yet you would dare whip me –”

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“Because I love you, because I respect you.”

“And because if you ceased to respect me you would cease to respect yourself?”

“Ah, I did not say that!”

“Then why not say it? It is true. And you want to say it, you want to say it!”

But he struggled against her power. “Why should I want to?” he demanded

peevishly.

“Because, either you must say it—or you must whip me,” she taunted.

Her eyes were upon him and the shameful fear that had unmanned him in the

dark chapel possessed him again. His legs had turned to water; it was a

monstrous agony to remain standing.

But she was waiting for him to speak, forcing him to speak.

“No, I cannot whip you!” he confessed miserably.

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“Then say it! Say it!” she cried, pounding her clenched fists together. “Why suffer

and suffer? And in the end you would only submit.”

But he still struggled stubbornly. “Is it not enough that you have me helpless?

Is it not enough that I feel what you want me feel?”

But she shook her head furiously. “Until you have said to me, there can be no

peace between us.”

He was exhausted at last; he sank heavily to his knees, breathing hard and

streaming with sweat, his fine body curiously diminished now in its ravaged

apparel.

“I adore you, Lupe,” he said tonelessly.

She strained forward avidly, “What? What did you say?” she screamed.

And he, in his dead voice: “That I adore you. That I adore you. That I worship

you. That the air you breathe and the ground you tread is so holy to me. That I

am your dog, your slave...”

But it was still not enough. Her fists were still clenched, and she cried: “Then

come, crawl on the floor, and kiss my feet!”

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Without moment’s hesitation, he sprawled down flat and, working his arms and

legs, gaspingly clawed his way across the floor, like a great agonized lizard, the

woman steadily backing away as he approached, her eyes watching him avidly,

her nostrils dilating, till behind her loomed the open window, the huge glittering

moon, the rapid flashes of lightning. she stopped, panting, and leaned against

the sill. He lay exhausted at her feet, his face flat on the floor.

She raised her skirts and contemptuously thrust out a naked foot. He lifted his

dripping face and touched his bruised lips to her toes; lifted his hands and

grasped the white foot and kiss it savagely - kissed the step, the sole, the frail

ankle - while she bit her lips and clutched in pain at the whole windowsill her

body and her loose hair streaming out the window - streaming fluid and black

in the white night where