The Social Cancer, by José Rizal - Home
The Social Cancer, by José Rizal - Home
The Social Cancer, by José Rizal - Home
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CHAPTER I 26<br />
Lady of Peace and Prosperous Voyages, who is worshiped in Antipolo, visiting in the disguise of a beggar the<br />
holy and renowned Capitana Inez during her sickness." [15] While the work reveals little taste or art, yet it<br />
possesses in compensation an extreme realism, for to judge from the yellow and bluish tints of her face the<br />
sick woman seems to be already a decaying corpse, and the glasses and other objects, accompaniments of long<br />
illness, are so minutely reproduced that even their contents may be distinguished. In looking at these pictures,<br />
which excite the appetite and inspire gay bucolic ideas, one may perhaps be led to think that the malicious<br />
host is well acquainted with the characters of the majority of those who are to sit at his table and that, in order<br />
to conceal his own way of thinking, he has hung from the ceiling costly Chinese lanterns; bird-cages without<br />
birds; red, green, and blue globes of frosted glass; faded air-plants; and dried and inflated fishes, which they<br />
call botetes. <strong>The</strong> view is closed on the side of the river <strong>by</strong> curious wooden arches, half Chinese and half<br />
European, affording glimpses of a terrace with arbors and bowers faintly lighted <strong>by</strong> paper lanterns of many<br />
colors.<br />
In the sala, among massive mirrors and gleaming chandeliers, the guests are assembled. Here, on a raised<br />
platform, stands a grand piano of great price, which tonight has the additional virtue of not being played upon.<br />
Here, hanging on the wall, is an oil-painting of a handsome man in full dress, rigid, erect, straight as the<br />
tasseled cane he holds in his stiff, ring-covered fingers--the whole seeming to say, "Ahem! See how well<br />
dressed and how dignified I am!" <strong>The</strong> furnishings of the room are elegant and perhaps uncomfortable and<br />
unhealthful, since the master of the house would consider not so much the comfort and health of his guests as<br />
his own ostentation, "A terrible thing is dysentery," he would say to them, "but you are sitting in European<br />
chairs and that is something you don't find every day."<br />
This room is almost filled with people, the men being separated from the women as in synagogues and<br />
Catholic churches. <strong>The</strong> women consist of a number of Filipino and Spanish maidens, who, when they open<br />
their mouths to yawn, instantly cover them with their fans and who murmur only a few words to each other,<br />
any conversation ventured upon dying out in monosyllables like the sounds heard in a house at night, sounds<br />
made <strong>by</strong> the rats and lizards. Is it perhaps the different likenesses of Our Lady hanging on the walls that force<br />
them to silence and a religious demeanor or is it that the women here are an exception?<br />
A cousin of Capitan Tiago, a sweet-faced old woman, who speaks Spanish quite badly, is the only one<br />
receiving the ladies. To offer to the Spanish ladies a plate of cigars and buyos, to extend her hand to her<br />
countrywomen to be kissed, exactly as the friars do,--this is the sum of her courtesy, her policy. <strong>The</strong> poor old<br />
lady soon became bored, and taking advantage of the noise of a plate breaking, rushed precipitately away,<br />
muttering, "Jesús! Just wait, you rascals!" and failed to reappear.<br />
<strong>The</strong> men, for their part, are making more of a stir. Some cadets in one corner are conversing in a lively<br />
manner but in low tones, looking around now and then to point out different persons in the room while they<br />
laugh more or less openly among themselves. In contrast, two foreigners dressed in white are promenading<br />
silently from one end of the room to the other with their hands crossed behind their backs, like the bored<br />
passengers on the deck of a ship. All the interest and the greatest animation proceed from a group composed<br />
of two priests, two civilians, and a soldier who are seated around a small table on which are seen bottles of<br />
wine and English biscuits.<br />
<strong>The</strong> soldier, a tall, elderly lieutenant with an austere countenance--a Duke of Alva straggling behind in the<br />
roster of the Civil Guard--talks little, but in a harsh, curt way. One of the priests, a youthful Dominican friar,<br />
handsome, graceful, polished as the gold-mounted eyeglasses he wears, maintains a premature gravity. He is<br />
the curate of Binondo and has been in former years a professor in the college of San Juan de Letran, [16]<br />
where he enjoyed the reputation of being a consummate dialectician, so much so that in the days when the<br />
sons of Guzman [17] still dared to match themselves in subtleties with laymen, the able disputant B. de Luna<br />
had never been able either to catch or to confuse him, the distinctions made <strong>by</strong> Fray Si<strong>by</strong>la leaving his<br />
opponent in the situation of a fisherman who tries to catch eels with a lasso. <strong>The</strong> Dominican says little,<br />
appearing to weigh his words.