by Kerry Postle
Occasionally people would pass through the village on their way to or from the big cities. And, once or twice, an elderly couple had turned up asking, so the rumour mill had it, after the poor doctor and his girl. But, in truth, very little changed in Fuentes. And that included the people.
That was why, when Richard Johnson arrived in the spring of 1936, fifteen years after the last significant addition to the population, the entire village took a sharp intake of breath. Here was a true stranger, who really did speak an alien language. His presence had the power to clear streets. And so, for the first few weeks of his stay at least, the English boy found the usually pleasantly busy streets of Fuentes absolutely dead.
Yet what repelled the villagers about the English boy was precisely what attracted Maria.
He’d been in the village for less than a month when she told herself she loved him. It was ten o’clock in the morning, a sunny day in late spring 1936, and Richard Johnson had made his way along empty streets to discuss possible work with her father.
Doctor Alvaro had found him a room a few streets away with a family that could do with the extra pesetas. The kindly doctor had thought it would be good to throw the boy in at the deep end by housing him in the heart of the community. Unfortunately, the impact of the splash ensured that no villager would come within striking, spitting or speaking distance of him, not even the family with whom he was staying. It didn’t matter. Alvaro took the boy under his wing: oversaw his progress; invited him round for food; discussed politics, history, family; monitored his health; checked on his happiness. If the rest of the village ebbed away from him, Richard was past noticing. The doctor’s care and concern flowed towards him, warm and comforting, its gentle waves lapping all around. The boy’s father could not have done more, and, in truth, had often done very much less.
That’s why Richard Johnson was melting his way along the already hot streets, a book slipping from a sweaty palm, towards Doctor Alvaro’s, determined to show his appreciation for everything the good man had done. He’d asked before. In fact, he’d asked quite a few times. But the doctor had always been too polite to take him up on his offer. Well, the boy was determined to ask again. He would offer his services to help out the doctor in any way he could (as long as – he made a note of adding as the perspiration dripped off the tip of his nose and sucked the shirt to his back – it was before ten in the morning and after five in the afternoon). Truly. In any way. Though how he could be of help to a medical practitioner when he had nothing more than a rudimentary knowledge of basic human biology (never mind the Spanish vocabulary to go with it), the eighteen-year-old wasn’t really sure.
It was apparent that Pablo Alvaro’s thoughts weren’t any clearer.
‘I’m here to help you, good sir. I am at your disposal. Completely.’ The eager words tumbled out of his mouth the second the doctor opened the door in the boy’s best formal Spanish.
‘Wonderful to see you Richard. Buenos dias. Please, come in. Maria will be delighted you’re here.’ At the mention of her name, the boy gave a blush so intense you could light a cigarette with it. He glowed as he followed the doctor through the dark, cool interior of the house to the tiled courtyard at its heart. ‘I just need to get something,’ the doctor said, turning and bumbling his way back inside. He left his young guest standing in the open doorway.
Maria looked up from a pile of books and leaflets, her expression both amused and knowing. Richard must be here to discuss ‘work plans’ again. That always sent her father scurrying back inside, rummaging through notes and letters in search of a job, any job, for the English boy to do. It would have to be one that kept him out of the sun, Maria thought to herself as she caught sight of his bright red cheeks.
‘Please, sit,’ she said to him, instinctively pointing towards the chair in the shade.
They nodded at one another. Smiled. Waited.
Maria was the first to break the silence.
‘What’s that you’re reading?’ she asked. Then wished she hadn’t.
‘La vida es sueño by Calderón de la Barca. It’s about free will and destiny. But then,’ Richard said, sizzling up once more, ‘you probably know that.’
Maria had heard of it. She smiled but did not reply. She hoped he would assume she’d read it.
‘What are you going to do when you grow up?’
Before she knew where it had come from it was out. She was playing the game she played with Paloma. She put her hand up and shook her head with embarrassment, a gesture to say, ‘What was I thinking of?’ But she needn’t have worried; this childish dreaming about the future provided safer, more fertile ground for the pair of them.
