On June 9, 1933, Spanish society woke up to the news of the murder of one of its young hopefuls, Hildegart Rodríguez, who at 18 had finished her law degree, begun her medical degree, and written a handful of books that, for her time, were considered daring and controversial even among those who defended the leftist ideas of the Republic. Hildegart had openly addressed the sexuality of women, especially the youngest; she wrote a history of prostitution, referred without shame to venereal diseases and how to avoid them, and reflected in other treatises on political thought and her own disillusionment with the theories of socialism and Marxism.
The woman who had been the youngest lawyer in Spain was found riddled with bullets in her own bed: and the author of the four shots, who had chosen for that creature whose head she had destroyed the decisive name of the medieval abbess, musician and writer Hildegard von Bingen, was none other than her own mother, Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira. Imbued with very peculiar ideas about the situation of women and how to improve it, she had carefully planned every step of the life of her daughter, her sculpture of flesh: her conception and pregnancy alone, her studies, her readings and her friendships. Since Hildegart was born, on December 9, 1914, Aurora placed in her her utopian dream that she would carry out her plans, and thus become the new woman of a new era.
With her, she left her native Ferrol and moved to Madrid: Hildegart's intelligence and depth of thought exceeded all her expectations. The girl not only easily assimilated readings intended for adults, but she also completed them, refuted them and developed more solid and coherent theories that attracted the attention of thinkers such as Gregorio Marañón or foreign intellectuals such as the writer H. G. Wells. In Hildegart they saw a prodigy, a promise that, paradoxically, was only hindered by the figure of an increasingly suffocating, increasingly paranoid mother, who refused to let her daughter, fascinated by social issues, choose a different path from the one marked out for her. Faced with Hildegart's decision to become independent, she decided to destroy her with the same irrevocability with which she had created her. She died in prison, without regretting anything, twenty years later.
Hildegart's texts have been overshadowed by her fulminating biography, by her terrible end. Original, brilliant, extremely modern, they are worth rescuing: they are more her than her own biography.
