A Forbidden Love

by Kerry Postle

  ‘I’m hungry,’ Maria said as she rummaged through the picnic basket she’d packed. She now knew as much as Paloma did about the landowners’ son having pumped her friend full of questions on their walk: and it wasn’t very much. She couldn’t even tell Maria what he looked like, having seen him only a handful of occasions herself many years ago. All Paloma could remember was that Cecilia had said that he was a ‘good boy’. Maria recalled that Cecilia had also said Dona Sofίa and Don Felipe were ‘good employers’ and so that was no recommendation. She smiled at Richard. ‘You must be hungry too,’ she said, as she handed him some bread and ham. She sighed as she looked into the distance, satisfied that she’d restored him to his rightful place in her heart.

  Paloma’s eyes settled a little closer to home. The look on her big sister’s face unsettled her. The more familiar expressions of defiance and self-satisfaction had been replaced by something more reflective and humble. She shot a glance at Richard. There was something different about him too, though she couldn’t identify what it was. But it was clear to her, from the way he repeatedly ran his fingers around the back of his collar and the way he dropped his gaze to the ground each time she caught his eye, that he was feeling more than a little uncomfortable about something.

  For the remainder of the picnic Paloma watched Lola and Richard’s every move. She found it uneasy viewing.

  ‘Oh, I would love to travel,’ Maria chatted on happily, still transfixed by the infinite possibilities she read in the sky as she got up to have a better look. She was oblivious to the fact that Richard was moving, little by little, ever closer to Lola, while on the blank, blue canvas up ahead her imagination was delighting in the creation of a fiction of her life that drew little on reality. There she saw her future as it stretched itself out, on a path as unbroken as the familiar cloudless sky along which she would travel. She could envisage no impediment to her personal plans. Not even a summer shower.

  She was of an age at which life is taken for granted and a happy-ever-after assumed.

  As for love, she believed that it was something that she could choose. She had no idea that, when the time came, it would choose her, whether she wanted it or not.

  And if she only had eyes to see she would have noticed that it had the English boy Richard Johnson in its grip.

  ‘Excuse me while I break myself some bread.’ ‘Oh, would you pass the ham?’ ‘Oh, would you mind passing me the knife?’ Richard was drawn to Lola like a magnet, her touch as she passed bread, ham, knife to him sending an electric current that brought an altogether different part of him to life. It was true that Lola was not as intellectual as Maria, her conversation not as witty or engaging, that the only English she spoke were the few words he’d given her that afternoon, but when she pushed herself against him it made his eyes gleam and his body melt in the most delicious of ways. He’d told himself only the day before that the warmth he felt for Maria was love. If that was so, then what was the name of the passion that had now taken him over body and soul?

  By the time they cycled home together everything had changed for Richard Johnson. And even though Maria did not cycle away from him – she slowed down, kept pace – it made no difference. Lola had awoken something deep within him and he within her.

  ‘Spain has been a Republic ever since the start of the 1930s, when King Alonso XIII was deposed. The Popular Front, in power since February of this year, is a coalition … left-wing. The right-wing tried to upset ballots with bullets in Madrid and Barcelona but failed. The labourers who work these fields went on strike just after the last election. Don Felipe the landowner had no choice but to pay them more. He wasn’t happy. Oh look! I can see Guido in the field over there. He manages the estate …’ Richard tried to follow what Maria was telling him – about politics, the running of the estate, how far Cordoba was with its beautiful mezquita, that the mezquita had once been a mosque before it was turned into a Cathedral after 1236, that the Moors had ruled southern Spain before that, about the Alhambra in Granada and the gardens of Seville. Did he know that Seňor Suarez had family in Seville, as well as Madrid? … Maria. She was a mine of information if only he cared to listen. But he did not. Instead his mind, heart and eyes were pulled along by a laughing Lola, who, bored by the bombardment of information that was detonating within her head, decided to break away to let off some fireworks of her own.

