The Barefoot Queen Page 17

  Milagros and Caridad’s affection for each other grew as they sat together by the river, but those evenings didn’t last long.

  “Girl.” The healer stopped her one night when she was about to leave the hut. Milagros turned back. “Listen to me: don’t distance yourself from your kind, from the gypsies.”

  Caridad received a similar message that day from Tomás.

  “Morena,” he warned her, entering the hut as she was carefully wrapping a cigar in leaf, “you shouldn’t take Milagros away from her blood brothers. Do you understand what I’m referring to?”

  Caridad’s long fingers stilled and she nodded without lifting her head.

  From that day on the two women strolled along the street of the settlement without going farther, Caridad behind the girl, converted into her shadow, mingling with those at the doors of their huts who chatted, played, drank, smoked and, above all, sang. Some voices were accompanied by guitars, others by the unembellished sound of palms hitting some object, most by the warmth of simple clapping of hands. Caridad had witnessed some of the celebrations in the San Miguel alley, but it was different in the settlement: the songs didn’t turn into a party or a competition. They were simply a way of life, something that was done as naturally as eating or sleeping; they sang or danced and then went back to their conversation only to start singing again or they’d all get up from their seats and go over to encourage and applaud the two almost nude little girls who were dancing off to one side, already showing some flair.

  Caridad feared that they would ask her to sing. Nobody suggested it, not even Tomás. They accepted her—with some misgivings, certainly, but they did: she was the Negress of Grandfather Melchor; he would decide what to do with her on his return. For her part, Milagros was growing used to being burdened by grief; she missed her parents, her grandfather and her girlfriends from the alley. Yet what tormented her most was her internal struggle. She had ending up putting Alejandro on a pedestal in order to compensate for a death that she knew was a result of her whims; nevertheless, she kept thinking about Pedro García night and day … What was he doing? Where could he be? And most important: which of her girlfriends was seeking his favors? Alejandro was watching her closely and knew her desires. Ghosts knew everything, Caridad had told her, but the thought of Pedro García being flattered by other girls ate away at her so much that she pushed away those feelings and took advantage of any errand Old María sent her on to approach the San Miguel alley furtively.

  She saw a lot of gypsies, including her girlfriends. One day she had to hide quickly in a doorway with her heart pounding when she saw her mother. She must have been going out to sell tobacco. I should be going with her, she thought as she watched her slow, determined gait. She dried a tear. On one occasion she saw Pedro, but she didn’t dare to go out to meet him. She saw him again another day: he was walking with one of his uncles toward the pontoon bridge, as handsome and dapper as ever. Milagros had regretted not going over to him on that first day. The council of elders’ sentence, she reminded herself, was to stay with the healer and not set foot in the alleyway. But Old María felt free to send her on errands to Triana … She ran along a street parallel to the one Pedro was on, circled a block of houses and before turning the corner took a deep breath, straightened her skirt and smoothed her hair. Did she look pretty? She almost ran right into them.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be at the settlement, with the healer?” spat out Pedro’s uncle as soon as he saw her.

  Milagros hesitated.

  “Get out of here!”

  “I …”

  She wanted to look at Pedro, but his uncle’s eyes had ensnared hers!

  “Didn’t you hear me? Leave!”

  She lowered her head and left them behind. She heard them speaking as she started walking again. She wished Pedro had bothered to look at her.

  “YOU HAVE to do it!”

  Old María’s shout echoed inside the dwelling. José Carmona and Ana Vega avoided looking at each other over the table where the three of them sat. The healer had showed up at their house unannounced that morning.

  Neither of the parents had dared to interrupt Old María’s words.

  “The girl is sick,” she warned them. “She doesn’t eat. She doesn’t want to eat,” she added, seeing in her mind the gypsy girl’s protruding cheekbones and her increasingly pointed nose since her frustrated encounter with Pedro. “She’s just a girl who made a mistake. Have you two never made one? She couldn’t foresee the consequences. She feels alone, abandoned. She no longer even finds comfort in the morena. She is your daughter! She is wasting away in plain sight and I don’t have a cure for grieving souls.”

