The Postcard Maker

THE POSTCARD MAKER three decades of penmanship on three continents by

Lawrence Bohme for my father, August Edward +++ Copyright (c) 2011 by Lawrence Bohme +++ All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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Foreword Almost all children draw, but very few go on doing it when they grow up, it is said. I was one of those, but rather than developing my talent and technique, as would have been normal, I went on making cartoons in basically the same way as when I was small. For one thing, I did everything on a tiny scale, which later on seemed especially strange because I was not only “big” in the sense of being adult but also in stature – nothing gigantic, but it still seems strange to some people that a man almost six feet tall should be a miniaturist. Dad remembers how when we still lived in London, after the war, I would bend down over the paper to draw with great concentration very small houses and trees and people and birds, and, all things being equal, I am still doing it today. You will even find, in the drawings that follow, a few of the kind of birds I drew when I was a child, resembling pointed bombshells with little wings and claws. It isn’t on purpose, I can assure you, but because I never learned how to draw birds properly. When I put a bird in the sky to liven up the scene or just to have something else in the sky except clouds, that’s how it comes out, no matter how hard I try to make it look like a sparrow or robin or even a crow. The reason is that I never wanted to be a painter or a draughtsman or “drawer” or whatever you call it in English (we have no real equivalent of the French “dessinateur” and Spanish “dibujante”, so I call it “drawer” even if it sounds like the place you put your drawers in after they come out of the washing machine). That’s why I never studied art, other than what you are given at school along with everything and everyone else. It is true that I was exposed to art at home, because my mother was a painter, but she worked in a modern style, a blend of impressionism, cubism and abstract expressionism – three good ism’s for you if you’re a fan of them – which I liked well enough but not to the point of wanting to follow on the same path. Her heroes were Picasso, Matisse and Cezanne, all of whom I liked, especially Matisse, but found that their very stylized way of showing things was useless as a means of saying something, not about my inner world but the real outside one I was delighted to be living in and longed to see more of. Later, another painteress (another English word we don’t have) entered my life, a German art student who took me to Italy where I found the kind of image-making that

suited me. One was the 17th century engraver Piranesi, for the way he used light and shadow to achieve a semblance of colour, and the other was the 14th century fresco painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti, for the way he depicted his city with its daily life, on the walls of Siena’s town hall, the Palazzo Publico. It was on that first visit to Italy that I realized that with my very basic, illustrative way of drawing I could do something similar. The German girl studied fresco-painting too, although like my mother she followed the modernistic path, especially – and logically enough - that of the German Expressionists. However, she also worked in pen and ink and made intriguingly suggestive drawings in a finely-wreathed network of very thin black lines, while I watched on. So one day I took one of her very modern mechanical pens made in Germany and began making some of my own, using photographs of the churches we had seen in Italy to illustrate a book I was going to write about our trip. But it wasn’t until three or four years later, when I found my way to Rio de Janeiro, at age 23, that I began drawing in earnest. I wanted to illustrate another book I actually did partially write about Brazil, its favelas and especially its extraordinary baroque churches. This was in some ways another dead end, because the drawings were so large and intricate that each one took me several months to make, and even if I had finished writing the book it would have taken me years to illustrate it, which my fast-moving existence would have made impossible. Also – as I later realized – the nibs I had chosen were so fine and I had used them to create such a feathery effect that no printer – in the pre-digital era – could have done them justice. But those five or six drawings, of churches and favelas, were my own art school, the place where I taught myself to really draw, if not like Piranesi at least like his favourite apprentice. The long afternoons I spent scratching away with my old-fashioned steel nibs that had to be dipped in a bottle – the architect’s pens which Lilo used in Paris were far too expensive for me in Brazil, with import duties at 300% - and gazing up at the fabulous encrustations of gold and mahogany on the whitewashed arches of Rio’s colonial churches, Igreja da Gloria, Mosteiro de São Bento, forced me to find my own way of making a sunbeam pouring in through the lace curtain of a balcony really shimmer, of making the fabulous tangle of curlicues and floral motifs on the walls really disappear into the darkness, like a shipwreck covered in barnacles and seaweed in the depths of a grotto. I felt like an alchemist who has discovered how to make gold, with my new-found power to create warm light and cool shadow, and capturing, as it were, those magical scenes on the tip of my little pen. As it was, life and love in Brazil were so absorbing that I gave up after the first half dozen drawings, and consigned them all to a folder which I opened now and then to show to friends. I soon learned the leather trade and how to design, cut and sow together bags and sandals, and that was how I made my living, in Brazil and afterwards. It wasn’t until five or six years later that, after setting up my little workshop in Cartagena, on the northern coast of Colombia, I got the idea of making postcards as an additional source of, let’s put it crudely, money. One of the places where I displayed my leather goods in that lovely and ancient seaport was a crafts boutique in the city’s monumental Palace of the Inquisition, run by a former Peace Corps worker from California, Dennis. After living in Colombia for several years performing humanitarian activities for the American Government and having while so doing fallen in love with both the country and its lovely women, he decided against going back to his mom’s place and went into mini-business with a small tourist shop rather unimaginatively called Artexpo. When he visited my workshop (and home in the back room) one day and saw my Brazilian drawings, Dennis immediately suggested I make some black-and-white postcards of Cartagena which he would have printed and put on sale. He had done this

