Bartolomé Read online

  The pair of them disappeared. Isabel watched them go with a worried look in her eyes. She was a little afraid of having to go into the strange apartment on her own.

  ‘Can we go up?’ asked Ana. She was curious and wanted to see the rooms.

  ‘It’s so dark here, Mama,’ complained Beatríz.

  Isabel screwed up her courage. ‘Beatríz will take the jewellery box and she’ll hold Manuel’s hand. Ana and I will carry up the chest with Bartolomé in it.’

  ‘Can he not get out down here?’ asked Ana.

  Isabel shook her head. ‘No, we’re not the only people in the house, and nobody can be allowed to see him.’

  Ana said nothing. So far, none of the other occupants of the house had observed their arrival. Why would they suddenly put in an appearance, all agog?

  The stairs were narrow and steep and even darker than the hall. They kept banging the chest against the wall. When they got to the landing, Isabel and Ana put it down. In the dusk, Isabel could make out a brown wooden door. That must be the door to their apartment. Isabel felt for the lock, and opened up. Light streamed onto the landing. The room was bright and spacious with two windows. Apart from a large clay pot, it was empty.

  Isabel pushed the chest in and opened the lid. Bartolomé crept out. The sudden light blinded him. He held his hands up to his face and tried to stretch his cramped and crooked body.

  Beatríz and Ana went barging around the room. Ana had opened the second door on the far wall. There was a poky little room in there, with a window high on the wall. This room was also empty.

  Isabel looked around, working out where she would put the various pieces of furniture. The bed would have to go in the big room. The children could sleep in the back room on their mats, and she could put three or four of the chests in there too. The front room would also be their living room during the day. The chairs would go by the windows. That way, she and Ana could do their sewing in good light. They might even be able to make lace to sell. Isabel had picked up, reading between the lines of what Juan had said, that the rent was still too dear and that they could use every extra penny they could make. The table fitted in by the bed, which could also be used as a seat in the daytime. She’d put the stools on the other side of the table.

  ‘Mama,’ Ana interrupted her thoughts. ‘Where are we going to cook?’ She hadn’t seen a fireplace in either of the rooms.

  Isabel grinned and pointed to the round-bellied clay pot. ‘We’ll cook on that. It’s a clay oven. You feed it coal or wood, and you can heat a pot or a frying pan on top of it.’

  Bartolomé had hauled himself up out of the chest by now. He couldn’t cross the room on his own, without any furniture to hang on to. He stumbled along by the wall until he reached one of the two windows. He wanted to see Madrid at last with his own eyes. But the window was too high. Beatríz stood next to him on her tippy toes. Bartolomé tried to imitate her, but in vain. With his club feet and mangled toes, he couldn’t manage it.

  Suddenly he was lifted up.

  ‘Now you can look out,’ said Ana kindly.

  Bartolomé looked delightedly down at the street. At last he could make sense of all the sounds he’d been hearing. All the people with wildly differing voices thronging the streets. The sound of cartwheels and the clip-clop of hooves. Patiently, Ana held him tight. Bartolomé kept making new discoveries. Washing hanging on lines that were strung out across the street. A lady with a fancy hairdo, followed by her servants, who were laden down with shopping baskets. A knife sharpener with his handcart. A musician with a flute and – Bartolomé’s eyes grew wide with astonishment – a comical creature sitting on his shoulder, dressed like a little man in red trousers, a white shirt, a green waistcoat and a black hat. It had a hairy face and around its neck it wore a collar with a chain, the other end of which was fastened to the broad belt of the musician. The animal – or was it really a tiny dwarf? – was twirling the flute-player’s hair with nimble fingers. A mob of children and adults had gathered around him. When the creature turned around, Bartolomé could see that his trousers had a hole in them, out of which snaked a long tail.

  ‘What is that?’ cried Bartolomé.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Ana had never seen such an extraordinary thing either.

  Isabel came to the window with Manuel in her arms.

  ‘It’s a monkey,’ she said. ‘An animal from Africa. They are like humans, only much smaller and very hairy.’

  ‘Get away from the window at once!’ Juan’s voice thundered angrily through the room. They had not heard him and Joaquín coming.

