SINO SA KANILA SI PADRE DAMASO?
Kapag inisip natin si Padre Damaso, ang kontrabidang prayle sa librong Noli Me Tangere ni Gat Jose Rizal, sino sa dalawang prayle sa litrato ang naiimagine natin na kawangis nya?
Ako, yung letrang “A” na prayle. Nakapicture sa isip ko si Padre Damaso na halos kalbo, mataba o bundat, parang DOM, kamuhi-muhi. Ha ha! Ganun din ba kayo?
Naintriga ako dahil nung pinanood ko ang Noli Me Tangere The Opera, ibang Padre Damaso ang nakita ko – matipuno, matikas, gwapo, malakas ang dating. Yan ang ipinakita ni Nil’s Flores na gumanap na Padre Damason sa Opera.
May basehan ba ito?
While re-reading Noli Me Tangere, as translated by Harold Augenbraum for Penguin Classics, I was looking for the description of Padre Damaso, and in Page 8 in Chapter 1 titled “A Gathering,” Rizal described Padre Damaso:
“In contrast, the other was a Franciscan who spoke a great deal and gesticulated even more. Though his hair was beginning to gray, his constitution seemed to have remained robust. Regular features, a disquieting mien, a square jaw, and a Herculean frame made him look like a Roman patrician in disguise. We are reminded unfortunately of one of the three monks in Heine’s The Gods in Exile who crossed a Tyrolean lake at midnight on the day of the autumnal equinox, each time leaving an ice-cold silver coin in the terrified boatman’s hand. Unlike the monks, however, Fray Dámaso was not mysterious; he was lively, and if his voice had the quality of someone who has never held his tongue, who thinks himself as holy and what he says memorable, his gay, open laughter erased that disagreeable impression. One could even excuse the sight of bare feet and hairy legs that would have made the fortune of a Mendieta in the fairs at Quiapo.”
(The footnotes say Heine was a German writer, and Mendieta was a well-known public figure of the time who acted as an official gatekeeper of the mayoralty and carnival manager. My thanks to my staff Jem who encoded this paragraph.)
Huwaah! My notion of Padre Damaso was just completely shattered, just as I got surprised of Nil’s as the padre!
So why have we been thought of a fat and balding Padre Damaso when that was not his description in the book?
Ka Leny of the Youth Formation Division (YFD) and I discussed this. We came to the conclusion that the previous abridged editions that circulated in most schools many summers before my college days and until then and even today may have perpetuated the image of a fat and balding friar, not the “robust, regular features, a loud character, a square jaw, a muscular and strong body with gray hair!”
And why feature the padre as fat and bald whom one can easily hate? In order that the men in cloth, the clergy whose features are just like the features of ordinary people, would be spared of the description that Rizal wrote about them. In order that we could not see Padre Damaso in them.
The Padre Damaso that we thought of was an isolated one, not of the ordinary priest or religious. In that description, Rizal is telling us that Padre Damaso is the one who can easily steal the hearts of the Filipina. The padre is macho gwapito!
Read again the Noli and the Fili. This time, read the books that were translated by either Soledad Lacson or Harold Augenbraum. They are the most faithful ones to the original.
