‘And it’s true that some women no longer want to have children.’
This time it had been Maria who’d choked, though her father’s eyebrows, try as he might to stop them, now leapt up to meet his fast receding hairline. This was a strange conversation indeed. Fascinating and embarrassing for Maria in equal measure. The teacher’s words had slapped her full in the face like a wave, waking her from her romantic dreams; as they receded, she’d taken in their meaning.
‘To have or not to have children, women see it as their right, their right to choose. Times are changing.’ And with that Seňor Suarez had coughed most dramatically, prompting the doctor to slap him hastily and heartily on the back while pointing his daughter towards the door with his eyes.
Maria hovered around the old oak table, topping up wine glasses and clearing away dishes as if she hadn’t noticed.
‘How’s the reading programme going up at El Cortijo del Bosque?’ Doctor Alvaro asked his friend.
El Cortijo del Bosque was the name of the local estate owned by Don Felipe, principal employer in the area. Work on his estate was agricultural. His workers were paid a pittance. Don Felipe himself was fabulously wealthy. And that was how it had been for centuries.
But things weren’t only changing in Madrid.
In February 1936 the left-wing coalition, known as el Frente Popular, had won the general election in Spain. This had allowed the good doctor and teacher to push through much needed reforms in Fuentes de Andalucía in general, and up at El Cortijo del Bosque in particular. In the early months of the year both had worked tirelessly to secure better pay and conditions for the estate’s workers, Suarez at the negotiating table, Alvaro behind the scenes. Guido, the estate manager, represented his employer’s interests, at times most savagely. But, snarl as he might, there was little he could do against what was legal; he had the will, but not the right, to resist.
Don Felipe, the landowner, was furious of course: with Guido and with the useless lumps of flesh who worked his land and whom he thought less of than his bulls and horses. As for Suarez and Alvaro, if Guido had ever mentioned them to him he certainly didn’t care enough about them to waste his energy remembering their names; they were men of no consequence. No, he was too busy shouting abuse at Manuel Azaňa, the new prime minister, along with the motley collection of left-wing degenerates that made up the government, to take any notice of them. Don Felipe despaired. Even his beloved Falangist party, a party that believed in the true greatness of Spain, in the monarchy, the Catholic Church and centuries of tradition, was coming under attack.
Don Felipe’s Spain, the Spain he knew and loved, was disappearing.
He had no choice but to whisk his family off to their second home in Biarritz.
And thus Suarez had no choice but to seize the moment and take education to the workers so that at the next round of negotiations they would be able to help themselves. That was what he was doing presently up at El Cortijo del Bosque. And Guido could do nothing to prevent it, no matter what orders his master barked at him from the south of France. But progress was slow.
‘The truth is we need more teachers,’ Suarez had confessed.
‘The truth is very few people in the village can read,’ Alvaro had replied. The sound of a creaking door disturbed him. His eyes had shot round like a searchlight at the top of a watch tower. There, standing in the kitchen doorway, a copy of Don Quixote clutched to her body, was his daughter.
‘You can do it,’ he’d said, knowing she’d been listening to them and confident that she would relish the chance. She’d nodded, pulling back her chair to re-join them. But before her skirt could touch the rush seat her father’s voice had scooped her back up and pushed her out of the room and towards the staircase. ‘Now bed, my girl!’
‘But if I’m to help out surely I need to …’
‘Bed!’
That night Maria hadn’t minded that her attempts to stay up late had failed. She had gone to bed happy and excited. Happy that she would be helping Seňor Suarez with the reading programme, excited at what he’d told her about women in Madrid. All night ideas of choice and freedom had stampeded around in her head looking for somewhere to live.
By morning they’d found a home. The teacher’s words were now her own.
And so that was how Maria was here, under her favourite olive tree, about to take a familiar game in a new direction. Starting to feel sticky, she shook her hair, generating at most a slight, warm breeze. She cast a ‘brace yourself’ look in Paloma’s direction: her friend was about to become the testing ground for her very own liberal education project.
She repeated, as word-perfectly as she could, what Seňor Suarez had said about women, children and marriage the night before. She lingered on the phrase ‘right to choose’.
Paloma said nothing. Maria continued.
‘Seňor Suarez—’ Maria slipped in his name because Paloma liked him ‘—said that women in Madrid have more …’ The older girl paused before opening her arms out wide and shouting out ‘freedom.’ She could not have drawn any more attention to the word if she’d underlined it and decorated it with a bright red ribbon.
Paloma fell back against the tree.
‘Well, you could get married, if you want to,’ Maria backtracked. ‘But you don’t have to. That’s what I’m saying. Things are changing. Gone are the days when parents start planning a wedding the moment a boy looks at a girl.’ Paloma breathed heavily out through her nose as if by the expulsion of air alone she could find room in her head for this shocking revelation. That she dropped her head to one side suggested that she’d failed. It was far too heavy a load for her fourteen-year-old brain to manage. She looked questioningly at Maria and rubbed the back of her head as if it were a magic lamp. A light flickered in her eyes.
‘It’s true,’ Maria insisted. ‘According to Seňor Suarez, women are having babies and they aren’t even married. In Madrid. Even Malaga!’ Paloma screwed up her nose then let out a snort. Madrid and Malaga were both as alien to her as the moon and every bit as inaccessible. ‘And some women in the city don’t even want to have children. At all. Not ever,’ Maria continued. ‘That’s what Seňor Suarez says. They’d much rather have a career.’
The older girl looked up at the sky and hid herself there a while, a smile of satisfaction on her lips. She’d delivered what she told herself was her coup de grâce (a phrase she’d learnt quite recently after having found it in some book or other, and she congratulated herself on having found an opportunity to use it, even if it was inside her own head). She’d chased away all thoughts of husbands and playing children from this game of theirs.
Paloma scrunched up her eyes to scrutinise her friend more closely. Was she teasing? Admittedly, Paloma had trouble imagining a husband for herself. As she went over the list of local prospective suitors she could not deny that they were unappealing. She shuddered as she had them parade across the stage of her mind one by one. Maria liked to re-christen them, as pirates, or book characters, to make them more exciting for her friend, but even that didn’t seem to be working for Paloma at this moment in time. Perhaps, if she were lucky, she might find a husband who came from another village. Or a nearby town. She pulled herself together. She would have a husband, one day, of that she was certain. But there was no point making herself distressed by going through all candidates just yet. As for children, of course, she sighed with relief, on safer and more comforting ground, she most certainly would have them.
Maria must want them too, surely, Paloma thought to herself. ‘That girl has no sense of family!’ ‘She’s always been such a selfish girl!’ Her mother’s unfair criticisms of her friend ricocheted around the confines of Paloma’s own mind. Maria was an