  Ana let Bartolomé drop quickly. Manuel began to cry with the shock. Beatríz’s lips started to quiver. What had they done wrong? They’d only looked out of the window.

  Juan banged the door of the apartment shut. ‘Anyone could have seen him!’

  They all knew who he meant.

  ‘It won’t happen again,’ Isabel promised hastily.

  ‘Certainly it won’t. From now on, Bartolomé can only be in the front room in the evenings, when the door has been barred for the night and the shutters are closed.

  Thus his father banished him to the back bedroom. His head hanging, Bartolomé allowed Ana to take him there. As the door closed over, he leant his head against the cool stone wall. He suddenly had a headache, and his throat was burning. The room with its little window, too high up in the wall to be reached, was just as much a prison as the chest had been. Nobody could see him here. Bartolomé started to cry quietly.

  El Primo

  BARTOLOMÉ’S days were all the same. He sat huddled alone in the little room for hours on end. In the evenings, when he was allowed to sit at the table in the big room, he listened enviously to the exciting stories of his brothers and sisters.

  Juan went to work in the mornings and often he didn’t come home until late in the evenings. He rarely had a day off. When he did, he would go walking sometimes with Manuel, Ana and Beatríz or he’d go shopping with their mother. Once he invited Joaquín for a glass of wine in a tavern. But mostly he went to bed and slept.

  He hardly ever gave a thought to his dwarf son in the back room. If it made Isabel happy to have the child with her, it was fine by him, as long as Bartolomé stuck to the rules.

  Juan had found an apprenticeship with a baker for Joaquín. ‘People always need bread,’ he said happily.

  If Joaquín did well during his probationary period, then he’d get a proper apprenticeship contract and he would move in with the baker. For now, he had to leave the house every day long before dawn and he came home early in the afternoon, stumbling with exhaustion. Bits of dough would be clinging to his black hair, and his hands would be chapped from the dry flour.

  ‘He’ll get used to it,’ Juan said, and he was right. After a while, the exhaustion disappeared and Joaquín was able to use his free afternoons to explore the city.

  Ana, when she wasn’t helping out around the house or sitting sewing by the window, spent many hours upstairs with the children of Señora Lopez, the apothecary’s widow, so that lady could supervise her late husband’s business, in which she still owned a share.

  Señora Lopez was constantly in fear of being thrown out on her ear. Her eldest daughter Maria was only ten years old. Since her father’s death the previous winter she had been betrothed to the new master apothecary. In a few years, after the wedding, or better still, after the birth of a grandson, Señora Lopez would finally be able to trust that her connection with the family of the apothecary would protect her from being swindled. Until then, she went to the shop several times a week to check the takings and the outgoings. That was when Ana took care of the youngest children, three-year-old Teresa and two-year-old Gaspar.

  Maria often had to go with her mother. The apothecary, an older man – he was forty – was proud of his young fiancée and was pleased when she sat meekly in a corner beside him.

  Beatríz had made friends with Augustina, the youngest daughter of Don Zorilla, the royal chamberlai
n. The two little girls played for hours in the back yard where there was a shed in which Señora Lopez’s pig and hens were kept, and where there was also a latrine.

  Manuel was a favourite with Doña Rosita, Don Zorilla’s wife, who had no son of her own. Whenever Isabel scolded Manuel or wouldn’t let him have his way or just didn’t have time for him, he would scarper as soon as the door of the apartment was opened. He wasn’t afraid of the steep stairs or the dark landing. He banged his little fists on the door of the apartment downstairs. Doña Rosita always welcomed him with open arms and spoilt him with tasty morsels and attention. Isabel didn’t like that.

  On the other hand, she could get on with her work when Manuel was out of the way. She could well use the money she got for the lace she made, which she sold to a dressmaker. Life in Madrid was expensive. In the village, the children had gathered firewood without giving it a second thought, but here every log had to be paid for. The same with fruit and vegetables. They used to grow these themselves, but now they had to buy them at the market.

