Simoun (Ibarra) Character Analysis

“[…] I stoked the greed, I helped it along, and the injustices and abuses multiplied. I fomented crimes and acts of cruelty so that the people would get used to the idea of death. I contributed to their anxiety so that, when they ran screaming from it, they would look for any solution at all. I shackled business to such an extent that with the country reduced to poverty and misery in the end the people would have nothing to fear. I put measures in place to deplete the treasury, and if that weren’t enough to create a popular uprising, I hit them where it would hurt the most: I made it so that the vulture itself would insult the body that gave it life and would corrupt it.”

“What will you accomplish with Spanish, especially with the few who will actually speak it? Kill off your originality? Subordinate your thoughts to the minds of others and instead of being free, you will really make yourselves into slaves. Nine out of ten of you who think of yourselves as members of the educated upper middle class are renegades to your own country! Those among you would speak that language neglect their own to such an extent that they neither speak it or understand it, and how many of you actually pretend not to understand a single world!”

The Chinaman respected the jeweler a great deal not only for his wealth but for the rumored influence he had over the captain-general. It was said that Simoun favored the Chinaman’s aspirations and was in favor of the consulate. A certain Sinophobic newspaper had made veiled references to him, though with a great deal of periphrasis, indirection, and sly suggestion, and in its well-known polemic enjoined the partisan newspaper of the people of the queue. Some of the more circumspect people added with nudges and winks that the Dark Eminence counseled the general to value the Chinese while depreciating the rigorous dignity of the natives.

“To subjugate a people,” he said, “there is nothing like humiliating them and debasing them in their own eyes.”

Simoun suddenly stopped speaking, as if he had been cut off. Somewhere inside him a voice asked if he, Simoun, were not indeed part of the trash of that damned city, perhaps even its most destructive ferment. And as the dead rise at the sound of the eternal trumpet, a thousand bloody ghosts, desperate shadows of murdered men, dishonored women, fathers torn from their families, vices engendered and fostered, virtues rejected now rose up in the echoes of that mysterious question. For the first time in his career as a criminal, since Havana, when through vice and bribery he had decided to create a means to carry out his plans, a man without faith, without patriotism, without conscience, for the first time in that era of his life something inside of him came out and protested his actions.

Rest in peace, sad daughter of my wretched country! Bury in your tomb the charms of youth, withered in their prime. When a people cannot provide its maidens with a peaceful home, a shelter of holy freedom, when a man can leave only dubious words to a widow, tears to his mother, slavery to his children, it’s better to condemn you all to perpetual chastity, drowning in your womanhood a future, damned generation.

“Every man!” Simoun repeated in a sinister tone of voice. “Every man, indios, mestizos, Chinamen, Spaniards, everyone you encounter without valor or energy…it’s essential to renew the race! Cowardly fathers only beget slavish sons and it’s not worth it to destroy only to rebuild with rotten materials. What? You’re trembling? You’re shaking, you’re afraid to sow death? What is death? What is a holocaust of twenty thousand wretches? Twenty thousand fewer wretches and millions of wretchednesses starved at birth!”

“What will the world say when they see such carnage?”

“The world will applaud, like it always does, saying that the strongest, and the most violent, are in the right,” Simoun answered with a cruel smile. “Europe applauded when the Western nations sacrificed millions of Indians in the Americas, and surely there are not to be found much more moral or peaceful nations. […] Europe applauded when a powerful Portugal despoiled the Moluccan Islands, it applauds as England destroys the primitive peoples in the Pacific to implant its emigrants there. Europe will applaud the way it applauds the end of a play, the end of a tragedy. The masses will hardly take notice, in the end, and will see only the effect. Commit a crime well and you will be admired and you’ll end up with more supporters than you would have had you committed a virtuous act, carried out with timidity and modesty.”

While these scenes unrolled in the street, in the dining room the greater gods handed around a piece of parchment on which the fateful words were written in red ink:

Mane Thecel Phares

Juan Crisóstomo Ibarra

“The glory of saving a country doesn’t mean having to use the measures that contributed to its ruin! You have believed that what crime iniquity have stained and deformed, another crime and another iniquity can purify and redeem! That’s wrong! Hatred creates nothing but monsters. Only love can bring about wondrous things. Only virtue is redemptive! No, if someday our country can be free, it will not be by vice and crime, not by corruption of our children, by cheating some, and buying others. No, redemption supposes virtue, sacrifice, and sacrifice, love!”

