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(Yesterday, we honored once again the eternal memory of
Jose Rizal with familiar rhetoric when it would have
been better if more of us would read him. To this day,
there are those who firmly believe that he retracted his
writings. There are also those who believe that he was
against the Philippine revolution—without bothering to
read what he had to say about it. Let us not only read
him but read him attentively. Whatever our conclusions
about his retraction and ideas about revolution, at
least we shall have a basis for them.)
THE
death of Elias achieves revolutionary significance the
moment society is recognized as a creator of victims in
order to execute them. Elias had been condemned even
before he was born, and it only remained for society to
carry out the death sentence. The civil guards fire at
Elias under the mistaken impression that he is
Crisostomo Ibarra. The mistake makes an important
difference: even the most unjust society makes a
pretense of legality. But in this instance, Ibarra is
the condemned man. But in executing the wrong man,
society has shown that aside from being arbitrary, it is
also inefficient: it loses its last refuge, that of
order. This marks the moment which makes revolution a
moral and logical necessity.
Society
makes victims and then silences them—as criminals. The
logic is clear: the victim, at a certain point in his
calvary, consents to crime and thereby cancels his
legitimate grievance. No longer purely the victim, he
can no longer pose his innocence against an unjust
society. This demonstrates that Ibarra, who “became”
Simoun, Kabesang Tales, who became “Matanglawin,” and
Balat, Elias’s uncle and husband of Sisa, deserved to
die. Something in them, something which yielded,
softened the legitimacy of their protest.
Elias
never yielded. Until his murder, his protest retains a
fidelity to origins. As a personal recourse, revenge
gives the apologists of an unjust society the right to
say: “ You pretend to be on the side of justice but you
resort to violence as we do. You are a hypocrite, while
we, we have our laws and institutions which authorize us
to try and convict.” In rejecting revenge, Elias proves
his wisdom and underlines the moral accent of his
protest: the victim, at the precise moment of his
rebellion, will not compromise his innocence.
This is
not an easy bargain. Elias’s bitter family history
provides enough occasion for cynicism and violence—more
than Ibarra’s or anybody else’s misfortunes. Since his
grandfather had been falsely accused of arson, Elias’s
family had always been injured and insulted. His
grandmother was a prostitute, yielding, if unwillingly,
to the corruption of the times, his grandfather, by
hanging himself, succumbed to injustice. (Under the
morality of the times, suicide was also a sin.) Elias’s
father impregnated a woman out of wedlock. All society
had to do was wait until this family of “criminals and
sinners” prove themselves deserving of punishment.
But we
know that Elias rejected revenge. He chose to keep his
grievance rather than kill Crisostomo Ibarra, the
descendant of Don Pedro Eibarramendia, the persecutor of
Elias’s grandmother and thus the author of Ibarra’s
cursed destiny. Elias would not visit the sins of the
father on the son. As he said to Old Pablo, the outlaw:
“I am ready to give up my search for the rest of the
family in whose hands my own suffered. I propose to
leave for the North and live among the non-Christians of
the mountains. I am all alone. Come with me. I offer you
a home and I shall be as a son to you as you shall be a
father to me.” The fatherless victim wants a father in a
land of innocence.
Having
rejected lex taliones, Elias now faces the temptation of
exile, a different form of suicide. This is paralleled
by Maria Clara’s flight to the cloister, where women are
virtuous because they are dead. But this is also
impossible, for Fray Salvi pursues her in the sacred,
though not sacred, secrecy of the convent. This is also
the flight of Sisa to madness, and in the end, Ibarra
himself combines madness with murder. But what flight
can ever alleviate the totality of human suffering?
Elias
rejects revenge, rejects exile, and, having spared
Ibarra, tries to enlist the support of this illustrado
in struggling for a just society. The result is the
following interview:
“My
friend, you and I cannot effect and cannot accomplish
changes,” said Ibarra.
“Yes,
alone, we cannot. But suppose we work with the people?
Suppose we listen to their grievances and become an
example to the rest in spreading the idea of true love
for the fatherland?”
“The
people ask for the impossible. There is need for
waiting.”
“Waiting
means suffering.”
“But if
I begin to ask for these things [reforms], those in
power will only laugh at me.”
“But if
you have the support of the people?”
“That I
shall not have! I shall not take by force what the
government deems unfit to grant. Never! If I see the
people armed against the government, I shall go over to
the side of the government…”
Elias
argues that there has been no liberty without fighting
and Ibarra replies, “The truth is that I have no desire
for such liberty.” Ibarra believes that the people
should first be enlightened and that’s why he’s building
a schoolhouse. And yet he knows of a schoolmaster who
failed to educate his pupils in the right spirit because
the authorities and the parents themselves prescribed
the rod and the catechism as the proper curriculum. To
Elias’s insight that institutions are too harsh and
oppressive, Ibarra replies that these are necessary to
cow the people and keep them out of mischief,
unwittingly admitting that the government must protect
itself against the people. Elias believes that there can
be no light without liberty and Ibarra believes there
can be no liberty without light.