  The whole family’s days were filled with work and play. Except for Bartolomé. He missed the village. Locked into the little room, he thought longingly of the dusty village square, the white houses and the little church with its stone steps and the weather-beaten wooden porch from where he had watched the doings of the village.

  Sometimes, when Isabel and Ana were alone, he was allowed into the big room in the daytime. He would sit quietly in a corner and watch them doing housework. But it never occurred to Isabel to give him a task to do. The sound of the street came pouring in through the big open windows of the apartment. Bartolomé listened longingly with his eyes closed and tried to imagine that he was taking part in the goings-on outside. But the more monotonous days that went by, the less he was able to conjure up this daydream and the quieter and sadder he got.

  One afternoon, just as Bartolomé was quietly going mad in the little room, where he knew every chink in the wall and every crack in the floorboards, Joaquín came bursting in. He hunkered down on the floor opposite Bartolomé. His cheeks were red from running, and his eyes were blazing with excitement.

  ‘Listen, Bartolomé!’

  Bartolomé looked dully at Joaquín. He used to enjoy it when Joaquín told him about the wonderful things that went on in the city. He used to imagine that he had experienced it all himself. He had run behind coaches, had seen someone thieving in the marketplace and had gone walking along by the mighty walls of the royal palace of Alcázar. But those dreams had long lost their magic. Instead, Bartolomé felt more and more keenly how empty and lonely his own life was. He turned his head away, but Joaquín was not to be put off.

  ‘I saw an important man,’ he whispered.

  Bartolomé sighed to himself. Joaquín’s stories were always about important gentlemen and rich ladies.

  ‘He was being carried in a sedan chair. I followed him. At San Isidor’s Cathedral, he got out and …’ Joaquín hesitated pointedly.

  ‘And …?’ asked Bartolomé without a great deal of interest in hearing the rest of the story.

  ‘He was almost as small as you. But grown up. He had a beard and he wore an elegant suit of gleaming black damask.’

  ‘A dwarf like me?’

  ‘Yes, but rich and respectable. I asked one of the bearers about him. The dwarf is called Don Diego de Acedo. But they call him El Primo. He is a secretary in the royal court.’

  ‘A secretary at court,’ repeated Bartolomé.

  Joaquín nodded. ‘He writes letters and documents for the king. He lives in the palace and I bet he’s well paid for his work, because he can afford his own sedan and bearers. Bartolomé, if only you could do that!’

  Bartolomé bit his lip. A dwarf like him could have a job and he could allow himself to be seen, without anyone looking down on him. How come his father had kept this from him and had locked him up like an animal when in Madrid dwarves could work for the king?

  ‘As a secretary, you would have influence at court. You could make sure I became court baker, and Ana and Beatríz could be lady’s maids to the little Infanta.’ Joaquín was weaving wonderful fantasies.

  ‘I can’t read and write,’ Bartolomé interrupted him. ‘I can’t do anything except sit and look.’

  Joaquín’s mood changed, but only for a moment. ‘You’ll just have to learn,’ he said. ‘There must be schools in Madrid.’

  Bartolomé gave a bitter laugh. ‘I’m not even allowed to sit in the big room during the daytime. And you think that Papa would send me to school?’

  Joaquín paced up and down. It irritated him that his fine plans were being destroyed by harsh reality. There had to be a way that Bartolomé could learn to read and write. Joaquín wondered if he could ask his father to send him to school in the afternoons. Then he could secretly pass on his knowledge to Bartolomé. On the other hand, he really didn’t feel like spending his time at school after working hard. And anyway, a school like that would cost a lot. Definitely more than his father could afford.

  But Bartolomé had been infected by Joaquín’s plan.

  ‘Maybe Ana could go to school in my place?’

  ‘Papa definitely wouldn’t pay to educate a girl,’ Joaquín replied.

  Bartolomé hung his head in disappointment. His crooked shoulders crumpled. He tried not to cry in front of Joaquín. A sob escaped him all the same.

  Joaquín paused and looked down at him. Up to now, he’d been thinking more about himself than about his poor crippled brother. He began to realise what it must be like for him in the little room and that his plan meant much more to Bartolomé than to himself. He gave him a quick hug.

