Lawrence Bohme

Lawrence Bohme, born in London - "under Hitler's rockets" - to an English mother and a German refugee, was raised in Vancouver, Mexico City, Kingston, Jamaica and New York. Also known as "Lorenzo" to his Spanish friends, he first came to Madrid as a university student in 1960 "fresh from Greenwich Village, with an American high school diploma and a baby-blue drip-dry suit". Soon after came Granada, where he fell in love with the ancient city of the Moors and their palace the Alhambra, and also with a whitewashed village in the nearby hills, Montefrio.

There, he befriended the town butcher, Manolo Avila, who was also "a tortured and eccentric" flamenco singer. Lawrence followed his anti-hero about as he each day slaughtered a goat for the morrow's trade - "singing as he slit its throat, like a pagan priest making a sacrifice, and then haggling over the bloody morsels with the housewives next morning in his tiny butcher shop. Between customers, he sang too, howling like a madman in a cage, beautiful, poignant flamenco"...

In Granada, Lawrence poured over the transcendental poems of Federico Garcia Lorca and Saint John of the Cross, the mystic poet who led the monastery of Barefoot Carmelites that once stood next to the Alhambra. Many of Lorenzo's nights - "far too many to get passing marks at the Granada university" - were spent carousing with his friends, in the taverns of the Albaicin.

In one such "abject wine shop" he first saw Lilo, an adventurous German painter and "hot-headed tomboy" from Munich. Lilo decided that Lawrence was "the man of her life, at just age 19!" - and recklessly threw in her lot with him. The two hitch-hiked their way to Seville and then travelled to Paris, where he enrolled in the French Civilization Course at the Sorbonne and she studied painting in Montparnasse, under France's "last cubist", André Lhote.

Then there was Italy, where Lilo "who underneath her outlandish ways was a highly cultivated German fraulein" led her young lover to the medieval frescoes of Siena and glittering mosaics of Ravenna. These magically alive and yet simply-wrought images made a great impression on our hero, because "they made me realize that with my self-taught and rather childish drawing style, as well as some guidance in pen-and-inkmanship from Lilo, I could create pictures that spoke of my world, just as Lorenzetti, Giotto and Simone Martini had done of theirs".

Youth being what it was - and with "all the lusty, truth-and-adventure-seeking girls who proliferated during the 60's" - Lawrence was soon "wonderfully free again". Before long he was travelling aboard a "very slow" freighter bound for Brazil - "28 days at sea from Los Angeles to Rio". There, he at last fulfilled the "romantic dream of living in a favela" which had haunted him ever since seeing the movie Black Orpheus "a total of 16 times". The reality, he swears, was "just as romantic as the dream, except for the stench of raw sewage" which wafted through the glassless windows of the shack he shared with a fisherman and his brood. "The whole flimsy lean-to wobbled on its stilts whenever we started dancing the samba to the beat someone tapped out on a tin can".

Lawrence paraded in the carnival of 1967 with his favela friends, "disguised as a Portuguese sugar cane planter leading his mulatta mistress on one arm", under the spotlights glaring down on Rio's broadest avenue. His intense friendship with Yukio, an artistically-inclined Japanese immigrant, inspired the two to set up a leather workshop producing bags and sandals "for the sun-tanned princesses of Ipanema". Business boomed, and kept him and Yukio in relative comfort - "as well as providing my neighbours in the favela with the most dignified work they had ever done", he fondly reminisces...

Five years "and many broken hearts" later, the "skinny Americanized Englishman" with his head of blonde curls and dark blue eyes - "the girls down there thought I was a prince!" - reluctantly bid farewell to his beloved Rio, "for literary reasons". After failing to find a publisher for his Brazilian sage, he made off to Haiti, which had recently opened up to foreigners after the death of the xenophobic dictator Papa Doc, in order, he says, to "discover the local culture and make a decent living". Practicing the trade he had learned in Rio, he "taught the sugar-cane cutters to produce my models of leather bags for men" which he shipped to the fashionable boutiques of New York - "in downtown Manhattan and uptown too". In the Black Republic, Lawrence learned to speak creole and, even more important, "how to feverishly savor every moment of life without a thought for the future, just as the Haitians had to".

Forced to get out of Haiti in a hurry by Baby Doc's greedy henchmen, Lawrence - in the company of his painter mother, Joan, and her six dachshunds - landed on the remote "and heavenly" once-English island of San Andres, off the coast of Nicaragua, lovingly described in "Goin' Garf!". His two years in "that time warp where the islanders thought that Queen Victoria still reigned far across the sea and would one day return to take them back under her wing" was "the happiest of my whole life" he says nostalgically. When the poetic businessman "ran into cash flow problems" and had to move on, "I left a living piece of myself there", he says, enigmatically.

Finally, Lawrence returned to "civilization, as they call it" - first to France and then to Spain where he "bought a farmhouse and sat down to study the history of the places where I had lived, to see what made their natives tick" and then to write about his adventures "in the light of my readings". He also reworked a diary he kept during his love affair with the Brazilian school teacher Cassilda, telling "how we made our daughter Nina", born in Copacabana and raised in Granada, Spain.

For twenty tumultuous years, Lorenzo made his living as a UNESCO translator and free-lance simultaneous interpreter, as a tour guide, a language teacher, a custom sandal-maker, a pen-and-ink postcard designer and, finally, a self-taught architect. As such he "fixed up for rental half a dozen peasant houses in Montefrio, known on the Internet as Las Casas de Lorenzo". There, in Lawrence's "organically-designed semi-caves, with the beds and chairs and couches carved into the whitewashed walls", a trickle of "curious travellers from computer-land" spent their holidays, living among the farmers and gypsies in a pristinely Andalucian setting.

Now Lorenzo has traded his "boots for bedroom slippers" and spends his days "writing it all down" which, he claims, "is like living it all over again, but without the discomforts and privations". For you to read, and travel with him!

(Photo taken by 8-year old August Bohme in the French village of Sare, Basque Country, 2014)