First bullets kill and then oblivion kills

2023-11-11 11:49:22

In times marked by crude words, vomitous truculence, and even what I do not hesitate to describe as literary and cinematographic junk, it is not easy to appreciate the smooth and sustained pulse of Patricia Font, director of The teacher who promised the sea.

For four years I investigated in depth the life of Antonio Benaiges, who worked from 1934 to 1936 as a teacher in a tiny town in the emptiest and deepest Spain: Bañuelos de Bureba. Forty years later, from 1979 to 1983, that town in Burgos was my first destination as a rural doctor. So the Benaiges children were, as adults, my first patients. Not a single one ever spoke to me about his teacher. It doesn’t seem strange to me if I think about the attempted coup d’état of 1981. Still, as one of them commented, it was time to “keep our nose tied.”

From that long subsequent investigation emerged my non-fiction novel That Sea We Never Saw, now in its fifth edition. Contact was also born with Francesc Escribano, one of the producers of the recently released film. It was Francesc himself who contacted me to review his script… I reviewed up to nine scripts, with abrupt discussions between both of us to reconcile points of view, something not always easy in such a complex story.

So let’s go to the movie. It was not easy to translate a story that was both so delicate and so violent into images. On the morning of July 19, 1936, Sunday, Antonio Benaiges was arrested and brutally beaten in the Plaza Mayor of Briviesca. He had gone out into the street wearing a striking red shirt on which, it seems, a hammer and sickle were engraved… Such a shirt was his breakfast that morning. The Falangists who detained him forced him, in part, to swallow it. His teeth were knocked out by rifle butt blows. Made a Behold the man, He was taken for a ride in an open van through the streets of Briviesca, a town that he loved deeply. There he wrote in his newspaper, La Voz de la Bureba. There he had collaborated in the founding of the Casa del Pueblo. There he gave the May 1, 1936 rally from the balcony of the town hall. There he had met her girlfriend and there he danced with her, every Saturday, next to the kiosk in the square.

He was a man of one piece, politically and socially committed to the weakest. But, above all, he was an exceptional teacher, who taught his students using a revolutionary method: the Freinet technique. During the two courses that Antonio Benaiges taught in Bañuelos, the children themselves printed twelve charming little magazines that I had the pleasure of reproducing in facsimile edition, grouped under the name Cuadernos de vida. He also played music for them on the first gramophone they saw…

Those very young schoolchildren had not seen something else: the sea.

The booklet they wrote with this title (The sea: vision of children who have never seen it) It is a prodigy of innocence and tenderness: “The sea will be very big, very wide, very deep. Fernando says that it will be like from Vallejopablo to the Quebrantalinos hill in width, meters and meters deep.” This was written by the boy Antonio García Hernáez in January 1936, precisely the boy who kept the school photograph that has become famous.

That summer of 1936 would have been the happiest in the lives of those children: the teacher had promised to take them to his family’s farmhouse in Montroig del Camp, lapped by the Mediterranean.

He couldn’t keep his promise. On the late night of July 19, he was taken from the Briviesca prison to be murdered at a nearby crossroads, not in the La Pedraja graves, which had not begun to be dug that first day of the military uprising. “He was bleeding from all parts of his body,” said one of his cellmates, Rafael Martínez.

That is the story that my novel reflects That sea that we never saw, in the book by Francesc Escribano The teacher who promised the sea, and in the excellent film of the same name by Patricia Font.

Her delicacy as a director has been extraordinary in pouring into images a film that spares us, through a wise ellipsis, all the horror that we do not see, but sense. In the education of children she spares no details and she shows us a wonderful teacher and wonderfully played by Enric Auquer. The work of the rest of the actors is also worth mentioning, especially that of the children selected in a casting that took place in the city of Burgos. Without forgetting the art direction of Josep Rosell, who recreates credible settings and environments in that Spain of 1936, so far away and so close at the same time.

The second common thread of the film may seem more dubious, developed in the present day and whose purpose is to discover in La Pedraja the remains of Ariadna’s great-grandfather, played with a permanently angry face by Laia Costa. There is also a long ellipsis here that deprives us of understanding the character…, but we sense the depression in which he lives and, in my opinion, this personal story would have only added footage to the film and distracted the viewer from what really it matters.

Although the remains of Antonio Benaiges are not in the graves of La Pedraja, from where 135 bodies have been exhumed, forgetting this parallel history would have been renouncing the present and continuing to condemn the many thousands of victims buried in the graves and gutters to oblivion. which, to our shame, continues to exist throughout Spain.

The Master Who Promised the Sea is a film worth seeing: for its rigor, for its emotionality, for its fight against forgetfulness.

I apologize to the reader for ending this review as I began it, with a phrase from my novel: “First bullets kill and then oblivion kills. Let’s not forget it.”