‘I am going to see the world, after Oxford. Travel around the rest of Europe, go to North America, South America, possibly India …’ Richard’s blushes evaporated, his thoughts of Calderón disappeared, while Maria feared her eyes might pop out if he went on listing places much longer. This English boy’s words were confident, his future assured. And that was the moment it happened. His answer, worlds apart from Paloma’s, worlds apart from her own, defined him. He knew that he would do things that Maria, even in her most extravagant of dreams, had never imagined possible. Because he could, and she couldn’t, not here, in Fuentes. It wasn’t even a question of her father stopping her. The freedoms her father spoke of, he believed in. But within the village Maria knew such freedoms would be hard won.
‘What about you? What would you like to do? When you grow up?’
‘Writer!’ Maria blurted out, throwing out the first thing that came to mind. Anyone could do that, she thought, even stuck in Fuentes. ‘Yes! When I grow up I’m going to be a writer!’
She looked to gauge Richard’s response but the sun was blinding. She raised a hand to shield her eyes from the light that was starting to make her squint. ‘Would you like to swap places with me?’ he asked her from his sheltered corner. She declined – she’d already spotted a heat rash on his neck now that his blushes had subsided.
A gust of warm air rustled the sun-dry leaves above Richard’s head. Maria lifted up her eyes, screwing them up tightly to see the precious movement, green against blue, and listen to the music of the rippling leaves. She went over the question in her head again: Would I like to swap places with him? Whether he’d intended it or not, Richard had opened up a world of possibilities to her. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
Richard went to get up. ‘Oh, no,’ Maria laughed, pushing him back down. He laughed in response without truly understanding why. ‘What are you reading, if not Calderón?’ he asked, fixing on something more tangible, with more than a hint of playful impertinence.
‘Oh, these?’ Maria cleared her throat, pointing to the heaps of pamphlets strewn across the table in front of her. ‘Seňor Suarez gave me these to look through. There are some pamphlets on workers’ rights and organisations, as well as extracts from Karl Marx. It’s part of a reading programme he started for the labourers in the area.’
‘Karl Marx?’
‘You must know of him. He’s very popular in Spain.’
Infamous in England was how Richard would have put it, but he said nothing. ‘Only eleven people turned up to his funeral … doesn’t surprise me that he got turned down for a job as a railway clerk because of his atrocious handwriting. So he said religion was the opium of the people. Well, don’t mind if I do …’ Peter Johnson’s rants about Karl Marx danced their spiky rhythm across the revolving surface of the wheel of memory that spun round in his son’s head. No, Karl Marx was not popular, not in his house.
‘… Workers of the world, unite!’ Maria read the rousing words.
‘Isn’t he a … communist?’
‘It’s not a dirty word.’ Maria laughed. ‘And yes, he is. Father is reading Das Kapital. In Spanish, of course. Promises he’ll pass it on to me when he finishes. Says it makes a lot of sense. There’s so much unfairness in this country. So many workers selling their labour at too low a price while rich, old families live lives of l
uxury on the backs of the profits. Um … capital is dead labour which, like a vampire, only exists by sucking the life out of living labour.’ Her eyes flickered downwards as if reading from one of the leaflets in front of her.
‘But aren’t you causing trouble by reading Karl Marx to them?’ Richard said, his father’s tirades still resounding in his head.
‘No. I wouldn’t say so. Last time there was a problem Seňor Suarez and my father had to help them out of it. It stands to reason that if we help them to read they will be able to help themselves next time. They’ll be able to write letters, read contracts, represent themselves. Things like that. Things that we both take for granted.’ She glanced at the slim volume he had in his hand, reminded of the fleeting ignominy she’d felt at not having read one of Spain’s finest writers.
Richard Johnson thought for a moment. ‘Can I take some of these leaflets? To look at them?’
‘Claro que si. You can take these,’ Maria said, offering him a handful. ‘As long as you get them back to me by next Thursday.’
‘Next Thursday?’
