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Chapter 2
The villagers had never seen such a strange looking boy as Richard Johnson. They called him el inglés (among an interesting array of other, more colourful names – all of them unflattering). He was impossible to miss. His colouring was what had distinguished him most from everyone else when he’d first arrived; so white that small children would run to their parents, cries of fantasma trailing behind them. And now, six months on, the reaction he elicited was scarcely any better. Oh, what they called him was different. But their alarm was just the same. Once other-worldly white, now vibrant, throbbing pink; the ghost had been well and truly turned into the gamba, with dark orange freckles seared on burnt crustacean skin, cooking away as he was under the hot flames of the Spanish sun. Ghost or prawn, either way the English boy stood out.
But why had he come to their small village to live under a sun that seemed not to like him in the first place?
What he and his parents told people was that he was in Spain to immerse himself in the language and culture. The eighteen-year-old Richard Johnson had a place to study Modern Languages at Exeter College, Oxford, starting in October 1936, and it was true that he needed to prepare himself for the rigours of academic life, as well as to hear and speak the words he’d spent so many hours thus far only reading and writing in a cold classroom.
But the real reason, the reason that eclipsed all others in his mother Margaret’s mind, was her son’s health. That he was of a delicate constitution was plain to see and his doctor had thought it might do him some good to experience warmer climes. The poor boy suffered from two afflictions. The first was psoriasis for which there was no cure. Other than the sun. At home, where it was chilly, damp and grey, Richard struggled with the condition. It irritated him and distressed his mother. A constant reminder of the genetic legacy she had bequeathed to her only son, handed on down from her father and his father before him. A long illustrious line. The affliction had skipped a generation with her; a blessing which she would have gladly foregone if it had meant not affecting her precious child. Instead, she endured her son’s absence, consoled by the knowledge that the sun would help him.
That his skin wasn’t robust enough to withstand the raw rays of the Andalucian sun for long was a detail that no one had factored in.
As for the second ‘affliction’, it was in some ways more and in some ways less grave than the first. It was also another reason for Margaret to want her son as far away from England, and away from his father and his paternal grandparents, as possible. You see, Richard Johnson had been staring into space. And he’d been staring into space for years while sitting at the back of the classroom of his very expensive, fee-paying school where teachers were employed on the basis of personal academic achievement rather than any particular ability to teach, let alone care about the young faceless charges before them. Not one of them had noticed the red-headed boy with the vacant expression at the back of the class.
It was his grandfather who’d spotted it. One Christmas he’d asked Richard to pass the gravy. He loved gravy. Liked to drench Margaret’s over-boiled sprouts in the stuff. When the damned fool of a boy didn’t answer on the third time of asking, his grandfather knew: the boy was having a mild epileptic episode. ‘Just like my old brother Vernon,’ he’d said. He was promptly taken to see the family doctor who confirmed it. Poor Richard. Another genetic legacy, this time bequeathed (his mother was relieved to say) from his father’s line.
His grandfather demanded that the boy be operated upon. From that day forward Margaret’s mind was made up. Her son had to go to Spain. As far as she could see, if Richard’s condition displayed itself as a little staring into the sunset every now and again, she was convinced that it could do him no harm. And it was infinitely better than submitting him to unnecessary surgery or endless discussions about its possibility.
And so, even with political changes afoot in Spain – news of it was beginning to make it into the nether regions of the press – both Margaret and Peter Johnson were convinced their son would be better off there until the family had stopped picking over the bones of Richard’s epilepsy. And considering they hadn’t noticed it for eighteen years there was a high probability that once out of sight, the vulture known as Family Concern would alight on the carcass of another victim soon enough.
And that was how, with a letter here and a telegram there, Richard Johnson had ended up in the care of a doctor in a village in Spain in the spring of 1936 where he would stay until the start of his first term at Oxford. And where he would become the most unlikely of heart throbs.
Maria hadn’t realised she was restless before the strange vision that was Richard Johnson came to Fuentes.
She did now.
She longed for his visits to her home, reliving them as she went off to sleep. She knew that even Paloma laughed at the look of him when she was at home with her sister; but he, in all his otherness, showed Maria that a big, beautiful world existed out there. And this sign of otherness that leaked out of him she took for his soul, his appearance, like blotting paper, changed by it forever.
That her father should be the person who brought this exotic being to their quiet village did not surprise her. She only had memories of living in Fuentes. Her father had always been its doctor, stitching wounds, administering medicines, making up poultices, visiting the old, the sick and the injured, as well as disappearing on visits that he chose not to explain to her. It was his life. But every few months he would receive a letter that connected him to a time before, to a life spent far away. Then he would hide himself away in his study and look through the album he kept in a drawer in his desk. The people who inhabited the photographs would leave the page and he would let them dance round and round in his mind. And for a few moments he would lose himself.
