La Madrecita and Carmen in 1998
Carmen was a favourite of the Madrecita.
No, Dad I wasn't. She loved everyone.
Yes, you were. I was there. You were one of her favourites.
Tere found the school while I was in the UK looking for work. She had to work too, and the first school they found was awful. She had to leave Eve there when she was very little. Eve used to wail she didn't want to go. Previously all three children had been to good schools. A school called CIPO, a Montessori School in Guadalajara, and then, when CIPO closed, they went to a Waldorf school run by Tere's cousin Beatrice.
Eve was there when she was one, barely a toddler. A memory will stay with me for ever from that school. We went to the opening day. The walls were draped with cloths in beautiful yellows and russets - silk cotton and wool. There were interesting wooden toys tidied away and baskets full of coloured objects. And the children began to sing to us spontaneously, joyously, movingly.
Martin cabalga ligero...
And I can hear the tune clearly but can't recall all of the words - a song like a Christmas carol.
St Martin was a soldier in the army of the Emperor Constantine. It was winter, freezing. When he found a beggar at the gates of the city of Amiens he took off his coat and cut it in half with his sword and gave one half to the beggar.
We were happy, but puzzled. This was a very unusual open day. They showed us their drawings and the whole programme seemed to be about inspiring children's artistic sensibility naturally. Perhaps the children sensed our puzzlement. There were only seven of them.
To understand further you have to know that Beatrice lived in Germany for many years and she trained as a Waldorf educationalist and that all three of her brothers are very talented classical musicians. Her sister was a mathematical whizz kid. An interesting family. Not my story to tell, but I might.
In any event, while I was looking for work in the UK (and I found it) Tere had to cope with the kids on her own for a year. Sadly Beatrice's school closed down and there were few alternatives. Eventually she found the little Catholic School on Avenida Vallarta, very near us. Tere begged them and so they accepted Eve too, even though she was only 3.
La Madrecita was Carmen's teacher and she was very kind to her. Chick's teacher was a very young nun; pretty, dark, thin; enthusiastic and inexperienced. Eve was the school mascot, the favourite for a while, the smallest and the cutest. She had, and still has, amazing eyes and everyone would stop us in the street to say.
Que bonitos ojos! Que bonitos ojos!
But La Madrecita, one of the saintliest women I have ever known, (as saintly as my mother-in-law Teresa) , had a special place in her heart for Carmen. She was also the headmistress.
We invited the nuns round for a meal and we attended all the school events and it was such a contrast to the Montessori and Waldorf schools. The school emphasized traditional learning styles and religion. Somehow it complimented the education they had in the first schools they went to.
Or perhaps it didn't. Perhaps it also undermined their confidence. But aren't all children undermined by traditional school systems when they are asked to conform? The sit behind silly little desks and repeat things in an anonymous chorus and lose somethign of their individual identity.
Perhaps one of the highlights of the school was when two identical twin sisters, friends of Carmen, (who we arranged to take over our house when we left Guadalajara), began to beat all comers in the Torneo Del Saber on Channel 6. They got to the semi finals. And every time they came on everyone heard the name of the school. We booked a ticket to be in the audience at the final, but they fell at the last hurdle.
Very often I would chauffeur the Nuns to their house just off the avenue. It was a chance to get to know them better and chat. I wanted to experience La Madrecita's grace. Click on the picture of her at the top. Perhaps you will see the grace we saw. A rare thing. What I understood was that la Madrecita may have had a great heart, but she had seen very little of the world. Her sense of humour and fun was quite simple.
But the miserabilist priests at the local church decided they no longer wanted the noise and problems associated with having a school attached to their church. The nuns couldn't pay enough. The suspicion was that the priests were going to start their own school. So they turfed the nuns out who had been there for nearly 30 years.I helped them move. I was there for a day lifting pieces of furniture - bookshelves, long tables, desks, and putting them into a large van which went back and forth, back and forth.
The nuns could use all the volunteers they could find.
But instead of closing the school, the nuns opened a little further down the road in an adapted house closer to the centre of the city. A very large house. They didn't adapt very much. The floors were marble and the passageways were narrow. La Madre Conchita replaced La Madrecita. She became Chicks' teacher and she was not as cheerful or enthusiastic as his previous teacher. She liked the gorier, scarier bits of the bible. But in private she was sweet and affectionate, and unsure of herself too.
But the coup de grace was a robbery. Thieves broke in and took everything of value including the computers which had been donated by parents.The school closed a month later but by then we had moved to Mexico City. Not even la Madre Conchita could save it.
We moved to Mexico City and the children went to the nun's sister school. We didn't see La Madrecita, she was not transferred to Mexico City. After living most of her life in Jalisco she was sent to the main school in Puebla.
I like to tell myself that it made less of an adjustment for the children, but they did have to adjust. They were outsiders for a while. Tapatios, from Guadalajara. The journey there was fast, but the journey back from the school in Mexico City was nightmarish because the school was so far to the South and I hit rush hour. We were slap bang in the centre near Chapultepec.
On Wednesdays I would have to go and pick the children up on public transport and it was a very long journey.Perhaps an experience with Eve in a Guadalajara market had traumatised me. We nearly lost her that day. I don't want to think about it.
I was paranoid that something might happen to us in the rush of a million commuters and I panicked every Wednesday fearing that I might lose one of my children in the melee and so I dragged them along by their little hands and barked orders as the subway doors hissed shut and marshalled them through concourses and I feel bad about it now.
Carmen looked for an excuse for me the other day.
You probably saved us lots of times in Mexico City Dad.
Yes, thank you,maybe. But I shouted a lot.
Inexcusable.
Perhaps my favourite time of the day was driving them to school. We would go fast or slow as they preferred. Usually fast because we were late and we would sing and laugh on the way to school. I used to sing the Mexican national anthem at the top of my voice which they would all find very annoying. The first thing all Mexican school children have to do in the morning is salute the flag which is brought in by the abanderado and an escort. I am still irritated that Chicks was never made an abanderado.
Eve would have to enter half an hour later than Carmen and John and so we stayed outside and there was the Tamale seller. These were the best Tamales in the world. Everyone came for the Tamales there. Builders with plaster covering their hands, people in suits, school children and their mothers and a Mercedes 7 limousine would slink up and the chauffeur get out to order.
There were always tamales rojos and negros and Tamales stuffed with cream and strips of poblano chile and sweet tamales. Eve and I gloried in them together. I would sit her on the bonnet of the car, still hot, ticking as it cooled. Both of us would have an atole, Eve a chocolate one and I a vanilla. We enjoyed our tamales together and I would send Eve into school convinced that, though it was a less friendly and welcoming place than the school in Guadalajara that she would be fortified and in good spirits.
The last time we say la Madrecita was on the day of the founder of the nun's order. The children went to buses to the school and we drove there. It was a very large school. The children paraded and performed but though we wanted to see ours we were looking for La Madrecita, who was there somewhere.
I think Carmen found her. And perhaps she was surprised by how happy we all were to see her. She was no longer the headmistress, just a teacher. Her banishment probably reminded of her 'failure' in Guadalajara often. In any event she was a little withdrawn. Resigned to God's will. But she was still la Madrecita.
We surprised her. Carmen and Eve gave her long big hugs. We thanked her for her kindness in Guadalajara and we remembered times together there. We made it very clear to her how important her acceptance of Eve had been to us and what an impact we thought her affectionate and human management of the school in Guadalajara had made.
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