with a Picasso lithograph of Don Quixote (probably without paying royalties to Picasso’s heirs) and they were doing very well, he said, considering what it cost him. In fact, what persuaded me to have a try was just that - according to Dennis, black and white drawings were cheap to print even in small runs of 500 or 1,000 cards, unlike pictures with three or four colours. All I would have to do was buy some of those pens that Lilo used and work in slightly bolder lines which would come out properly. Dennis handed me a photographic card he had on sale showing the harbour of Cartagena with its fishing boats anchored by the old city wall and said, “Draw this”, and I sat down that night and did it, without even making my own sketch or taking my own photo. My buddy Dennis Lynch – good-looking guy with a pony-tail and a motorbike, always with a luscious colombiana on the back – sold printed the cards very satisfactorily and did well enough with them for me to decide to make more. Then, however, fate stepped in, my leather workshop was stripped of everything in it one night by burglars, I couldn’t afford to set up another one and chose instead to move to a Caribbean island belonging to it, although 500 miles north, up near the coast of Nicaragua. It was there, on the other-worldly ridge covered with coconut trees called San Andres, where the people, descendants of Jamaican slaves, still spoke a curious patois of English, that I set up a workshop of my own in a clapboard house on stilts facing the windy shore. On sale were my bags and sandals, and half a dozen pen-and-ink drawings of the island, which I had printed down in Cartagena. The mostly American tourists who stopped by bought them by the handful, which was for me both a source of income and joy. As, over the next years, I drifted from one island to the other with my crate full of hammers and awls, needles and brass buckles and rivets, the day came when it was no longer the sales of leather bags that were supporting the printing of the postcards, but the other way around. It would be some time before I gave up leather work to devote myself to postcard-making instead, but it came, and I never once looked back. What follows is a selection of the cards I drew over three decades, from 1975 (given that the Cartagena card I did for Dennis was lost) until well after 2000. They were made in several West Indian islands – San Andres, Saint Martin, Saint Barths, Saint Croix, Saint Kitts and Saba; in New York and Boston; in Provence and Paris; and in the Spanish towns of Granada and Montefrio. When I returned to Rio, 15 years after my first stay, I had the chance to use the motifs of my early, much more elaborate pictures to create postcards there too, and put them on sale in the bookshops and crafts markets of the city. As you will see, the cards were fairly simple to begin with because my self-taught skills had become a little rusty, but also because I was still unaware of the genre’s possibilities. By the time I left the Caribbean they had become more detailed, and once I returned to my boyhood haunts in lower Manhattan I was able to make them reflect the patchwork of communities there, and the ones I drew of Paris, when I moved back to Europe, were embellished with lines from the great French poets, and some of my own. The Granada cards are, as they could only be, a tribute to the beauty of the city’s Moorish Palace, the Alhambra, and its old casbah, the Albaicin. And the day came when I put down my drawing pen and picked up the writing kind, and since then I have never looked back. My eyes and fingers are still good enough to draw a picture now and then, but no longer up to tirelessly doing what I want for hours and days and even weeks on end, as they did when I was a postcard maker. My dear father, who uncomplainingly supported so many of my projects and undertakings, always wanted me to put all the cards in a book with the story of how they were made,

and since he went off on his last trip a Moorish girl in my life has been telling me the same thing, so before it’s too late, what else but to obey?

SAN ANDRES ISLAND, 1975 I wanted to live on the east shore of the island because that’s where the old-time islanders were, in the elongated village called San Luis in Spanish but which they called “de Gawf”, or “Garf”.

An old island house. Mr. May’s shop had been closed for years but he still sat in the open door to greet visitors.

His house was behind the shop, on the shore, and he lived in it all alone.

Just south of Mr. May’s, I set up my own shop in a house that was known for its previous owner, “Mister Sam”. My bedroom was upstairs in the loft. You can see my mother, who came once on a visit, putting the dishes out to dry. It was charming but very basic - on the far left is the outhouse with some steps leading up to the door.

Next door to me was a Catholic church, made of timber. The priest was a kindly young man from Colombia called Father José.

In the village of San Luis, called by the islanders Garf, lived a half-Chinese man called Lau Chau, “Lau” for short, had his home, garage and grocery store. He was the most colorful personality on the island, and noisily drove up and down in his old red truck. The text says, in standard English, Lau Chau’s Backyard – Miss Lee (his assistant) frying yucca (mandioc root, grown on the island) – the horse that carries coconuts – the hogs (the pigs in their pen) – the hog’s food cooking – Mr. Palacio’s breadfruit tree - Lau’s red truck and his son Beans working.

The Baptist Church on The Hill (in Spanish, La Loma), built with wood brought from Alabama in the mid-19th century. These drawings also illustrate the book Goin’ Garf!

GRAND CAYMAN, 1977 Living in San Andres was delightful, but making a living there was difficult so after two years I moved north to the Cayman Islands.

I lived up the shore from the island capital, in Bodden Town, a mere strip of such houses facing the sea. Mine was the one on the left.

Bodden is also the surname of many islanders. The island was originally a hideaway for pirates and settlers from Scotland.

Since the island was very dry, gardens were traditionally just an arrangement of sand and stones, carefully swept every day with a palm frond. You can see one of my birds in the sky.

The two pictures above were for Christmas cards. I made one every year, wherever I was in the islands.

Georgetown is the capital of the island. There are some old parts left, but it is mostly office buildings with off-shore investment banks – hundreds of them!

This lively old lady became a dear friend of mine, and often sang a song for me with her guitar. I changed her name for the Christmas card though, because her relatives wouldn’t have liked it.

SAINT MARTIN – SINT MAARTEN, 1978 I did well in Cayman but after two years felt like moving on, and moved my shop to Saint Martin, one of the small islands in the eastern Caribbean, known as the Lesser Antilles.

The Court House Square in Philipsburg, on the Dutch side of the island, is where the cruise ships unload their passengers. My shop was in the house on the left, next to the camera store, but since I drew and printed the card before I moved to the island from Grand Cayman, my “Sandal Shop” sign is missing.

I sometimes got an order to make a postcard for a luxury hotel, where they were given to the guests. La Samanna was on the French side and famous for its celebrity guests such as the Kennedy widow and fine restaurant. I did a poster for them too.

I lived in the big house in the middle of the drawing, facing the beach of Grande Case, a town on the French side of the island. When I did this drawing a gendarme on a bike and some excited kids appeared, so I imagined the reason “Leading the gendarme to the scene of the crime”. I never heard what it was all about, though.

There are beautiful houses, much like those of New Orleans, in the capital of the French side, Marigot. A retired American lady called Connie had a boutique in the one on the right, where she sold my postcards.

A back street of Philipsburg.

In Grande-Case, near my house. I wanted to make a card that said something about the history of the place. Richardson was a common name there, although the family spoke French. This one’s descendant was Roland Richardson, a local painter who studied in France.

This picture of the main church on the Dutch side came out a little dark…

…so I later replaced it with another one, that also showed the church from the outside. I like the first drawing better though – messier, but more atmospheric.