  Ana played with her hands and José repeatedly rubbed his mouth and chin when the healer referred to them.

  “Your problems shouldn’t affect the girl; what happens between you isn’t her fault.”

  José seemed about to say something.

  “I’m not interested,” María said before he could speak. “I’m not here to solve your disagreements, or even to give you advice. It’s not my intention to find out what brought you to this situation; I only want to know: don’t you love your daughter?”

  And after that meeting, on a cool dusk in late September, Ana and José Carmona showed up at the settlement. Caridad saw them before Milagros did.

  “Your parents,” she whispered to the gypsy girl despite the fact that they were still quite a distance away.

  Milagros froze; some of the boys she was chatting with fell silent and followed her gaze, locked on Ana and José, who approached along the street, between huts and shacks, greeting those still sitting at their doors whiling away the time. When José stopped to talk to an acquaintance, her mother stepped ahead of him and, when she was a few paces away from her daughter, opened her arms. Milagros needed no further invitation and launched herself into them. Caridad felt a knot in her throat, the boys released the breath they’d been holding and there was even someone, from the shacks, who applauded.

  José approached them. Milagros hesitated when she saw him, but the shove that Ana gave her encouraged her to walk toward him.

  “Forgive me, Father,” she mumbled.

  He looked her up and down, as if he didn’t recognize her. He brought a hand to his chin, with feigned seriousness, and scrutinized his daughter again.

  “Father, I …”

  “What’s that over there?” he shouted.

  Terrified, Milagros turned to where he was pointing. There was nothing out of the ordinary. “I don’t … what? What are you talking about?”

  Some gypsies were curious. One of them got up and started to approach the spot José was pointing to.

  “I’m talking about that! That, don’t you see?”

  “No! What?” screamed the girl, looking for help from her mother.

  “That, girl,” he said pointing to an empty chair at the door to one of the shacks.

  “That chair?”

  “No,” answered her mother. “Not the chair.”

  An old guitar was leaning against the chair. Milagros turned toward her father with a smile on her face.

  “I won’t forgive you,” he said, “until you get every gypsy in this settlement to kneel before your charms.”

  “Let’s get started!” accepted Milagros as she straightened her back proudly.

  “Gentlemen!” José Carmona then howled. “My daughter is going to dance! Prepare yourselves for the sight of the most lovely of all gypsy women!”

  “Is there any wine?” said someone from one of the huts.

  Old María, who had witnessed the scene and was already dragging a rickety stool over to where the guitar was, let out a laugh.

  “Wine?” exclaimed Ana. “When you see my daughter dance, you’ll steal all the grapes on the Triana plantation to offer them up to her.”

  That night—with Caridad in attendance, watching from behind the gypsies, trying to keep her legs from moving to the sound of the music with the joy she saw bri
mming in Milagros—José Carmona had no choice but to be true to his word and forgive his daughter.

  AFTER THE party, life continued in the gypsy settlement on the grounds of Triana’s Carthusian monastery. Ana agreed to sell the cigars rolled by Caridad, in a sort of truce following the outburst of rage she had received her with; that forced her to go and see her daughter frequently. And Caridad saw her workload increase when Fray Joaquín showed up with a couple of bags of tobacco unloaded on the beaches of Manilva.

  “You owe me,” was all he said to Tomás. The gypsy was about to reply, but Fray Joaquín didn’t let him. “Let’s leave things the way they are, Tomás. I have always trusted you; Melchor has never failed me, and I want to think that you had some problem that I know you will never reveal to me. I have to make back the community’s money, you understand? And the cigars that Caridad makes increase the tobacco’s value.”

  Then he went to see her.