‘Yes. That’s when he’ll … I mean we’ll,’ she added, a look of bashful pride on her face, ‘be needing them. That’s when we’ll be using them.’
It struck Richard Johnson that this was something he could do.
‘If I read all of these and make sure I understand every word, could I help?’ His heart beat with a sense of purpose.
‘I’ve been thinking.’ Doctor Alvaro appeared out of nowhere and was now standing behind his daughter, looking down at his visitor. ‘I don’t really know how I’m going to be able to use your talents. But don’t worry,’ he said reassuringly, relieved not to see disappointment on Richard’s face. ‘I’ll ask around and see if I can find something else for you to do.’
‘No need, father. I think I’ve found just the job. Isn’t that so, comrade?’ Maria gave the English boy a knowing wink. Then she turned round and planted a calming kiss on her grateful father’s cheek.
Chapter 4
‘No, she cannot. And you shouldn’t be doing it either!’ Cecilia shouted at Maria as the girl watched the large, hairy mole above her friend’s mother’s upper lip vibrate. Maria was on a mission to help Seňor Suarez recruit volunteers to teach some of the labourers up on the estate to read. She’d successfully enlisted Richard Johnson, thereby making her father a very relieved man as he no longer had to invent jobs for the hapless boy to do. And so, emboldened, she thought she might try her luck with Cecilia in the (what she saw now as foolish) hope that she would allow Paloma to help out too. Paloma was a good reader: Maria had made sure of that. Therefore it seemed reasonable that her friend should be allowed to pass on the skills she’d learnt by teaching others. ‘She’d make such a good teacher,’ Maria insisted. Contrary to appearances Cecilia had a soft spot for Maria and the girl knew it. She’d got round her friend’s mother many times before. Unfortunately, this was not going to be one of them. ‘The answer’s still no,’ the older woman insisted, her arms crossed defensively across an ample bosom.
‘And you can take this back,’ Cecilia said. And with that her friend’s mother thrust the pamphlet that she had given Paloma only hours before back into her hand. As clenched fist met unsuspecting palm, Maria felt Cecilia’s entire body bristle with anger. The gratefully oppressed, that’s how she regarded Cecilia, aggressively tenacious while holding onto the chains that enslaved her. She had no idea what the pamphlet said. But the older woman believed she didn’t need to. If that communist Seňor Suarez had anything to do with it (and he did) then it meant trouble. That was the point. Words, words and more words, probably written by that red troublemaker himself. They spelled out nothing but danger, Cecilia was sure of it. And she didn’t want her daughter to have any part in it. No, Maria would not be getting round her today. She folded her arms one way, then the other, as if to prove it.
In Cecilia’s small world, workers worked on the same estate – El Cortijo del Bosque. Her son Manuel had a labouring job there, her husband Fernando (God bless him) had died while working in its wheat fields, and she herself had gone from kitchen girl to housemaid to housekeeper, also cooking for the landowner and his family when the need arose: all on the same estate, all for the same family. Seňor Suarez and his talk of workers’ rights infuriated her. Divisive talk. She’d heard it all before. That teacher with all his false promises had given her Fernando hope – useless, backbreaking hope that one day he’d have his own plot of land to farm where he would at last enjoy the fruits of his own labours.
Something to do with government land reforms. Government land reforms: as insubstantial as dreams and as flammable as the paper they were written on. And it was that Seňor Suarez who’d sold it to Cecilia’s husband. But she knew, had always known, it was never going to happen. Don Felipe was a latifundista of the old school who believed in tradition, glory, church and the rightness of a social hierarchy where his boot had the God-given right to press down forcefully on the heads of men like her husband, keeping their noses well and truly snuffling in the soil. His soil. It was never going to be theirs. Don Felipe might pay them a few pesetas more, but give them his land? Never.
Fernando had been a fool. For listening to Suarez, for daring to raise his head and hope for something more. And the bitter memory stung like acid in Cecilia’s soul.
He’d got above himself. And look where it had got him. Dead and buried under the very land he’d wanted.
