Chapter XV · THE KATIPUNAN

To his father and mother he wrote urging them to come to Dapitan and make their home on the land that he had bought. In this he must have lightly estimated the rancor or the vigilance of his enemies, or have been imperfectly informed about what was going on in Manila—or both. It was a time when all suspected persons were to be watched with unusual diligence, and of these the Rizal family came first. Meantime, the exile’s fate, of which he was wont to take a somber view, shifted somewhat its familiar aspect of misfortune and sent him one gleam of happiness. In the midst of his lonely state and Promethean miseries adroitly prepared for him, he met a woman that attracted him, and ended by marrying her.

After this, a marriage seemed impossible, and Josephine returned to Hong-Kong with Taufer.

But the affair had gone so far that already Rizal had made overtures to the parish priest to perform the ceremony. The priest shook his head: there were Rizal’s well known heresies in the way; he could not marry a heretic. Rizal said that if by heresies his political opinions were meant, nothing could induce him to profess any change in them; but if the priest meant religious views, he was ready to declare that he was and had been at all times a faithful son of the Catholic religion and purposed so to remain. The priest thought a declaration to this effect might win past the bishop, who now appeared as the chief obstacle; at least he would send to Cebu to find out. The letter of inquiry he had written and was about to despatch when news came that the engagement had been broken. The letter was never sent.

This advice the lovers deemed good when Josephine reached Dapitan and reported it; there was no more talk of a dispensation from the bishop of Cebu. A marriage ceremony was performed by the simple device of the taking of hands before witnesses and the registering of their mutual vows.

Rizal’s stout-hearted mother succeeded about this time in winning permission to visit her son; later came two of his sisters. Their presence revived in him the hope he had once cherished of uniting his family in a spot where, after so much of strife and grief, they might begin life afresh and be free from the friars that were the landlords and rulers of Biñan and Calamba. He could see no reason why Mindanao should not be well adapted to their needs. Government could not urge against such a plan the objection it used against the North Borneo project; Mindanao was Philippine territory. He wrote to Despujol asking for the necessary permits and received a chilly answer reminding him that he was an exile and an outcast and in no position to seek favors of his Government. Steady persistence in the face of whatever rebuff was one of Rizal’s strongest traits; the man seemed as incapable of discouragement as George Washington was; and the philosophical reader of history may well consider the appearance of this quality in three men that founded three nations, William the Silent, Washington, and Rizal, and inquire whether in value to the world this possession did not overtop all others. With one cherished hope crushed, he turned to another. He set himself to improve agriculture in the region where he had been marooned; he showed the farmers how they could raise better crops and get better prices for them. From the United States, where in his travels he had observed with interest the latest agricultural inventions, he imported modern farm machinery, using it upon his own place and teaching its use to others. It has been the lot of few men to lead lives of such varied use to their fellows. He seemed to go through the world with eyes observing whatever was done around him and mind considering how it could be done better.

He was of somewhat violent passions and such deficiencies in self-control as were to have been expected from his experiences and inadequate training. Nevertheless, he had great sincerity, a mind of extraordinary fertility, and a readiness for swift decision and action. He showed himself to be indomitable when wholly concentered upon the one cause; and his contribution to it is not now to be disparaged because he happened to come no nearer the academic walk than Lincoln came.

When Rizal, lured from Hong-Kong by false promises of safety, landed in Manila, Bonifacio was twenty-nine years old. He had long revolved in his mind the fact so patent to all observing Filipinos that the first step to their freedom must be unity. About the time Rizal was founding his Liga Filipina, Bonifacio was formulating another and much more portentous union. The two were launched about the same time; one in the open, the other in the dark and with the utmost secrecy. Bonifacio called his society the Kataastaasang Kagalanggalangang Katipunan ng̃ mg̃a Anak ng̃ Bayan, which being interpreted means Supreme Most Respected Association of the Sons of the People. For brevity’s sake the long unwieldy name soon came to be shortened into K.K.K. or the Katipunan, and so remains in history. Bonifacio shaped it like a masonic lodge, with a ritual, passwords, grips, and the swearing of fealty and silence. Its avowed object was the overthrowing by force of the Spanish power and the establishing of the Philippine nation, free and independent.

