Bartolomé Read online

  ‘What El Primo has achieved, Bartolomé could do too.’

  ‘Of course. God’s grace could rest on your poor brother in a special way also. But who are we mere humans to know where and how God’s grace will fall?’ answered Don Cristobal mildly.

  ‘Father, he must learn to read and write. Please help him. I promised him, and I can pay. Not much, but you won’t have to teach him for nothing.’

  Joaquín gave the old monk a beseeching look.

  ‘You want me to go to your house, behind your father’s back, and teach your brother to read and write? Have you any idea what you are asking?’

  Don Cristobal shook his head. He could never do such a thing. The abbot wouldn’t allow it, and without his permission he couldn’t leave the monastery. If the child could come to him, though …

  Joaquín seemed to read Don Cristobal’s thoughts.

  ‘Father, if he could come to you, would you teach him?’ he asked.

  ‘I have a lot to do. I am not just the porter here,’ murmured Don Cristobal. ‘I have to look after the church and the garden too.’

  ‘While you are teaching Bartolomé, I could work in the garden,’ Joaquín offered. He had a feeling that the monk was almost ready to help. He had no idea how he could get Bartolomé to the monastery. He’d have to get his head around that later.

  ‘And I’ll pay you too,’ he went on.

  ‘I can’t take money,’ said Don Cristobal. As a monk, he could call nothing his own apart from his habit.

  ‘Or I could use the money to buy …’

  ‘Candles?’ Don Cristobal suggested.

  Joaquín’s heart leapt. Was the monk trying to say that he would teach Bartolomé?

  ‘A candle for Our Lady,’ Don Cristobal decided.

  Joaquín was jubilant. Forgetting that the monk was a holy man, he hugged him hard.

  Don Cristobal gave in.

  ‘Twice a week, Tuesdays and Saturdays, for an hour at lunchtime.’ Don Cristobal added, ‘But only if your father allows it.’

  Joaquín nodded. It was all fine with him. The monk would teach Bartolomé. That was all that mattered.

  As Don Cristobal closed the gate behind Joaquín, he decided he would wait until the first lesson before asking the abbot for permission.

  The Secret Plan

  ‘WE have to do it!’

  Bartolomé had never seen his brother so determined. As confident as his father, bossy even, Joaquín was speaking to Isabel.

  ‘We can’t tell him. Not yet anyway. He would forbid it,’ Joaquín insisted.

  Bartolomé looked at his mother. Would she agree to keep the secret from his father?

  Isabel felt she was being steamrolled into it. Joaquín, Ana and Bartolomé were all lined up in front of her. She tried to withstand the pleading looks of her children. She couldn’t allow such a thing. Juan was her husband. She must not keep anything from him.

  ‘Mama.’ Ana came right up to Isabel. ‘Mama, if Bartolomé can read and write, then he has a future.’

  ‘He can earn his own money that way,’ Joaquín added.

  ‘Then maybe Papa will be proud of me,’ Bartolomé whispered.

  Isabel had to look into his great, dark eyes. She could sense his longing. It would be wonderful if Bartolomé learnt a profession.

  But Juan would be terribly angry at the deception. No, she could not allow it.

  ‘Nobody must see him. Your father has forbidden it,’ she said quietly.

  ‘I know,’ said Joaquín. ‘That’s why I am going to transport him in the laundry basket. Ana will come too and people will think I am helping her with the washing.’

  ‘We’ve had a trial run. Bartolomé fits, and Joaquín is strong enough to lift up the basket and to carry it. We’ll show you!’

  Ana’s face glowed with enthusiasm. Without waiting for an answer, she led her dwarf brother to the basket and heaved him in. Bartolomé made himself as small as possible. His black mop of hair disappeared beneath the rim of the basket. Ana put a few bits of washing on top of him.

  ‘While Bartolomé is studying, I’ll wash a few clothes, and everyone will see us coming home with the wet laundry. Nobody will have a clue what is going on,’ Ana assured her mother. ‘There will be no questions asked.’

  Joaquín knelt in front of the laundry basket, slipped his arms into the straps and stood up, wobbling. Drops of sweat beaded his forehead as he walked up and down the room taking little steps.

