Bartolomé (6 page)

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!'

‘Yes, but you can see that the Bible is worth a lot more than a homemade alphabet board,' said Don Cristobal kindly.

Disappointed, Bartolomé stared at the book. If he wasn't going to be allowed to read it, he would never learn to write properly.

‘Your father should buy you a cheaper book,' the monk suggested. ‘Then you can practise your reading and writing at home.'

Bartolomé was just about to shake his head sadly and explain to the monk how unlikely it was that his father, of all people, would buy him a book. Just in time, he remembered that Don Cristobal did not know the whole truth.

‘I'll ask him,' muttered Bartolomé.

Don Cristobal nodded contentedly.

‘Next week, you can show me your own book, and we'll use it to practise on. The Bible belongs in the library and I can't borrow it a second time without the abbot's permission.'

A Book

‘I NEED a book,' Bartolomé announced as soon as Isabel hauled him out of the laundry basket.

‘A book?' Isabel looked at Bartolomé in dismay. Only priests and rich people had books, people who had mastered the art of reading and who had the means. Simple people like them didn't own books.

‘The Bible would be best.' Bartolomé was thinking of Don Cristobal's fat book that contained infinitely many words.

‘The Bible!' cried Isabel in horror. A Bible cost a small fortune. She remembered that they had collected money in the village to buy a new Bible when Father Rodriguez's old Bible had become illegible because it was covered with spots of mildew. Every family had had to contribute.

‘You can forget about that,' she said shortly and began hanging up the wet clothes.

‘I can't make any progress without a book,' said Bartolomé stubbornly.

‘But you're able to read and write already. Take a piece of coal. I'll say all the words I can think of, and you can write them out.'

‘I can't,' sighed Bartolomé dejectedly.

Isabel left her washing and hunkered down in front of Bartolomé. She stroked his hair.

‘Nonsense. Yesterday, you could write anything.'

‘It wasn't right. It was only the sound, and not the way the words are spelt,' Bartolomé tried to explain. ‘It's only when you know the spellings that you can write the words without mistakes.'

Isabel didn't understand what Bartolomé was talking about. ‘Don Cristobal will teach you these spellings in the next lesson, and you'll remember them,' she said consolingly.

Bartolomé laughed, in spite of himself.

‘You see? Everything is fine again,' said Isabel happily, making to go back to her work.

Bartolomé grabbed hold of her. ‘Mama,' he asked, ‘did you ever count the stars in the sky?'

‘Of course not. You can't do that. There are too many.'

‘If every star was not a light but was a word, would you be able to learn all those words, without looking at the sky?'

Isabel looked attentively at Bartolomé. ‘You mean,' she said slowly, ‘that you don't just have to hear words, you have to see them if you want to be able to write them down?'

Bartolomé nodded. ‘That's the way it is. I learned that today. And that's why Don Cristobal wants me to have my own book, so I can learn the spellings of the words out of it. He can't give me one, and I can't ask Papa.'

Isabel put her arm around Bartolomé. Where was she going to get a book for him? She needed the few coins she earned from her sewing for the housekeeping. She'd only been able to pay for the two little candles that Bartolomé's lessons cost by buying vegetables at the market for herself and the children that were not as fresh as they should have been. She could use that to make a thick soup and along with the stale bread that Joaquín could get cheaply from the baker, she could fill the children's tummies.

Beatríz and Manuel were too small to notice the difference. Joaquín, Ana and Bartolomé didn't complain, because they knew what Isabel was saving the money for.
But it will never be enough for a whole book
, thought Isabel.

‘We can't do it, Bartolomé,' she whispered, hugging him tightly.

Ana, who until now had been sitting in a corner, listening, got up and went to them. ‘I know a way out,' she said decisively.

Isabel stood up. ‘What's that?' she asked.

‘When Señora Lopez and Maria go to the apothecary shop in the mornings, I can sneak a book down. The widow has a few in her bedroom. I can make sure that Teresa and Gaspar suspect nothing. Then, before the widow comes home, I can put the book back.'

Bartolomé beamed. He had never loved Ana so much as he did just at that moment.

Isabel looked horrified. ‘That's stealing,' she said.