“[…] I stoked the greed, I helped it along, and the injustices and abuses multiplied. I fomented crimes and acts of cruelty so that the people would get used to the idea of death. I contributed to their anxiety so that, when they ran screaming from it, they would look for any solution at all. I shackled business to such an extent that with the country reduced to poverty and misery in the end the people would have nothing to fear. I put measures in place to deplete the treasury, and if that weren’t enough to create a popular uprising, I hit them where it would hurt the most: I made it so that the vulture itself would insult the body that gave it life and would corrupt it.”

“What will you accomplish with Spanish, especially with the few who will actually speak it? Kill off your originality? Subordinate your thoughts to the minds of others and instead of being free, you will really make yourselves into slaves. Nine out of ten of you who think of yourselves as members of the educated upper middle class are renegades to your own country! Those among you would speak that language neglect their own to such an extent that they neither speak it or understand it, and how many of you actually pretend not to understand a single world!”

The Chinaman respected the jeweler a great deal not only for his wealth but for the rumored influence he had over the captain-general. It was said that Simoun favored the Chinaman’s aspirations and was in favor of the consulate. A certain Sinophobic newspaper had made veiled references to him, though with a great deal of periphrasis, indirection, and sly suggestion, and in its well-known polemic enjoined the partisan newspaper of the people of the queue. Some of the more circumspect people added with nudges and winks that the Dark Eminence counseled the general to value the Chinese while depreciating the rigorous dignity of the natives.

“To subjugate a people,” he said, “there is nothing like humiliating them and debasing them in their own eyes.”

Simoun suddenly stopped speaking, as if he had been cut off. Somewhere inside him a voice asked if he, Simoun, were not indeed part of the trash of that damned city, perhaps even its most destructive ferment. And as the dead rise at the sound of the eternal trumpet, a thousand bloody ghosts, desperate shadows of murdered men, dishonored women, fathers torn from their families, vices engendered and fostered, virtues rejected now rose up in the echoes of that mysterious question. For the first time in his career as a criminal, since Havana, when through vice and bribery he had decided to create a means to carry out his plans, a man without faith, without patriotism, without conscience, for the first time in that era of his life something inside of him came out and protested his actions.

Rest in peace, sad daughter of my wretched country! Bury in your tomb the charms of youth, withered in their prime. When a people cannot provide its maidens with a peaceful home, a shelter of holy freedom, when a man can leave only dubious words to a widow, tears to his mother, slavery to his children, it’s better to condemn you all to perpetual chastity, drowning in your womanhood a future, damned generation.

“Every man!” Simoun repeated in a sinister tone of voice. “Every man, indios, mestizos, Chinamen, Spaniards, everyone you encounter without valor or energy…it’s essential to renew the race! Cowardly fathers only beget slavish sons and it’s not worth it to destroy only to rebuild with rotten materials. What? You’re trembling? You’re shaking, you’re afraid to sow death? What is death? What is a holocaust of twenty thousand wretches? Twenty thousand fewer wretches and millions of wretchednesses starved at birth!”

“What will the world say when they see such carnage?”

“The world will applaud, like it always does, saying that the strongest, and the most violent, are in the right,” Simoun answered with a cruel smile. “Europe applauded when the Western nations sacrificed millions of Indians in the Americas, and surely there are not to be found much more moral or peaceful nations. […] Europe applauded when a powerful Portugal despoiled the Moluccan Islands, it applauds as England destroys the primitive peoples in the Pacific to implant its emigrants there. Europe will applaud the way it applauds the end of a play, the end of a tragedy. The masses will hardly take notice, in the end, and will see only the effect. Commit a crime well and you will be admired and you’ll end up with more supporters than you would have had you committed a virtuous act, carried out with timidity and modesty.”

While these scenes unrolled in the street, in the dining room the greater gods handed around a piece of parchment on which the fateful words were written in red ink:

Mane Thecel Phares

Juan Crisóstomo Ibarra

“The glory of saving a country doesn’t mean having to use the measures that contributed to its ruin! You have believed that what crime iniquity have stained and deformed, another crime and another iniquity can purify and redeem! That’s wrong! Hatred creates nothing but monsters. Only love can bring about wondrous things. Only virtue is redemptive! No, if someday our country can be free, it will not be by vice and crime, not by corruption of our children, by cheating some, and buying others. No, redemption supposes virtue, sacrifice, and sacrifice, love!”