  “The Virgin of Candlemas has been waiting a long time for your visits,” he said as soon as he entered the hut.

  Caridad got up from the chair where she was working, brought her hands together in front of her and lowered her gaze to the floor. The Dominican watched the two old people who shared the hut with her out of the corner of his eye. He was surprised to see Caridad in her old slave clothes. He remembered her dressed in red, kneeling before the Virgin, moving rhythmically, forward and back, when she thought no one was looking. He knew, from the brothers who had lived in Cuba, about the mix of African religions with the Catholic one, and the Church’s tolerance of it. At least they believe and come to the religious celebrations! he had heard on numerous occasions, and it was true: Caridad went to church, while most of the gypsies didn’t set foot in there. What had happened to her red clothes? He didn’t want to ask.

  “I brought more tobacco for you to work with,” he announced instead. “For each bundle of fifty cigars you make, one will be for you.” Caridad was surprised to find herself looking at the friar, who smiled at her. “One of the good ones, one of the twisted ones that you make with leaf, not from the scraps.”

  “And what is there for us, who put her up in our home?” interjected the old gypsy.

  “OK,” accepted the clergyman after letting a few seconds pass, “but you both have to come to mass every Sunday, and on the feasts of precept, and pray the rosary for the souls in purgatory, and—”

  “We’re too old to be running this way and that,” snapped his wife. “Wouldn’t your reverence be satisfied with a little prayer at night?”

  “I would be, but the man upstairs, no,” smiled Fray Joaquín, ending the discussion there. “Are you OK, Caridad?” She nodded again. “Will I be seeing you again at San Jacinto?”

  “Yes,” she confirmed with a smile.

  “I trust I will.”

  He hadn’t yet seen Milagros. He bid them farewell and before he was out of the door he heard the gypsies demanding that Caridad give them a share of those promised twisted cigars. He clicked his tongue; he had no doubt that she would give in to them. He asked for the hut of the healer and it was pointed out to him. He knew what had happened in the potters’ quarter because it had caused quite a stir in Triana. Rafael García made sure that no one spoke to the authorities about either the murder of the gypsy boy or the fire: the gypsies were all sworn to silence through the various patriarchs of each family; the payos who had witnessed or been involved in the fight were sent a few intimidating messages, which were enough to keep them quiet: none of them wanted to end up fleeing in the night, ruined, like the potter who had shot the gypsy boy. Despite all that, the rumors had spread as quickly as the fire in the ceramics workshop and Fray Joaquín’s stomach had knotted when he found out about Milagros’s part in it. He prayed for her. Finally he managed to discover the decision made by the council of elders based on the intervention of Old María and he again fell to his knees to thank the Virgin of Candlemas, Santa Ana and San Jacinto for the painless punishment she was given. The nights he’d spent worrying about her being banished from Triana dragged on endlessly; he was racked with the fear he’d never see her again!

  Why couldn’t I fall asleep on those nights? he asked himself yet again as he pulled aside the curtain and distractedly went over the threshold of the shack that had been pointed out to him. Milagros and Old María were leaning over a table sorting herbs; they both turned their heads toward him. Suddenly his insomnia didn’t matter anymore; all his worries vanished at the sight of her wonderful smile.

  “May God be with you,” greeted the friar without approaching, as if he didn’t want to interrupt the women’s work.

  “Father,” answered Old María after looking carefully at him for a few seconds. “I have been waiting for more than fifty years for that God you speak of to deign to come to this shack and grace me with some relief from poverty. I have dreamed of the thousand ways it could happen: surrounded by angels or through one of the saints.” The old woman lifted her hands and fluttered them through the air. “Encircled in blinding light … And,” she added, shrugging her shoulders, “the truth is I never thought that he would send a friar to stand in the doorway like a dumbfounded fool.”

  Fray Joaquín was slow to react. Milagros’s stifled laugh made him blush. Dumbfounded fool! He straightened up and adopted a serious expression.