One of my Christmas cards. The islanders most speak neither French nor Dutch but English, and don’t worry much about which foreign country they belong to.

SAINT BARTHELEMY – SAINT BARTHS, 1979 Saint Barthélemy, or Saint Barths as everyone calls it, is within sight of Saint Martin. I liked it better and moved there, setting up my shop in the main port, Gustavia.

I lived near the bayside, in a small wooden cottage like the ones on the far left, and just behind the church in the next postcard.

This charming stone church was taken over by the Anglicans long after the Swedes who built it had departed. The island belonged to Sweden for many years and there are traces everywhere of their reign. Sweden needed a trading base in the Americas, and bought it from the French in the 18th century, but for economical reasons returned it to France a century later. It was just a dry, rocky island then with only a few Norman peasants scraping a living from the soil, but by the time I got there it had become the most fashionable place for holiday-makers in the West Indies. Modern-day Swedes must regret having given it up!

This is my business card. The small wooden house I lived and worked in – just behind the Anglican Church - was painted yellow.

This bar, Le Selecte, is popular among “boat people” and other beatniks. Some of the lady customers would arrive on one sail boat as the captain’s “first mate” and a few months later depart on another in the same capacity. It was also called The Swedish Bar, because it had a portrait of the King of Sweden on the wall. (upper left). There was a colourful poster with pictures of poisonous tropical fish not to be eaten. French chansons and reggae music were always playing on the tape deck.

This card and the one below were special orders I got. Francine was a nice French lady who made a Saint-Tropez style beach restaurant which was very popular.

Les Castelets was the island’s most exclusive hotel, very high up on a mountain top. It had only 10 rooms and received some famous ballet dancers from New York, such as Baryshnikov. I often went up there in my jeep to measure the guests for their sandals, and the French lady in charge, Genevieve, asked me to make them a postcard. You can see the plane – a Canadian “Twin Otter” – arriving from Saint Martin and Guadeloupe.

I was sad to learn, long after I left, that a hurricane destroyed the hotel entirely. The islanders always said the old German who built it up there was a crank and they were right!

This postcard shows how exciting the landings are in Saint Barths. The strip is very short (2,000 meters) and the only planes that have the right hovering capacity for it are Twin Otters, built for the Canadian North. Sometimes planes can’t stop soon enough and end up crashing in the water (and the same can happen when taking off). The pilot has to graze the top of a hill during the approach in order to get down fast enough to touch the beginning of the strip – that’s when the flaps go down, which makes the plane seem to hang in the air.

OTHER ISLANDS I visited other islands in the area to find shops that wanted my postcards, and if I found them to take photos of the scenes I liked best, which I used to make the drawings at home.

This was a special order I got from St. Kitts for the Golden Lemon Hotel, owned by a kindly and distinguished old American called Arthur.

The volcanic island of Saba, belonging to the Dutch West Indies, soared so high in the ocean that we could see it from Saint Barths. Everything there is built of black, volcanic stone, and there are many tropical plants and flowers, but not much else. I didn’t sell enough cards there to break even, either.

My best customers were in the US Virgin Islands, where there were lots of rich Americans, both residents and tourists, who loved my postcards! St. Croix is a beautiful and very lively place, and I had a friend I could stay with there too, so I went quite often.

St. Croix once belonged to Denmark. When the Spanish discovered it they called the island Santa Cruz. All these islands changed hands many times during their history.

This was another special order, from a restored sugar cane plantation which had been restored as a museum. I imagined it as it was in the days of slavery, during the Danish period.

St. Thomas was pleasant, but all I can remember about it that distinguishes it from other islands in the region is that the painter Pisarro was born there, before emigrating to France.

A scene in the harbor of St. Thomas. The boat at the wharf called Lady Astor is selling melons from Dominica. I loved living in the islands, and I only left because the person I was living with wanted to. People have often told me that I should have left her instead!

Tortola is British, and its Spanish name – with the accent on the first rather than the second syllable, as it is pronounced today - means “turtle dove”. I took a walk in the tiny capital and with the photos I made this story-card.

When in Saint Barths I had the idea to make a series of story-cards, each one with a chapter about a man like me who got washed up in an imaginary island and made a new life there. I knew an American “beach-bum” who also did this and gave my hero his name, Richard.

It is mostly San Andres but could be any of the islands. We see the island being invaded by tourism.

Richard was a pioneer of the new industry. I had a “calypso party” just like this one, on San Andres, and it was a huge success, but ended up with a row that contributed to my decision to leave the island.

The cards told the story of other refugees from civilization, and the law too, whom I met in the islands. Tourists loved them and I sold quite a few, but got tired of it after Chapter 4.

NEW YORK and BOSTON, 1980 The plan was to move to southern France, but make postcards in New York first. I had made a lot of money with the cards in the islands so I could afford the luxury of spending a year drawing pictures of my favourite city. I had nice memories of Boston so thought I would do some there too.

This card recalls the folk musicians who played here every Sunday when I was a kid. We used to joke that Garibaldi would pull the sword out of its scabbard the day a virgin walked in front of his statue.

Most of the card and book shops I sold to were in Greenwich Village, where I lived on and off over the years. Here is the corner of West 4th Street and Cornelia, seen from 6th Avenue, with all the individualists walking about doing their free-wheeling thing, far from the midtown skyscrapers.

The gay movement was already in full stride, and its many adepts “cruising” along Christopher Street, all the way down to some very sleazy bars on the Hudson River pier. The story-card starts near 6th Avenue, on Gay Street, one of the Village’s oldest

alleyways, whose suggestive name actually comes from a 19th century city official called Mr. Gay. I was never been able to discover if the “movement” took its name from the street or the “carefree” sense of the word, though.

The part of Manhattan traditionally known as Little Italy is really down by Canal Street, but Bleeker Street in Greenwich Village was solidly Italian too so I put them together in the same story-card. John’s Pizza – sold only in whole pies, as the sign on the window succinctly says – was still there when I went back recently. So was Rocco’s coffee shop, but you don’t see many nuns around now.

