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jasminjajarefeThe day after the humbling party, Ibarra goes to see María Clara, his love interest, a beautiful
daughter of Captain Tiago and an affluent resident of Binondo, Manila. Their long-standing love
is clearly manifested in this meeting, and María Clara cannot help but reread the letters her
sweetheart had written her before he went to Europe. Before Ibarra left for San Diego,
Lieutenant Guevara, a guardia civil, reveals to him the incidents preceding the death of his
father, Don Rafael Ibarra, a rich hacendero of the town.
According to the Lieutenant, Don Rafael was unjustly accused of being a heretic, in addition to
being a filibuster—an allegation brought forth by Father Dámaso because of Don Rafael’s non-
participation in the Sacraments, such as Confession and Mass. Father Dámaso’s animosity against
Ibarra’s father is aggravated by another incident when Don Rafael helped out on a fight
between a tax collector and a student fighting, and the former’s death was blamed on him,
although it was not deliberate. Suddenly, all of those who thought ill of him surfaced with
additional complaints. He was imprisoned, and just when the matter was almost settled, he got
sick and died in jail. Still not content with what he had done, Father Dámaso arranged for Don
Rafael’s corpse to be dug up and transferred from the Catholic cemetery to the Chinese
cemetery, because he thought it inappropriate to allow a heretic such as Don Rafael a Catholic
burial ground. Unfortunately, it was raining and because of the bothersome weight of the
cadaver, the men in charge of the burial decided to throw the corpse into the lake.
Revenge was not in Ibarra’s plans; instead he carries through his father’s plan of putting up a
school, since he believes that education would pave the way to his country’s progress (all over the
novel the author refers to both Spain and the Philippines as two different countries which form
part of a same nation or family, being Spain the mother and the Philippines the daughter).
During the inauguration of the school, Ibarra would have been killed in a sabotage had Elías—a
mysterious man who had warned Ibarra earlier of a plot to assassinate him—not saved him.
Instead the hired killer met an unfortunate incident and died. The sequence of events proved to
be too traumatic for María Clara who got seriously ill but was luckily cured by the medicine
Ibarra sent her
After the inauguration, Ibarra hosts a luncheon during which Father Dámaso, uninvited and
gate-crashing the luncheon, again insults him. Ibarra ignores the priest’s insolence, but when the
latter slanders the memory of his dead father, he is no longer able to restrain himself and
lunges at Father Dámaso, prepared to stab the latter for his impudence. As a consequence,
Dámaso excommunicates Ibarra. Father Dámaso takes this opportunity to persuade the already-
hesitant father of María Clara to forbid his daughter from marrying Ibarra. The friar wishes
María Clara to marry a Peninsular named Linares who just arrived from Spain.
With the help of the Captain-General, Ibarra’s excommunication is nullified and the Archbishop
decides to accept him as a member of the Church once again. But, as fate would have it, some
incident of which Ibarra had known nothing about is blamed on him, and he is wrongly arrested
and imprisoned. But the accusation against him is overruled because during the litigation that
followed, nobody could testify that he was indeed involved. Unfortunately, his letter to María
Clara somehow gets into the hands of the jury and is manipulated such that it then becomes
evidence against him.
Meanwhile, in Captain Tiago’s residence, a party is being held to announce the upcoming wedding
of María Clara and Linares. Ibarra, with the help of Elías, takes this opportunity and escapes
from prison. But before leaving, Ibarra talks to María Clara and accuses her of betraying him,
thinking that she gave the letter he wrote her to the jury. María Clara explains to Ibarra
that she will never conspire against him but that she was forced to surrender Ibarra’s letter to
her in exchange for the letters written by her mother even before she, María Clara, was
born. The letters were from her mother, Pía Alba, to Father Dámaso alluding to their unborn
child; and that she, María Clara, is therefore not the daughter of Captain Tiago, but of Father
Dámaso.
Afterwards, Ibarra and Elías board a boat and flee the place. Elías instructs Ibarra to lie down
and the former covers the latter with grass to conceal the latter’s presence. As luck would
have it, they are spotted by their enemies. Elías thinks he could outsmart them and jumps into
the water. The guards rain shots on the person in the water, all the while not knowing that
they are aiming at the wrong man.
María Clara, thinking that Ibarra has been killed in the shooting incident, is greatly overcome
with grief. Robbed of hope and severely disillusioned, she asks Father Dámaso to confine her into
a nunnery. Father Dámaso reluctantly agrees when María Clara threatens to take her own
life. demanding, “the nunnery or death!”[2] Unbeknownst to her, Ibarra is still alive and able to
escape. It was Elías who has taken the shots. It is Christmas Eve when Ibarra wakes up in
the forest, gravely wounded and barely alive. It is in this forest that Ibarra finds Basilio and his
lifeless mother, Sisa.
