Noli Me Tangere: Chapter 50 Summary & Analysis

Elías tells Ibarra that sixty years ago his (Elías’s) grandfather worked for a Spanish merchant in Manila. One night, the warehouse catches on fire, and the merchant blames Elías’s grandfather, who is subsequently dragged behind a horse in public as punishment. Everybody abandons him except for his wife, who is pregnant and starts begging on the family’s behalf, though nobody contributes any money. To make up for this, she starts working as a prostitute. Elías’s grandfather goes into the mountains with his wife and son, where the wife gives birth to a baby who dies soon thereafter. Unable to take the grief, the disgraced man hangs himself in front of his living son, who watches his father’s body decay and tries to care for his ailing mother.

Elías continues his story. Before long, he says, Manila authorities smell his grandfather’s decomposing body and arrest his wife for not reporting the death. She is pregnant once again, so they wait until she gives birth to whip her. They then release her into the mountains again, and she flees with her two children to a nearby province where the small family lives in the woods like animals, “hating and hated.” The older boy soon becomes a notorious bandit. The younger lives peacefully with his mother. One day not long after his older brother has been caught and persecuted for his crimes, the boy finds his mother dead underneath a tree, her stricken gaze fixed on a basket hanging in the overhanging tree—a basket containing his older brother’s bloody head.

The young boy in Elías’s story runs away from his dead mother and brother, finally reaching a town where nobody knows of his family’s misfortune. There, he works hard for a rich man and saves money. During this time, he meets a young woman and falls in love. When the two try to marry, though, officials ask for his identification papers, and his past comes to light. His lover’s father—a wealthy man—takes him to trial and he is eventually sent to prison. Meanwhile, his lover gives birth to twins, whom her father raises secretly. One of these twins is Elías, and his grandfather—the rich man—tells him his father is dead. The twins live a good life full of many riches.

One day Elías insults a distant relative, who retaliates by revealing the truth about his family history. In fact, it appears Elías’s father has been working in his grandfather’s house as a servant for the boy’s entire childhood. The relative finds this out and makes it known, and Elías renounces his family inheritance. His grandfather dies out of shame, and his twin sister loses her fiancé to another woman. This same sister disappears one day, and Elías learns that she drowned in a nearby lake with a knife shoved into her chest. Since this discovery, he has been wandering the Philippines as people slander his name and fear him.

Having heard his friend’s story, Ibarra says he understands why Elías feels the way he does about corruption and criminality. But he also challenges Elías’s notion that “justice should seek goodness to recompense virtue and to reeducate criminals,” saying that this idea is “utopian” and unrealistic. He says that he refuses to be the leader of a rebellion, asserting that it is wrong to force change upon a government body. Rather, he wants to effect change through other means. “I want good for [my country],” he says, “which is why I built a school. I seek it in education, for forward progress. Without light, there is no path.” Elías replies by saying that “without struggle there is no freedom,” but Ibarra holds fast to his point of view.

After Ibarra gets off the boat, Elías rows to a different beach, where he meets one of Captain Pablo’s men. “What should I tell the captain?” the man asks. “Tell him that Elías, if he doesn’t die before, will make good on his word,” Elías says.