Month after month the Katipunan spread among the disgusted and restless Filipinos—secretly, always; and we are to surmise that the care with which the movement was to be concealed until the instant of the blow recommended it to people smarting under a Government so obese and still so viciously protected. How long this Government was ignorant of what was going on nobody knows. If the vast network of spies and agents provocateurs, with which Spanish, like Russian, rule was maintained, brought in no hint of the mine that was being driven beneath the feet of the governing class, the spies must have made their first recorded failure, and that concerning the one thing most important to their employers. Filipinos, one may say, had not so known these ever busy birds of ill omen.

The deportation of Rizal gave to the Katipunan a great impetus; the masses of people bitterly resented the cowardice and perfidy that had contrived at last to drag down the popular champion. At first they knew no way to voice their protest. The Katipunan relieved them of their uncertainty; it was the weapon thrust into their hands. A year went by under this slowly darkening sky; then two years. Rizal was at Dapitan; it seemed likely he would remain there until his last day, for nothing would soften the hatred with which the friars and patricians regarded him, and their word was the country’s law. Yet if he could be brought back in the character of a revolutionary leader the whole country would rise behind him. Ingenious minds brooded upon the ease with which he could be rescued. Only a small force of troops guarded Dapitan; it could be overpowered by a handful of resolute men. Rizal’s habit was to take long canoe journeys alone around the coast, pursuing his scientific inquiries; of his own will he would never violate his parole, but suppose he should be seized and carried off by force? He could then be picked up by a British mail-steamer, be landed at Singapore, and be free. Intimations of these plans were conveyed to him: he vetoed all of them. It was his word of honor that he had given never to attempt to escape; not even with the least connivance at a rescue would he taint his word; not even by allowing other men to entertain a thought that his faith could be tainted; and not even in dealing with a Government that had dealt perfidiously with him.

The disputed versions of his reply are not worth the attention they have had, because, as has been pointed out here and more than once, Rizal’s convictions on these matters are clear. One obvious reflection is enough to illustrate them. If he had lived through such strenuous days as followed 1896 he would have been found in the front ranks of those that fought for freedom and yet would never have ceased to mourn that freedom could not be won in another way. As to this, “El Filibusterismo,” if there were nothing else, would be testimony enough; and if Philippine independence involved only sentimental and not commercial interests there would be no attempt to distort or to obscure it.

When Bonifacio received Valenzuela’s report of Rizal’s decision, he swore, after his fashion, and determined to press on with his own plans and forget the exile. Against the notion that the Philippines were unready for revolution or unfitted for self-government he set himself like a man in a battle that has thrown away fear with his scabbard. He recalled that, weighing duly the relative strengths of the antagonists, the American colonists were not worse prepared for the struggle that set them free. Most revolutions, history had taught him, had been begun by people that fought with broken weapons or bare hands; witness Camille Desmoulins and the ragged crowd he led from the café in the courtyard of the Palais Royal that fateful night in July. Hardly a weapon among them all more deadly than a hammer, and yet to the echo of their feet fell absolute government in every corner of Europe. All the world now honors those empty hands; on the very spot where Desmoulins addressed the crowd, behold now his statue! Are revolutions ever wrought by well ordered ranks of daintily uniformed guards? Are they ever launched when every condition is fitted, like joiner-work, to their success? And, in fact, are they ever made to any man’s volition or by anything but blind destiny that sits behind the whirlwind?

Bonifacio, at least, had no idea of waiting until the Philippines should be populated with university graduates able to demonstrate in scholarly phrases the philosophical sweetness of liberty. Desiring freedom, he desired it then and there. Month by month, the Katipunan spread and carried with it, as a flood carries a straw, the catastrophe of this story.

At Dapitan life went on unchangingly. It is likely that Rizal had there a happiness and a serenity he had not known since childhood. He says as much in one of his letters:

My life now is quiet, peaceful, retired, and without glory; but I think it is useful, too. I teach here the poor but intelligent boys reading, Spanish, English, mathematics, and geometry. Moreover, I teach them to behave like men. I taught the men here how to get a better way of earning their living, and they think I am right. We have begun, and already success has crowned our trials.

He tells how even in that out-of-the-way place there were lessons for him to learn; how he was taught there to steer and reef, to manage a canoe, to speak Visayan, and the better to know his own country. “God can send you your fortune,” he adds, “even amidst the persecutions of your friends!”