Ana shrugged her shoulders. ‘Bartolomé needs a book, and we're just borrowing one for him.'

‘But taking something without asking is stealing,' replied Isabel.

‘It's a question of Bartolomé's future. We have to do it,' Ana insisted.

‘No!' Isabel knew she could never approve of theft. If only she owned something that she could swap for a book! She thought of the little wooden box with her jewellery in it. There were just a few cheap pieces of thin silver. Only her grandmother's ring was worth anything. It was gold, with a sparkling chip of diamond. She might get enough money for it to buy a book. On the other hand, it was an heirloom, destined for Ana, just as she, as the eldest daughter, had got the ring from her mother on her deathbed.

‘My ring,' said Isabel softly.

Ana understood at once what she meant. She knew the piece of jewellery and had often admired it. One day, the ring would be hers. Not to wear, of course, but to treasure as a valuable jewel, as her mother did.

Ana hesitated. The ring for a book? Maybe Don Cristobal could still be persuaded to lend Bartolomé one. Or maybe he'd got it wrong, and Bartolomé could learn to spell even without a book? And why couldn't she secretly borrow one of Señora Lopez's books in her absence? That would hurt nobody, whereas the ring would be lost for ever. Had Bartolomé any idea how hard and how unfair this decision was?

‘Ana, if I get work and it makes me rich, the first thing I will do is buy you a new ring,' Bartolomé promised.

Ana looked into her brother's dark eyes. ‘We'll sell the ring,' she agreed.

‘Do you really want to do that?' Isabel asked.

Ana nodded quickly.

Isabel got the jewellery box from the back room and gave it to her eldest daughter. Carefully, Ana opened the lid and put the ring on her finger. She went to the window and held it up to the sunlight. It glittered. Dreamily, Ana waved the ring back and forth. She would never own this piece of jewellery now.

‘What are you doing?' asked Joaquín, coming in and putting down a leather water container. It was one of his chores to fetch water every day, and since Isabel never pressed him to come home quickly, he liked doing it. He liked wandering through the narrow streets of Madrid, observing the merchants and the artisans or running along behind a fine coach along with other lads in the hope that the rich owner would take a notion and throw them a few coins, which they would then jostle for. On this afternoon, however, his rumbling stomach had brought him home earlier than usual.

‘Why have you put that ring on? Joaquín asked now.

‘We're going to use it to buy a book for Bartolomé,' Isabel explained.

It took Joaquín a while to work out what was going on. Like Ana, he was of the opinion that she should use Señora Lopez's books. Isabel absolutely forbade it. None of her children could ever have theft on their conscience.

‘Don't sell the ring, though,' Joaquín suggested. ‘Pawn it.'

Isabel blenched. Only the very poorest people went to the pawn shop. It was a terrible shame for a family when a person was forced to pawn their possessions.

‘Then I can redeem the ring later, and give it back to Ana!' cried Bartolomé, delighted.

‘But suppose I don't get enough money that way to buy a book,' Isabel asked.

‘Don't take any money for the ring,' explained Joaquín. ‘Instead, ask for a book. In Calle Granado there is a pawnbroker who sometimes sits out in front of his shop, reading. He'd definitely agree to that plan. And when Bartolomé doesn't need the book any more, we can take it back and then all we have to pay is the interest. That can't be too bad.'

‘How do you know all this?' asked Ana.

‘You can learn a lot in this city if you are quick on your feet and if you keep your eyes open and your wits about you,' Joaquín answered, very sure of himself.

Isabel wrapped the ring in a piece of linen and hid it carefully in her petticoat pocket. Draping her scarf over her head and shoulders, she turned to Ana.

‘Go and get Beatríz and Manuel from downstairs and stay here with them in the apartment,' she ordered.

Ana nodded.

‘And get the supper ready.'

‘What if Papa comes home earlier than usual?' asked Ana.

Isabel hesitated. Juan must never know that she'd gone to the pawnbroker. On the other hand, she couldn't lie to him.

‘Joaquín, take the little jug with you. We'll buy some oil at the market,' she said.

Ana smiled. ‘So you've gone out to buy oil,' she said.

Isabel reddened. ‘That's right,' she snapped.