Well, nobody could ever accuse Cecilia of not knowing her place – it was right up there on the estate doing exactly what she was told to do. And she would do her damnedest to make sure her children followed in her footsteps.
It was the only security she knew.
‘There’s no need for any of Don Felipe’s workers to read,’ she said, wagging her finger in Maria’s face. ‘That terrible teacher. Getting the farm workers to bite the hand that feeds them.’ A guttural rattle vibrated at the back of the woman’s throat.
‘But Cecilia, because of him men can now provide for their families. Don’t you remember? Children were going hungry before.’
That was it.
‘Out! Out now!’ Cecilia shouted, pointing Maria towards the door. Maria knew when she was beaten. She didn’t mind that Cecilia had shouted at her. She wasn’t afraid of her friend’s mother, but she wouldn’t convince her, that much was sure. Her eyes squirmed away from the fury in Cecilia’s; she hoped she hadn’t earned a beating for her friend. An unusually subdued Maria went to leave as a tired and taciturn Manuel entered.
‘Maria.’ Manuel greeted her. He had been working all day and his young body was wet with perspiration. His skin, Maria couldn’t help but notice, was a deep, glistening, golden brown, and, his dark hair shone in its blackness, swept back as it was from his strong jawed face, with its dark brows and liquid brown eyes. His stomach was taut with hunger, his throat parched with thirst, while his heart, though she didn’t know it, was heavy. He was perfect. All apart from a small scar on his left cheek. The sight of him reminded Maria why she’d thought him beautiful not so very long ago: because he was.
‘Good evening Manuel.’ Maria forced her eyes to meet his. Cecilia looked on suspiciously. A coil of hair fell about his eyes. He swept it back with a large, strong hand. For a moment his beauty threatened to break through and touch Maria’s soul, but the moment passed quickly. She shook her head to stop it from catching on and commended herself on being made of more cerebral stuff. A smile of relief blew across her face.
Maria held out a pamphlet and offered it to him. ‘Oh no you don’t, my girl!’ said Cecilia, flinging her arm out and intercepting it as though it were a poisoned arrow.
‘It’s tomorrow. Up at the estate—’ But before she could say any more Maria found herself hastily turfed out onto the road.
She looked back at Cecilia, disappointed but not surprised, the faint smile on her lips that signalled superiority enough to push the poor woman into a rage.
‘And if you d
on’t want tongues to wag you’ll heed my words and not have anything to do with it either,’ the red-faced Cecilia called after her, loud enough to bring all the neighbours rushing to their windows. ‘And,’ she shouted, now to the back of the girl’s head, furious that Maria appeared disproportionately collected in the face of Cecilia’s own fast-burning fury, ‘you’ll ruin your chances of ever getting a husband if you carry on this way! I’ll be having words with your father about this.’
‘Oh, Cecilia!’ Maria said calmly as she walked away.
*
The designated meeting place for the lesson was in the courtyard of the estate. The estate manager, Guido, didn’t like it but the law was against him. Still, he’d done his best to warn the workers off. That was why, when Seňor Suarez turned up, the teacher had only found three boys up for the reading challenge. They looked a little beaten around but the smiles on their faces as they came closer soon blinded him to their bruises. He recognised Manuel, as well as Pedro and Raul, the Espinoza brothers. ‘We’ve come to read,’ poor Fernando’s son said, holding out Maria’s scrunched up pamphlet as proof. Disappointed not to see the girl who had given it to him, Manuel’s eyes searched all around. There, in the distance, he recognised the one known as ‘el inglés’, his hair as golden as the crops all around him, next to whom, Manuel realised with a heavy heart, was Maria. The pair seemed to be in no particular hurry. ‘Manuel? Manuel? Do you agree Manuel?’ The teacher’s words pierced the surface of the boy’s consciousness. ‘Manuel? Manuel? Did you hear me?’ The Espinoza brothers laughed. ‘A teacher each,’ Seňor Suarez repeated. He too had seen the English boy and Maria.
