el fingidor

the cultural magazine of the University of Granada

October December 2000

Edition No. 10

Lawrence Bohme,

a Marco Polo on the World Wide Web

by Professor Antonio Pamies of Granada University's School of Translation

    Lawrence Bohme was born in London in February of 1942, at the height of the German bombardment and during a night of explosions and flames, to an English mother and a German father who, accused of being a Communist, had fled his native Berlin. His surname - originally spelled "Böhme" - means "bohemian" in German and seems to have been coined just for Lawrence. Perhaps it fated him to lead his nomadic and adventurous life.

    Soon after the end of the war, Lawrence's family emmigrated to Canada, but ten years later his mother left the fold to become a painter and took her son to live in Mexico. There, 14-year old Lawrence got his first taste of the language and culture of Spain, through his friendship with the youngest member of a distinguished family of Civil War exiles who had been companions to poet Federico García Lorca and film-maker Luis Buñuel.

    Lawrence's footloose mother soon took him to sejourn in Jamaica, still a British colony, and then to New York, where they lived in the unconventional Greenwich Village of the late 1950's. There, in Washington Square Park, Lawrence met his lifelong friend, budding mathematician, linguist and globetrotter Anthony Naro, whom our hero describes as "a scientist with the soul of a poet".

    In 1960, at the age of 18, Lawrence finally made his pilgrimage to our country on the pretext of studying Spanish philology, and after a brief bout of "academic tourism" in Madrid arrived at Granada's Faculty of Philosophy and Letters in the "Palace of the Columns" (now the School of Translation). But more than anything else, Lawrence candidly admits, he came here to explore the gypsy world of El Sacromonte, which he had read about in the poems and plays of his beloved Lorca.

    At the San Fermin fiesta of Pamplona, Lawrence cast in his lot with a young French novelist and fellow traveller, Yves Vequaud, who gained temporary fame by leaping into the ring to fight a bull with his wind-breaker (and then spending a few nights in jail for his trouble). The two set off on a tour of the summer's ferias taurinas, hitch-hiking from one town to the other and sleeping in the ruins of Moorish castles, on beaches and once even on a village sidewalk, until a Civil Guardsman led them to an unoccupied cell of the local jail.

    They saw the the initiation ceremony of future bullfighting star Paco Camino, and mingled with the jetset of personalities who followed the fights from Valencia to Torremolinos, such as French poet Jean Cocteau and the legendary Orson Welles (but not Hemingway, whose last dangerous summer in Spain had been the year before). And on their way through Spain they came to the charming village of Montefrio, to meet the flamenco singer Manuel Avila, who was then the town butcher.

    Lawrence soon gave up his studies in Spain for the Sorbonne. In Paris, he says, "I was a patchy student but learned lots about fine food and soon knew enough French to enjoy Baudelaire and Proust in their own language". He lived with the German painter Lilo Wagner, a tragic personality who 20 years later took her own life in Ibiza. Lilo guided her English disciple through the churches and museums of France and Italy, where he found inspiration to develop the pictorial talents he had inherited from his mother. What fascinated him most was the freshness and spontaneity of medieval painters such as Fra Angelico and Giotto.

    But, after parting ways with Lilo and a brief interlude in New York and San Francisco, his friend Naro - being, unlike Lawrence, an academic prodigy - was awarded a Fullbright scholarship to study in Brazil, sufficiently well-funded to keep both of them in the lap of luxury on Copacabana Beach ("it was the beginning of the 60's and Bossa Nova had just been born, Brazil was so exciting...").

    From there it was just a short climb up the hill to the Cantagalo Favela, between Copacabana and Ipanema. As in the song, from their window they could see the great statue of the Cristo Redentor overlooking the city ("I was young, I lived from day to day, I fell in love with Brazil as one falls in love with a woman"). When Naro returned to New York, Lawrence kept body and soul together giving English lessons and making leather bags and sandals which he sold in Rio's fashionable boutiques.

    And he moved into his new friends' home of boards and tin in the Cantagalo Favela. When carnaval came, in 1967, they asked him to parade with their "samba school" ("they needed a white man to enact the legend of Isaura the slave girl", he says, "in which the Portuguese fazendeiro falls in love with the mulatta Isaura, whose role was played by Doca, a well-battered female drug dealer, her face covered in scars from the many scraps she had been in. She had been given the leading part simply because she was the only woman in the favela who could afford to pay the high price of the fantasia, or costume."

    Things took a less amusing turn when his unattractive partner made it clear that she wanted to consummate their, for Lawrence, purely theatrical liaison by luring him into a small hotel on the dancers' path. All our hero could do was pretend he didn't understand and explain to his comrades that she wasn't his type: não é meu tipo não.

    When the carnaval ended he and Doca were no longer on speaking terms, but during that first crazy time in Brazil - "the happiest years of my life" - Lawrence created a magnificent collection of pen and ink drawings of the country he loved, in a style which is influenced by the medieval frescoes he had seen in Italy and the sensuous baroque carvings of Brazil's exuberant churches.

