Bartolomé (4 page)

Arrival

NOBODY had tummy-ache in the morning. The opposite, in fact. Don Pacheco had drunk a glass of wine with Juan, but otherwise he seemed to assume that his guests had already eaten. They had spent a cold, draughty night on the stone floor of the unused kitchen quarters of the hunting lodge, without their mats and blankets.

‘There was no breakfast either,' Joaquín complained, as they hurried down the drive of the castle. Bartolomé smiled in his chest, up on the cart. It had been warm in the stable, and he'd had no shortage of food. He remembered Father Rodriquez, the old priest in their village. One evening, when Bartolomé had been sitting on the stone steps watching the other children playing, the priest had picked him up, carried him into the church and shown him the great wooden cross hanging on the wall above the high altar.

‘The last shall be first,' the priest had said, pointing at the cross. Bartolomé hadn't believed it at the time. He was the last in the village, and he could not imagine that ever changing.
Until last night
, thought Bartolomé, pleased to hear Joaquín impatiently asking his father when on earth they could stop and have some breakfast. Last night, he'd been the first. It was a lovely feeling and it might even be a sign. Maybe an even bigger miracle would take place in Madrid that would turn him, the cripple, into a proper son.

But whatever miracles might happen in Madrid, Bartolomé had to get back into his prison long before they got to the city gate. As the narrow road emerged from the forest, it met a broad road. Countless coaches and riders passed them in the next few hours. All important people, together with their noble wives and children and their servants, all apparently wanting to get away from Madrid, to escape the hot, muggy city even if only for a day.

On the roadside, it seemed that every peasant who had a table and a couple of benches had set them out in the shade of a tree. In these temporary little bars, the peasants sold wine and little portions of food to hungry travellers. Merchants with carts and hand-baskets offered all kinds of wares: vegetables, fruit, baked goods and sweets. Their loud voices boomed through the air.

Bartolomé heard Beatríz whining in the midday heat. She wanted to take a little rest and have something to eat and drink. But Juan went plodding on, past all these temptations. He wanted to reach Madrid before dusk.

As Juan led his wife and children through the western gate into the city, they clung anxiously to the side of the cart. They had never seen so many houses and people in one spot. Nearly every building had several storeys. Some façades were beautifully decorated and there were windows of glass in which the rays of the sun sparkled. The streets through which they went were paved with great flat stones over which the cart rolled easily.

‘Calle Zaragoza, behind Plaza Major. That's where we live. In case we get split up, that's where you are to go,' Juan warned them. ‘Ask somebody the way.'

He sat Beatríz on the back of the donkey. Ana and Joaquín gave him a horrified look. They would never be able to find their way in this enormous city.

Juan took no notice of their terror. He marched on, set on reaching his goal, pulling the donkey by the bridle behind him. Ana and Joaquín took each other by the hand. With his other hand, Joaquín held tightly to the cart. Even Isabel was gripped by fear as they left the broad streets and stepped into the narrow alleyways between high houses. Here, where it was so narrow, the people seemed to crowd in. Isabel believed she'd never seen so many people at once. She'd like to have walked with Juan, taking his arm. But that wasn't the way it happened. Keeping her eyes fixed on Joaquín and Ana's backs, she hurried along behind them.

Manuel was bound securely on her back. He'd slept soundly for most of the journey. Now, however, he was woken by the noise of the city. He didn't know which way to look. There was so much to see.

They came to a marketplace full of pens with live animals for sale. Manuel pulled excitedly at Isabel's headscarf when he noticed the hens, geese, goats and sheep. He wanted her to stop. But Isabel had eyes only for the cart and her children. She didn't want to lose sight of them.

Juan turned out of the marketplace into a wide street that led to the Cathedral of San Isidor. When they reached the square in front of it, he stopped to wipe the perspiration from his forehead. They were nearly there.

Ana, Beatríz, Joaquín and Isabel stared open-mouthed at the imposing towers that seemed to reach as high as the clouds. But it was Manuel who noticed something familiar in all this unimaginable splendour. ‘Barmo, Barmo!' he shouted, pointing excitedly at the cathedral.

Barmo? Isabel swung around towards the cart. That's what Manuel called Bartolomé. Surely he couldn't have disobeyed his father's order and crept out of the chest? No, the chest was tightly closed.

‘Barmo, Barmo!' Manuel kept calling. He was so excited that he tried to wriggle out of the cloth that bound him to his mother's back.

Isabel looked where Manuel was pointing and was horrified. There, in a niche in the grey façade sat Bartolomé, miserable and in rags. It was only when she looked again that she realised that it was not her own son but another crippled child, stretching out his hand to the passersby, who took no notice of him.

Shocked, Isabel looked away. Tramps had come into the village from time to time, homeless old men and women, childless or abandoned by their children. People gave them a crust of bread, sometimes a bowl of soup. But she'd never seen such a pitiable little child begging. Did he not have any parents?

Juan had also noticed the little creature. ‘Now you know why I didn't want to bring him,' he said in a hard voice. Without waiting for Isabel's answer, he gripped the bridle more tightly and walked on. The little caravan set off again slowly, following him. Isabel did not look back as they left the cathedral square.

New Home

CALLE ZARAGOZA was a narrow, densely inhabited alleyway near the Alcázar and the great Cathedral of San Isidor. Juan stopped the cart in front of one of the buildings and opened the door. A dark hallway stretched out in front of him. Noises came crowding out of the house, the crying of a child, shrill girls' voices and the clucking of hens. It smelt of food and of drains.

‘This is our new home,' said Juan.

‘Do we have to live with strangers?' hissed Ana, disappointed. She had dreamt of a roomy house with a garden.

‘In Madrid, only the rich people have their own houses,' explained Juan shortly. He looked at Isabel. ‘We have the whole first floor all to ourselves,' he said, trying to set her mind at rest. ‘We have a big room at the front, facing the street, and a small room at the back, looking out onto the yard. Upstairs lives Señora Lopez, the widow of an apothecary. She owns the house. Don Zorilla and his wife rent the ground floor. He's a royal chamberlain, and he has three daughters, Jeronima, Luzia and Augustina. Jeronima is a little simple, but she's a good soul. You don't need to be afraid of her. But at the same time, you shouldn't annoy her.' Juan looked sternly at Joaquín.

‘Don Zorilla found the apartment for me. I owe him a favour because of that. It's not easy to find a reasonable place in Madrid in a good area. Señora Lopez gave me a good deal on the rent, and in return you'll do her washing, Isabel, and Ana will look after her children from time to time.'

Everyone helped with the unpacking, except Manuel and Bartolomé, who wasn't allowed out of the chest yet. Juan had to take the donkey and cart back before evening. Quickly, they put the chests, the bedstead, the chairs and the rest of the luggage in the hall.

Juan gave Isabel a big key. ‘For the door to the apartment,' he explained. At home in the village, they'd had no key, just a bolt that Isabel used to fasten the door at night.

‘I'll carry the big pieces up when I get home,' said Juan.

‘May I come with you?' asked Joaquín. Juan thought it over. Joaquín should really be helping the others to carry up the chests. On the other hand, it would be good to familiarise him a bit with the area, so that he could show Isabel the way to the well and the market the following morning. Juan nodded.

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 chamberlain. 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.