Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira

Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira (Ferrol, A Coruña, April 23, 1879 – Ciempozuelos, Community of Madrid, December 28, 1955) was a Spanish woman who is remembered as the mother of Hildegart Rodríguez Carballeira, a girl she conceived as a scientific experiment and who, according to Aurora's wishes, was to represent the woman of the future.

Biography
Although she lied about her age, and many versions circulate, it is believed that Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira was born in 1879, in the family home on Magdalena street, in Ferrol, A Coruña, Spain. Her parents were Francisco Rodríguez Arriola (b. 1833) and Anna Carballeira Lopes. She was raised by a doting father in upper class, eccentric circumstances.

Faced with the lack of a formal education that she always regretted (and that would be one of the reasons given for her daughter to complete the work for which her mother was not prepared), Aurora replaced it with readings from her father's abundant library, liberal and progressive ideas, fundamentally utopian socialists.

When Aurora's sister Josefa had a son, Pepito Arriola, and left him in the care of Aurora (who was sixteen years old), she educated him until he became a child prodigy, at which time Pepito was claimed by his mother and taken to Madrid, where he had enormous success as a musician. This fact strengthened Aurora's reformist and eugenic ideas, in addition to her concerns for women's rights, and led her to conceive the project of raising a woman in optimal conditions who would become an example of Aurora's ideas. She looked for a father who could never claim paternity of the future baby. According to Professor María Rosa Cal Martínez, who established the identities with arguments, it was a Lleida military priest named Alberto Pallás. Aurora had three sexual encounters with him as a "physiological collaborator" until, being sure of the pregnancy, Aurora moved to Madrid to give her daughter the life Aurora had prepared for her.

The experiment initially met Aurora's expectations. Hildegart became an international celbrity, until the freedom in which she was brought up led Hildegart to chose differing political political commitments and to launch an attempt to gain independence from her mother. Aurora, inspired by paranoid delusions of an alleged international conspiracy to ruin the "perfect" result her eugenic experiment and unwillingness to let go of control over daughter's life, killed Hildegart on June 9, 1933, by shooting her four times while the teenager was sleeping. Aurora's own explanation was, "(El escultor, tras descubrir la más mínima imperfección en su obra, la destruye)," "The male sculptor, after discovering the most minimal imperfection in his work, destroys it."

Aurora never regretted Hildegart's murder and repeatedly said that she would do it again. Aurora was sentenced to 26 years in prison, serving most of it in the Ciempozuelos psychiatric asylum.

Until her medical records were found in 1977, Aurora was believed to have become of the "disappeared" during the Spanish Civil War, but she actually died of cancer in the Ciempozuelos psychiatric facility on December 28, 1955. She was buried in a mass grave.

Literary

 * (Screenplay for the film by Fernán Gómez based on the novel by Eduardo de Guzmán.)
 * Llarch Roig, Joan, Hildegart, la virgen roja, Barcelona, Producciones editoriales, 1979.
 * Hackl, Erich, Auroras Anlaß, Diogenes Verlag, Zúrich 1987 ISBN 3257017340
 * (Study of Aurora's clinical history at the Ciempozuelos hospital.)
 * Cal Martínez, María Rosa, A mí no me doblega nadie: Aurora Rodríguez, su vida y su obra (Hildegart), Ediciós do Castro, Sada (La Coruña), 1991. ISBN 84-7492-542-8
 * Domingo, Carmen, Mi querida hija Hildegart, ed. Destino, 2008. ISBN 8423340287
 * Martini, Antonietta, Infierno: Ribellarsi al Destino. Traduzione e studio de La virgen roja di Fernando Arrabal, Edizioni Accademiche Italiane, Saarbrücken, 2014. ISBN 9783639656923
 * (It is the fifth novel in the Episodes of an Endless War series.)
 * Martini, Antonietta, Infierno: Ribellarsi al Destino. Traduzione e studio de La virgen roja di Fernando Arrabal, Edizioni Accademiche Italiane, Saarbrücken, 2014. ISBN 9783639656923
 * (It is the fifth novel in the Episodes of an Endless War series.)

Film

 * My Daughter Hildegart (1977), directed by Fernando Fernán Gómez, with a script by the director himself and by Rafael Azcona. Aurora is played by Amparo Soler Leal.
 * The red virgin (2014), directed by Sheila Pye. Aurora is played by Maribel Verdú.
 * Hildegart oder Projekt: Superwoman (2016), directed by Barbara Caspar.
 * Hildegart, upcoming film directed by Paula Ortiz, with Najwa Nimri playing Aurora.