In this letter he dwells with a kind of delight on his exacting labors in philology, of his studies in Tagalog and his Tagalog grammar, which he had almost completed. It is plainly to be seen that his activities kept him from nostalgia, as his captivity from the turmoil of his years in the noisy and bitter world; and now he was happily married!

But man is not so easily separated from his Nemesis. Of a sudden all this house of content fell in ruins about him.

Manila, August 30, 1896.

Esteemed General and Distinguished Friend:

I recommend to you with genuine interest Dr. José Rizal, who is leaving for the Peninsula to place himself at the disposal of the government as volunteer army surgeon to Cuba. During the four years of his exile at Dapitan he has conducted himself in the most exemplary manner, and he is, in my opinion, the more worthy of praise and consideration in that he is in no way connected with the extravagant attempts we are now deploring, neither those of conspirators nor of the secret societies that have been formed.

I have the pleasure to reassure you of my high esteem, and remain

Your affectionate friend and comrade Ramón Blanco.

On September 3, the next mail-steamer, the Isla de Panay, departed for Barcelona, with Rizal as a kind of self-watched prisoner, guarded by his parole and not otherwise; for here as before it is to be remarked as one of the curiosities of this story that however his enemies in the Government might hate him they seemed to have full confidence in his word of honor.

But while he was still waiting on the Castilla in the harbor disaster had begun to ripen for him.

The whole Katipunan conspiracy was laid bare to the Government.

According to the accepted story, on the night of August 19, the mother superior of a convent-school at Tondo burst upon the parish priest at his house with information that she had discovered a terrible plot to massacre all the Spaniards in the Islands. A brother of one of her pupils was a member of the Katipunan. Assessments upon members of the order had now become frequent, as Bonifacio’s preparations drew to a head. It is an ancient Filipino custom for the woman in each household to keep the purse for the men. This young man’s treasurer was his sister. Of late he had been coming to her so often for funds that she insisted upon knowing what he wanted the money for. Then little by little she wormed his secret from him and fled with it to the mother superior, who took it to the padre.

Or some plot. At the best of times, as we have seen, hysteria in the governing class of Manila slept on a hair-trigger, and, being once awakened, offered a credulity more than childlike to the most grotesque creations of the most unhealthy imagination. On this occasion its manifestations were of the worst. Such wild tales as flew about the city in those days, and had the approval of grave men that must have known better, were fit only for a group of children telling ghost-stories in the dark. That in the middle of the night armed bands of ferocious, horrible natives were to steal upon the innocent repose of every white person and slit his throat from ear to ear as he slept, was the least terrifying of these rumors, and the earliest fruitage of an aroused and exotic fancy. Curiously enough, it had no merit in originality, but was wan and hoary with age; for one hundred and fifty years, at every revolt of the overtaxed natives, it had been brought out and paraded. It even persisted to a later day and was used to frighten adult Americans that might have been deemed beyond such melodrama. Certain plans required American dislike of the Filipinos, and thus the dislike was to be engendered. In the present instance, it can hardly be necessary to say to any Filipino reader that wholesale murder was no part of Bonifacio’s plans, nor any other of the ogreish and blood-curdling designs that he was then said to have formed. That it seems needful to do him this justice before another public is only further evidence of the gross misrepresentation that interest and profits have made of all this chapter of history.

At the first alarm, Bonifacio and some others had made their escape; he was now in the country proclaiming the republic and raising troops; but of Filipinos that still remained and could be accused of affiliation with his hated society there was naturally no lack, and in a few hours the jails were overflowing and the executioner overworked.

The instructions were that he was to be returned as speedily as possible to Manila for trial. He arrived at Barcelona in the morning. A steamer was to sail for Manila that afternoon. Nevertheless, for the few hours he must stay in Barcelona he was thrust into prison, the sudden reversal of the confidence with which he had before been treated indicating plainly enough to the initiated which party was now in control at Manila. By a strange turn of fate, the Spanish commandant at Barcelona was that same Despujol that had so basely decoyed him from Hong-Kong into Spanish power and but for whom he might have been at that moment safe beyond Spanish clutches. Despujol had the hardihood to call upon the man whose life he had sold. Rizal received him with the tolerant spirit that was so marked in his character, for it is not recorded of him anywhere that he uttered so much as one reproach against those that had wronged him; and Despujol seems to have felt something like contrition as he viewed the wreck he had made of a life so unusual.

That afternoon the steamer left for Manila with Rizal a prisoner on it.