The Barefoot Queen Read online

  “Where did he go?” inquired Milagros.

  He didn’t want to tell her. He refused to continue talking to them.

  They returned downcast to the alley, Caridad bringing up the rear, her eyes on the ground.

  “Oh, so he forgot about that crazy idea, huh?” said María sarcastically on the way.

  “Maybe it wasn’t about—” Milagros started to retort.

  “Don’t be naive, girl.”

  They continued walking in silence. Except for the two coins that Santiago had given them, they had no money. They had no food either. They had no relatives! There wasn’t a single Vega in Triana, according to Doroteo. The old healer couldn’t hold back a sigh.

  “Let’s buy something to eat and go and collect some herbs,” she then announced.

  “And where will we prepare them?” asked Milagros sarcastically. “In your—?”

  “Shut up!” interrupted the old woman. “You have no right to question me. We’re all having a hard time. When someone gets sick, they’ll be running to find a place to prepare them.”

  Milagros shrank back at the reprimand. They were walking toward La Cava, where the rubbish was piling up. María looked at the girl out of the corner of her eye and, when she heard her first sob, made a gesture to Caridad to console her, but Milagros quickened her step and left them behind, as if fleeing.

  Caridad didn’t catch Old María’s look. Her thoughts were still on Melchor. I’ll find him in Triana, she had repeated to herself over and over again during the journey back. She imagined meeting him again, singing for him again, his presence … his touch. If he had been arrested, as they had assumed so many times over the course of their flight, they would have freed him like the others, and if he hadn’t been arrested, why wouldn’t he come to Triana as soon as he found out that his people had been freed? But he wasn’t there, and the young Carmona men assured them that no Vega had left the arsenal. A thousand times that very morning her stomach had turned at the image of those gaunt faces and scrawny torsos on Milagros’s cousins. If that was the toll on young men, what would Melchor be like? She felt her eyes grow damp.

  “Go with her,” asked the healer, pointing to Milagros.

  Caridad tried to hide her face.

  “You too?” asked María with desperation.

  Caridad sniffled and tried to hold back her tears.

  “Why are you crying, morena?”

  Caridad didn’t answer.

  “If it were about Milagros you would already be with her. I doubt that José Carmona treated you kindly even once, and as for Ana Vega …” María stopped suddenly, tensed her old neck and looked at her in astonishment. “Melchor?”

  Caridad couldn’t hold it back any longer and she burst into tears.

  “Melchor!” exclaimed Old María incredulously as she shook her head. “Morena!” she finally called out. Caridad made an effort to look at her. “Melchor is an old gypsy. A Vega. You’ll see him again.” A smile flickered over Caridad’s mouth. “But now she is the one who needs you,” insisted the healer, turning to point at Milagros as she headed off.

  “I’ll see him again? Are you sure?” Caridad managed to babble.

  “With other gypsies I wouldn’t dare to predict, but with Melchor, yes: you will see him again.”

  Caridad closed her eyes; satisfaction was already invading her features.

  “Go on, run after her!” urged the old woman.

  Caridad gave a start, rushed ahead, reached her friend and draped an arm over her shoulders.

  NO ONE consoled Fray Joaquín on the unpleasant morning when he left Triana, shortly before Milagros and her companions returned to the settlement. He carried in his bag the official letter issued by the Archbishop of Seville; Fray Pedro de Salce, the famous preacher, walked by his side singing litanies to the Virgin, as he always did when he went out on missions. He was accompanied in his prayers by two lay brothers who each led mules loaded down with chasubles, crosses, books, torches and other objects needed for their evangelizing.

  Some of the walkers they passed fell to their knees and crossed themselves as Fray Pedro blessed them without stopping, others matched their rhythm to that of the religious men and prayed with them.

  “Are you troubled?” asked the preacher between songs, aware of the other man’s pain.

  “I’m immensely happy for the opportunity to serve God that your eminence has given me,” lied Fray Joaquín.

  The friar, satisfied, lifted his voice to sing the next prayer while Fray Joaquín’s mind filled only with Milagros, again, as it had ever since the day following the roundup. He should have gone with her! Milagros was going to have to contend with the Andévalo until she reached Barrancos. Where was she now? He trembled as he thought of the fate the girl could have suffered at the hands of the soldiers or the bandits who populated those lawless lands. Bile rose in his throat at the mere image of Milagros at the mercy of a band of fiends.

  A thousand biting and anxious questions like those had been haunting him since the very moment when he’d lost sight of Milagros’s back. He wanted to run after her. He hesitated. He couldn’t decide. He lost his chance. And on the way back to San Jacinto he sank into melancholy; he was distracted, uneasy, inconsolable. Milagros never left his mind and, finally, he decided to go to the prior and renounce his vows.

  “Of course it makes sense for you to stay in the order!” the prior contradicted him after Fray Joaquín confessed his sins and doubts. “It will pass. You aren’t the first. Great men of the Church have made bigger mistakes than yours. You haven’t had carnal contact with her. Time and Saint Dominic will help you, Joaquín.”

  And in the end, the prior of San Jacinto found a solution for that lost soul. He’d watched him wander around the monastery and teach grammar lessons to the boys without the slightest conviction; Fray Joaquín needed something to galvanize him, thought the prior. The solution appeared when he heard about the death of Don Pedro de Salce’s companion. Don Pedro was the most celebrated of all the missionaries who walked the lands of the kingdom of Seville preaching the gospel and Christian doctrine. The prior persuaded the archbishop to name Fray Joaquín, also renowned for his sermons, as his new companion. It wasn’t difficult; nor did he have any trouble convincing the friar to accept his nomination.

