Bartolomé (11 page)

A Human Dog

WHEN Marie Barbola propelled Bartolomé into Maria Augustina's room, several people were already waiting for them. Two servants had charge of a wooden bathtub. Three water carriers were filling it with warm water. Maria Augustina emptied a phial of bath oil into it with her own hand. It smelt of the Infanta's favourite perfume.

Two seamstresses and an assistant were all set in one part of the room. The assistant, a thin girl barely ten years old, was struggling to hold heavy bales of material in her arms. Two pageboys were chatting idly near the window. As the serving girl started to undress Bartolomé they came closer and stared without embarrassment at his back where the bones were visible under the skin and had grown into a hump. They laughed.

Bartolomé was put into the water, even though his father had already washed him, and was scrubbed. He didn't have the nerve to protest. Afterwards, the serving girl rubbed him dry with a big towel. But as she reached for Bartolomé's shirt, Maria Augustina shook her head. ‘He's going to have a new outfit.'

The serving girl bundled up his few pieces of clothing and left the room. The manservants carried the bathtub out.

‘The Infanta wants a human dog,' said Maria Augustina. ‘Therefore he'll have a costume made of brown material which will envelop him from head to toe. Only his face can remain visible.'

The seamstresses nodded eagerly and pulled Bartolomé out of the towel, into which he had crept in order to avoid the gaping of the pages.

The older woman measured his body. Meanwhile, Maria Augustina chose a material. She decided on a bolt of soft, dark brown velvet.

‘We have no time to lose,' she said. ‘I want to surprise the Infanta with it this evening at bedtime.'

The women cut out the material on a table in the corner of the room, and got to work. Bartolomé had wrapped himself up again in the towel as soon as they had left him in peace. He sat quietly in the middle of the room and waited. Maria Augustina disappeared, followed by the pages and the dwarf woman. For two hours Bartolomé sat on the floor, watching the seamstresses sewing away, seam by seam. The assistant threaded needles and laid pieces of material side by side, and, when she had time, she stared over at Bartolomé as if he was the strangest thing she had ever seen.

Late in the afternoon, Maria Augustina came back with her retinue. She bent over Bartolomé, raised his head up and looked into his face.

‘It is far too pale,' she said accusingly. ‘As a brown dog, you'll need a dark face. We'll have to paint you.'

She straightened up and beckoned a page.

‘Go to Master Velázquez in the studio and request an apprentice who will bring me a selection of brown paints,' she demanded.

The apprentice painter was a young lad in a paint-spattered smock. He brought a little box and laid it in front of Bartolomé on the floor. He looked curiously at Bartolomé, who stared anxiously at the box.

‘It's only got paints and paintbrushes in it, no instruments of torture,' the apprentice whispered and gave a wink. He lifted the lid. Bartolomé bent forward a little and looked in. He saw a row of little bottles.

The apprentice turned up the lid of the box and set the bottles on it. They were labelled on the outside, and they contained powders of every shade of brown.
Umber, burnt umber, Cassel earth, bitumen, sepia, Siena, burnt Siena, ochre
… Bartolomé read. He hadn't known that there were so many kinds of brown. Sepia was so dark that it seemed almost black, whereas Siena was a reddish brown. Umber was like dark, freshly ploughed earth, and burnt umber was the same colour as the clay oven at home.

Next to these stood bottles of clear fluids. Bartolomé murmured the strange-sounding names: linseed oil, spirit gum, Venetian turpentine, poppy-seed oil, tragacanth, distilled water.

The apprentice painter was still taking items out of the box. A marble bowl, a flat clay dish, a thick white sheet of glass, a pestle and several little spoons. The last thing he laid on the lid was a single hen's egg. He looked around.

‘I'm all set,' he said to the page who was standing next to him.

‘I'll just see if Doña de Sarmiento can make time for you,' replied the page from on high.

‘He'll choke on his own arrogance,' murmured the apprentice, as the page strolled, with a rolling gait, to Maria Augustina, who was supervising the work of the seamstresses. Bartolomé laughed involuntarily. He put his hand quickly in front of his mouth. Laughing was sure to be forbidden. The apprentice painter gave him a surprised look. Then he grinned.

‘Don't you agree?' he whispered and imitated the page's snooty expression. Bartolomé bit his hand to prevent himself from bursting out with loud laughter. His crooked body was shaking.

