About that time my brother Perry, also struck by the phrase, wrote to me suggesting a possible source: a prose poem by Mallarmé (1842–98) entitled “Le Démon de l’analogie” (The Demon of the Analogy), probably first composed in 1864, when Rizal was three years old, published in La Revue du Monde Nouveau in 1874 as “La Penultième” (The Penultimate), and again on March 28, 1885 in Le Chat Noir, with the original title restored.9 Perhaps, he suggested, Rizal might have been inspired by the poem, since he came to live in Paris only three months later.

  My initial reaction to this suggestion was disbelief. Though Rizal started learning French at the age of twelve, when he entered the Ateneo, the Jesuits’ elite secondary school in Manila, it seemed unlikely that he would have been able to tackle so difficult and esoteric a text. But later the suggestion seemed at least worth looking into. It transpired that Mallarmé’s title was a creative homage to “Le Démon de la perversité,” Baudelaire’s translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Imp of the Perverse.”10 This tale was first published in barbarous Baltimore in 1839 as part of Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque, and then by Baudelaire in the second volume of his Poe translations.11 An odd chain of possibilities then loomed up—from Poe’s neurotic-psychological imp, through Baudelaire’s quasi-theological demon and Mallarmé’s uncanny source of poetic inspiration, to the political imagining of a colonized Rizal-in-Europe. But had Rizal read Baudelaire or Poe? Neither in De Ocampo’s catalogue (see note 5), nor among Rizal’s cards at the López Museum Library was there any mention of Poe, Baudelaire, or Mallarmé.

  A STUDENT OF HOMEOPATHY

  Then came the second accident: the arrival on my desk of a draft article from the pioneering Gay Studies scholar Neil Garcia, of the University of the Philippines. Garcia had asked himself whether Rizal was gay, and answered his own question negatively by saying, à la Foucault, that in the 1880s gayness did not yet exist in the Philippines. Garcia also seemed to feel that as a Third World provinciano, Rizal must have been sexually pretty innocent.12 But the article called serious attention to a short passage from the chapter in El Filibusterismo titled “Tipos Manileños” (Manila Types).13 There, at the splashy opening night for a travelling French vaudeville troupe, the cynical student Tadeo regales his country bumpkin cousin with scandalous gossip (mostly made up) about members of the Manila elite in the audience. At one point Tadeo comments thus:

  Ese respectable señor que va elegantamente vestido, no es médico pero es un homeópata sui generis: profesa en todo el similia similibus … El joven capitan de caballería que con él va, es su discípulo predilecto.

  That respectable gentleman, so elegantly dressed, is no doctor but a homeopathist of a unique type; he professes in everything the principle of like-with-like. The young cavalry captain arriving with him is his favorite disciple.

  The gossip is catty, but not shocked; moreover, the insinuation of homosexuality flies past the country boy who knows no Latin, and also does not understand the meaning of the word homeópata. In other words, Tadeo appears really to be addressing not a country boy but some rather sophisticated readers.

  Who were they? This question became still more pressing when I consulted the big facsimile edition of the original El Filibusterismo manuscript. For Rizal had first written, and then crossed out, the following phrase: “profesa en el amor el princ … similia similibus gaudet.”14 If we take princ to be principio, then we can translate the whole phrase as “he professes in matters of love the principle that like rejoices in like”, or “like gains happiness from like.” Gaudet is a strong word in Latin, expressing gladness, happiness, even rapture. One can easily see why Rizal thought better of this formulation. Artistically speaking, it absolutely did not fit the cynicism of the character Tadeo, who never speaks of amor. But culturally and morally speaking, it would surely have been scandalous in the Philippines of the friars. Besides, were there really prominent men in late-colonial Manila who showed up at big public events with their good-looking military boyfriends? It does not seem too likely.15 (Yet one remarkable earlier source pictures a quite visible trade in young male prostitutes).16

  On the other hand, Garcia did not mention an equally curious passage in the following chapter, titled “La función” (The Show), which describes the vaudeville performance and the various characters’ reactions to it. The troupe stages one scene of merry-making in the servants’ quarters by servantes, domestiques, and cochers. The first, clearly female, are probably kitchen staff; the second, of less explicit gender, are probably housemaids. The third group, however, are, as coachmen, unmistakably male. All the groups, however, are played by actresses, the last in teasing drag. Towards the end of the chapter, the nameless narrator limns the jealousy felt by the beautiful, opportunist mestiza Paulita Gómez, as she watches her current beau, the student Isagani, in the audience.