    When life in Brazil became too difficult, he returned to New York in the hope of finding a publisher for a book he was writing about his carioca adventures. Failure resulted in deep depression, but he fortunately came across one of the Indian gurus who were roaming about the West during the 70's, and who showed him to get hold of himself by meditation. "I was never one to follow fads and cults, but it was just what I needed", Lawrence assures us.

    With his new clarity of spirit he embarked on a new adventure, this time setting out for the Caribbean, and right to the belly of the beast: the Haiti of Baby Doc, who in the wake of the death of his father, Papa Doc, had invited foreign investors to create local industries, offering them all the benefits and tax breaks - or so claimed the article our hero read on the subject in the New York Times. He soon found himself setting up a leather crafts workshop on an Episcopalian Mission in the hinterland of Port-au-Prince, where he set about training six sugar cane cutters to make men's leather bags ("the latest rage in the boutiques of Manhattan").

    Lawrence did well with his exports, learned creole and "went native" among the peasants to the point of practicing polygamy and voodoo. In fact, things went so well that an envious priest decided to take over his business for himself, and had the tonton macoutes chase him off the island.

    Lawrence next tried his luck in Colombia, where - naturally - the proverbial shirt was soon stolen off his back. A year or two later he was back on the islands, starting from scratch and drifting from San Andrés to Grand Cayman, Grand Cayman to St. Maarten and then to St. Barth's, making his living drawing postcards and crafting made-to-measure sandals, for the American business tycoons who flew in on their Lear jets.

    In 1980 he was rich enough again to return to his beloved France, to Provence precisely, where he conquered the heart of Sylviane, a painter who had rebuilt an ancient house in a medieval village. He created a collection of postcards of southern France, but a few years later he found himself down and out in Paris, where necessity drove him to seek a more reliable source of income, namely the one he had been trained for in the first place, languages.

    As luck would have it, the day he stepped into the Unesco headquarters he discovered that there was an urgent need for a translator who knew Brazilian, because the one in charge was down with the flu. "The first job they gave me was about a project to build a computer school in Pernambuco, a sort of underground bunker. I had never even seen a computer back then, and barely understood a word of the technical jargon. So maybe it was my fault that shortly after the school was inaugurated it filled up with sea water and had to be abandoned".

    Like the thief who returned to the scene of the crime, Lawrence was seized by an attack of saudade and decided to make a lightning visit to Rio for the carnaval, where he met Paulenice, his "Nubian princess", who soon produced Nina, a mulatta with green eyes about whom he went wild ("since I was never much of a husband, I decided to at least be a fantastic father"). The lightning visit ended up taking three years, until our nomad decided that the time had come to settle down.

    He took his new family back to his dear Montefrio, where they fixed up an abandoned farmhouse, the Cortijo de los Siete Olivos, which the villagers now call the Cortijo del Inglés. But the prodigal son of Montefrio found himself once more without a peseta to his name, and in order to get a job at the Seville Expo signed up for a crash course, at Cambridge University, in simultaneous interpretation, a trade which he plies until this day "because it gives me an excuse to travel". From that time on Lawrence embarked on an increasingly eccentric series of artistic and commercial activities, becoming a writer-innkeeper-farmer-polyglot-electronic-hermit, if you get what I mean!

    The Cortijo de los Siete Olivos, as its name suggests, is lost among the Andalucian olive groves and when Sir Lawrence came across it had neither water, electricity or telephone. But the indomitable Englishman overcame these obstacles by having a 1 mile long pipe laid to bring in water from the town, and installing 4 photovoltaic panels on the roof which, during the sunny Spanish days, charged 6 truck batteries stacked up in the kitchen. He removed all the internal power packs from his office machines and hooked them up directly to this sustainable energy source, so that, in combination with one of the earliest models of mobile phone (we are now at the end of the 1980's) he was able to continue translating for Unesco and the UN, thus benefitting from both Swiss rates and Spanish sunshine!

    He invested his earnings by purchasing and restoring ruined houses in the old gypsy quarter at the foot of Montefrio's castle, El Arrabal, which had become a garbage dump. With the help of a few local masons they became charming and well equipped holiday homes. He even moved into one himself, and rented out the farm to help cover his costs. Thanks to the Internet, a medium in which Lawrence was undoubtedly a pioneer, he rented out his cottages to websurfers from all around the world, pouring the profits into the rebuilding of the next one down the path.

    Next he restored a cave, the Cueva del Sopo, as a cabaret for the local gypsy girls to put on performances for the adventurous visitors. Thus Lawrence became Montefrio's first tourist trade entrepreneur. Much of his time is spent improving and expanding his web site, with digital photos, drawings and stories about the region and its history and customs (as Lawrence says, "I ended up becoming an 'explainer' of Spain for foreigners"), all in three languages of course, so that when his guests arrive in the village they have the feeling that they are visiting an old acquaintance, and are going to enjoy an experience which is far more stimulating and original than the usual tourist trap.