  ‘How far is it to the monastery?’ Isabel asked in spite of herself.

  ‘Not far,’ gasped Joaquín. ‘I can do it.’

  Isabel hesitated. She had never seen her children so set on anything, and if they carried Bartolomé through the streets like this, they would not be breaking Juan’s edict.

  No, that’s not right, thought Isabel. The monk would see Bartolomé. But did a monk count anyway? Was he not pledged to silence? This thought eased Isabel’s conscience.

  ‘Mama?’ Bartolomé stuck his head over the edge of the basket, like a cuckoo breaking out of the egg. Isabel couldn’t help but laugh.

  ‘Can I?’ asked Bartolomé.

  Isabel nodded. She couldn’t help herself. Bartolomé’s joy was so great that he would have leapt out of the basket and jumped right into his mother’s arms, if only he had been capable of it.

  HIS knees wobbling from the effort, Joaquín reached the monastery gate. Nobody in the busy streets had taken any notice of them. Nobody could have guessed that the two excited children were hiding a secret in their laundry basket.

  Joaquín knocked at the gate, which Don Cristobal immediately opened. He had been waiting for them.

  ‘Where is he?’ he asked in surprise when he could see no crippled dwarf.

  ‘In the basket,’ answered Joaquín, stumbling into the monastery.

  Ana followed him.

  ‘In the basket?’ Don Cristobal frowned. ‘Does your father not know about this?’

  Ana interrupted him. ‘Our father doesn’t want him to be seen on the street,’ she lied emphatically.

  ‘Is that so?’ Don Cristobal asked Joaquín.

  Hanging his head, Joaquín muttered his agreement. He didn’t want the monk to see his red face. He put the basket down, and Ana helped Bartolomé out. She could feel her little brother shaking with excitement. She held him good and tight so that he could lean his body against her.

  ‘I’m Don Cristobal, and you must be Bartolomé,’ said Don Cristobal, trying to hide his shock. He hadn’t expected the child to be so badly deformed. The big hump, which forced his upper body forward, the crooked legs, which seemed too weak to support even the little dwarf body, the club feet. Don Cristobal felt a shudder running up his spine. He had once seen pictures of the devil which showed Satan with feet deformed like these. No, this was superstitious thinking, unworthy of a man of the cloth.

  ‘I want so much to learn to read and write.’ Bartolomé looked trustingly at Don Cristobal.

  How could this ugly dwarf have such a pure, bell-like voice? Don Cristobal looked into Bartolomé’s crooked face and saw something else that was wonderful: Bartolomé’s eyes gleamed hopefully at him like two dark pearls. Don Cristobal went down on one knee and grasped Bartolomé’s outstretched hands. These, he discovered to his surprise, were finely formed. Perhaps Joaquín was right, and God’s grace rested even on this poor freak. Were the voice, the eyes and these hands not a sign?

  ‘You will learn to read and write, Bartolomé,’ promised Don Cristobal in a firm voice.

  The monk led Bartolomé into the shady cloister where he had set up a low bench and a footstool under the white stone arcade. Don Cristobal sat down on the bench. When his pupil had taken up his place on the stool, the monk took a little wooden board out of his habit, on which he had carefully painted the lower-case and capital letters of the alphabet. He showed them to Bartolomé.

  ‘This is an A, this is a B, a C …’

  Bartolomé listened carefully. Out of the corner of his eye, he co
uld see Joaquín, weeding the roses in the courtyard.

  The monk continued patiently, moving his finger over the board and naming the letters. Bartolomé repeated what was said and tried to remember the shapes of the letters.

  ‘What is this letter called?’ Don Cristobal tested him after a while.

  Bartolomé stared at the straight white stroke out of which two fat tummies grew. He wasn’t quite sure. All these letters looked so alike, but had such different names.

  ‘That’s a B,’ he decided eventually.

  Don Cristobal smiled. The crippled child was quick. In no time he had memorised all the letters on the board.

  ‘Name the letters as I point them out,’ Don Cristobal continued. His finger jumped hither and thither and Bartolomé worked hard to read the letters.

  ‘B – A – R – T – O – L – O – M – E.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Don Cristobal praised him. ‘But do you know what you have just read to me?’