Maria would too.
Whenever her father was out doing his rounds she would enter his study. Within seconds she would be stroking the flat images of the woman pictured next to him in the album, placing a finger on the delicate young woman’s papery cheek and dreaming of the past. When both her parents were alive.
She would then shuffle through the post, looking at the postmarks on the envelopes of any letters her father had received; ‘Madrid’, ‘Seville’, ‘Malaga’, ‘Granada’, ‘Cordoba’. Each place name had the power to erect exciting new worlds in her mind. She had no need to see what was written inside to be transported there. Not that she had any qualms about reading her father’s letters. It was just that in the main their contents were always the same – disease and politics – and Maria was fed up with reading that people thought her father had the cure for both.
Shortly after Christmas 1935 the letters became more frequent, the postmarks more varied and far flung. An increasing number arrived from Madrid, followed by more still from Cadiz, and Barcelona. The words inside, when she chose to read them, were now feverish, about strikes and demonstrations. Yet they also brought with them a wild optimism for change that galloped off the sheets and into Maria’s heart on the occasions she picked them up.
But for all their unbridled promise, nothing and no one had yet come to wake up their sleepy little village.
Then, one day in early January 1936, Maria noticed an English postmark. As usual the sight of it was sufficient to fire her imagination. Here was another bridge, this time to England. She closed her eyes and conjured up a country that was cold, green, wet, where people drank tea. Those bits did sound horrid to her. But it was also home to Shakespeare, and George Eliot, and well-loved by Voltaire for its religious tolerance and freedom of speech (she had listened well to Seňor Suarez and her father over the years, though, strangely, never been tempted to follow up on their reading recommendations). When her imagination had no further details to draw on she read the letter. She wept with joy at its contents. Someone, an English someone called Richard Johnson, aged eighteen, from England, would soon be walking across that bridge to stay in Fuentes de Andalucía until October. Maria could not wait for his arrival.
She brushed up her English vocabulary, practised her English grammar, fell asleep reading Charles Dickens in translation one painful sentence at a time. Richard Johnson. She didn’t care what he might look like. He would be in her life very soon, providing a window on the big, wide, wonderful world.
Chapter 3
The villagers of Fuentes thought the Alvaros an unusual family, and Fuentes was an unusual place for them to settle. People usually dreamt of moving to Madrid, and so when a finely dressed Madrileňo holding a plump, well-fed baby in one arm held out his hand one Monday morning way back in 1921 to help a frail-looking woman out of a carriage, most of them couldn’t believe their eyes. Sturdy trunks followed, full of books, bottles and medical instruments. By the end of the second day the finely dressed man had tended three babies with a fever, lanced twenty-seven boils, treated the infected wounds of seven farm labourers, and diagnosed nine cases of gout.
El doctor had arrived.
Within weeks he had become indispensable, caring for the infirm and curing the sick, usually with his robust-looking baby in tow.
‘Poor doctor! Poor child! What sort of a wife must that woman be to let her husband do so much? She never leaves the house!’ the women of Fuentes enjoyed muttering to each other, their eyes rolling in sisterly condemnation.
The answer came in the winter of 1923 when poor Seňora Alvaro left her home for good, in a coffin – thus putting an end to the muttering.
The response was rapid. All rallied round, some bringing him food, others looking after the poor motherless girl. It wasn’t their fault the woman had died. They weren’t doctors (they bit their tongues from running on to the inevitable conclusion their cruel thoughts had already jumped to). But they were mothers. And they would treat this Maria as one of their own. That she looked like she had sprung from the Andalucian soil made her easier to accept. She was strong and dark and not at all like the frail, colourless woman who had given birth to her (if, one or two of the more spiteful among them whispered, she really had).
And although many of the mothers in the village talked openly amongst themselves over the years that the doctor should show that daughter of his a firm hand, they too indulged the girl. Her growing spirit and fearlessness were a joy to behold. Most of the time.
As for the men, they acknowledged the doctor’s loss at the funeral. They never gave it much thought after that. Pablo Alvaro was their doctor, first and foremost. They had no time to contemplate his suffering. Not when they had to endure so much of their own. The moment they stepped outside the church was the moment they put him back on his pedestal. Oh, they would have the odd drink with him, careful to be on their best behaviour when he was around, but they would never break bread with him. It wasn’t because they didn’t like him – they did. It was because they didn’t understand him. He was good, well-meaning, but he came from a different world. They consoled themselves as the years went by that he had Seňor Suarez, the teacher, and Father Anselmo, the priest, for company, thereby relinquishing themselves of all feelings of guilt and responsibility. To the villagers’ ears these three pillars of Fuentes society may as well have spoken a different language for all the sense they made.
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 luxury 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.
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