One of the conflicts which drive the Noli Me Tangere is Crisostomo Ibarra’s search for his father’s grave. The search starts after the celebrations in Kapitan Tiago’s house, when Ibarra is tipped by Lieutenant Guevara, a guwardiya sibil, of the events which led to his father’s death. Don Rafael, Ibarra’s father, is a charismatic insulares — sympathetic to the plight of farmers; dressed like the natives, too — who garners the ire of the recently arrived friars. Padre Damaso accuses him of being a heretic for failing to confess his sins. Don Rafael is imprisoned after an extended trial, where even his friends turn their backs on him, and dies of an illness a year into his sentence.
Still eager to exact vengeance, Padre Damaso orders that Don Rafael’s remains be exhumed and transferred — only 20 days after his death — from a Catholic cemetery to a Chinese cemetery which, at that time, was considered unholy ground. (Rizal, nonetheless, was well aware of his Chinese roots.) But the gravedigger, hassled by the rain and the weight of the corpse, throws Don Rafael’s body in the river. In Leon Ma. Guerrero’s translation of Noli, the poor laborer’s rhetoric is that it was “better [for the corpse] to drown than to lie with the heathen.” In Rio Alma’s translation, the chapter with Ibarra confronting the gravedigger (and by meaningful coincidence, Padre Salvi) is called “Banta ng Unos” or threat of a storm. This unburial is, indeed, the beginning of the end for Ibarra.
Ibarra’s seemingly plain dilemma comes to mind now that we’re forced to confront the issue of the dictator’s burial at the Libingan ng mga Bayani (henceforth, Libingan). What could Rizal — undeniably a bayani, if not the bayani — be thinking if he were alive now?
Arguing with Loyalists
I’m growing tired of expounding on Marcos’ many atrocities in my column. I have written pieces that are backed by credible sources, which range from books and peer-reviewed articles, records, and conversations with real-life persons, both dead and surviving victims of martial law. (See “My Favorite Marcos Lie: The Tasaday” published February 27, 2016; “Marcos vs. Aquino” published September 26, 2015; “So you think you love Marcos?” published February 24, 2014; “EDSA na naman?” published February 23, 2013, just to name a few.) There comes a point when writing again and again about Marcos and martial law becomes a lazy act of spoon feeding and therefore, futile. It seems that in entertaining the many absurd and unverifiable conspiracy theories of neo-Marcosians, we give credence to their cause when they, in fact, have none. And by keeping Marcos in the realm of the undead, we can neither mortally persecute and imprison him, nor can we truly bury him and end his enduring reign. I have come to the hapless conclusion that there simply is no repose for the cretins who continue to deny the existence of Marcos’ crimes — not even this imminent transferal of the dictator’s remains. They will not stop until Marcos (or his wax figure) literally rises from his glass box in Ilocos and once more take the country by its reins. This is a narrative these Marcosians are likely to believe would one day, come true.
Here is where I find the Noli useful. In fighting the fictional “Greatest President of the Philippines,” a fiction like Rizal’s books can serve as the proper antidote. The power of fiction lies not in presenting hard facts but in molding our ways of seeing the world. And as the fiction of a singular, all-powerful, “great” Ferdinand Marcos Sr. arises and distorts its audience’s frames of mind, a fiction like the Noli can offer a fuller, more socially aware and correct perspective. We’ve tried arguing with cold, hard facts, but it could hardly convince Marcos supporters who are quick to poison the well and say, “You’ve been brainwashed.” Perhaps, fire is best fought with fire.
Rizal is turning in his grave
The Noli is a novel which critics continue to call romantic and overly sentimental prose. Being a fan of Rizal, I’d like to think that he had no choice but to be sentimental, what with the numerous deaths that he had to portray in the Noli (including, no less, a murder of a child). As such, it presents us with a blueprint for mourning; perhaps, among the many remarks Rizal makes in his books is a criticism on the way we bury our dead. If I may be so bold, I imagine Rizal to be turning in his grave, wondering what the huge fuss is about in burying Marcos at the Libingan — or why, in the first place, is there even a cemetery for heroes?
If we continue to trace Ibarra’s slow decline to exile, the next time he mentions his father is in the knife-wielding scene at the banquet Crisostomo prepared at the Ibarra residence. There, the unrelenting (and uninvited) Padre Damaso continues to speak wrongly of Don Rafael. His words cause Ibarra to stand up from his chair at the dining table, grab a sharp knife, and hold the friar hostage. It is in that instant that Ibarra loses himself and gets excommunicated. He will later be implicated in a revolt, brought to prison, and by skewed circumstances, become a fugitive on the run.
Ibarra never mentions his father again after the banquet. In his final conversation with Elias, he no longer feels the need to avenge his father. Instead, he wants to fight the great injustices the Spaniards have dealt to his countrymen. After everything he had been put through, his great realization is that the problem is beyond him or his ancestry. “At that time I was blind, disgusted — I don’t know what. Now I see the horrible cancer that is gnawing away at our society, that seizes on the flesh of our country, and must be torn out… I shall become an agitator, but a true agitator, I shall call to all the oppressed,” Ibarra said (Guerrero translation). It is in this instance that we see Rizal, through his characters, care no longer about burial places and instead take heed of the call to fight the greater war.
Making sense of the inevitable
At the same time, the more heroic figure in the story, Elias, opted for a no-frills burial. Instead of a grave in holy ground, he asked the young Basilio to stack him on top of the boy’s deceased mother and burn their corpses together in a pyre. “Nothing will remain of me… I die without seeing the sun rise on my country. You who are to see the dawn, welcome it, and do not forget those who fell during the night,” Elias said. His quiet passing is the manner by which most of our heroes exit this world. Also, his words are, perhaps, the more fitting epitaph than the one written at the entrance of Libingan: “I do not know the dignity of his birth, but I do know the glory of his death”— a rather corny one-liner.
Marcos falls somewhere outside this story. He is not Don Rafael, not Elias, not even Sisa. He is a dictator, a liar, a plunderer, and a murderer. But with the inevitability of his burial at the Libingan, we have to make sense of it somehow and locate this occasion somewhere in our collective memory as Filipinos. So if we were to place him in Noli Me Tangere, he would be one of those hacienderos who bribed a friar, peddled influence, to be buried somewhere inside an old church, not knowing that no matter how much money he paid, the Almighty would send him to hell.
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