Pablo Fidalgo’s dramatic poem about the abuse at his school in Vigo: “My childhood is a garden full of garbage”

There is no will to repair. Nor does he desire to become a spokesperson for anything. He doesn’t want to speak for others. That function is not yours, nor does it matter or interest you. Your task is more humble and, at the same time, so important. “My small victory, although it may sound corny, is to put all this into words,” says writer Pablo Fidalgo Lareo. “All this” are the abuses that, for decades, the Marists of Vigo committed against generations and generations of students. And “putting it into words” is The encyclopedia of paina stark dramatic poem based on his own experience at school, which allowed him, he says, “to recover his body, which was in a more confusing place.” “My childhood is a garden full of garbage,” he writes.

On June 1, 2021, Fidalgo Lareo (Vigo, 1984) had breakfast with the facade of his school on the cover of The Country. The journalist Íñigo Domínguez published the first in a series of stories which recounted the continued existence of “institutionalized abuse and sadistic violence” in the Marists of Vigo in the 1960s. “I was in Sicily that day, preparing The book of Sicilywhich I later premiered with the National Dramatic Center,” he says in conversation with elDiario.es, “and as soon as I read the news, I started to remember.” He had studied during the 90s, but all that awakened echoes in him. He began to write, and the ideas, images, sensations came to him “like a torrent.” “This is a life that is going to be filled with pain […] It is a body that has experienced strange things / It is a body that does not know what to think”, begins the prologue of the text.

“Slowly, as I wrote, I began to think that the scene was the means to tell this story,” he says. There are autobiographical novels, first-person testimonies, and investigative journalism about abuse in religious schools. Fidalgo Lareo was looking for another place: that of poetry, “even if it is narrative.” And documentary. The encyclopedia of painwhich is now published in a book by the Vigo company Solar de Editions, was two and a half years ago a poetic monologue embodied by the Argentine actor Gonzalo Cunill. “I always write with the people I want to present my works in their heads,” he says, “Gonzalo had also experienced similar situations in his country. “He grew up during the military dictatorship.” The piece went on stage at La Abadía, in Madrid, in 2022, and later traveled to Vienna, Berlin or Amada, in Portugal. But not to Galicia nor, of course, to Vigo.

“He yuyu It was basically a lynching.”

“Because even though I think so much about language / I am actually made of images that were recorded in me at school,” he writes, “I don’t remember that abuse of me, but, as I told you at the beginning / just because I don’t remember doesn’t mean that did not exist. / What I can remember was / that they treated us like beasts and urged us like dogs.” “The difficult thing was finding the tone, the position from which to write, which is firm, but very fragile,” he understands. From that point, The encyclopedia of pain It tries to unfold the chronology of that dull terror, for a moment of low intensity, and activate a memory that, in some way, was blocked. But it had had consequences on the writer’s adult life.

“You have to be willing to put your hands” in a dirty subject, but the piece is not written solely by its author. “It’s like a shared memory,” which Fidalgo Lareo also reached through conversations with former students of the center. “That’s how I remembered about the yuyuwhich I had erased from my head,” he points out. “He yuyu It was basically a lynching. / In that game, one of us was taken among all of us, / chosen for no reason, / and his balls were crushed against the goal post. / What I remember most about this is the terror of being next,” he writes, “and of being egged on by the teachers / and by the others, who were as terrified as I was.” All this terrain is slippery, orientation is not easy, and although it is clear what the source of the oppression was, the violent dynamic ended up engulfing the community.

“Sometimes it became a pack, a herd, of teachers and students,” he recalls. And that still scares him today. The school’s soccer team, in which he himself was a goalkeeper – this is how Cunill dresses in the play -, like a horde that turned in on itself. Some students, subjected to the pressure of harassment from superiors and peers, disappeared. One day they did not return to class and no one gave an explanation to the others. “One of my most vivid memories of that time is that: / harassed children who one day stop coming to school / and of whom no one returns to school / and of whom no one speaks again,” he writes, “as if they were disappeared.” , / as if they were people who did not resist, / as if it were natural selection.” The Maristas regime was an authoritarian regime, one of control, with victims and missing persons, Fidalgo Lareo relates in his documentary poem, written raw, with a clinical record, of zero degree.

The dictatorship did not leave religious schools

“The piece is militant,” he assumes, “but above all I wanted to understand. In fact, I try to think about the historical situation in which all this happened.” The national Catholicism of the dictatorship was not extinguished with the physical death of the dictator, he concludes. The initial information of The Country They allude to the decade of the 60s, The encyclopedia of painwhose subtitle is (This doesn’t come out of here)also talks about the 90s, when the author was a child. “Spain, in the nineties, had not really emerged from the dictatorship, / although they called it democracy. / Have you ever thought about that? / No one took care to change the methods or ideas in the teachers’ heads, / no one entered the religious schools, / no one was monitored,” he writes. And the past never ends passing away, furthermore: “I have no doubt that things like this continue to happen. Maybe in another way.” At best.

“We are children of overwhelm and abuse. / We are children of fear and silence”, he defines towards the end of the book. Written in crude, with an objectivist style, the relationship of this dramatic poem with his poetic work is direct. “I go back under the table. / Where you can’t hit the table. / There where the only possibility is to dump it,” said a poem by The neglect (Letraversal, 2022). But The encyclopedia of painalso an attempt to overturn the table, is, if possible, more brutal. He doesn’t share everything: “I think it could be more brutal even if I made other descriptions of what was happening.” And yet, his own hometown found it more than enough. There, the piece has not been able to go on stage and only last week was it confronted with its text. It was during the presentation of the Solar de Editions volume at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Marco).

“In Vigo, as in other places, there was a desire to hide and forget what happened,” he explains. It was not possible. And although no stage has hosted – yet – The encyclopedia of painthe presentation of the book was, according to Fidalgo Lareo, almost a compensation. A hundred people, of which almost 20 spoke. The theater as an assembly, defended by Bertolt Brecht. Something similar had already happened at the premiere, at the Teatro de la Abadía, in Madrid. “It turns out that it is something that, in the end, affects many people,” he points out, and recalls the Ombudsman’s calculations in 2023: some 440,000 people, 1.13% of the Spanish population, have suffered abuse in religious settings. “In the Marco I felt something very strong, a kind of fraternity that, suddenly, turns us into citizens who share a history,” he points out. And all on Rúa do Prínicipe, the epicenter of Vigo’s Christmas paroxysm: “Other things happen under the Christmas lights.”

Pablo Fidalgo trusts that, finally, The encyclopedia of pain (This does not leave here) I arrived in Galicia. “And the absence of the work is sometimes more significant than the work itself,” he points out. For now, in 2025, there will be performances in Mérida (Mexico), then in Bilbo and later in Rio de Janeiro.