  He let out a complicit laugh as he watched Lola whizz by. Her skirt was pulled up high, exposing her thighs. As she cycled into the warm air, a gentle breeze blew through her hair. Maria was tempted to race her. She resisted the urge. She was ashamed of herself for cycling away from Richard earlier on, felt guilty that she’d recoiled at his inability to cope with the heat. He was cerebral. So was she. And she would prove it. The life she longed for was that of the mind. Bodies were an encumbrance. And so, she chatted on, skating over the history of Spain and around Spanish literature, skilfully encompassing Don Quixote with a figure of eight … And Richard nodded his head as if listening, though his eyes and thoughts were taken up with the vision of Lola, beautifully seductive, cycling into the deepening blue of the late afternoon sky.

  The lane widened. Paloma, up until now stuck behind Maria and Richard, manoeuvred around the pair.

  ‘I’m telling on you,’ she hissed at her sister, when she’d caught up with her. ‘I have no idea what you mean!’ Lola answered, her laugh extending across the summer fields.

  Chapter 6

  It may have been true that Don Felipe and Dona Sofίa had planned to return ‘sometime next week’ but times and dates, like everything else in life, were theirs to change.

  ‘Sunday? Sunday? I thought they weren’t coming back until next week. The house isn’t ready. And I always go to church on a Sunday.’ But it really didn’t matter what Cecilia always did. Cecilia had been blindsided.

  That was how she found herself allowing her daughters to go off for a picnic with a foreigner and why she was here in the kitchen on her hands and knees scrubbing away at the flagstone floor while perspiration dripped off the tip of her nose. She wondered if Luis, the landowners’ son away at an English boarding school, would be joining them. She hoped so. He would be eighteen years old now. Same age as her Manuel. A broad smile broke out across her face at the thought of the boys.

  *

  Fifteen minutes away in a speeding car bumping over stones and re-acquainting themselves with their estate were her employers. Their son was not with them. Dona Sofίa was holding on to the door handle for grim death, concerned that her wrist might dislocate at any moment, while Don Felipe was driving as fast as the car would allow. He congratulated himself on the fact that he was master of all he surveyed: land, animals, and people. Dona Sofίa held a handkerchief to her forehead with her free hand, taking care to close her eyes for fear that she might inadvertently poke one of them out as the wheels of the car jolted over small stones.

  ‘See that Sofίa? Our workers!’ Her husband shouted at her in order to be heard over the sound of the engine. ‘We’ll whip this place back into shape.’ He swerved past two girls causing the wheels of the car to momentarily spin out of control. ‘Unbelievable!’ His wife’s eyelids sprang open, her eyeballs very nearly popping with surprise as she saw the feral creatures wobbling around on their bicycles. Her husband slammed his palm down on the dashboard. Who were these girls getting in his way? And why weren’t they at church? Girls out on bikes on a Sunday morning. The thought of it made his blood boil. He stamped his foot down hard on the accelerator as he saw another one, dressed in white, standing by her bike at a turning. A furious cloud of dust and grit filled the air. The car roared and so did its driver. And he continued to do so as the first thing he saw when the dust cloud settled was Richard Johnson careering off the road and into one of his fields.

  ‘What was that?’ A fish out of water cooking under the strong sun, the sight of the English boy stunned Don Felipe, and Dona Sofίa no less so.

  ‘Must be a Bolshevik … or a Je
w.’ Inconvenienced by the jerkiness of her husband’s driving, she sat forward and blinked repeatedly, perplexed by the ghostly apparition. She remembered the article she’d been reading only the day before calling for the need of ‘a new Reconquista’ to purge Spain of ‘contamination’. It acknowledged there were few Jews left ‘thanks to their expulsion the first time in 1492 by Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella’, but now their friends, ‘communists, socialists, freemasons, liberals and the like’, were growing ‘like noxious plants’, destroying the very fabric of Spanish culture and tradition ‘from within’. She’d felt it a little extreme at the time. But, seeing this boy, so alien, so near to her estate, it did make her wonder.

  ‘Thank heavens we’ve come back,’ she said, a loud tut of disapproval punctuating her words. Don Felipe growled.

  He pulled up outside the farmhouse ten minutes later. He tooted on the horn six times. Cecilia looked up from the floor she was scrubbing in time to witness Guido the estate manager open the car doors for Don Felipe and his wife. Opening car doors – one of the many jobs her employers couldn’t do for themselves, she caught herself thinking as she pulled herself up to standing. She smoothed out the folds of her apron and rushed into the hall. It was a surprise to her that Don Felipe hadn’t used his chauffeur to drive them here.