  Paulita se ponía más triste cada vez, pensando en como unas muchachas que se llaman cochers podían ocupar la atención de Isagani. Cochers le recordaba ciertas denominaciones que las colegialas usan entre sí para explicar una especie de afectos.

  Paulita felt more and more depressed, thinking about how some of these girls, called cochers, might occupy the attention of Isagani. The word cochers reminded her of certain appellations which convent-school girls use among themselves to explain a species of affection.17

  The masculine noun, along with the obvious sexual implications of being a “rider,” make it clear what “species of affection” is intended. One could go further and argue that a certain sexual–sociological reality is involved, since the explanation of the French word as (nun-evading) teenage argot is the narrator’s gloss—notice the sudden switch to the generalizing present tense of usan (“they” use among themselves).

  It is interesting that this passage does not appear in the facsimile, which means that Rizal inserted it at the last minute. Why? Neither the “homeopathist” nor the “coachmen” are important to the narrative, and they are never mentioned again. Acte gratuit? It seems improbable. Were the passages inserted for a Filipino readership? Possibly, but more than a century would pass before any Filipino author again referred to male or female homosexuality in this allusive, but offhand manner.18 Another possibility is that in these passages Rizal was thinking of his European readers.19

  LÀ-BAS

  In any case, Rizal’s mention of homeopathy struck a chord in my failing memory. I dimly recalled a novel where homosexuality and homeopathy came together—the bizarre, scandalous, avant-garde À rebours (Against Nature) by the half-Dutch, half-French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907), which I had read, half-secretly, when I was about sixteen. It turned out that my memory was only 50 percent correct: homosexuality was there, and homeopathy too, but in quite unrelated contexts. Had Rizal ingeniously put them together? But Huysmans’s name did not show up in De Ocampo’s little book or in the López Museum’s library cards (nor, for that matter, in Pardo de Tavera’s francophile personal library). Besides, though originally published in 1884, À rebours was not translated into Spanish until around 1919 (with a foreword by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez), long after Rizal’s death.20 The first English-language version came out at almost the same time.21 If Rizal had read À rebours, he had to have done so in the original French. Perhaps it was a sheer fluke that Huysmans and Rizal had put homeopathy and homosexuality together in novels written less than seven years away from each other. But it seemed sensible to keep reading.

  Joris-Karl Huysmans

  À rebours has a single, aloof central character, the rich, elegant aristocrat Des Esseintes, who is so appalled by the dominant crass bourgeoisie of the French Third Republic, the corruption of the Catholic Church, the shadiness of the politicians, the low quality of popular culture, etcetera, etcetera, that he retreats into a private world of aesthetic fantasy, cultivating strange sexual experiences, avant-garde literature, rococo antiquarianism, and “mediaeval” Christian mysticism. He also builds himself a weird, expensive home designed to expel Nature, which he regards as now passé. No real flowers, for example, but artificial blooms made of rare and strange jewels; a pet tortoise slowly dying under the weight of a carapace entirely studded with gems. One cannot help but recall that Simoun, the central figure in El Filibusterismo, draws his singularity, his wealth and his power, from trafficking in rare and antique precious stones. Another coincidence?

  Maybe. But there were other much stronger correspondences. In the long chapter where Des Esseintes’s avant-garde literary preferences are laid out, special praise is given to Huysmans’s close friend Mallarmé; and in a list of the nobleman’s favorite texts by the great poet, “Le Démon de l’analogie” is singled out for mention.22 Baudelaire’s “Le Démon de la perversité” and Poe are mentioned too.23 If Rizal’s French was not up to managing the original prose poem, could he not have got an interesting idea for his Noli me tangere simply from reading Mallarmé’s title inside À rebours? But the most striking coincidences between the work of Huysmans and Rizal turned out to be with El Filibusterismo, rather than with Noli me tangere. I will mention just three, all of which involve sex of different types.