You might say that the current dating-agency rage started in Greenwich Village circa 1970, and specifically the Village Voice, then a very original and amusing newspaper (which I here called the Village Weekly, so it won’t be confused with the city daily it sold out to). I was fascinated by the descriptions people thought up about themselves and their dreamed-of mates and put some of them together to make this story-card, illustrated with my own visions. JM means Jewish Man, F means female, sks is seeks, WF is white woman – and the rest is obvious! I selected the bits I liked but swear I didn’t make up a word of these tiny jewels of neo-Americana, with all their and pathetic fantasy. The last one on the right hand side might very well be me in my 60’s, except I wouldn’t have mentioned the knife and fork.

Wo Kee was where me and my teenage sidekick Anthony went to feast on lobster in garlic sauce, sweet and sour pork and other marvels whenever we had a few bucks, in 1959-60. You can see the Village foodies lining up on the sidewalk. You went in a small door and down a long staircase into the basement.

The great pagan temple of capitalism, corny, kitschy – but unique.

Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, a nicely made bit of neo-Gothic dwarfed by its shiny new neighbour.

Horse-drawn buggies waiting by the Plaza Hotel.

BOSTON I did a set of cards for Boston, where I spent three months living in a clapboard apartment house in Lynn, overlooking a grim cityscape of rusty shoe factories.

They are strictly tourist postcards, showing the town and region’s historical sites.

I have no personal relationship with Boston except that, when I visited Anthony at MIT, I would love to go to the Union Oyster House to eat raw oysters and clams at the semi-circular bar. You can see the wrought iron sign standing above the market buildings.

While I was there I sold quite a few cards to the various shops, but then made the mistake of leaving them in the care of a young lady I was introduced to as being in need of a job, on the understanding that she would distribute them for me, keep a percentage of the proceeds as her fee, and send the rest to me in Europe, where I was headed next. I never heard from her again and still don’t know if she sold out the stock of cards I gave her.

PROVENCE, 1981 I wanted to do my leatherwork and postcards in France, and began with a collection for Provence and the Côte d’Azur.

Here is the famous avenue called La Croisette, where film stars and millionaires mingle. In the background is Le Souquet, Cannes’ medieval quarter.

The old quarter of Nice, called Le Vieux Nice, is enormous, and very atmospheric – a world of its own, really.

Biot is a medieval town in the hills, famous for its artists, especially Ferdinand Leger. Not at all my cup of tea - workers-of-the-world-style cubism, full of

smokestacks, spanners and raised fists. My mother admired him and even when to meet him when she studied painting in France.

Antibes, just west of Nice, is a beautiful city with a half-medieval half-Renaissance church standing on the ramparts. Picasso lived there and there is a museum with his work. One of the things I like best about Antibes is the fishermen who sell raw mussels by the port, on the half-shell with a dollop of chopped-onion vinaigrette on top, which you swallow right at the stand.

Grasse is famous for its perfume factories, using the fragrant herbs and lavender of Provence. Its labyrinth of twisting alleys climbs up a hill to where the medieval cathedral stands, overlooking the coast far down to the south.

The market square and surrounding streets in Grasse are at the top of a long steep alleyway which ends in the arched passage you see on the right.

Further west is the town of Fayence with a string of picturesque villages. I lived in Seillans, on and off, for some years, the village on the bottom right.

Near Fayence lived an old lady I befriended, and wrote a little story about what she told me. “Madame Dalmasso lives alone in this “mas” (a provençal farmhouse). Her

granary roof has holes and leaks, and the well has run dry. She neither sells nor eats her geese. If you ask her, “Why do you keep them, then?” she answers gently, “Just for the pleasure of doing it”.

Menton is a handsome town near the Italian border. The old city is up on the hill overlooking the sea, and if you climb up the stairs and alleys you come to this splendid piazza with its baroque church and ornate pavement.

Sospel. North of Menton, up in the mountains along the Italian border, is a rugged valley with towns which once belonged to Italy. Sospel has an 11th century bridge with its toll gate in the middle. The churches are painted in many colours, in the Italian baroque style, and in the restaurants fresh trout from the river is served. There is often a fish tank in the dining room for you to choose your trout, which is then taken out with a net and dropped straight in a big pot of boiling water, and a minute later served whole with melting butter on top. This heavenly dish is called “truite au bleu”.

Saint Paul de Vence is the most famous artist village in Provence – many famous painters lived and worked here. It’s become a bit touristy, to put it mildly.

St. Tropez is so famous for Brigitte Bardot and flashy yachts that people often forget that it is also a very beautiful and lovingly preserved fishing town, with whitewashed streets and intimate squares. Every alley seems to lead down to a view of the Mediterranean, with water lapping at your foot.

The market of St. Tropez, just inside the ramparts by the port. You enter through the arched gate in the back. The fish stalls are right inside the gate, lined up along the wall of the passageway.

In the hills above St.Tropez is the village of Ramatuelle, where many artists and actors lived. Gérard Philippe lived and is buried there. My little poem says “among the

vineyards and olive groves, the road that leads from St. Tropez goes up towards the sky, to Ramatuelle”.

Tourettes-sur-Loup was once a ruined medieval village, like so many others, until it was restored and turned into a center for artists and craftsmen. I tried to rent a shop here but they were too expensive. On the left we see a potter in his door, and on the right a weaver. On the far right is a leather worker’s shop with a cowhide hanging on the wall. It might have been me in there.

Deep in the forests of Provence is one of France’s most beautiful Cistercian monasteries, Le Thoronet. It has been a museum since the Revolution, so the monks I have shown here are just imaginary. The poem is by François Villon, and says, in medieval French, “I know about everything in this world, except my own self”.

I made an envelope for the cards decorated with two lovers writing to one another and asking the mailman to hasten his step. It was in pale yellow, parchment-coloured paper, not shown here.

PARIS 1982 Eventually, I found my way back to Paris, where I lived as a student 20 years before.

The book stalls along the Seine are called “bouqinistes” (“bouquin” is slang for book) and specialize in old editions and prints. The poem is by Baudelaire, and speaks of the “teeming city, city full of dreams”. The steepled roofs across the river are, on the left, the Court House and Police Station, and on the right, the bell towers of Notre Dame Cathedral.

