Glory be to God on high and peace on earth to men of goodwill!80 But as we will see later on, men needn’t exhibit goodwill for them to live in peace. The impudent found him stupid, the poor, heartless and cruel, someone who exploited the misery of others. To his subordinates he was a despot and a tyrant.

He was rich, and his gold prayed for him. For masses and alms, God had created powerful, supercilious priests. For novenas and rosaries, God in his infinite goodwill had created the poor, for the benefit of the rich, in fact, since for one peso poor people would recite the sixteen mysteries and read all the holy books, including the Hebrew bible, if one increased the payment

But because of his wealth, his confidence in justice, and his hatred of anything that was not legal or just, they ruined him.

‘If I kill the head of a family, if I make a woman into a destitute widow and happy children into helpless orphans, will I have satisfied eternal justice if I let them hang me, or confide my secret to someone who has to keep it to himself, or give alms to the priests, who need it the least, or buy myself a papal pardon, or weep night and day? And what about the widow and children? My conscience tells me I should replace as much as possible the person I have murdered and dedicate myself completely and for my whole life to the welfare of the family whose misfortune I have created. And even then, even then, who will replace the love of a husband and father?’

‘Señor Guevara, do you think God pardons a crime, a murder, for example, solely because one tells it to a priest, who is, in the end, a man, and who has the duty to keep it to himself, and who is afraid of burning in hell, which is an act of attrition, who is a coward, and certainly without shame? I have another conception of God,’ he would say, ‘to me one does not correct one wrong by committing another, nor is one pardoned by useless weeping, or by giving alms to the church.’

but you must be brave. In the Philippines you are not considered to be honorable unless you have been to jail.”

In every instance I noted that a people’s prosperity or misery lay in direct proportion to its freedoms or its inhibitions and, along the same lines, of the sacrifice or selfishness of its ancestors.”

So what if he never went to confession. So what? I don’t go to confession either. But to claim that he committed suicide is a lie, a slur. A man like him, with a son in whom he has placed all his hopes and affections, a man with faith in God, who understands his responsibilities to society, an honorable and just man, does not commit suicide.

“King or rook or nobody! To us there is no other king than the rightful—”

Are these natives truly indolent by nature, or is it, as a foreign traveler has said, that we make excuses for our own indolence, our backwardness, and our colonial system by calling them indolent? It has been said of other colonies whose inhabitants are of the same race . . .”

We mortals are, in general, like tortoises: we value and classify ourselves according to our shells;

With that in mind, I will try to reproduce your current condition faithfully, without prejudice; I will lift the veil hiding your ills, and sacrifice everything to truth, even my own pride, since, as your son, I, too, suffer your defects and shortcomings.

Nowadays an incorporeal José Rizal floats through the Philippines and its diaspora, his very nature hovering somewhere between man and spirit, an ineffable essence permeating the history of a renewed Philippines. He has become the spiritual descendant of Lapu-Lapu, a secular messiah who expels the invaders with the stroke of his mighty pen, a martyr, an avenging saint, an anito in whom one invests the atom of identity.

Historians, critics, and conspiracy theorists have combed his juvenilia for predictions of his own mortality, and then characterized them as serious prophetic discourse.

When Father Dámaso, one of the novel’s darkest figures, fractures Tagalog in his sermon the scene is comic, but when he violently forbids a schoolmaster from teaching Spanish to his Filipino students, broken Tagalog becomes a political weapon.