  As landowner and manager walked around to the back of the house, Dona Sofίa wafted delicately into the house, a forced smile on her face as she greeted Cecilia and the three house staff all lined up at the bottom of the stairs to welcome her.

  ‘Would you like refreshments Dona Sofίa?’

  ‘Cecilia! Girls! How lovely to see you all again. Pilar, isn’t it? No? Julietta? Are you sure? Ah well. Never mind. Nothing for me, nothing at all. Just bring an orange juice up to my room, would you? But I can’t answer for Don Felipe.’ With a flick of her wrist, she gestured that her husband was somewhere outside and that Cecilia, or Pilar, or Julietta, or whatever her name was, should go and find him. ‘And now I need to lie down,’ she said abruptly. ‘We’ve had an encounter of the most unpleasant kind. With some hideous cyclists. You wouldn’t happen to know who they were?’ And without waiting for a reply she floated up the staircase leaving Cecilia feeling as though someone had trampled over her grave.

  The housekeeper made her way towards Don Felipe.

  ‘… My workers have been doing what?’ he said to his estate manager, his voice at once angry and incredulous. Aware of his housekeeper shuffling towards him like something brought back from the dead he broke off long enough to snap, ‘Orange juice – verandah,’ while shooing her back inside the house with his own inimitable wrist action.

  ‘Reading, you tell me!’ Don Felipe’s words rang in her head as Cecilia scuttled away. ‘But why, Guido? Why?’ he bleated with all the emotion of a man betrayed.

  In the kitchen Cecilia squeezed, pummelled and beat the oranges, extracting every drop of juice from them that she could. She placed two glasses on one tray, a single glass on another, filled them to the top, then, as she went out onto the verandah, she told one of the house girls to go up to Dona Sofίa’s bedroom. By the time Cecilia had placed the tray down outside her unsettled thoughts had travelled down to her wrists, palms, tips of her fingers, causing her usually steady hands to buckle and shake. The orange juice cascaded over the rim of the glasses, spilt out over the tray, spread across the table, until finally trickling, drop by hard-pressed drop down onto the ground beneath. She watched the scene unfurl before her, and though she willed it to stop, she was powerless to stem the flow now that it had started.

  ‘Careful! Clumsy woman!’ The clumsy woman dashed off to fetch a cloth.

  ‘Names! Give me names!’ She felt Guido’s eyes burning into the back of her head as she retreated. They burned no less when she returned.

  ‘Perhaps Cecilia can help you,’ the sly fox said. ‘Speak, woman!’ Her employer’s words, pushing her to give an answer, shocked her like the point of a sharp knife. She looked at Guido, searching for help. She found none. What was she to do? She had to name someone. Seňor Suarez? No. That English boy? No. Then, before she knew what she’d done she blurted out ‘Maria!’ ‘Maria?’ Don Felipe echoed back at her. ‘Yes,’ Cecilia confirmed. ‘Maria. Maria Alvaro. The doctor’s daughter.’ She felt no guilt. Rules, after all, did not apply to Maria Alvaro.

  Chapter 7

  It was the day after the landowners had returned to their estate and Don Felipe was having breakfast while scanning the paper looking for news. He put it down in frustration. ‘Still nothing in the papers about any coup, dear?’ Dona Sofίa asked. Her husband gave a loud shush, followed by a hasty glance at the door to make sure none of the servants were listening. ‘Oh, it’s not the coup I’m looking for. Though in view of the strikes all over the country,’ he said, jabbing his finger at some article, ‘it had better come soon.’

  Pools of unrest had been bubbling beneath the surface right across Spain since the start of the decade. Tension. Civil unrest. A struggle for the heart and soul of Spain. Made all the worse by an international politics of extremism. The growth of fascism in Germany and Italy whispered to the Spanish masses that the ruling class would never give up its power without a fight. The victory of communism in Russia murmured in the ears of the ruling class that the workers would rise up if not kept down. A tug of war was being played out where right and left struggled for supremacy. Up until now an equilibrium of sorts had been maintained. Up until now Don Felipe had had to allow his workers to form unions, had had no choice but to approve of liberal absurdities such as reading programmes. But all that was about to change. Bullets were about to overcome ballot boxes and the landowner couldn’t wait. It was the reason for his return.