  “Woman,” he declared with a much stronger tone than he had intended, “I want to speak with the girl.”

  “If she doesn’t mind …”

  Milagros got up without thinking twice, smoothed her skirt and hair and walked toward the preacher with a mocking expression on her face. Fray Joaquín let her pass.

  “Father,” called out Old María, “what about my riches?”

  “Believing that God will one day visit you is the greatest wealth that anyone can aspire to in this world. Seek no other riches.”

  The gypsy waved a hand in the air dismissively.

  Milagros waited for the friar outside.

  “What do you want to talk to me for?” she asked, flattering him slightly while maintaining her mocking expression.

  What did he want to talk to her for? He had gone to the settlement about the tobacco and …

  “What are you laughing at?” he asked instead of answering her question.

  Milagros arched her brows. “If you could have seen yourself in there …”

  “Don’t be impertinent!” The friar squirmed. Must he always look foolish in front of that girl? “Make no mistake,” he tried to defend himself, “my expression was just … seeing you there making potions with herbs. Milagros—”

  “Fray Joaquín,” she interrupted, speaking in a slow drawl.

  But the priest had already found an excuse for his untimely visit. He straightened up seriously and walked down the street with the girl beside him. “I don’t like what you are doing,” he scolded her. “That’s why I wanted to speak with you. You know that the Inquisition keeps a close eye on witches …”

  “Ha!” laughed the girl.

  “It’s no laughing matter.”

  “I’m no witch and I’m not planning on becoming one. Old María isn’t either, and she is against those spells used to trick payos. You know, the hidden treasures, the love potions, they’re just scams to part fools from their money. She only cures with herbal remedies …”

  “It’s similar. What about the evil eye?”

  Milagros’s expression soured.

  “Did you know that the Inquisition just arrested a gypsy for giving the evil eye to livestock, here, in Triana?”

  “Anselma? Yes, I know her. But they also say she makes spells to dry up the milk of paya mothers and that they have seen her naked, riding a stick and flying out of windows.” Milagros was silent for a few seconds to gauge the priest’s reaction. “Naked and flying on a stick! Do you believe the part about the stick? It’s all lies. She isn’t a witch. Did you know what would have to happen for a gypsy to become a witch?”

  The friar, with his gaze on the dirt road
they walked along, shook his head.

  “Witches transform in their youth,” explained Milagros. “And everybody knows that Anselma Jiménez wasn’t one of the chosen. There are some water and earth demons who will choose a young gypsy girl and, as she sleeps, fornicate with her. That is the only way to become a true witch: after fornicating, the gypsy acquires the powers of the demon who has lain with her.”

  “That means you do have witches,” replied the priest, suddenly stopping in his tracks.

  Milagros frowned. “But I’m not one. No demon has fornicated with me. And the witch doesn’t have to work with herbs.” She gesticulated broadly to keep the friar from putting in his twopenn’orth. “That doesn’t have anything to do with it: anyone can be chosen.”

  “I still don’t like it, Milagros. You … you are a good girl …”

  “I have no choice. I suppose you know about the ruling by the council of elders?”

  “Yes, I know.” He nodded. “But we could find another solution … If you wanted …”

  “As a nun, perhaps? Would you marry me off? Would you get me a good dowry from one of your pious parishioners? You know I could never marry a payo. Fray Joaquín, I’m a gypsy.”

  And there was no getting away from that fact, the priest had to acknowledge despite himself, ruffled by the insolence and arrogance with which Milagros addressed him. The seconds passed, both of them standing almost at the point where the settlement road entered the garden plots, her trying to figure out what was going through the friar’s mind, he with her last words still ringing in his head: I could never marry a payo. Some women who were making baskets at the doors to their huts, who until then had only been watching them out of the corners of their eyes, stilled their skillful hands and observed the situation.

  “Fray Joaquín,” warned Milagros in a whisper, “the women are watching us.”