On this day when the nation marks the death anniversary of our national hero Dr. Jose Rizal, let us remember him with this excerpt from his novel “Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not),” written in 1887.
The novel and its companion volume “El Filibusterismo” are said to have fired up Filipino public sentiment against Spanish colonial rule, particularly the role played by Spanish friars who, in many towns, became the embodiments of colonial power and arrogance. Without the novels, it is believed, it would not have been possible for the popular agitation for reforms to grow into a full-blown armed revolution led by Andres Bonifacio and the Katipunan.
The excerpt is taken from the famous “idyll in the azotea,” an open-air porch in ancestral homes, where the hero of the “Noli,” Crisostomo Ibarra, meets in a tryst with Maria Clara, the love of his youth whom he had left in the Philippines for studies in Europe. Returning to put up a school for the town’s young people, Ibarra finds that his father had died in his absence, and worse, the father’s grave had been desecrated and emptied on orders of the parish priest.
Based on the English translation by Charles Derbyshire from the original Spanish, the scene not only lays the basis for Ibarra’s motivation for returning to his homeland and educating the next generation, but also explains the hero’s transformation into the darkly subversive Simoun in “Fili.” It also foreshadows later events in Rizal’s life, tracing the arc of anti-Spanish feeling from reform and Indio participation in political matters, to active protest, rebellion and revolution against the colonial powers: Spain and the interloper, the United States.
Exile, it must be explained, was an experience shared by Rizal and his “fictional” hero, Ibarra. But while Ibarra came home from Europe fired by reformist zeal, Rizal’s years in exile served to stoke his nationalism, and led him to imagining (if not yet into active organizing) a Philippines freed from the shackles of Spain.
This is how the “idyll in the azotea” begins:
* * *
Ibarra smiled with happiness as he opened his pocketbook and took from it a piece of paper in which were wrapped some dry, blackened leaves which gave off a sweet odor. “Your sage leaves,” he said, in answer to her inquiring look. “This is all that you have ever given me.”
She in turn snatched from her bosom a little pouch of white satin. “You must not touch this,” she said, tapping the palm of his hand lightly. “It’s a letter of farewell.”
“The one I wrote to you before leaving?”
“Have you ever written me any other, sir?”
“And what did I say to you then?”
“Many fibs, excuses of a delinquent debtor,” she answered smilingly, thus giving him to understand how sweet to her those fibs were. “Be quiet now and I’ll read it to you, I’ll leave out your fine phrases in order not to make a martyr of you.”
Raising the paper to the height of her eyes so that the youth might not see her face, she began: “My—I’ll not read what follows that because it’s not true.”
Her eyes ran along some lines.
* * *
“My father wishes me to go away, in spite of all my pleadings. ‘You are a man now,’ he told me, ‘and you must think about your future and about your duties. You must learn the science of life, a thing which your fatherland cannot teach you, so that you may someday be useful to it. If you remain here in my shadow, in this environment of business affairs, you will not learn to look far ahead. The day in which you lose me you will find yourself like the plant of which our poet Baltazar tells: grown in the water, its leaves wither at the least scarcity of moisture, and a moment’s heat dries it up. Don’t you understand? You are almost a young man, and yet you weep!í These reproaches hurt me and I confessed that I loved you. My father reflected for a time in silence and then, placing his hand on my shoulder, said in a trembling voice, ‘Do you think that you alone know how to love, that your father does not love you, and that he will not feel the separation from you? It is only a short time since you lost your mother, and I must journey on alone toward old age, toward the very time of life when I would seek help and comfort from your youth, yet I accept my loneliness, hardly knowing whether I shall ever see you again. But you must think of other and greater things, the future lies open before you, while for me it is already passing behind; your love is just awakening, while mine is dying; fire burns in your blood, while the chill is creeping into mine. Yet you weep and cannot sacrifice the present for the future, useful as it may be alike to yourself and to your country.’ My father’s eyes were filled with tears and I fell upon my knees at his foot, I embraced him, I begged his forgiveness, and I assured him that I was ready to set out.”
* * *
Ibarra’s growing agitation caused her to suspend the reading, for he had grown pale and was pacing back and forth.
“What’s the matter? What is troubling you?” she asked him.
“You have almost made me forget that I have my duties, that I must leave at once for the town. Tomorrow is the day for commemorating the dead.”
Maria Clara silently fixed her dreamy eyes upon him for a few moments and then, picking some flowers, she said with emotion, “Go, I won’t detain you any longer! In a few days we shall see each other again. Lay these flowers on the tomb of your parents.”