  ‘You’ll have to talk to her dear,’ his wife said.

  ‘I know,’ Don Felipe replied, picking up the pamphlet that Guido had handed to him the previous evening. ‘I don’t care if she is the doctor’s daughter!’

  ‘Oh, I’m not talking about the girl, silly!’ said Dona Sofίa, who, contrary to her show of interest, had little time for some child who wanted to play teacher to the workers. ‘No. I’m talking about Cecilia. It’s her arms. Did you not see them yesterday? They’re hideous. The lower classes have no sense of shame or modesty,’ she said, breathing heavily. She put down her magazine full of beautifully dressed young women and put a hand to her well-coiffed curls checking they were still in place. One had dropped. She closed her eyes and asked for strength. The ceiling fans simply moved hot air around and she couldn’t stand keeping the shutters closed. The heat combined with the sight of her housekeeper’s indecent arms was making Dona Sofίa irritable, as was her husband’s inability to grasp what was truly important. And now her hair was losing its shape. It was really too, too much.

  ‘Cecilia!’ Don Felipe called. The housekeeper rushed in, her fleshy arms wrapped round a heavy pile of freshly ironed sheets. ‘Why are you doing that?’ Dona Sofίa asked. ‘Put them away, then come back,’ she tutted.

  When Cecilia came back in she rubbed her arms repeatedly with worry. She’d been worried about Manuel all night. What if Guido had given him away?

  ‘Cecilia, dear,’ Dona Sofίa said, a fixed smile nailed to her face. ‘We have something to say to you.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Cecilia said, waiting for judgement. If only Luis was here. He had always been able to curb the worst of his parents’ excesses. ‘I promise that I will work hard to make amends.’ Cecilia wasn’t past begging to keep her son in employment.

  ‘Well, we do expect to be having some very important guests staying with us in the not too distant future,’ Dona Sofίa replied, frankly surprised at her housekeeper’s eagerness to accept responsibility and expressing regret at having let herself go. ‘And so your diligence and commitment will be much appreciated. Behind the scenes.’

  Relief flooded Cecilia’s body from head to toe that Manuel’s name still hadn’t been mentioned but Dona Sofίa’s lipstick-coloured lips still moved up
and down with unstoppable purpose.

  ‘I don’t want you serving … Best we keep you in the kitchen.’ She then nodded over to her husband. He coughed three times. ‘Yes. Play to your strengths,’ he said. ‘Cooking, cleaning, stuff like that.’ His wife pushed him on with her eyes and touched her upper arm, ‘Yes,’ he continued. ‘And we’d like you to wear sleeves from now on, old girl. More decent on a woman of your age, don’t you think?’ And with that he turned round and went to look for Guido. It was time to get to the bottom of that unpleasant reading nonsense.

  Dona Sofίa gave the old girl, who was five years younger than herself, her most beneficent smile, full of pity. She lowered her eyelids in imitation of the Virgin Mary in her favourite painting by Filippo Lippi, Madonna and Child with Two Angels that she’d seen in Florence.

  ‘How’s Manuel?’

  Dona Sofίa clutched a letter to her chest not really caring to know about her housekeeper’s son one way or the other but the question put the fear of God in poor Cecilia. She needn’t have worried. Her employer’s interest in Manuel was the same as it had ever been – a flimsy pretext for talking about her own sweet boy, Luis. And he was a sweet boy.

  ‘He’ll be back soon. He has a fine mind. Reads philosophy … and the finest novels – in English, of course.’

  That her employer boasted, Cecilia found tedious, but she was grateful for the opportunity to remember the child she’d loved so well. When he’d been first sent away to school he’d been so young. Such a gentle child. His parents weren’t the only people to miss him when he’d gone.

  Luis and Manuel were the same age, possessed the same generous natures. Manuel was the only one of Cecilia’s children that had ever been allowed on the estate. Dona Sofίa had even allowed a friendship to blossom between the boys. They’d been inseparable.