Bartolomé by Rachel vanKooij Page B

believe that his first lesson was over so quickly. But the church clock chimed the hour, confirming Don Cristobal’s guess about the time.
    With difficulty Bartolomé tore his eyes from the wooden board. He wanted to read more. He wanted to read Joaquín, Ana, Manuel and Beatríz. He wanted to spell butter, egg and cheese.
    â€˜Could I take the board home with me?’ he asked.
    Don Cristobal hesitated. He’d made the little board himself. But a monk was not allowed to own anything. Everything belonged to the monastery. On the other hand, the child would be able to practise at home if he had it, and nobody in the monastery had any use for the board.
    â€˜You must bring it back for the next lesson,’ he said.
    Bartolomé hugged the board to his body.

Reading and Writing
    HE practised away at home. Isabel looked at her little son with a new respect. After a single lesson he was able to spell not only his own name, but also those of his brothers and sisters and his parents. She was so engrossed, she almost failed to hear Juan coming home. Quickly, she hid the letter board under Bartolomé’s sleeping mat.
    â€˜You can only use it when nobody can see.’
    Bartolomé knew what that meant. His father must not find out, and neither must Beatríz. She was too small to keep a secret. He sat in a corner and thought about the wonderful board. If he closed his eyes, he could see the letters in his mind. He was surprised to find that he didn’t need the board. ‘They’re all in my head,’ he whispered. He traced them in the air with his finger.
    He had an idea. Impatiently, he waited till he heard his father fastening the shutters. Then he stood up and wobbled into the front room. There was a basket of coal beside the stove. He sat down quietly beside it and blackened his index finger with coal dust. Nobody took any notice of him. Isabel and Ana were preparing supper. Beatríz was playing with Manuel. Juan and Joaquín were talking and carefully brushing Juan’s coachman’s boots.
    Bartolomé spat on the stone floor and polished it with the cuff of his shirt until it shone. Carefully he drew the letters, one after another, with his blackened finger.
    Ana saw what Bartolomé was doing. She looked over at her father. Juan hadn’t noticed anything. She put her foot quickly on the letters and rubbed them into smudges.
    â€˜Stop that,’ she whispered to her brother. ‘He mustn’t get a hint of what is going on.’
    Bartolomé nodded obediently, but his face was hot with joy.
    â€˜Did you see? I can write them all by myself. It’s easy. They’re just lines and loops.’
    The next few days passed as if in a dream. In Bartolomé’s head, the letters floated in and out of each other. He tried to shape them into words. Every minute that his father and Beatríz were out, he wrote words on the floor of the back room with a coal. Isabel gave him a bowl of water and a cloth.
    â€˜You must wipe them away immediately,’ she warned him, and in the evenings, before Juan came home, she herself washed Bartolomé’s coal-blackened hands and face. She put a clean shirt on him also and stuck the dirty one in the laundry basket.
    â€˜Ana will wash it on Saturday,’ she said.
    â€˜Saturday,’ thought Bartolomé. That was when he would see Don Cristobal again. He could hardly wait to climb into the laundry basket.
    ASTONISHED, Don Cristobal watched the dwarf eagerly writing words on the flagged floor of the cloister, using a piece of coal. Of course, what he wrote was full of mistakes, but the letters were beautifully formed, the lines all straight and the loops regularly drawn. A slate and slate pencil lay on the bench beside the monk. Don Cristobal had intended to introduce Bartolomé to the art of writing as he had learned it himself as a young monk in the monastery’s scriptorium. For days at a time, they’d