The two islands of old Paris, Ile de la Cité and Ile St. Louis, with a couple sharing a bottle of champagne. The words are from a song by Léo Ferré, which compares the smaller – and most charming - of the two islands to a little boat moored in the river. “When you’re an island, you prefer to stay put, in the heart of the city”.

The great medieval church of St. Germain des Prés was once part of a monastery which has since disappeared. In our times, it is the landmark of the Existentialist movement, when Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Juliette Gréco, sat in the

sidewalk café on the left. The poem says, nostalgically, “So many people have passed through here, so many loves, so many friends, in St. Germain des Prés”.

The Luxembourg Garden, in the Latin Quarter. The poem, a veritable ode to youthful amorousness, is by Rimbaud, “You’re always a fool when you’re seventeen, and there are leafy trees above your head”.

The legendary, and notorious Rue St. Denis. In the 1980’s it was still (before the government clamp-down) said to be the world’s largest red-light district, thronging with

men and women all day long. I had to work from memory here, because the girls and their pimps would have ordered me to put away my sketch-pad or camera. But as long as you obeyed the rules, the street and its side-streets, one of which we see here (ironically called Rue St. Sauveur, Street of the Holy Saviour) was remarkably calm, as shoppers inspected wares and wares inspected shoppers. What is especially strange is that the storefronts here were all taken up by wholesalers of fashion accessories, thread and buttons and lace, so you see respectable-looking seamstresses plying their way through the outlandish crowd without a glance at the flesh trade. I wrote the words for the card, saying “I went around the corner of the street of the girls”, imagining I was the man in the middle looking at the lady with the fluffy dog. My friend Yves Véquaud, who was a writer and lived nearby, told me that having such a little dog on a leash was said by some of the prostitutes to make them more attractive to customers in search of novelty. The little old man with the beret, on the right, doesn’t seem to be in need of special stimulation, though.

Not far away on the Right Bank is the elegant Place des Vosges, once the Royal Square of Paris. When the Revolution came, and then Napoleon, its name was changed to reward the newly-created (and far-away) Vosges Department for being the first one to pay its taxes to the bankrupt government. Statues of kings were torn down by the revolutionaries, but some were rebuilt when the Bourbons came back, such as the one in the middle of the square, representing Louis XIII on his horse. The Place des Vosges is at the heart of Le Marais, the part of the Right Bank which, before the embankments were built, was susceptible to flooding whenever the river overflowed, hence its name “The Marsh”. When the court moved to Versailles it fell into decline, and wasn’t cleaned up and restored until half a century ago. Note the sign on the column with the name of the quarter’s main street, Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, now famous for its trendy boutiques. You might think that “franc bourgeois” refers to the well-off inhabitants who although not nobles had special privileges or freedoms, but it’s quite to the contrary. There was on this street a poorhouse for the old and infirm who, because they were unable to make a living, were

declared exempt from taxation and for official purposes designated as “tax-free citydwellers”, since bourgeois, once upon a time, meant simply people who lived inside the burg.

The Place de la Contrescarpe, is famous for the penniless artists who have always haunted the square. In the Middle Ages it lay just outside the city walls, and since everything that entered the city was taxed, including the wine, you could get drunk there cheaper. The most famous inhabitant was history’s first recorded drop-out, the 14th century poet François Villon, and later there was Verlaine and Hemingway. The poem by Villon looks back at his happy student days and compares them to his current misery. He rhetorically asks, “what has become of them now, my carefree comrades of yesteryear, always so full of songs and jokes?”. The three rakes on the left are m’self in the middle with carefree comrades Yves and James on either side.

This one is called La Chambre de Bonne – the Maid’s Room. Old Parisian houses always have tiny cubicles on the top floor, with sloping ceilings like this one, for the servants, but since few people can’t afford servants any more they are rented to students. Here is mine, overlooking the chimney pots of the Latin Quarter, with my girlfriend Marie- France taking a nap. The poem is by Baudelaire, describing his mistress in a seductive moment – she was a mulatto dancer from Martinique. “The very-dear one was naked, and knowing my tastes, she had only kept on her sonorous jewels”.

I lived for a time on this street, the Rue Mouffetard. The market, that begins in front of the Church Saint Médard and climbs half way up the hill, is famous throughout Paris.

The Pantheon seen from the Left Bank of the Seine, at the bottom of the Montagne Sainte Geneviève. The poem is by Apollinaire, about a bridge, but not the one in the picture: “Your hand in mine, let us face one another, while, under the bridge of our arms flows the stream of timeless glances”.

This one is called La Pissotière. There were still some of these old urinals left in Paris then, ugly, smelly things that feminists hated because only men could use them. The poem is by Baudelaire, saying that the streets of Paris were where “ghosts grab your sleeve as you pass, in broad daylight”.

Here I am at age 19 crossing the inner courtyard of the Sorbonne, on the way to class in my Spanish hunting cape. I once got a letter from a collector saying that this postcard was the only one ever made of “la Cour d’honneur de la Sorbonne”, as it is called. Another specialist told me that the cardof the street-walkers on Rue St. Denis was also the only one of that equally Parisian scene.

Église de Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, one of the city’s oldest churches, in the Latin Quarter and just across the Seine from Notre Dame Cathedral. In fact, the same stonecutters who built Notre Dame worked here too, hired by a community of monks who

wanted to have a church as beautiful, if not as large as the one they saw going up on the island. It was badly damaged in the Revolution and later given over to the Maronite church, as you can see from the ikons on the screen crossing the nave. It isn’t much to look at from the outside, but the tiny nave is a piece of pure Gothic. Being fond of tiny things, it has always been one of my favourite churches.

La Rue Mazarine in the Latin Quarter leads from Saint-Germain-des-Prés to Cardinal Mazarin’s palace on the Seine, the home of the Académie Française. The very famous poem is by Verlaine and says, literally, “It weeps in my heart as it rains on the city”. A more poetic translation might be, “The tears fall in my heart as the rain falls on the city”.

