THE STORY OF SIMOUN

Revenge was sweet, however, for the Montecristo of Dumas. The Simoun of Rizal is unhappy even in revenge. He is one of the darkest creations of literature, a man who believes salvation can come only from total corruption.

"I have inflamed greed," he says. "Injustices and abuses have multiplied. I have fomented crime, and acts of cruelty, so that the people may become inured to the idea of death. I have maintained terror so that, fleeing from it, they may seize any solution. I have paralyzed commerce so that the country, impoverished and reduced to misery, may have nothing more to fear. I have spurred ambition, to ruin the treasury; and not content with all this, to arouse a popular uprising, I have hurt the nation in its rawest nerve, by making the vulture itself insult the very carcass that feeds it!" Simoun is beyond any wish for reform, or autonomy, or representation in the Cortes.

"I need your help," he tells Basilio, "to make the youth resist these insane cravings for hispanization, for assimilation, for equality of rights. Instead of aspiring to be a province, aspire to be a nation... so that not by right, nor custom, nor language, may the Spaniard feel at home here, nor be regarded by the people as a native, but always as an invader, as an alien."

And he offers Basilio "your death or your future; with the government or with us; with your oppressors or with your country"; warning the boy that whoever "declares himself neutral exposes himself to the fury of both sides" -- the most poignant line in the novel; though Rizal, when the moment of choice came, did not exactly declare himself neutral.

But Basilio, even when finally converted to the revolution, shrinks from Simoun's command to exterminate not only the counter-revolution but all who refuse to rise up in arms:

"All! All! Indios, mestizos, Chinese, Spaniards. All whom you find without courage, without spirit. It is necessary to renew the race! Coward fathers can only beget slave children. What? You tremble? You fear to sow death? What is to be destroyed? An evil, a misery. Would you call that to destroy? I would call it to create, to produce, to nourish, to give life!"

Unlike Montecristo, Simoun fails. Dying, he flees to the house beside the Pacific where lives Father Florentino; and through Father Florentino, Rizal seems to annul what he has been saying so passionately, during the novel, through Simoun. What had sounded like a savage sneering at reform becomes a celebration of reforms, of spiritual self-renewal. Salvation cannot come from corruption; garbage produces only toadstools. In Dumas, the last words had been: Wait and hope. In Rizal, the last words are: Suffer and toil. And the jewels with which Simoun had thought to fuel the holocaust, Father Florentino hurls into the ocean, there to wait until a time "when men need you for a holy and high purpose."

This final chapter is beautiful [end of page 71] but unsatisfactory. The Noli Me Tangere had mocked the naiveté of the reformist, the futility of collaboration; El Filibusterismo should, therefore, have unequivocally justified revolution -- but it takes back in the final chapter what it pushed forward in the preceding ones.

Excerpt from the "Anatomy of the Anti-Hero" by Nick Joaquin