‘I'm Andrés. What are they planning to do with you?' asked the apprentice.

‘Bartolomé,' whispered Bartolomé. ‘They are going to make me a human dog for the Infanta.'

Andrés seemed shocked. He had often had to help out with plans of the ladies-in-waiting. For example, once they had wanted to paint a pony for the Infanta with black and white stripes, to turn it into an African animal of some sort. He had painted cats purple and once he'd had to tint the hair of all the pages green. He'd had to paint the doughy face of Marie Barbola yellow recently to make a full moon of it. He hadn't realised that she wasn't going to take part in a play, but was going to be hung upside down from a rope in front of a window. When they had told him that, he felt guilty.

‘A dog?' asked Andrés.

‘I don't want to,' said Bartolomé. ‘I'm a human being.'

Andrés nodded. But what could he do? He could do nothing to stop it. He was only a little insignificant apprentice who was lucky enough to be trained by the king's court painter.

‘Did you know that a painter always paints a dog into his picture when he wants to represent courage and loyalty?' he said, trying to console Bartolomé.

‘Really?'

‘If the lady-in-waiting asks me to make you up like a dog, I will paint you so that you look like the bravest dog in all of Spain,' he promised.

‘Why is there chatter going on here?' complained Maria Augustina, appearing out of nowhere.

Quickly, she chose two colours. ‘Dark brown for the snout and a light brown for the rest of the face.' She was pointing at the umber and the ochre.

Bartolomé watched Andrés shaking a little of the coarse ochre powder onto the glass platter and grinding it with the pestle. Then he mixed linseed oil with tragacanth and a trace of distilled water in the marble bowl. Then, to Bartolomé's surprise, he cracked the egg into the flat clay dish and beat it with a spoon until the yolk and the white formed a foam. He poured part of this into the marble bowl. He stirred it carefully with the spoon and then shook the finely ground ochre powder into it until it became a gleaming light brown paste.

Bartolomé watched what he did. He hadn't known that this was how you made paint, though his mother had sometimes boiled onion skins to make a brew that would dye wool a reddish colour.

Andrés noticed how interested Bartolomé was, and he felt flattered by the attention. In the studio, he was the youngest, the dogsbody. He was not paid much heed, either by the master painter or by the other apprentices. He was entrusted with only the lowliest tasks.

Andrés sat down on the floor in front of Bartolomé and dipped a thin paintbrush with a short head into the paint. Carefully, he painted Bartolomé's face.

‘Close your eyes so you don't get paint in them,' he said to the dwarf, who was still wrapped in the towel. Bartolomé felt the paintbrush brushing softly over his closed eyelids. It tickled, and he grimaced.

‘It'll be over in a minute,' murmured Andrés kindly.

When he had painted most of Bartolomé's face light brown, he asked for clean water and fresh cloths. He rinsed the paintbrush carefully and cleaned the glass sheet, the pestle, spoon and bowl.

Andrés noticed how Bartolomé watched all his movements carefully. ‘Would you like to try it for yourself?' he offered.

‘Could I really?' asked Bartolomé, surprised.

Andrés nodded. He was glad to see how Bartolomé's sad eyes suddenly lit up. Like a master craftsman, Andrés instructed his pupil and he was amazed how neatly Bartolomé crushed the umber powder on the glass platter and mixed it with the linseed oil, tragacanth, water and the rest of the egg to make a paste. At first, the spoon just made dark streaks, but soon the pigment jelled into a uniform dark brown emulsion.

‘I have made proper paint, all by myself,' breathed Bartolomé, overcome, and it didn't bother him at all that Andrés smeared the dark brown paste in a thick layer over his mouth and nose.

Maria Augustina came back and regarded Bartolomé's painted face critically.

‘It'll be fine with the costume,' she said at last.

Andrés cleaned his utensils and bottles and packed them back into the box. As he closed it over, he waved goodbye to Bartolomé.

‘Thank you, Andrés,' said Bartolomé softly.

Andrés was taken aback. He hadn't expected the sad little creature to thank him. He was pleased, and at the same time he felt ashamed. Who knew what sort of tricks they would play on the dwarf.

‘Bartolomé.' Andrés bent down, close to the grotesquely painted face with its grateful eyes. ‘Never forget that you are the bravest dog in all of Spain!'