  ‘Bartolomé, I promise you that you will learn to read and write,’ he whispered.

  Don Cristobal

  FOR the next few days, Bartolomé was bursting with impatience. He could hardly wait to see Joaquín. In the afternoons, he sat in the little back bedroom. He listened intently, his ear to the door, to hear the quick footsteps of his brother on the stairs. Joaquín was aware how much faith Bartolomé was putting in him and decided to let Ana in on the plan. Maybe she would be able to think of a way to find a teacher for Bartolomé.

  ‘But Papa mustn’t get wind of it,’ he warned her.

  Ana nodded. ‘He won’t allow it,’ she said, ‘because nobody is allowed to see Bartolomé.’

  ‘And I can’t think either where we are going to get the money to pay for lessons,’ declared Joaquín.

  ‘If we let Mama in on the plan, she’d be able to help by saving on the housekeeping,’ Ana said. She had noticed that Isabel was worried about Bartolomé, because he had got so quiet and sad. Now his eyes were shining again.

  ‘We won’t tell her until I have found a teacher,’ Joaquín decided. ‘She might forbid us, on account of Papa.’

  Joaquín’s search ran into a blind alley almost immediately. Anyone who was able to read and write had no time for teaching, or demanded a lot of money to teach this fine art.

  When Joaquín noticed one day that Bartolomé’s eyes had dulled again, he made his mind up. After work, he went to the Franciscan monastery and knocked. An old monk, bare-footed and wearing a simple brown habit, opened the gate. Joaquín excused himself shyly. He couldn’t think how to put his request into words.

  ‘My son, what can I do for you?’ asked the monk kindly.

  ‘My name is Joaquín Carrasco, and I have a request,’ said Joaquín bashfully.

  ‘Of God or of me, Joaquín?’

  ‘Of you, Father.’

  The monk nodded and waited patiently. He seemed to have all the time in the world.

  ‘My brother, Bartolomé … he needs to learn to read and write,’ Joaquín stammered.

  ‘This isn’t a school, Joaquín.’

  ‘I know. But my father would never send him to school.’

  ‘Your father probably has other plans for your brother. As a son, you should not question your father’s decisions.’

  Joaquín looked into the
monk’s kindly face. ‘I know, Father, but …’ He was ashamed to say what he had to say. He had never before said a bad word about his father. ‘Forgive me, Father, but my father locks Bartolomé in a back bedroom. Bartolomé sits there like a prisoner, and no outsider is allowed to see him.’

  Don Cristobal, for that was the old monk’s name, saw before him a skinny, lanky lad who was revealing a family secret, his face ablaze. Even if he didn’t hear confessions himself, he knew that behind many a closed door in Madrid things happened that would horrify an old man like him, and would make him doubt God’s goodness. And now it was his turn to search for the right words.

  ‘Would you like me to speak to your father?’ he offered finally. ‘Sometimes a conversation can change things.’ Or not, he added to himself.

  Joaquín shook his head in horror. ‘He mustn’t find out that I’ve been here.’

  ‘Is it that bad? Does he mistreat your brother?’

  ‘No, he would never do a thing like that,’ said Joaquín quickly. ‘He’s ashamed of him, I think. He is so ashamed that nobody is allowed to see Bartolomé. Bartolomé hasn’t grown. His body is crooked. He has club feet and he can hardly walk on them.’

  ‘A dwarf,’ murmured Don Cristobal.

  Joaquín nodded. ‘A dwarf, a cripple, a freak – that’s what an outsider would call him. But he is my brother and he is clever and he learns quickly.’

  Joaquín’s cheeks were glowing, not with shame now but with enthusiasm.

  ‘If he can learn to read and write, then he can become the king’s secretary, like El Primo. He is respected by everyone and doesn’t have to hide away.’

  ‘El Primo,’ said Don Cristobal. ‘Joaquín, you must know that there are hundreds of dwarves and cripples who eke out a living as miserable beggars on the streets of Madrid, and also probably many like your brother who are hidden from the mockery of the world in dark rooms and hovels. El Primo’s story is most unusual. God’s grace has rested on him in a very special way.’