Ibarra is excommunicated, and Capitan Tiago, through his fear of the friars, is forced to break the engagement and agree to the marriage of María Clara with a young and inoffensive Spaniard provided by Padre Dámaso. Obedient to her reputed father’s command and influenced by her mysterious dread of Padre Salví, María Clara consents to this arrangement, but becomes seriously ill, only to be saved by medicines sent secretly by Ibarra and clandestinely administered by a girl friend.
Ibarra succeeds in having the excommunication removed, but before he can explain matters an uprising against the Civil Guard is secretly brought about through agents of Padre Salví, and the leadership is ascribed to Ibarra to ruin him. He is warned by a mysterious friend, an outlaw called Elías, whose life he had accidentally saved; but desiring first to see María Clara, he refuses to make his escape, and when the outbreak occurs he is arrested as the instigator of it and thrown into prison in Manila.
On the evening when Capitan Tiago gives a ball in his Manila house to celebrate his supposed daughter’s engagement, Ibarra makes his escape from prison and succeeds in seeing María Clara alone. He begins to reproach her because it is a letter written to her before he went to Europe which forms the basis of the charge against him, but she clears herself of treachery to him. The letter had been secured from her by false representations and in exchange for two others written by her mother just before her birth, which prove that Padre Dámaso is her real father. These letters had been accidentally discovered in the convento by Padre Salví, who made use of them to intimidate the girl and get possession of Ibarra’s letter, from which he forged others to incriminate the young man. She tells him that she will marry the young Spaniard, sacrificing herself thus to save her mother’s name and Capitan Tiago’s honor and to prevent a public scandal, but that she will always remain true to him.
Ibarra’s escape had been effected by Elías, who conveys him in a banka up the Pasig to the Lake, where they are so closely beset by the Civil Guard that Elías leaps into the water and draws the pursuers away from the boat, in which Ibarra lies concealed.
On Christmas Eve, at the tomb of the Ibarras in a gloomy wood, Elías appears, wounded and dying, to find there a boy named Basilio beside the corpse of his mother, a poor woman who had been driven to insanity by her husband’s neglect and abuses on the part of the Civil Guard, her younger son having disappeared some time before in the convento, where he was a sacristan. Basilio, who is ignorant of Elías’s identity, helps him to build a funeral pyre, on which his corpse and the madwoman’s are to be burned.
Upon learning of the reported death of Ibarra in the chase on the Lake, María Clara becomes disconsolate and begs her supposed godfather, Fray Dámaso, to put her in a nunnery. Unconscious of her knowledge of their true relationship, the friar breaks down and confesses that all the trouble he has stirred up with the Ibarras has been to prevent her from marrying a native, which would condemn her and her children to the oppressed and enslaved class. He finally yields to her entreaties and she enters the nunnery of St. Clara, to which Padre Salví is soon assigned in a ministerial capacity.
O masters, lords, and rulers in all lands,
Is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?O masters, lords, and rulers in all lands,
Edwin Markham
How will the future reckon with this man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings—
With those who shaped him to the thing he is—
When this dumb terror shall reply to God,
After the silence of the centuries?
El Filibusterismo
I
On the Upper Deck
Sic itur ad astra
One morning in December the steamer Tabo was laboriously ascending the tortuous course of the Pasig, carrying a large crowd of passengers toward the province of La Laguna. She was a heavily built steamer, almost round, like the tabú from which she derived her name, quite dirty in spite of her pretensions to whiteness, majestic and grave from her leisurely motion. Altogether, she was held in great affection in that region, perhaps from her Tagalog name, or from the fact that she bore the characteristic impress of things in the country, representing something like a triumph over progress, a steamer that was not a steamer at all, an organism, stolid, imperfect yet unimpeachable, which, when it wished to pose as being rankly progressive, proudly contented itself with putting on a fresh coat of paint. Indeed, the happy steamer was genuinely Filipino! If a person were only reasonably considerate, she might even have been taken for the Ship of State, constructed, as she had been, under the inspection of Reverendos and Ilustrísimos. …
Bathed in the sunlight of a morning that made the waters of the river sparkle and the breezes rustle in the bending bamboo on its banks, there she goes with her white silhouette throwing out great clouds of smoke—the Ship of State, so the joke runs, also has the vice of smoking! The whistle shrieks at every moment, hoarse and commanding like a tyrant who would rule by shouting, so that no one on board can hear his own
