Bartolomé

Little Island received financial assistance from The Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíon), Dublin, Ireland.

Little Island gratefully received financial assistance from Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur, Vienna.

The Publisher acknowledges the financial assistance of Ireland Literature Exchange (translation fund), Dublin, Ireland.
www.irelandliterature.com
[email protected]

The publication of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut, which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

About the author

RACHEL VAN KOOIJ was born in the Dutch city of Wageningen in 1968. She moved to Austria at the age of 10, and later studied Special Needs Teaching at Vienna University. She now lives in Klosterneuburg near Vienna and works with handicapped people. She says of herself: ‘I write about the things I like to read about.'

About the translator

SIOBHÁN PARKINSON was born in Dublin in 1954. After graduating, she worked as a book editor. She is now one of Ireland's most successful writers for children and was Ireland's first Children's Laureate. She has translated books by Renate Ahrens, Sabine Ludwig and Burkhard Spinnen from German into English. She lives in Dublin with her husband.

Las Meninas
by Velázquez

This book is inspired by the painting
Las Meninas
, which was painted in 1656 by the famous Spanish artist Diego Velázquez. Velázquez was employed as court painter by King Philip IV, and he frequently painted the royal family, and especially the king's little daughter, the Infanta.

Las Meninas
hangs in Spain's national art musem, the Prado in Madrid, and you can see an image of it on the gallery's website (
www.museodelprado.es
) or on Wikipedia.

THE INFANTA'S PET

by

Rachel van Kooij

Translated by
Siobhán Parkinson

BARTOLOMÉ: THE INFANTA'S PET

Published 2012 by Little Island,
7 Kenilworth Park,
Dublin 6W, Ireland,
www.littleisland.ie

First published as
Kein Hundeleben für Bartolomé
by Jungbrunnen Verlag in Vienna in 2003

Copyright © Verlag Jungbrunnen Wien 2003
Translation copyright © Siobhán Parkinson 2012

The author has asserted her moral rights.

ISBN 978-1-908195-26-5

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owner.

British Library Cataloguing Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover design by Someday
Typesetting by Kieran Nolan
Printed in Poland by Drukarnia Skleniarz

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Part 1

Bartolomé

F
ROM a distance, with its low white-washed houses, the village looked like a smudge of white that an artist had painted between the greeny-brown of the hills.

Bartolomé Carrasco was sitting in the shade on the crumbling old steps of the church, watching the children who gathered here every evening after supper to play on the village square. They were barefoot, like himself, and not well dressed.

Bartolomé was drawing in the dust with his finger. He was sketching his thirteen-year-old brother, Joaquín, who was kicking a ball around with his friends. The ball was really a pig's bladder, filled tight as a drum with air and wrapped in rags. Now that the sun had gone down, it was not as hot as it had been, and the game was fast and furious. Children's voices echoed hoarsely over the square. Dust swirled around the players.

One of them gave the ball a mighty kick, and it came rolling in Bartolomé's direction. It looked as if it was going to ruin his drawing. He hauled himself up to kick it out of the way with his club foot, but he couldn't manage it, and instead he went head over heels into the sand, and the ball landed on his hump. Above him, he could hear the laughter of the children. Joaquín grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and pulled him up, shook him like a ragdoll so that sand came streaming out of his shirt and trousers, and shoved him roughly back onto the steps.

‘Give it over,' he muttered to Bartolomé.

A whisper went around among the children: ‘The cripple wants to play.' They didn't dare say it out loud, though, because anyone who made fun of the ugly little dwarf would have Joaquín to reckon with.

The game went on, more furiously than before. It pained Bartolomé to watch. Joaquín was the quickest and most skilful. Time and again, he used his long legs to keep possession of the ball.

