The Master had trouble identifying the Student as the protégé he once was. The old man and the blossoming firebrand shared a distinctive history that kept in tune with subversion and resistance. But as far as the Master was concerned, the aggregation of their joint efforts were intended to be aligned with moderation, in the spirit of the Aristotelian Golden Mean.
Early on, the Student remained faithful to the Master’s ideals. When the Master beseeched the Student’s restraint in the face of state-sponsored injustice and terrorism, the first thought that came to the Student was to heed the prudence of his teacher. “It takes greater courage to run away from danger than to confront it,” said the Master with deep affection for his ward.
But as the passage of time tends to do an innocent, wide-eyed prodigy, the Student gradually became disinclined to adhere to his Master’s pacifistic precepts for social and political change. Turning the other cheek, placing flowers in the barrel of soldiers’ rifles, and pleading to make love not war would no longer suffice. For change to come about, the Student and other discontented visionaries like himself would put their trust in their purest of aggrieved sensations and also in their fervent self-righteousness.
In forswearing the Master’s nonbelligerent beliefs as they resonated from Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and José Rizal, the Student had come into his own. He was no longer today what he was yesterday. But at what price? The Master couldn’t have been more saddened by the Student’s sullen transformation. Like the proverbial moth to a flame, the Student was drawn to the immediacy, the clarity, and the swagger of direct action.
The Student was convinced that it was time to step out of the comfort zone that the Master had so carefully familiarized for what was supposed to be the Student’s benefit.
The Student began frequenting radical, avant-garde circles first without his teacher’s knowledge then later to his teacher’s dismay. The apparatchiks that made up the rank-and-file of these circles were bent on overthrowing both the Dictator and the established, collusive order that could be best described as his enablers in ruling tyrannically over the nation.
The ideological roots of these conspiratorial agitators emerged out of a textual crucible of negation composed over a hundred years before. In 1869, Russian nihilist Sergey Nechayev wrote the “Catechism of a Revolutionary.” The book, which espoused the notion that in a revolution the ends justify the means whatever those means were, left an indelible mark on the radicals’ collective minds.
Nechayev taught them that to take power into their own hands they must not be weighed down by questions of right and wrong, by compromising their principles, or by negotiating away the essence of their purpose. Nechayev’s revolutionary must not shy away from spilling blood, stabbing friend or foe in the back, or from taking on the role of a pitiless criminal all in the service of creating a new society.
Some parallels could be drawn with Andres Bonifacio and the Katipunan in Nechayev’s work. The Student certainly came to that conclusion. He associated the Katipunan’s stated functioning as a secret society dedicated to armed revolution to Nechayev’s own focus on the formation of a covert organization ready to do its worst to achieve its broader goal.
The Master was equally acquainted with Nechayev’s publication. Whereas the Student showered “Catechism” with praise, the Master leveled his opprobrium at Nechayev, calling his book a collection of barbaric articles of faith. When the Master recognized the extent of the Student’s deference to this dead Russian, and how he had been supplanted in his former disciple’s mind, the old man thought of José Rizal and how the reluctant but valourous martyr of the Philippines cautioned about the risks of an armed revolution, particularly one that was ill-timed and ill-conceived. Rizal knew that a rancorous revolution may not have only been an exercise in futility, but that it could devolve into a nightmare of unimaginable proportions.
Guns and passions, a volatile combination to be sure thought the Master. Be that as it may, he had to be honest with himself and concede that all the savvy, meticulousness, and civility in the universe could not induce a committed extremist to resist taking a turn for the worse as the Student was in the process of confirming. Perhaps, the Master further reasoned that the Dictatorship was so steeped in villainy, corruption, and evil that violence was the only hope in giving decency and normality back to the people.
Still, for the rest of his days the Master would agonize over what more he could have done to talk his beloved pupil out of avenging the trials and sufferings of the people at the point of a dagger. In the last few hours before the Student’s fateful undertaking was to materialize, the old man made one last attempt to remove the burden the young man placed upon himself to carry in his heart and mind. To do this, the Master would bring into play Rizal’s literary protagonist in “El Filibusterismo.”
