The Story of the Moth, Part 1: The Text
"What preoccupied me the most was the death of the imprudent, but at the bottom of my heart, I didn't blame it."
An excerpt taken from Memoirs of a Student in Manila by Jose Rizal:1
One night, when everybody at home was already asleep, when all the lights in the globes had already been put out by blowing them off by means of a curved tin tube which seemed to me the most exquisite and wonderful toy in the world, I don’t know why my mother and I had remained watching beside the only light that in all Philippine houses burned all night long, and that went out precisely at dawn waking the people with its cheerful hissing.
My mother then was still young. After a bath her hair which she let down to dry, dragged half a hand-breadth on the floor, by which reason she knotted its end. She taught me to read in Amigo de los Niños, a very rare book, an old edition, which had lost its cover and which a very industrious sister of mine had covered again by pasting on its back a thick blue paper, the remnant of the wrapper of a bolt of cloth.
My mother [was] undoubtedly annoyed at hearing me read pitifully, for, as I didn’t understand Spanish, I could not give meaning to the phrases, took away the book from me. After scolding me for the drawings I had made on its pages, with legs and arms extended like a cross, she began to read asking me to follow her example.
My mother, when she could still see, read very well, recited, and knew how to make verses. How many times during Christmas vacation afterwards, she corrected my poems, making very apt observations. I listened to her full of childish admiration, marveling at the ease with which she made them and at the sonorous phrases that she could get from some pages that cost me so much effort to read and that I deciphered haltingly.
Perhaps my ears soon got tired of hearing sounds that to me meant nothing, perhaps due to my natural distraction, I gave little attention to the reading and watched more closely the cheerful flame around which some small moths fluttered with playful and uneven flight, perhaps I yawned, be what it might; the case was that my mother, realizing the little interest that I showed, stopped her reading and said to me:
“I’m going to read to you a very pretty story, be attentive.”
Upon hearing the word story, I opened my eyes expecting a new and wonderful one. I looked at my mother who leafed through the book as if looking for it, and I got ready to listen with impatience and wonder. I didn’t suspect that in that old book that I read without understanding, there could be stories, and pretty stories. My mother began to read to me the fable of the young and old moths, translating it to me piece by piece into Tagalog. At the first verses, my attention redoubled in such a way that I looked towards the light and fixed my attention on the moths that fluttered around it. The story could not have been more opportune.
My mother emphasized and commented a great deal on the warnings of the old moth and directed them to me, as if to tell me that those applied to me. I listened to her, and what a rare phenomenon [that] the light seemed to me more beautiful each time, the flame brighter, and I even envied instinctively the fate of those insects that played so cheerfully in its magical exhalation. Those that had succumbed were drowned in the oil; they didn’t frighten me.
My mother continued her reading, I listened anxiously, and the fate of the two insects interested me intensely. The light agitated its golden tongue on one side, a singed moth in one of those movements fell into the oil, clapped its wings for some time, and died.
That assumed for me the proportions of a great event and as a strange phenomenon that I have always observed in me when something excites me. It seemed to me that the flame and the moths were moving far away, very far, and that my mother’s voice acquired a strange, sepulchral timbre.
My mother finished the fable. I was not listening; all my attention, all my mind, and all my thoughts were concentrated on the fate of that moth: young, dead, full of illusions.
“You see?” My mother said to me, taking me to bed. “Don’t imitate the young moth and don’t be disobedient; you’ll get burned like it.”
I don’t know if I replied, promised something, or cried. The only thing I remember is that it took me a long time before I could sleep.
That story had revealed to me things unknown to me until then. To me moths ceased to be insignificant insects; moths talked and knew how to warn and advise as well as my mother did. The light seemed to be more beautiful, dazzling, attractive. I [understood] why moths fluttered around lights.
Advice and warnings resounded feebly in my ears. What preoccupied me most was the death of the imprudent, but at the bottom of my heart, I didn’t blame it. My mother’s solicitude didn’t have all the success that she hoped it would.
Analysis will come next week.
Jose Rizal, “Memoirs of a student in Manila”, in Jose Rizal, ed. Gregorio F. Zaide & Sonia M. Zaide (Quezon City: All-Nations Publishing Co., Inc.), 319-321