  Bartolomé shook his head shyly. The different sounds of the letters were whirling around in his head. They didn’t make any sense.

  ‘Listen more carefully as you say them,’ Don Cristobal told him, and once again, his finger wandered from letter to letter.

  ‘B – A – R – T – O – L – O – M – E.’ The dwarf looked up in astonishment. ‘It sounds like my name. It sounds like Bartolomé!’

  He moved his finger eagerly over the board.

  ‘First a B, then A, R, T …’ He spelt Bartolomé without a single mistake. His name.

  Don Cristobal was delighted.

  ‘You’ve done very well. We’ll practise some more in the next lesson.’

  Bartolomé could hardly believe that his first lesson was over so quickly. But the church clock chimed the hour, confirming Don Cristobal’s guess about the time.

  With difficulty Bartolomé tore his eyes from the wooden board. He wanted to read more. He wanted to read Joaquín, Ana, Manuel and Beatríz. He wanted to spell butter, egg and cheese.

  ‘Could I take the board home with me?’ he asked.

  Don Cristobal hesitated. He’d made the little board himself. But a monk was not allowed to own anything. Everything belonged to the monastery. On the other hand, the child would be able to practise at home if he had it, and nobody in the monastery had any use for the board.

  ‘You must bring it back for the next lesson,’ he said.

  Bartolomé hugged the board to his body.

  Reading and Writing

  HE practised away at home. Isabel looked at her little son with a new respect. After a single lesson he was able to spell not only his own name, but also those of his brothers and sisters and his parents. She was so engrossed, she almost failed to hear Juan coming home. Quickly, she hid the letter board under Bartolomé’s sleeping mat.

  ‘You can only use it when nobody can see.’

  Bartolomé knew what that meant. His father must not find out, and neither must Beatríz. She was too small to keep a secret. He sat in a corner and thought about the wonderful board. If he closed his eyes, he could see the letters in his mind. He was surprised to find that he didn’t need the board. ‘They’re all in my head,’ he whispered. He traced them in the air with his finger.

  He had an idea. Impatiently, he waited till he heard his father fastening the shutters. Then he stood up and wobbled into the front room. There was a basket of coal beside the stove. He sat down quietly beside it and blackened his index finger with coal dust. Nobody took any notice of him. Isabel and Ana were preparing supper. Beatríz was playing with Manuel. Juan and Joaquín were talking and carefully brushing Juan’s coachman’s boots.

  Bartolomé spat on the stone floor and polished it with the cuff of his shirt until it shone. Carefully he drew the letters, one after another, with his blackened finger.

  Ana saw what Bartolomé was doing. She looked over at her father. Juan hadn’t noticed anything. She put her foot quickly on the letters and rubbed them into smudges.

  ‘Stop that,’ she whispered to her brother. ‘He mustn’t get a hint of what is going on.’

  Bartolomé nodded obediently, but his face was hot with joy.

  ‘Did you see? I can write them all by myself. It’s easy. They’re just lines and loops.’

  The next few days passed as if in a dream. In Bartolomé’s head, the letters floated in and out of each other. He tried to shape them into words. Every minute that his father and Beatríz were out, he wrote words on the floor of the back room with a coal. Isabel gave him a bowl of water and a cloth.

  ‘You must wipe them away immediately,’ she warned him, and in the evenings, before Juan came home, she herself washed Bartolomé’s coal-blackened hands and face. She put a clean shirt on him also and stuck the dirty one in the laundry basket.

  ‘Ana will wash it on Saturday,’ she said.

  ‘Saturday,’ thought Bartolomé. That was when he would see Don Cristobal again. He could hardly wait to climb into the laundry basket.

  ASTONISHED, Don Cristobal watched the dwarf eagerly writing words on the flagged floor of the cloister, using a piece of coal. Of course, what he wrote was full of mistakes, but the letters were beautifully formed, the lines all straight and the loops regularly drawn. A slate and slate pencil lay on the bench beside the monk. Don Cristobal had intended to introduce Bartolomé to the art of writing as he had learned it himself as a young monk in the monastery’s scriptorium. For days at a time, they’d had to draw nice tidy lines side by side and then later they were allowed to link them up with loops, and only when the master decided they were good and ready were they allowed to copy letters. But this child had mastered in four days what it had taken Don Cristobal ages to accomplish in his youth.

