“That’s impressive, Oscar!” said classmate Mauro Yánes.
“I wish I could play the flute,” said his friend Alberto Luna.
“Do you also sing?” asked schoolmate Fausto Ventura. When Oscar nodded yes, Fausto said, “I love to sing. Let’s sing together sometime.”
“Boys,” Father Calvo interjected, “have you heard we sometimes entertain ourselves here by putting on musical performances and plays? A Catholic high school in the city, run by the Marist brothers, will also ask us to provide an evening’s program for them. Fausto, we’ll arrange for you and Oscar to sing a duet.” He turned to Oscar. “Might you be willing to play your flute at the high school sometime?”
Oscar smiled. “I would like that.” Already he felt welcomed and appreciated in his new home. If his brothers and sisters never quite understood him, his classmates did.
Actually, except for San Miguel’s stifling heat and the pesky mosquitos that made some students and faculty so sick with malaria they had to withdraw, everything about his new home in the flat lowlands agreed with Oscar.18 He liked his classmates, his teachers, and the seminary itself—an inviting and compact campus in the center of the bustling, growing town of about 17,500 people.
Oscar trekked over the mountains to this destination, then the San Miguel minor seminary that Oscar attended. (1998 photo, Emily Will)
Some forty students, ages thirteen to eighteen, lived and studied at the preseminary, and a limited number of older students attended the major seminary. The dorms, classrooms, chapel, and dining hall formed a horseshoe around an airy tropical garden. The terra-cotta tile roofs on the long, low white buildings lent a cozy appearance. There was enough land to assign each seminarian a small plot to grow vegetables. The students also helped tend the fruit trees on the property—grapefruit, lemon, avocado, papaya, and others.
Oscar found his days full and challenging. He and his classmates rose at five thirty each morning. They washed, dressed in their long, black cassocks—Mamá had tailored Oscar’s first one—and meditated and prayed until six-thirty mass in the chapel. Afterwards, they changed into yellow tunics over pants, ate breakfast, and attended classes from eight until noon, with ten-minute breaks between each fifty-minute class.
The students sat together for the noon dinner, with the teacher-priests at nearby tables. After the meal, one of the priests read from the classics. The stories engaged Oscar and his classmates and introduced them to a range of literature from various cultures. They returned to classes from two to four in the afternoon, followed by an hour of recreation. The day ended with supper, homework, and devotions.
Rebel Hair
Oscar, thirteen, and some eight to ten other boys from around El Salvador formed the youngest, or first-year, class. Oscar quickly became friends with Rafael Valladares, a witty, outgoing youth a few grades ahead of Oscar. Rafael, a bishop’s nephew from Opico, a town in western El Salvador, had attended an excellent private elementary school and soon became top student. Before long, though, Oscar, with some extra math tutoring, began to rival his friend in scholarship.
Rafael churned things up with his teasing and joking. He teased Oscar about his prominent nose, proclaiming, “It looks like a cuma,” a curved machete.
A nickname was also in the making. Oscar had been cast as an elderly manservant in a play to be given at the Marist high school. The evening of the performance, a local woman came to help the students with costumes and makeup. She brought a bottle of white talcum powder to “gray” Oscar’s head. Oscar’s hair was so bushy, however, that as she sprinkled it with talc, the powder settled to his scalp where it couldn’t be seen.
“Ai-yai-yai! With this boy I’m going to go through the entire container!” she said in mock complaint.
Oscar’s thick, unruly hair had already drawn his classmates’ attention, but after this event Rafael nicknamed him cabeza de súngano, the equivalent of something like “shaggy head” or “mophead.”19
Rafael had persuaded classmates to join him in producing a student newsletter. In one issue, he penned a short rhyming couplet, supposedly in Oscar’s name, using the indigenous town names—Cacahuatique and Chaparrastique—by which Ciudad Barrios and San Miguel were still sometimes referred:
Como un arbusto oloroso
nací por Cacahuatique.
Y cresco súngano y hermoso
aquí por Chaparrastique.
Like a fragrant bush
in Ciudad Barrios I was born and bred.
And here in San Miguel
I grow into a handsome mophead.20
Oscar took Rafael’s ribbing in the good-natured vein in which it was intended. Not so another classmate, who socked Rafael after Rafael turned his wit on him. But the joker knew he had it coming. “Already I’m being crucified,” Rafael said with a laugh. Oscar dished out some teasing of his own but, unlike Rafael, knew when to stop.
After the priests learned Oscar could type, they sometimes asked him to put this skill to use for them.21 Father Antonio Aguadé, in particular, who handwrote the articles he contributed to the diocesan newspaper, would ask Oscar to type them. Oscar didn’t mind doing so, although it meant missing the hour of outdoor activity. Later Father Aguadé repaid the favor by taking Oscar out of some classes to teach him to play the harmonium, a reed organ.
Oscar, second from right, and three minor seminary classmates. (photo credit, Zolia Aurora Asturias and Eva del Carmen Asturias)
Oscar also developed his singing voice at the preseminary. At one of the Marist school performances, he and Fausto Ventura pleased the audience with their duet of the well-loved song Golondrinas yucatecas, “Yucatecan Swallows.” Its sentimental lyrics compare youth with springtime when swallows arrive and nest, and old age with winter, when both dreams and swallows depart.
Family Environment
Oscar and his classmates would do just about anything for their main teachers, Father Antonio Aguadé, who also served as rector, and two young priests Fathers Benito Calvo and José Burgoa. They were from Spain, members of the Claretian order. Spanish priests in general bore a reputation for rigidity and strictness, but the youthful Calvo and Burgoa joined their students in their joking and fun. All three guided their charges through friendly support rather than rigid discipline.
After Father Aguadé’s death in 1960, Romero would describe him as “the kind father, the good teacher, the sincere friend, the tireless writer” who desired first and foremost to nurture his students’ gifts.22
Minor seminarians on an outing. Oscar, looking to his right, stands between the priests, one of whom is Monseñor Daniel Ventura Cruz. Rafael kneels in front of Oscar. Bernardo Amaya holds his hat in one hand and rolled-up towel in the other.(photo courtesy of Father Bernardo Amaya)
Fathers Calvo and Burgoa took the boys on frequent outings, often to the nearby Grande River and sometimes to Lake Olomega or beaches along the Gulf of Fonseca. Father Burgoa taught many of the boys to swim, an activity Oscar enjoyed and did well.23