“These are going to be the final moments of my life. But we will always have each other,” the Student said with stoic terminality. “I’m tired of fighting shadows. This is the real thing now. I’ve been waiting too long to see that evil woman die. Justice won’t be a fantasy any longer.”
Overwhelmed with premonition, the Master said “Simoun will always be Simoun. Have you forgotten ‘El Fili’? Or in the grand scheme of things have you decided that murder is far more chivalrous than goodwill?”
In a way, the Master had created a false perspective for the Student for as the history of mankind as shown us, murder as political theater can accentuate the memory of the act, stretching it out into an awe-inspiring marvel of courage and selflessness. Therefore, from the Student’s “true” perspective, an assassination of exigency if properly carried out and with some luck, can bring an assailant within an eyelash of incomparable transcendence.
Unruffled by his mentor’s guilt trip tone, the Student remembered the joy and privilege he savored throughout his apprenticeship with the Master. The Student’s convictions may have paved the way to perdition, but the respect he had for the old man was everlasting.
“Without you I would never have believed that there is no struggle that cannot be overcome. You have been my guardian, my friend, my confidant, my guide. I know you think I have a deathwish. But I have never felt more alive than I do now. And I owe it all to you.”
It was the greatest compliment the Student could have paid to the Master. And the Master knew it. This only intensified his despondency. It was then that the old man realized the depth of the Student’s devotion to what would be his red-stained cause, to his idée fixe which was brought to life when so many of his protesting classmates disappeared without a trace never to be found or heard from again.
“Wasn’t it Thoreau who said old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new?” said the Master in a fit of self-pity.
“Master, I’m simply answering my calling if it’s the last thing I do.”
There could be no misunderstanding. The Master could only stand by as the Student spun into his inexorable stride. The Student had not only come of age as a man of political action but had indeed become Jose Rizal’s conspiratorial seditionist Simoun. Moral chastity and virtue missed the point. You need power to change the world and power as Chairman Mao famously put it, grows from the barrel of a gun.
The Student pulled out the weapon of his choice and closely examined it as he had done a hundred times before. But his weapon was not a gun but a bolo knife which is typically used in the Philippines for farming and related purposes. Barely over a foot long, the bolo knife’s steel blade presented a formidable weapon at close range.
In a form of ritual purity, the Student cleaned the blade with lukewarm water before covering it with its protective sheath. Upon returning the bolo knife to his backpack, the Student declared “If somehow my life is spared after I kill the woman then I will have failed.”
The Master said, “Is it possible that it makes sense that deliberately bringing about your demise will be some kind of grand poetic justice? Even if you manage to kill the First Lady and nobly die in the process, what will you have accomplished in the bigger scheme of things? Will you have toppled the system, the structure that so many of us abhor? No. People will scoff that with a provocative expression of blind enmity you only managed to nick the regime despite doing so in the most savage and reprehensible manner.”
With an effort the Student brushed off his Master’s fulmination and stood up to bid him goodbye. The interdependent symbiosis that the Master and the Student shared was about to come to an end. If nothing else, there was one thing the old man could be proud of and that was he never led the Student astray. How could he for his sensitive heart was always in the right place. A combination of love, compassion, and empathy. That was the secret of the Master’s pedagogic success notwithstanding his inability to deter the Student from his all but suicidal mission.
There was nothing left to be said between the two men. With tears welling in both their eyes, Master and Student hugged each other warmly knowing that this would be the last time they would ever be in each other’s company again.
Not wanting to prolong the agony of a maudlin adieu, the Student quickly swung away from the Master and dashed out the door of his office.
His influence in shaping the Student’s life direction substantiated the singular power he held to ingrain valuable wisdom in a budding consciousness. The Master could not bear the loss of that power and the emptiness that was sure to follow.
The Master walked over to the small veranda that overlooked the university campus, the campus that he graced with his intellect and benevolence. He peered out at the dusky sky that was enveloping the landscape around him. Curiously at that moment, the Master did not have the Student forthrightly in his thoughts but rather, he pondered some lines from T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:
"There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create...
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair...
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?"
ALLEN GABORRO
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