Dog-training

HOW am I supposed to feel like the bravest dog in Spain?
thought Bartolomé as Marie Barbola put the dog costume on him. The worst part was to see his hands, the only parts of him that had grown properly, disappearing into the fabric ‘paws' of the costume. When Marie Barbola had fastened the buttons on his stomach, Bartolomé had to crawl to the big mirror, dragging a long tail behind him. The pealing laughter of the pages followed him. He hardly dared to look in the mirror. When at last he did so, he saw a little brown hump-backed dog with floppy ears, which had been sewn on either side of the costume's headpiece and which dangled back and forth. Bartolomé looked unhappily at his reflection. No way could he be a brave dog.

‘Marie Barbola, you'll have to teach him to bark and do tricks!' Maria Augustina instructed.

The pages clapped ecstatically. One of them gave a cheeky pull on Bartolomé's long tail. The other lifted up one of the floppy ears and roared into it, ‘Bark!'

Brave dogs don't bark,
thought Bartolomé.
Brave dogs bite when people annoy them.
But he knew he wouldn't be allowed to do that.

Bartolomé had to creep on all fours behind Marie Barbola through the corridors of the palace kitchen wing. There the dwarf woman had a tiny, sparsely furnished room with a discarded sofa that served as a bed, a chest, a table with a cracked washbasin and a battered tin jug. There was a worn carpet on the floor and a little stove provided heat in winter. The single window looked out onto a minuscule inner courtyard that let light into other rooms.

Marie Barbola climbed up on the sofa. ‘Are you hungry?' she asked Bartolomé.

‘Yes.'

At lunch, he'd been so excited about going to see Don Cristobal again that he'd hardly been able to get anything down, and since then he'd had nothing to eat.

Marie Barbola slipped down from the sofa and disappeared. She came back shortly with a bowl, in which steamed chunks of bread that had been fried in olive oil.

Bartolomé's stomach rumbled loudly. Marie Barbola gave an amused giggle and put the bowl beside her on the sofa.

‘If you bark, you'll get a piece.'

Bartolomé let out a strangled gurgle. Why did even this dwarf woman have to tease him?

‘That sounded like a whimper, Bartolomé,' she said encouragingly and threw him a piece of bread.

Bartolomé tried clumsily to pick it up in his paw.

‘No!' Marie Barbola admonished him. ‘That's not how a dog eats. Behave yourself, or I'll eat it all up on you.'

She stuck a piece of bread greedily into her mouth. Humiliated, Bartolomé crouched over the food and caught it in his teeth. He chewed and swallowed. It tasted of nothing.

‘Well done!' she praised him. ‘And now bark!'

Bartolomé barked and stood up and begged. Each time he did it to Marie Barbola's satisfaction, he was thrown a piece of bread. Hunger and the knowledge that he had no other choice drove him to play along with this grisly game.

‘You really are a regular dog,' Marie Barbola snorted as she made Bartolomé raise his hind leg at the leg of the table.

He could manage to hold this pose unsteadily for a moment, but then he fell over. Marie Barbola threw him the last piece of bread. Bartolomé ignored it.

‘I don't want to be a dog!' he wailed in despair.

Marie Barbola shrugged her shoulders. The dwarf should know by now that he had no alternative.

‘El Primo. He's like me. Why can't I be a secretary?' Bartolomé pleaded. ‘I can read and write.'

Marie Barbola laughed bitterly. Everyone knew El Primo. He was one lucky fellow.

‘The Infanta wants you as a human dog. It doesn't matter, Bartolomé, who you are or what you can do. You have to be what she wants,' she told him in no uncertain terms. ‘And you needn't start getting uppity. Reading and writing are of no interest to anyone. That'll make you nothing but enemies.'

Bartolomé hung his head and bit his lip. He mustn't cry. That would ruin his make-up.

‘It's only a game,' said Marie Barbola, suddenly kind. ‘A game that rich folks play. Don't take it to heart. If you're smart, and steer clear of intrigues and gossip, you can have a wonderful life at court. Think of it as a stage play, with you in the leading role.'

A game. A play. Bartolomé sighed.

‘You'll see, you'll have plenty of time for being human later. I'm sure the Infanta won't want to have you around the whole time,' Marie Barbola said confidently.