Those legs!
thought Bartolomé enviously. His own legs were spindly little sticks, out of which grew feet like two squashed lumps of clay with crooked toes. He certainly couldn't run on them. Even walking was difficult, more like stumbling. His arms were far too long in comparison with his legs and his body with its big hump, but if he balanced on his hands he could scramble along quite quickly, like an animal, on all fours. But he mustn't let anyone see, or he'd be beaten. Not by his father, Juan, but by his mother, Isabel.

Juan Carrasco was coachman to the little princess, the Infanta Margarita, in Madrid, and he rarely made the hard three-day journey home to visit. Most of the men of the village worked away from home. They were mostly labourers on the farms of rich landowners. Not so Juan. He had had the nerve and the determination to go to Madrid. At first he'd worked as a stable hand in the royal stables, and so good was he with horses that he came to the attention of the stable manager and was promoted to coachman.

Juan was ambitious. At first he was just an ordinary coachman, driving the luggage cart when the king journeyed from one royal castle to another. Bartolomé knew all their names. Alcázar and Buen Retiro were the city palaces. El Escorial was an abbey, Torre de la Parada a hunting lodge. Juan Carrasco, a simple country man, was soon made coachman to the Infanta, the king's little daughter. He was called Don Carrasco now in the village, and although he never came home on horseback in his fancy uniform, but came on foot and dressed like one of them, still he was hailed as a gentleman.

No, it was not his fine father who punished Bartolomé when he went creeping along on the ground. He knew what a dreadful way to behave this must be, since his own mother beat him for doing it. ‘You are not an animal!' she yelled at him every time she caught him crawling. ‘You are a human being, like us.'

But Bartolomé knew all too well that this was not true. He was not like his brothers and sisters. He did not have the fine upright stance of his fourteen-year-old sister Ana or the lithe limbs of Joaquín. Even though he was ten years old, he was smaller than his six-year-old sister Beatríz, and even his baby brother Manuel had a perfect body. Bartolomé was secretly jealous of the healthy skin, the straight limbs and the perfect little feet, each with five rosy toes, that he saw when his mother washed and changed the baby. Why, Bartolomé wondered, had he been born so deformed?

The football game was slowing down now. The ball was left lying on the sand. The children were tired. They'd been herding goats since early morning or pulling weeds in the miserable fields. All the work of the village fell on the shoulders of the women and children. They watered the stony fields, they looked after the olive groves and the orange and lemon orchards. Only Bartolomé and the old priest spent their days in idleness. Though, mind you, Father Rodriguez did say mass and baptised children, heard confessions and buried the dead. Bartolomé, on the other hand, could only sit and watch life passing him by. At ten years of age, he was the only boy in the village who had never stripped off and swum in the river or gone fishing there. He'd never harvested olives or picked stones out of the fields at ploughing time. He was good for nothing.

He looked over at his sister. Beatríz was sitting happily at the front door, playing with her doll. It was just a piece of wood that she'd tenderly wrapped up in a cloth. She was rocking the doll and singing a song to her. Bartolomé knew that inside the house his mother was singing Manuel to sleep with the same song. His other sister, Ana, was sitting with the big girls by the well. They were brushing each other's hair. She was still a girl, but soon she and her friends would put on long skirts and marry. On his last visit home, Juan Carrasco had brought a suitor for his eldest daughter, a quiet, serious young man, the son of a friend. But nothing had come of it. Bartolomé had overheard his parents discussing the matter. He often lay awake at night, because his legs hurt, and that's how he'd come to overhear the conversation.

‘He thinks she might give birth to another cripple.' His father's hard, accusing voice still rang in Bartolomé's ears.

‘I've got four strong, healthy children,' his mother whispered. ‘That's more than most.'

But that counted for nothing with the suitor, Bartolomé thought sadly, nor with his father.

As the pale red sun sank behind the houses, the children disappeared. Bartolomé waited patiently until the square had emptied. Then he looked carefully around. Most of the shutters had already been closed. He couldn't see anyone watching him. Quickly, he lowered himself onto his hands and ran like a dog. He didn't haul himself up onto his feet until he had reached the front door, and then he lurched into the house.