  FLAUBERT AND A FUTURE MURDERER

  First is the scene in À rebours where a near-impotent Des Esseintes takes as a short-term mistress a young female ventriloquist. To get himself in the mood, he purchases two statuettes, one of polychrome terracotta representing the classical Chimaera, a mythical female monster combining a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail, and the other, made of black marble, representing the also-female, also monstrous Sphinx. These are placed at the far end of the bedroom, which is illuminated only by the dim glow of embers in a coal-grate fire. The woman in bed with Des Esseintes, coached beforehand by her lover, then gives voice to the two statuettes’ sepulchral conversation, including a famous phrase from Flaubert’s La Tentation de Saint Antoine (The Temptation of Saint Anthony): “Je cherche des parfums nouveaux, des fleurs plus larges, des plaisirs inéprouvés” (I seek new perfumes, ampler blossoms, untried pleasures).24 At this point, as hoped and planned, Des Esseintes’s virility comes back to life.

  In the extraordinary eighteenth chapter of El Filibusterismo—it is called “Supercherías” (Trickeries)—Simoun coaches Mr Leeds, a skillful American (yankee) prestidigitator and ventriloquist, in a scene reminiscent of Hamlet’s use of the players to jolt his stepfather’s guilty conscience.25 Mr Leeds makes the mummified head of an ancient male Egyptian speak of millennia-past horrors endured at the hands of scheming priests—crimes that exactly replicate those once inflicted on the young Ibarra and his doomed love Maria Clara by the lustful, conniving Dominican, Father Salví. This Dominican has been lured into attending the show, and now faints in superstitious terror. The curious thing is that Mr Leeds summons the clearly male mummy head to speak by using the single word ¡Esfinge! (Sphinx!).26 What is purely sexual–literary in Huysmans seems to have been transformed by Rizal, cross-gender, into the psychological–political.

  Next, there is the curious scene where Des Esseintes picks up a teenager off the street, and takes him to a very expensive brothel.27 There he pays for him to be initiated by Vanda, an experienced and seductive Jewish prostitute. While the boy is busy losing his putative virginity, Des Esseintes chats with the madam whom he knows very well. Says Madame Laure:

  “Alors ce n’est pas pour ton compte que tu viens, ce soir … Mais où diable as-tu levé ce bambin?” “Dans la rue, ma chère.” “Tu n’es pourtant pas gris,” murmura la vielle dame. Puis, après réflexion, elle ajouta, avec un sourire maternel: “Je comprends; mâtin, dis donc, il te les faut jeunes, à toi.” Des Esseintes haussa les épaules, “Tu n’y es pas; oh! mais pas du tout,” fit-il; “la vérité c’est que je tâche simplement de préparer un assassin.”

  “So it’s not on your own account that you’ve come tonight … but where the devil did you pick up that baby?” “On the street, my dear.” “Yet you’re not drunk,” murmured the old woman. Then, after a moment’s reflection, she added, with a maternal smile: “Ah! I understand; come on, you rascal, tell me, you need them young.” Des Esseintes shrugged his shoulders. “You’re off the mark. It’s nothing like that,” he went on, “the truth is that I am simply preparing a murderer.”

  Having denied any sexual interest in the lad, he then explains his scheme. He will pay for the boy’s sessions with Vanda for about six weeks, and at that point will cut him off. By then, the boy will be sexually addicted, and to pay for further sessions will turn to burglary and thus eventually to murder. Des Esseintes’s ultimate purpose is to create “un ennemi de plus pour cette hideuse société qui nous rançonne” (one enemy more for this hideous society which holds us to ransom). This is, however, merely a moral/immoral and aesthetic gesture. One more corrupted teenager will not in himself change anything in France.

