The Quiapo Pair — El Filibusterismo

January moonlight fills Quiapo plaza with cosmorama music, lantern light, and crowds who come to see and be seen. Padre Camorra, Ben-Zayb, and Padre Salvi stroll through the fair while Camorra, drunk on champagne and appetite, nudges the journalist toward every pretty girl and mutters when he will become curate of Quiapo. He pinches Ben-Zayb's arm when Paulita Gomez passes in piña and rose silk on Isagani's arm, trailed by Doña Victorina, and the whole plaza stops to stare at her coquetry while Isagani reads every look as theft and every smile as betrayal.

Juanito Pelaez greets them with his hump more pronounced; Paulita answers coolly, but Doña Victorina calls Juanito her favourite over Isagani. Camorra nearly leaves his companions to follow Paulita until Ben-Zayb pulls him toward a booth of local wooden figures: Indians, clerks, soldiers, and friars carved in numbers that dwarf every other type. Rizal notes the sculptors idealise Manila friars as serene saints with crucifix and palm, unlike European caricatures of gluttony, yet the crowd still laughs when Ben-Zayb points to a lean friar writing a sermon by lamplight and asks whom it resembles.

Camorra retorts with The Philippine Press, an old woman ironing with a sad-iron the joke names as the press, and the party roars until Ben-Zayb joins in. Other dolls provoke argument: The Country of Abaka shows a bound man before Civil Guard rifles; critics quarrel over proportions and whether Indians can sculpt until Don Custodio declares they have aptitude but should make saints only. Ben-Zayb then matches a Chinaman to Quiroga, a British Indian to Simoun, and a figure to Padre Irene while the jeweler himself has already vanished unnoticed.

Camorra curses Simoun's stinginess, Ben-Zayb speculates he feared Leeds' mirror trick, and the group moves on to the famous sphinx without buying a single trifle from the artisans whose satire they enjoyed. Rizal pairs colonial spectacle with unpaid mockery: power strolls the fair, laughs at its own likeness, and leaves the craftsmen empty-handed. When Simoun disappears before the next illusion, who is already planning not to be the butt of the joke?