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Herculean proportions, easy and open laughter, but withering looks, he waswont to bare his hairy legs and unshod feet. He habitually gave in to fits ofanger which often degenerated into violence, abusing his assistant priest andraining blows and kicks on the sacristans and students, which rightly won forhim the significant nickname, "Father Big Stick."Ignorant but conceited, he was no more refined and gentlemanly in hisrelations with the other social classes. From his Olympian throne he despisedthe government officials, tagging them as heretics and irrational, insulted thestudents from Europe and Manila, methodically qualifying them assubversives, and honored any person with liberal ideas with the not toopleasant titles of daft, vulgar mestizo, sniveller. But ironically, among theFranciscans, he enjoyed the reputation for eloquence, although his sermons,delivered in an unintelligible patois of Latin, Castilian, and Tagalog, wasnothing more than a litany of malaprops, ill-worded panegyrics ofFranciscans saints, and coarse and demeaning diatribes against the natives.But the most serious charge Rizal laid against Fray Damaso was hisrather loose morals. Just assigned to San Diego, he developed an intimatefriendship with the two most influential persons in town, Capitan Santiago(better known as Tiago) and the powerful Don Rafael Eibarramendia. Theirrelations quickly soured, however, into mutual hostility and suspicion. Onefine day, Fray Damaso, abusing his friend's trust, allowed himself certainintimate relations with Capitan Tiago's wife, the fruit of which was MariaClara, future fiancee" of Don Rafael's son, Crisostomo, the principal figure ofNoli me tangere. The break between D. Rafael Ibarra (short forEibarramendia) seems to have been occasioned initially by the departure ofthe latter's son for further studies in Europe—the nursery of heresies andanticlericalism in the priest's opinion.From then on, Fray Damaso regularly censured D. Rafael from the pulpit,alluding to him personally and then accusing him of heresy and subversionfor not attending mass, although the whole town knew that he was, in both hisprivate and public life, a man of unsullied reputation. One unfortunate day,the rich landowner of San Diego had an altercation with another Spaniardwho fell down, accidentally striking his head against a stone and dying on thespot. For this reason, the former was accused of homicide, thrown into jailwhere he languished for several years and finally died. He was buried, not inthe Catholic, but in the Chinese cemetery by order of his former friend, FrayDamaso. Later, by the same priest's order, his remains were disinterred andcast into the lake of Bai.117