Donkeys also have memories, the teacher explained to José, because the donkey took revenge for the boy pricking him with the needle of a gramophone. Paula and “Felipa” were “cracked” by the candy that her father brought her from Briviesca and it made them laugh a lot. Florentina once saw a train and calculated that it would be as long as “from here to the fountain.” Baldomero boasted of having roasted 20 potatoes, used 16, and entertained the teacher with two, who liked them “very hot,” while he worked at the printing press. These children’s adventures and learning were published in the artisanal school magazine of Bañuelos de Bureba (Burgos), coordinated by the Catalan republican teacher Antonio Benaiges. Such adventures appeared in the January 1936 issue. There were seven months left before Benaiges would be beaten, paraded around the town and shot in the moor. His modern teaching methods were condemned and the Francoists executed him.
The teaching staff never appeared but their educational legacy lives on after decades of oblivion and fear. The cold hits the silent streets of Bañuelos, sneaks through the hinges of the windows and passes through the hole of a thick iron key in the lock of an old abandoned house, as if inviting someone to occupy it. At the end of Calle Mayor emerges a stone house with a white plaque with blue letters. “Public school,” reads the building where Benaiges lived and educated for two years after arriving there in 1934. The stone walls and the century-old gate precede a room dominated by a large reproduction of a photo from the time: 16 children, some sitting and others standing, looking at the camera. There are as many children as there are neighbors left in Bañuelos today. Some wear long leotards, the girls wear coats with wide lapels and the contrast in heights shows the different ages of that rural classroom. Behind, tall, solemn, the professor who promised to see the sea in his native Montroig, in Tarragona. The rebels prevented it. His replacement, a Falangist teacher.
Ascensión Rojas and Javier González, 68 and 66 years old, observe the image. The original appeared “in the pigeon house” of Antonio García, a deceased former student. She smiles nostalgically, he shakes his head. The woman studied there as a child, before going to Madrid and meeting her husband. She never heard anything, beyond disconnected comments, about the victim. Fear spread in Bañuelos after the fascist uprising of July 18, 1936 and the immediate murder of Benaiges, pointed out by traditionalist elites for his pro-Republic status and teaching students to open horizons under the innovative Freinet method, which connected them with international schools. “I never heard from the teacher, nothing was talked about, there was a lot of fear,” laments Rojas, a tenant of those old desks, still adorned with drawings of owls or eighth notes, decades after the generations stimulated by Benaiges. The school-house preserves the blackboard used by the teacher and the box where he stored the types used to write the booklets of his pupils using a printing press. González quotes the doctor José Antonio Abella, a doctor in those places, author of the book about what happened to the teacher after discovering his story despite the silence of those elderly patients, once enthusiastic students.
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“The children chose the topics, wrote, corrected with the teacher and then published them themselves with the printing press,” says the man regarding the material used then, not original because the fascists burned it. The notebooks suffered the same fate except for those kept by Benaiges and now replicated by the association thanks to the great-nephews of the Tarragona native. More than 1,000 people visited the town to see this house-museum in 2022 with the stimulus of a story replicated in the cinema, in theaters this Friday, and in theaters. The couple is shocked by how the nearby Briviesca City Council (PP-Vox), a town where Benaiges went to dances or to read republican manifestos, censored the play this summer even though the cast minimized the cache and everything was ready. Rojas gets emotional trying to understand “why there are people, even young people, who continue to want there to be ‘us’ and ‘them’”, some “sides” currently expressed in the form of silence: even the children of those students urged their parents to not to recall the issue.
The couple fondly remembers the works carried out on the semi-ruined building. She had a “bomb” time in those classrooms where the wood floor was still stained with the ink of those kids converted into editors. Now there is barely a concrete base. The interventions are paid for by the association with its meager funds. González ironically talks about public aid: the Provincial Council of Burgos barely granted them 300 euros for four repairs, the Junta de Castilla y León (PP-Vox) ignores the issue and not even the mayor (PP, before Podemos), responsible for this municipal building, gives him visibility: “When the actors of the film came he did not want to receive them because he was very busy.” “This shouldn’t be political!” his wife exclaims.
The effort to resurrect and value the figure of Benaiges could not be completed with the discovery of the body. Many bodies of reprisals from Burgos appeared in the common grave of La Pedraja, scrutinized for signs of the teacher, murdered at the age of 33. He never showed up. The little known about his death is that he was shot on some road next to yellow seas of grain.
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