"We could hear the inconsolable cries of the dolls that the nuns locked away in the dark."

PalmThe first time that I went to school It was at the Augustinian nuns' house in Andratx. Until then, my life had been quite different. We lived on a property outside the town, in Son Esteve, and my world was the countryside. Animals were my companions: cats, dogs, the sound of the wind in the trees. I had no siblings and spent many hours with adults or with a cousin who came to visit from the surrounding farms. My educationBefore entering school, it was nature.

In the village there were also the children of day laborers and people who had come from the mainland. Those were the first children I heard speaking Spanish. In fact, the landowner, who practically lived on the estate, was from Córdoba, and he was the one who started teaching me Castilian.

When I was finally taken to the Augustinian school, the contrast was brutal. I found myself locked in a room with rows of dolls and nuns I had only ever seen from afar. All I could think about was getting out of there and never returning to that world. What shocked me most were the punishments. There was a room with a curtain, and if anyone talked, they would close it inside, plunging it into darkness. For a small doll, that was terrifying. You could hear them crying inconsolably.

Using death to scare small dolls

But at school, everything revolved around sin. They explained that many venial sins could eventually become mortal sins. I believed it all. So much so that one summer I stopped sleeping. I thought I had accumulated so many small sins that I would eventually die. I remember an aunt of mine saw me very distressed and asked me what was wrong. When I told her, she calmly told me that I hadn't committed any mortal sins. That conversation reassured me greatly. I was always grateful to her for it. In fact, I think that episode made the family realize that this atmosphere was affecting me too much, and soon after, they took me to Palma.

I went to live with some cousins ​​on Joan Crespí Street, right next to the Sagrat Cor school. Everything changed there. It was the first time I wore a uniform: winter, summer, and even a PE uniform, plus a bib. There was a seamstress in the same complex who made them. There were a lot of us students: three classes per grade, with more than thirty dolls in each class. There were punishments too, but they were more psychological. When you went to the bathroom, you had to take a piece of wood they called the "board," because the doors couldn't be closed. You put that board over the door to indicate it was occupied.

But the way they worked was extraordinary. I came from a world where I didn't even know what a school playground was, or what a physical education class with games and ropes was like. There I discovered everything. We worked with worksheets, in groups, and then we sat in a circle to discuss what we had done and what difficulties we had encountered. Looking back, I think that school was a kind of pilot school for what would later become the 1970 education law. Parents even came to see how we worked. They held open house events so they could observe our system. Every Saturday they gave us a card with the week's evaluation: behavior, tidiness, habits. It could be "good," "very good," "satisfactory," or "unsatisfactory." Red was the worst.

Incipient sex education

We also went on excursions, visited monasteries, and occasionally participated in spiritual retreats: a week away from school dedicated to religion. In our first year of high school, we even had a sex education session. A mother with many children came to explain it to us. I didn't explain much, only that women have a hymen and that it should be monitored because it breaks during the first sexual encounters or, as they said, even while horseback riding.

During those years I also learned about the social weight of accents. One day, in town, a doll from Puerto de Andratx said to me, "Look, another one with a country accent." I was so embarrassed that I decided not to speak. I went more than two months without saying a word in class. It was torture for me, because I needed to play and socialize.

Academically, I was doing well. I got very good grades, except in math. I especially remember a scene in religion class when a student asked what was going on with the theory of evolution because if God had created us in his image… and we came from coins. The nun got very angry and sent her out of the class. As she was leaving, the student said, "Yes, Darwin said so." She was referring to Charles Darwin, a name that was hardly ever mentioned in religious schools. The next day, in the playground, that same student was with her father, who had argued with the nuns. When she came back into the classroom, she simply said, "Darwin is a lot of Darwin." I also remember perfectly the day Luis Carrero Blanco was assassinated. We were told that they would call the families and that we could go home because it was a national day of mourning. We didn't even know who he was.

And meanwhile, although most of us were very Mallorcan, we didn't speak Catalan at school. It wasn't until I was nineteen that I discovered a friend of mine also knew it. Neither of us knew about the other. We had simply internalized that speaking that language in there was inappropriate. When someone did, the nun would come out into the hallway and say, "Silence, everyone, I heard Mallorcan being spoken." And we were all punished.

'My school years This is a series from ARA Baleares that reconstructs what education was like in Mallorca, decade by decade, through first-hand accounts. This week we delve into the 1960s.

*Text prepared based on the interviewee's testimony