The Pantheon stands on top of the hill named for Saint Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris. She was a 5th century nun who miraculously saved the city from being ravaged by the Barbarians. The church in the background, on the left, is Saint Etienne du Mont, and the tower on the right is the Tour Clovis, all that is left of the great medieval shrine built for Geneviève’s remains. Not many people realize it, but the Pantheon was originally built to be a church dedicated to Saint Geneviève, but then the Revolution came and turned it into a Temple of Reason. The poem says “my heart at peace, I went to the top of the mountain” and shows me and my friend Jean-Claude taking our Brazilian daughters, Luanda and Nina, for a walk. The stooped old man on the left is meant to be my favourite modern French writer, Paul Léautaud, with his meshed shopping bag or “net”. He had lots of dogs and cats and went around the butcher shops asking for scraps to make their dinner.

“Le Petit Déjeuner”. I rented a room from a lively lady called Annick who sold my cards in her boutique, for half a year. You could see the Cathedral from the kitchen table.

I lived in this old hotel too, on the Rue St. André des Arts. You can see me peering out of the top-floor window on the right. The words are the opening line of Baudelaire’s most famous poem, “My child, my sister, imagine the pleasure of going away to live there together”. Its name is “Invitation au Voyage” and people often imagine that the poet was talking about some exotic country in the tropics. In fact, he was gazing at the barges moored along the Seine and dreaming of getting on one to sail far away to… Amsterdam!

“Le Bistrot”, a typical working people’s lunch restaurant in the Latin Quarter (there were still some left in the 1980’s). Inspiration for this one was Le Restaurant des Beaux-Arts, across the street from the Fine Arts School. The two characters in the foreground are me, on the right, and Anthony reading the menu on the left.

When I got back to France, it already had high-speed trains, the “TGV”. These ones are in the Gare de Lyon. Baudelaire’s poem says, “but the real travellers are those who go away just for the pleasure of leaving”.

“La rue Champollion”. This short little street next to the Sorbonne is famous for its ciné-clubs, state-subsidized art movie houses where you can see all the great classics. The life work of a given director is shown over the period of one week, as you can see in the posters. The poem is by the mystic Saint John of the Cross, which I chose because it talks about entering the “dark night where only the soul shines”. I always say

that these shrines to the Seventh Art, where I spent so many afternoons, are “small churches for atheists”.

MONTEFRIO, 1983 I spent several summers in this town near Granada in the early 60’s and returned there 20 years later to visit my old friends. Quite naturally, I ended up making some postcards of the place too.

The words are a tribute to my youthful memories of “Montefrio, land of olives, art and friendship”. You can see the olive groves all around, and what I meant by “art” was the talent of the town’s flamenco singers. The castle on the cliff is really a Gothic church (now a museum) standing on the ruins of a Moorish fortress. The domed building below is the town church.

Those first summers were spent in this house, called the House of the Corner of Jesus. There is a small chapel imbedded in the corner with the copy of a popular image of Christ enshrined in the nearby town of Moclín. People – mostly women, since the “Cristo de Moclín” is famous for making sterile women fertile – would stop to pray and leave fresh flowers.

Montefrio’s other church is San Antonio de Padua, popularly called El Convento because there was once a monastery next to it, which was still in ruins when I returned

in 1983. The popular poem says “What’s your street called? My street has no name, it’s called what it’s called”.

As you climb the hill from El Convento, you pass some of the Stations of the Cross which lead to the Calvary Hill on top. This one has been whitewashed so often that it has become part of the house and steps. The poem is by Lorca and says, “dressed in black robes, she thinks that the world is very small, and the heart immense”. He might have been talking about one of the old ladies knitting. The little girls are carrying drinking water back from the fountain in jugs called “pipotes”.

Higher up, we come to the gypsy quarter, El Coro, and here they are putting on an impromptu show. I lived some years in a house just to the right of this scene. The poem, by Lorca again, says “Oh, city of the gypsies! Who could have gone there and not recall it?”

Later, I bought this farmhouse and worked in it as a translator, as you see in the window. The maid is whitewashing the outside and my daughter is picking plums from the tree. The poem by Lorca says “friend, I want to trade my horse for your house”. It tells the story of a gypsy smuggler wounded by the police whose last wish is to die decently in a bed. This is Lorca’s most popular poem, which begins “Green, how I love you green, the ship is on the sea and the horse on the mountain”.

My friends making flamenco for me by the fireplace. See the ham hanging from the rafters, and the big pans for making paella. The words are from a folk song which tells of a woman so enamoured of her husband that her face glows even brighter than the coals of the fire.

My house is on the left (I sold it long ago to a friend), facing Parapanda Mountain, a huge rock which is the highest peak in the region. The words are from a flamenco song and tell of a gypsy who walked along through the olive trees with his sweetheart, and put his arm around her as chastely as if she were his sister.

RIO DE JANEIRO, 1986 Once I was settled down in Spain, I ran into some money and decided to use it to visit my old friends in Brazil, whom I hadn’t seen in 15 years. This was a time in my life when I started going back to some of the places I had lived in as a young man.

One of my friends was this fisherman you can see selling fish from his canoe on Copacabana Beach, with the Sugar Loaf Mountain in the background. I am on the other side of the boat with my infant daughter, who was born a year after I arrived. Because of Nina and her mother, I ended up staying there for much longer than planned.

The Sugar Loaf Mountain, seen from the foot of the statue of Christ the Redeemer, on the peak known as Corcovado – “hunchback hill”. The freighter about to enter Guanabara Bay, on the far right, might be the one that first brought me to Brazil in 1965.

After seeing the film Black Orpheus in New York over two dozen times, my dream was to live in a favela. This is the one I found, or that found me – the Morro do Cantagalo. You can see me in my bedroom window in the shack on the left. The shack in the foreground was a general store cum tavern where the samba boys would work out over a few beers.

Another view of the Morro do Cantagalo, with a samba written by a local bard, in praise of his lovely favela (and it was lovely, if you didn’t mind the raw sewage and rats). “The Cantagalo has a real fine view, a first-class panorama. On one side you can see Ipanema, and on the other Copacabana. This is the gift that Mother Nature gave to us.”

I found romance – back in the 60’s, and in the 80’s too - in this “gafieira” or ball room near the harbor, famous for its intricate samba dancers. You can see the gentlemen literally throwing the ladies around, to the big beat from the bandstand. I am in the far left corner dancing, not quite cheek-to-cheek, with one of the habituées.

