Kerry Postle - A Forbidden Love

‘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 Jew.’ 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.

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?