It will be a memorial to Don Perogrullo, another one, but life in the ’60s had a different pace that keeps hitting me with memories. For example, the country boy that I was, apart from taking the first breath in the huge and vanished civil hospital, counted on his fingers and he had many visits to Cienfuegos. In any clinical laboratory or in the office of Dr. Manolo Romero in Santa Elena, between Prado and Cristina.
During the summer holidays of 1969, two events occurred that for me amalgamated themselves between a mass of neurons in varying degrees of preservation: the moon landing of Apollo XI on July 20 and the conquest of the baseball world championship in Santo by the national team on Sunday, August 26.
Neil Armstrong’s small-big step on the surface that adorns the best nights and Rigoberto Rosique’s golden hit in Quisqueya, confused in the memories of a boy counting the days to “come to town and the trap”, as later Poemed by El Trovador.
The also solid building of the old College of the Jesuit Fathers, a carpenter’s square with its corners in San Fernando and O’Donell, finally welcomed us on the half cloudy morning of September 20th.
The parents almost took us by the hand and left us in front of our bewildered peasantry in this mass of embedded masonry, three stories and windows carved by the best smiths of Cienfuegos. Inside, corridors as wide as a street and a mirror in Gulliver mode, framed by fine woods.
Nationalized in 1961 and renamed in honor of Roda’s martyr, Raúl Suárez Martínez, the religious school was then better known as El Concentrado. Who knows which bureaucrat came up with the little name, alluding to the concentration of sixth-grade students from some rural areas of the Cienfuegos region. At the same time, however, there was also a concentration on the tenth grade, since the primary schools in the communities only went up to the ninth grade. Completing this mix of age and learning were the aspiring high school seniors who lived out of town and stayed and supported themselves with the “Jesuits”.
Inside the institution
Nereida Acea was the name we certainly first learned upon arriving at the campus that was designed to round out our elementary education. A small, black-skinned woman, enforcing respect without a rod. It could be that the years of blood-soaked letters had already passed.
From the teachers, that’s what they were called in elementary school, I remember Gallardo, from mathematics; Rafael Fernández Gelpi, various science subjects; Omar Alfonso, Spanish, and Pedro Juan, Physical Education. And there I stay. In 54 years, a lot of water has flown under the bridges of all rivers in the world.
The classroom windows overlooking San Fernando Street were a luxurious vantage point from which to explore the city to the south, a visual scene bounded by the bay on the right and the first peaks of the hills on the left. The sea breeze, an added value for the joyful act of learning.
Socializing with boys and girls who came to the city from their other small agrarian geographies was an extension of life in the making, crossing the borders of the home region for the first time.
In the concentrated class, there was a sixth-grade enrollment graded by age; the 11-year-olds in Group 1, the 12-year-olds in Group 2, the 13-year-olds in Group 3, and so on, followed this simple arithmetic logic until they reached 6, generally they are candidates for recruits in the forthcoming conscription and they are about to make their debut in the club of marriageable women and housewives. Designs from a time that was still marked by school delays.
inner hall of the center
In this confusion of different ages, love, romance or just falling in love, in order to be happy, had to cut a lot of stuff. The world lived through the years of the sexual revolution that came in the same combination of The Beatles and French May. Then there’s the cocktail of hormones that the brown and cream-colored uniforms hid. But compared to the current genital struggle, these erotic skirmishes would be ridiculous. For some, a kiss on the cheek made him a candidate for hero of the week in his class.
All of these things, including the soccer guerrillas, the formations at midnight sharp in the rectangular patio, the quasi-military scrub and Sunday visits from parents, that there was no passport, I remembered a few days ago while San Fernando walked up the stairs like someone looking for Glory.
The old masonry of the school, reserved for wealthy city kids before giving way to the kids, sweating and furrowing, fell in love with the cell phone camera flirting with the usual grates at the same time orphaned wooden windows on the upper floors and the restoration with the first conquests in the first Floor. And in the background the music of a kind of hammer and a laborious saw.