“O Botequim” – one of the many sidewalk juice-beer-and-coffee counters near Copacabana Beach.

“Igrejinha da Gloria”. Rio has two exceptionally beautiful and unusual baroque churches, this one atop the Gloria Hill, overlooking the bay…

…and the Monastery of São Bento, on its own hill near the harbour. The encrustations were carved in hardwood and then gilded to create a fantastically rich and mysterious effect. These two postcards are scale versions, greatly simplified, of the drawings I did when I first arrived in Rio in the 60’s.

Lapa, in downtown Rio, is famous for its bars and nights of samba-singing, a traditional gathering place for Brazil’s musicians and composers, in the days of Carmen Miranda. The words are from a samba telling the story of the neighbourhood. You can see the famous tramway viaduct in the background, taking people up to the mountainside quarter of…

Santa Tereza, very popular among the city’s artists and intellectuals. The trams are called “bondes” – pronounced BON-gees – because the British company that founded the company in the 19th century was called Mr. Bond.

Copacabana Beach. In the foreground are a millionaire with a T-shirt saying UNEMPLOYED and a nanny holding his, or some other millionaire’s baby. Brazilians have a beach culture – everyone wants to be there, from every sector of the society. The words are from a bossa nova song about the samba beat that throbs all along Rio’s seafront.

I never cared for the carnival because it was too big and noisy (and vulgar), but I always looked forward to the New Year’s Eve macumba celebration on the beach. Adepts of the Afro-Brazilian religion came from all around to greet Iemanjá, the Queen of the Sea, and throw gifts for her into the water.

That man has a real live boa constrictor wrapped around his body!

Bossa Nova Party. Four friends play a song that says “if everyone danced the samba, life would be so much easier to live”, while I listen with my daughter beside me.

The song by Tom Jobim says, “I wish life were always like this, here with my guitar and you close to me, and, looking out the window, the Corcovado in the moonlight”.

GRANADA, 1989 I returned to Spain with Nina and her mother, where I wrote a book about Granada and illustrated it with these drawings, which I also printed separately as postcards. As it was, the book was, and still is, very successful but I could never find a good outlet for the cards – the local souvenir shops said that black-and-white postcards weren’t “commercial” enough and didn’t want to use valuable stand-space on them. So they were only ever sold in my own workshop on Cuesta Alhacaba, until I went away.

Just below Cuesta Alhacaba is the main gate to medieval Granada, the Puerta de Elvira. You can see the white houses and the towers of the Albaicin rising in the background, and behind them the Sierra Nevada. Beautiful city!

Plaza Nueva is one of the city’s busiest meeting places. On the left, the royal palace from which eastern Andalucia and the Canary Islands were governed after the Reconquest. The Alhambra is in the upper right and, in the center, the church of Santa Ana, once a mosque, and the Darro River beside it.

The bell tower of the Cathedral, with the market at its feet. Here I am buying a chumbo – cactus fruit – from a street vendour, who first peels away the prickly skin. Grainy, but delicious!

La Capilla Real. The Royal Chapel stands beside the Cathedral but isn’t really part of it. In fact it’s much older, and was built after the Reconquest as a burial place for the Catholic Monarchs and their offspring. The style is late-Gothic and very ornate.

Corral del Carbón. The patio of this Moorish inn or “fondak” was used, after the Reconquest, for the sale of charcoal, and also as an open-air theatre. There’s me and my daughter coming along in the foreground.

The River Darro flows at the foot of the Alhambra hill, in the gorge which separates the palace from the old Casbah, El Albaicin. The bridge in the foreground was built after the Reconquest by the Christians, but the remains of the much larger one we see behind it were part of the great wall which surrounded both Alhambra and Albaicin, crossing the river in this place. On the left, several ancient convents and monasteries, and the Church of San Pedro, which was also once a mosque. Blood may be thicker than water, but in Granada, history is too!

Alminar de San José. This Moorish minaret in the Albaicin was turned into a Christian bell tower after the Reconquest, although the mosque was torn down to make way for the current Iglesia de San José, which we see on the left. The tower is one of the oldest examples of Islamic architecture in Granada, even older than the Alhambra. The small, arched construction to the left of the tower is the ablutions well of the vanished mosque.

Palace of Dar al-Horra. Also in the Albaicin, this great Moorish palace gets its name “house of the honourable lady” from the wife of the wayward Sultan Muley-Hacen, who replaced her with a young Christian captive, and sent the ageing Aixa off to the other side of the river, to live here in honourable exile. The “bridge” is in fact an aqueduct which brought water to the palace from a canal beginning in the sierra. When the Christians took Granada in 1492, what impressed them most was the abundance of water flowing everywhere, compared to the bone-dry and filthy cities of Castile.

Puerta Nueva, the oldest remaining gate to the Albaicin, and, at the top of the street, a chapel built in the blocked-up gate called “Puerta de San Román”. The tiny chapel is dedicated to the city patron saint, San Cecilio.

On the top of the Albaicin hill is a beautiful square called Plaza de San Miguel Bajo, after the church which we see here. We can see that it was once a mosque from the Moorish well embedded in its side, for the ritual ablutions. The crucifix on the right is the Cristo de las Lañas, the “Christ of the Clamps”, so called because after being

shattered into bits by church-hating soldiers in the Civil War, the deeply religious inhabitants defiantly patched it back together with unsightly iron clamps.

Colegiata de San Salvador. This patio of an ancient mosque, with its ablutions well in the middle, was left intact when the mosque itself was replaced with a great church, called “colegiata” because it was devoted to the conversion to Christianity of the people of the Albaicin, just after the Reconquest. The priests in charge failed utterly and were driven out of the quarter by indignant Muslims hurling stones and insults. In the background, the great wall that was built to protect the Albaicin and the Alhambra from the invading Christians. As it was, the city surrendered after a long siege.

