October 26, 1949, was not a day with major news. Teacher Clemente Manuel Sabala, editor-in-chief of the newspaper that published my first reports, ended the morning meeting with two or three routine instructions. He did not assign any specific task to any editor. A few minutes later, he learned by phone that the burial crypts of the ancient Santa Clara monastery were being emptied and instructed me without much hope: "Go take a look there to see if any idea comes to you." The historic monastery of the Poor Clares, which had been converted into a hospital a century earlier, was about to be sold and replaced by a five-star hotel. Its magnificent single-nave church was almost at the mercy of the elements due to the gradual collapse of the roof, but in its crypts remained buried three generations of bishops and abbots, as well as other prominent figures.
The first step was to empty them, hand over the remains to whoever claimed them, and throw the rest into a common grave. I was surprised by the primitiveness of the method. The workers uncovered the graves with crowbars and hoes, removed the rotten coffins, which disintegrated with the slightest movement, and separated the bones from the shapeless mass of dust, rags, and withered hair. The more prominent the deceased, the more painstaking the work, because they had to sift through the fragments of the corpses and finely sift their remains to recover jewelry made of precious stones and metals. The overseer copied the tombstone details into a school notebook, arranged the bones into separate piles, and placed a paper with the name on each to avoid mistakes.