    All it takes is a little success at what you're doing to find yourself the victim of envy and resentment. Although the village gypsies who took care of the houses and danced at the flamenco shows thought that El Inglé was the cream of the crop, the corrupt Mayor, notorious for his shameless vote-buying and contempt for the town's cultural heritage, did not. Lorenzo lashed out at him on his Sunday morning FM radio programme, called Lorenzo Luchando ("Lorenzo Fighting", on which he also played flamenco, jazz and Bach. He told travel stories and took along his daughter Nina who read out her favourite poems. And he made a decisive contribution to getting rid of the local straw-boss, but was so outspoken that the local Socialist Party then in charge closed down the programme.

    But El Inglé goes on fighting. He recently created Natívola, his own publishing house (for publishing his own books only, of course) which got off to a start with a handsome and unconventional guide book to Granada ("a book for the curious traveller" as he calls the series), illustrated with his own drawings and in three versions (English, Spanish and French) all of which he is proud to have written and translated himself. Every detail of the book, entitled Granada, City of My Dreams, has been hand made by Lawrence, just as he used to craft leather sandals in the French West Indies.

    All of which goes to show that, cheap cyber-chatter about the future of telecommunications notwithstanding, the Internet can make it possible for a single person to become a highly visible display window accessible by anyone anywhere, as long as they have a computer and a connection. It opens an entirely new perspective on the concept of commercial communication, proving that it is indeed possible to do business and retain one's personal identity and aesthetic principles.

    In fact, the sheer beauty of Lawrence's site (www.donlorenzo.com) is precisely what makes it such a success. Our gypsy poet goes on restoring the houses under the castle of Montefrio, and bringing to that forgotten corner of the earth a steady trickle of civilized tourists. We have learned that he is currently taking out his Spanish nationality too, and that he plans to change his name along with his passport, with the literal translation of his current one into Spanish: Lorenzo Bohemio.

freely translated by Lorenzo

Click here to read the Spanish original

My own version of the story, written for another website almost 20 years ago, when they still called me Lawrence...

Lawrence Bohme was born in London on February 2, 1942, to a German war refugee father (Bohme was originally written with two dots over the "o", Bohme) and a Welsh mother. The family emigrated to Vancouver, Canada, immediately after the war, where Lawrence spent a healthy but otherwise uneventful childhood. When he was 12 his mother flew the family coop and set out on a series of adventures as a fledgling abstract painter, taking Lawrence to share her nomadic existence in Mexico, Jamaica and Greenwich Village... Graduating from Charles Evans Hughes High School in New York's "Hell's Kitchen" on West 18th Street, Lawrence went on a whirlwind tour of some of Europe's finest universities (Madrid, Sorbonne, U. of London), qualifying him today as a glorious and staunchly anti-academic dropout, who is wont to say, when asked for his CV, that he graduated from "the University of the World, Faculty of Life". After three years divided between the walk-up hotels of the Latin Quarter (Rue Mouffetard) and the flamenco taverns of the Andalucian town of Montefrio (where he was to return much later in life), Lawrence decided, impulsively and perhaps mistakenly, that he could make it in life without a degree and - after briefly returning to the US and seeing "Black Orpheus" 13 times at the Little Carnegie Cinema - went to California to raise the necessary cash (as a choke-setter in the forests of Sonoma County and busboy at Fisherman's Wharf) to get on a Japanese freighter bound for... Rio de Janeiro (we are now in the year 1965, and LB is 23).

After five idyllic years of living between a shack in the Cantagalo Favela overlooking Copacabana Beach, with a poor black family, and a swanky apartment on the beachfront itself, with a wealthy American friend, parading in the 1967 Carnaval disguised as a Portuguese plantation owner who married a beautiful mulatta slave, and learning the trade of leather craftsman, Lawrence embarked on a 10-year crawl of South America and the Caribbean, setting up his one-man custom crafts boutique in Cartagena, Colombia and the islands of San Andres, Haiti, Grand Cayman, Saint Martin and Saint Barth's. During this time he launched his collection of pen and ink postcards of the West Indies, which he later continued in New York, Boston, Cote d'Azur, Paris and... Montefrio, near Granada.

Returning to Europe in 1980, Lawrence was forced due to chronic cash flow difficulties to become a tri-lingual translator and interpreter at Paris' UNESCO. However, he was soon able to resume his wandering ways when his father generously bestowed on him part of the payment which at that time was retroactively granted to him by the German government in reparation for the hardship he had been caused while a young man in Berlin...

Lawrence next returned to Rio where he met Paula during Carnaval, conceiving his "cafe au lait" daughter Nina in the last days of Lent... He soon brought both of these ladies to live in his "cortijo" (farmhouse) near Granada, in the village of Montefrio, where he rebuilt two peasant cottages in picturesque spots to rent to adventurous travellers.

Lawrence continues to draw his pen and ink postcards and work as a UNESCO translator and conference interpreter, mainly in the Andalucian region; he currently publishes his "Stories from Montefrio" in the local press and this finely produced webpage!

And I solemnly swear that every single word of the above is basically true!

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