Even higher up than the Alhambra and the Albaicin is El Sacromonte, famous for its gypsy caves. In fact, the caves were dug long before the gypsies arrived, by the Moors, but after the Reconquest and the departure of the Moors the gypsies moved into them, and they are still there today, along with a colourful community of international “bohemians” – a term which originally, and ironically, meant gypsies. The Alhambra can be seen on the left and the great wall on the right, with the city below. ALHAMBRA

“Patio de los Leones”, courtyard of the lions. This most emblematic part of the palace represents the Garden of Paradise, with the columns and arches around it suggesting palms trees surrounding an oasis. The lions around the fountain are said to have been a gift to the Sultan by a Jewish merchant, representing the 12 tribes of Judah.

Tower of Comares and Patio de los Arrayanes (courtyard of myrtles). This is the greatest tower of the Alhambra and the home of the Sultan himself, with the harem living around the courtyard and its large pond fringed with aromatic myrtle bushes.

The Throne Room, inside the Tower of Comares. This vast and sumptuously decorated hall was where the Sultan received his guests, for which it is also called the Hall of Ambassadors. After the Reconquest, the monarchs Isabel and Fernando ruled the new territories from this room, and announced here the notorious expulsion of the Jews. The arched windows were once sealed, not with the current lattice-work, but stained glass windows or “comariyyas” in Arabic, giving the room its name, Comares.

Mirador de Lindaraja. The name given to this exquisite fairy-tale loggia comes from a legend about poor abandoned Queen Aixa, again, who before being packed off to the Albaicin would sit here gazing out onto the city – hence the Arabic name “the eyes of Aixa”.

Generalife, the royal hunting lodge – often mistakenly described as a summer palace. The famous inter-meshing fountains around the long pond were added by the Christians, to imitate Italians gardens of the period. A lovely place, but too re-worked by its new owners to have much historical value left.

El Partal, one of several ruinous palaces in the Alhambra citadel, with Generalife on the hill in the background, and a tiny mosque on the right. A fairy-tale palace, to be sure… END other ebooks by Lawrence Bohme Eyes on the World The Eagle Flies Alone Student of Life School is Over America, Again Tender Tropics Granada, City of My Dreams Portrait of Montefrio Nina’s Book Goin’ Garf

The text and artwork in this book is the sole property of Lawrence Bohme and cannot be reproduced without his permission, for which you should write to lawrence.bohme at either his gmail or hotmail address.

Lawrence Bohme was born in London in 1942 “under the V-2 rockets”, to an English mother and a German war refugee father. When he was 4, the family emigrated to Vancouver, where Lawrence “failed to become a real Canadian boy, but loved the trees”. 10 years later his restless and beautiful mother decided to abandon home and husband to become a painter in Mexico, where Lawrence learned his first foreign language and became a bullfight aficionado, “a passion which, like so many others, has long since faded”. After several years they moved to Jamaica, still under British rule, where Lawrence discovered his “first tropical paradise and the beauty of the island girls”. By the time he was 16 his mother had led him to Greenwich Village which was where he was “really born”. It is significant, perhaps, that his surname “Bohme” was originally spelled “Böhme” (but anglicized during the war, when having a German name was undesirable) which means “man from the old state of Bohemia”, or simply put, “bohemian”. At age 18, Lawrence set out, on his own this time, to “be a student, rather than really study, at the University of Madrid, a thrilling experience of no academic worth”, soon ending up in an Andalucian village near Granada called Montefrio, where he had befriended an eccentric flamenco singer, Manuel Avila, who was also the town butcher, and where he was christened “Lorenzo” by the locals, “a name that stuck so well that when my hair went white they began calling me Don Lorenzo”. Hooking up with a “temperamental and self-destructive” German painter he met in the streets of Granada, Lilo, Lawrence moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne, where, in his words, he “learned many important things”, one of which was that he “didn’t want to spend any more time in schools”. Tiring of both Lilo and Paris, he drifted aimlessly about Rome and Sicily “for one long autumn, admiring the frescoes and façades” before “returning home” to New York. There, he fell in love with Virginia, “the Panamanian voodoo doll”, and “after seeing the film Black Orpheus 16 times also fell in love with Brazilian music and women”, making his way there a few years later, on a Japanese freighter carrying immigrants from Yokohama to Rio de Janeiro, via Los Angeles.

His long stay in Rio, where he lived in a favela with a fisherman and his family and became a leather bag and sandal maker, “was both exciting and illuminating”, but at the end of five years he had “another fit of wanderlust” and, after some deambulations, found himself in the Haiti of “Baby Doc” Duvalier, teaching sugar cane cutters to sew leather satchels which he exported to men’s fashion shops on Lexington Avenue and St. Marks Place. Having learned creole and explored the hills of southern Haiti on the back of a small white horse he called “Blanc”, he “fell out with the local ton-ton macoutes” and, now in the company of his adventurous mother, fled to Cartagena, Colombia where he set up another leather shop. From there began a long odyssey through the Caribbean islands, making leather bags and drawing pen-and-ink postcards “to keep body and soul together”: San Andres, Grand Cayman, Saint Martin and Saint Barths. For reasons too complicated to describe here, he returned to Europe in 1981, living in a village high in the hills of Provence and then Paris, where he had his greatest success as a postcard designer and became an external translator for Unesco, “at last working in a field I was originally educated for, to my dear old Dad’s great relief”. A few years later, Lawrence returned to his beloved Andalucian town, Montefrio, where he bought a white house in the olive trees and “began studying history in earnest, because – unless you want to become a dentist or an astronomer - it’s the only thing worth studying”. An unforeseen visit to Rio resulted in the birth of his daughter Nina, whose mother accompanied him back to Montefrio so that they could bring her up together, which he ”succeeded in doing, for better or for worse”. At this time he made his living as a translator and conference interpreter, as well as restoring several cottages which he rented on the Internet as “Las casas de Lorenzo”. After a stormy incursion into village politics “at the risk of my life”, Lawrence, a bachelor again, moved to Granada’s old casbah, the Albaicin. There, on Cuesta Alhacaba, he began writing about his life and travels “in the company of a daring Moorish girl” who in 2005 gave him a son, August “named for my father, August Edward Böhme”. Soon after, Lawrence moved back to France because “I wanted Gus to have French as his mother tongue, it being the world’s most beautiful language but impossible to learn perfectly later in life”. The threesome now live with their dachshund Froggy in the Basque seaport of Saint Jean de Luz.