Elias
now faces the fulfillment of his promise to join Old
Pablo, outlaw chief and potential revolutionary, in
spite of his reservation that in a revolution, the first
to suffer are the weak and the innocent—unless, perhaps,
all the people are in revolt. But he doesn’t live long
enough to make the fatal plunge because in an
insurrection contrived by Fray Salvi (Maria Clara’s
ravisher) in order to frame Ibarra, Elias is killed
instead.
We
arrive at the threshold of the matter. Before us stands
brightly the sacrificial nature of Elias’s death.
Society fails to make the victim a criminal and in
killing him commits the definitive crime, the murder of
the innocent, providing in turn the ethical foundation
of revolution.
Elias
provides the “objective condition for revolution,”
Crisostomo Ibarra is able to escape into exile and to
return after seven years to make revolution as
“Simoun”—but he is doomed to fail. He fails because the
meaning of Elias’s sacrifice is lost on him. He
predicates revolution on the rescue of Maria Clara from
the convent, deliberately devising the corruption and
destruction of the unwary, the nonbelligerent, the dupe,
to realize his project, since for him all are complicit
with an unjust society. As Simoun, he sees revolution as
an end in itself not as a means to achieve a greater
end.
In
making Simoun’s revolution fail, Rizal “anticipated”
Albert Camus’s words in The Invincible Summer:
On the
one hand, action is self-discipline because of the
grandeur of the objects it pursues. On the other hand,
these same objects serve as pretexts for permitting any
act that will impose them with certainty. No doubt, the
action contained within the bounds imposed by respect
for freedom and a sense of justice runs the risk of
failing and of being destroyed. But if revolutionary
action renounces this risk, the guarantees with which it
sought to surround itself can easily be forced in lies,
dissimulation, cynicism, in short, its own negation.
“Lies,
dissimulation, cynicism”—the negation of the ethics of
revolution.
More
than a century separates the two moralists of
revolution: Rizal and Camus.
After he
blesses the soul of Simoun, the good Father Florentino,
the native antithesis of the friars Damaso, Salvi, and
the rest, apostrophizes:
Where
are the youth who will consecrate their golden hours,
their illusions and enthusiasm for the welfare of their
country? Where are they who would generously shed their
blood to wash away so much shame, so much crime, so much
abomination? Pure and spotless the victim has to be for
the holocaust to be acceptable!…Where are you, youth,
who will incarnate in yourselves the vigor of life that
has fled from our veins, the purity of ideas that have
been soiled in your minds and the fire of enthusiasm
that has been extinguished in your hearts… We wait for
you, O youth! Come, for we await you!
He then
carries the iron chest which contains Simoun’s fabulous
fortune to the cliff (where the idealistic Isagani, who
foiled Simoun’s plot to blow up the church where a
wedding was to take place, used to sit to “fathom the
depths of the sea”) and consigns it to the Pacific with
these words:
May
Nature guard you in her deep abysses among the corals
and pearls of her eternal seas! When for a holy and
sublime end men should need you, God will draw you from
the breast of the waves… Meanwhile there you will do no
evil, you will not distort right, you will not foment
avarice…
In our
present understanding, revolutions destroy an unjust
society, but for Elias, as Rizal portrayed him,
revolution is based on the very principle that society
is based on. In the context of Elias’s time, this
society was supposedly based on Christian principles,
but it acted against them. Elias concluded: We are all
living under a sacrilegious society.
Elias
does not mean a religious revolution, however. To the
people of San Diego, the question is where is God? “Oh,
if God only existed!” is their lament, for certainly He
is not in the church where the frailes, notably Damaso,
preside.
There is
only one acceptable society, founded on the dialogue
between man and the state, between authority and
freedom—under God. And if such a society does not exist,
it must be made to exist. Ergo: Revolution. One destroys
but never reforms a sacrilegious society.
Elias is
a rare bird, indeed. Perhaps, he’s only real in Rizal’s
novel, unlike Crisostomo Ibarra, who studied abroad,
imbibed liberal ideas, returned to the country to
institute reforms, and when thwarted, went into exile
and returned as a provocateur (in alliance with
oppressors) with a sentimental but ruthless agenda for
revolution.
In
criticizing the corrupt and abusive people of our times,
the late Sen. Claro M. Recto sarcastically said they
were not even like Simoun. But who knows now?
Wouldn’t
we rather pine for Elias, who, as Old Pablo believes,
“shall never perish”—even if only in the imagination? As
Elias’s body went up in flames, Sister Rufa thought that
the rising smoke came from a kaingin, the clearing. She
couldn’t have known its significance, being a minor
character in the novel, but Rizal could have meant it as
symbolic of the phoenix.
Indeed,
Elias must not perish.
One is
tempted to say that Rizal could be examining himself
through Crisostomo Ibarra by starting, like any
illustrado, as a reformist. Spain, after all, had her
liberal intellectuals, and the Indios Bravos, though in
exile, were beyond the reach of the oppressive clerico-fascist
society. They wrote satirical pieces, the best of which
was Rizal’s Noli/Fili. For his writings, he was martyred
as a subversive, filibustero.
He is,
finally, Elias. |