  But in El Filibusterismo, Simoun’s basic project is intended to change everything. He says this to the young medical student Basilio, who has felt helpless against the clerical murderer of his little brother, whose death had driven his mother insane:

  Víctima de un sistema viciado he vagado por el mundo, trabajando noche y día para amasar una fortuna y llevar á cabo mi plan. Ahora he vuelto para destruir ese sistema, precipitar su corrupción, empujarle al abismo á que corre insensato, aun cuando tuviese que emplear oleadas de lágrimas y sangre … Se ha condenado, lo está y no quiero morir sin verle antes hecho trizas en el fondo del precipicio.

  Victim of a vicious system, I have wandered throughout the world, laboring night and day to amass a fortune and bring my plan to fruition. Now I have returned to destroy this system, precipitate its corruption, and push it to the abyss towards which it insensately hurtles—even if I have to make use of torrents of tears and blood. There it stands, self-condemned, and I do not wish to die before seeing it shattered to pieces at the bottom of the precipice.28

  Meanwhile he will use his vast wealth to corrupt further the whole “ransom-holding” colonial order—inciting it to greater greed, vaster embezzlements, worse cruelties and deeper exploitation, to bring on the cataclysm. As noted earlier, his final plot is to place a huge nitroglycerine bomb, hidden inside a fantastic Huysmanesque jeweled lamp in the shape of a pomegranate, in the midst of a wedding party attended by all Manila’s top colonial officials. Meantime, Jul, Basilio’s beloved fiancée, has committed suicide to avoid succumbing to the goatish friar Padre Camarro, and the boy is now psychologically ready to become “one more enemy of this hideous colonial society.” He is quickly convinced by Simoun to get his personal revenge by helping to organize a pitiless massacre of any adult male not supporting the “revolution”.29 This is a political project, not an aesthetic gesture, and reminds us that the 1880s and 1890s were the heyday of spectacular assassinations, in Europe and the USA, committed by despairing and hopeful anarchists. The linkages will be discussed in detail in a later chapter.

  UNTRIED PLEASURES

  Finally, there is the episode in À rebours in which Des Esseintes picks up an attractive teenage boy and has a sexual relationship with him for several months, which is described summarily as follows:

  Des Esseintes n’y pensait plus sans frémir; jamais il n’avait supporté un plus attirant, et un plus impérieux fermage; jamais il n’avait connus des périls pareils, jamais aussi il ne s’était plus douloureusement satisfait.

  Des Esseintes could never think of it again without shuddering; never had he endured a more alluring, and a more imperious captivity; never had he experienced such perils, never too had he been more painfully satisfied.30

  One should not take these sentences out of context. Des Esseintes, like Huysmans himself, is heterosexual, with a long string of mistresses. The affair with the boy appears to be part of a Flaubertian search for plaisirs inéprouvés.

  There is no equivalent to this episode in El Filibusterismo, and Simoun appears to be almost asexual. Yet it may suggest a context for the half-bowdlerized description of the elegant “homeopathist” and his favorite disciple. The account in À rebours of Des Esseintes’s avant-garde tastes in poetry praises not only Mallarmé in the highest terms, but also Paul Verlaine (1842–96); and in a preface written for a reissue of the novel in 1903, Huysmans declared that he would have awarded Arthur Rimbaud (1854–89) the same accolade had he published a collection of his poems by the year À rebours originally came out. But Rimbaud’s epoch-making Les Illuminations only appeared two years later, in 1886, just before Noli me tangere, and well after Rimbaud had abandoned poetry and Europe.31

  Verlaine and Rimbaud had been “notoriously” tempestuous lovers in the 1870s, and some of their poems made clear references to their sexual relationship. Verlaine was a lifelong friend of Huysmans, and besides, in avant-garde literary circles it was a point of honor to disdain bourgeois, official, and good-Catholic conceptions of morality.32 Given Rizal’s sojourn in Paris in the second half of 1885, mid-point between the equally sensational À rebours and Les Illuminations, and his later frequent visits, his allusions to male and female homosexuality in El Filibusterismo are likely to have been stimulated in part by his perusal of Parisian books and periodicals. Lesbian affections, furthermore, were very chic in nineteenth-century French literature from the time of Balzac on. Conceivably, then these passages represent a certain claim to membership in Casanova’s “république mondiale des letters.”