  ‘Don Cristobal?’ Bartolomé interrupted the monk’s thoughts.

  ‘Yes, my son?’

  ‘How many words are there?’

  ‘An infinite number.’

  ‘Infinite. Is that as many as there are stars in the heavens?’

  Bartolomé was thinking of the night sky over the village.

  ‘Even more than that,’ said Don Cristobal with a smile.

  Bartolomé looked at the words at his feet. How few there were, and how many he still had to learn! He couldn’t imagine knowing more words than there were stars in the sky. He’d started his second lesson with the intention of learning to write everything. Now he realised how stupid that had been. He looked up unhappily at Don Cristobal.

  ‘I’ll never do it. No matter how hard I think, I just don’t know enough words.’

  ‘You’ll learn them.’

  ‘How?’

  Don Cristobal made a decision.

  ‘Wait here.’ He hurried away through the cloisters. He was back in a moment. In his hand he had a fat leather-bound book.

  ‘Sit up beside me on the bench,’ he ordered Bartolomé.

  Bartolomé clambered up. Being so twisted in his body, he needed to lean against the monk in order to be able to look into the book.

  Don Cristobal leafed carefully through the pages. They were all filled with closely written letters.

  ‘As many as the stars in the sky,’ Bartolomé thought. There had to be an infinite number of words in this book. As Don Cristobal stopped turning the pages and put a finger on one line, Bartolomé bent forward eagerly. He would read all these words, he thought, he would take note of them, and later he would transcribe them using a piece of coal.

  ‘In those days …’ Bartolomé stumbled from word to word. Sometimes, a word was too long for him, and then Don Cristobal had to help him to sound out the letters in the right order so that they yielded up their sense. Suddenly Bartolomé stopped.

  ‘I know this story. It’s the Christmas story,’ he realised, surprised.

  Don Cristobal nodded in agreement. ‘So now you know what book I have been reading from?’

  Bartolomé looked reverently at the book. It had to be the Bible. At home in the village, only Father Rodriguez had read the Bible.
/>   ‘I don’t want … I can’t become a priest,’ stammered Bartolomé, shocked.

  Don Cristobal suppressed a laugh. ‘People who are not priests can read the Bible too,’ he explained with a smile.

  Bartolomé gave a sigh of relief and bent over the page again. Now that he knew which story it was, he managed to read it far more easily. Sometimes he could even work out a long word by himself.

  In the end, Don Cristobal put a hand over the page, hiding it.

  ‘Now you must write the words too, Bartolomé. You need to look at them carefully, letter by letter, and then afterwards you’ll write them from memory.’

  Bartolomé slithered off the bench and knelt on the ground. He took the slate and the slate pencil from Don Cristobal. Then the monk held the Bible for him and showed him a word.

  ‘K-neel,’ Bartolomé read.

  ‘Kneel,’ the monk corrected him.

  There were only a few letters in the word. It couldn’t be that hard. First came a K … But wait a minute.

  ‘Why is there a K that is not pronounced in that word?’ he asked.

  ‘For the look of it,’ answered the monk. ‘Sometimes a letter is just there so that the word looks right, but it’s not pronounced. That is the beauty of the written word.’

  ‘But that’s so hard!’ said Bartolomé. He thought about the words he’d written out at home on the floor. He’d just written them according to the way they sounded to him, because he didn’t know about this beauty thing.

  ‘Did I make a lot of mistakes?’ asked Bartolomé, meaning the words he’d written on the flags at the beginning of the lesson.

  ‘An awful lot,’ said Don Cristobal merrily. But when he saw how horrified Bartolomé was, he added: ‘You’ll soon come to recognise the words by reading and then you’ll be able to write them without making any mistakes.’

  Reading, thought Bartolomé. Would Don Cristobal lend him the Bible? He stretched out his hand automatically for it. Don Cristobal shook his head.

  ‘That won’t do, Bartolomé. The Bible belongs to the monastery. I can’t lend it.’

  ‘But I brought the board back!’