I will never be able to forget Don Victoriano, my teacher. To take away the title “Don” would be to disfigure his memory, and I seek quite the opposite. He was a memorable teacher in the classrooms of the beloved school in San Lorenzo Street in my hometown. From the time I was six years old until I was eleven, when I entered the Claretian seminary, he was a craftsman in the craft of turning us into people. We learned many lessons from him: Those of the old “Alvarez” encyclopaedia and those of the never stale encyclopaedia of life. His aristocratic name was part of his personality, as was his characteristic moustache or the receding hairline on his forehead. Our teacher was a complete and complete man: a pedagogue, witty, wise, an artist, up-to-date, sharp… and above all, a Christian. On Saturdays, without missing a single one, he would explain to the children in his school the Gospel of the corresponding Sunday. I still remember some of his simple and wise explanations that more than made up for the boring parish sermons. He was never a holy water beatific, although he attended daily mass in the neighbouring Claretian church. His mentality was as broad as an olive grove: In my school we read Homer’s Odyssey and Cervantes’ Don Quixote. He would tell us at length and at length about the things that were going to change, and in this way he would guide our gaze forward.
We can never thank teachers like Don Victoriano enough. They educated us in the sense of work and in the duty to collaborate with others. They taught us to do good and to right wrongs. They set limits to our whims and childishness with their gentle ways of educating in freedom without losing an iota of authority. They earned appreciation, admiration and respect… because they corrected and caressed, valued achievements and pulled us up when we were sinking in the pit of error. It is true that sometimes their rigidities or disciplinary methods were somewhat exaggerated, but they gave us the precious gift of desiring excellence without renouncing effort.
Today – I think, almost without daring to say it – we miss them. We live in a world where good and bad are confused because they are so blurred. There is an allergy to rules that harms us all because of the fierce individualism it unleashes. When human beings are left to the inertia of instinct, indifference, or immorality, the bad is left to roam free, to the greater detriment of the weak.
Let us pay homage to those teachers of our childhood, white coats and chalk in hand. They never received on their pay slips even half of what their efforts or the time they “wasted” for us deserved. Thanks to those wise counsellors we grew up in the faith with no qualms. If any of their names are lost in this wheel that is life, we will surely recognise them again in the phrase of a friend, in the sentence of an elder, in the frown of a father, or in the caress of a mother, to keep reminding us of the way.
Juan Carlos cmf
(PHOTO: Tra Nguyen)