  Fray Pedro de Salce and Fray Joaquín were headed to Osuna. Before choosing a town, the expert priest studied those places that hadn’t been evangelized in recent years; Osuna and its surrounding area met the requirement. It took them three days to reach it, and they were approaching when night had already fallen. The silence was absolute; the houses were sketched in silhouette against the moonlight. Fray Joaquín was tired, and Don Pedro stopped. The young man was about to ask him where they would sleep when he saw that the brothers who led the mules had begun to rummage around in the saddlebags.

  “What—?” asked Fray Joaquín, surprised.

  “You follow me,” interrupted the missionary while he put on a chasuble and urged him to do the same.

  They put together a large cross that they carried in pieces and Fray Pedro ordered Fray Joaquín to carry it. The lay brothers lit two torches made of straw and tar that burned with a smoke blacker than the night and, then, the priest carrying a bell in his right hand, they walked toward the town.

  “Arise, sinners!”

  Fray Pedro’s shout broke the calm as they reached the first door. Fray Joaquín was shocked by the harshness of a voice that during the three days of walking, almost without pause, had been whispering psalms, hymns, prayers and rosaries.

  It didn’t look as though they were going to rest. Fray Joaquín resigned himself as the preacher urged him to raise the cross.

  “Lift it up, show it to everyone,” he added, ringing the bell. “Neither the adulterer nor the young man with ugly sins will enter the kingdom of heaven!” he then shouted. “Arise! Follow me to the church! Come to hear the word of the Lord!”

  And in response to his loud invocations and call
s, his threats of eternal hellfire and all manner of ills for those who didn’t follow them, and the tolling bell in Don Pedro’s hands, people came out of their homes or peeked from their balconies, dazed, surprised. The church bell, which the parish priest rushed to ring as soon as he heard the missionaries’ call, accompanied those who had already joined the procession, barefoot, sketchily dressed or covered in blankets, while the friars, holding the cross high between the torches of the lay brothers, went through the streets of Osuna, which was plunged into absolute chaos.

  “Neighbors of Osuna: I have called you, says the crucified one,” shouted Fray Pedro, pointing to the cross, “and you haven’t listened; you have scorned my advice and threats, but I too will laugh at you when death comes knocking!”

  And the people knelt to cross themselves repeatedly and beg loudly for forgiveness. Fray Pedro gathered them all in the church, and there, after a fervent sermon and the reciting of several Hail Marys, he announced the start of a mission that would last sixteen days. Neither the parish priest nor the town council could oppose him, since he carried a letter from the archbishop. The priest ordered that before the mission began the church bells be rung for a half an hour and that the authorities convene the inhabitants of neighboring towns to leave their lands, trades and labors and, guided by their parish priests, heed the call of the Lord.

  The idea was, as Fray Pedro explained to Fray Joaquín that very night, to surprise the folks in the middle of the night and frighten them so they would come to the missions. The rumors, which he himself and others like him had started from the pulpit over the years, spread among the humble, illiterate people: a shoemaker who had died for not following the missionaries; a woman who’d lost her son; a man whose harvest had failed while another who had complied and left his crops in God’s hands saw how they prospered on his return.

  “They are sinners! We must strike fear into them,” the priest lectured him after listening to Fray Joaquín’s civilized sermons. “Fear of sin and hell has to take hold of their souls.”

  And Friar Pedro certainly achieved that! Those poor souls abandoned their tasks for more than two weeks to come to mass every day and listen to him preach. And those from the nearby towns traveled leagues to enter the chosen town in organized processions, singing the rosary behind their respective parish priests.

  During those weeks mass was celebrated daily; there were sermons in the churches, streets and plazas, and general processions, with hymns and prayers, attended by thousands of people that culminated in the perfectly ordered penitence procession: first the children from all the towns with their teachers, carrying a baby Jesus on a litter and followed by the men who didn’t have a special outfit for the procession. Behind them came the penitents in white, purple or black robes, or a simple sheet covering those without robes, carrying crosses, crowns of thorns on their heads and ropes around their necks; they were followed by those who wrapped their bodies in brambles, walked on their knees or even dragged themselves along the ground; then those with their arms outstretched and tied to poles; those who practiced “dry flagellation,” among which there were ten-year-old boys who whipped their backs with five-tailed ropes, and between those and before the clergy, the authorities, the women and the choir that brought up the rear of the procession, were the blood flagellants, who flayed their skin with lashes of their whips.

  Prior to that exalted public manifestation of contrition, the missionaries had been preparing the faithful. Halfway through the mission, and with the people’s guilt exacerbated by the preachings, the church bell called to flagellation at nights and the men came to the temple. Once they were all inside, the doors were closed and Fray Pedro went up to the pulpit.

  “It’s not enough that your hearts repent!” he warned loudly during the sermon. “Your senses must also suffer, because if you leave the body without punishment, the temptations, the passions and the bad habits will bring you to sin again.”

  When the priest finished his sermon, he rang a little bell to indicate that the candles and torches lighting the church would be put out, which was when Fray Joaquín, like the hundreds of men clustered in the temple, took off their clothes. “We clergy must set an example,” Fray Pedro exhorted him. In the darkness, the bell rang out three times and the sound of the straps and whips on flesh mixed with the Miserere intoned by the choir in doleful ceremony.

  In the dark, tremendously distressed by the sound of the whiplashes and the laments of the congregants, by the Miserere inciting them to repent, by the powerful voice of Fray Pedro above all those sounds calling them to atone for their sins, Fray Joaquín clenched his teeth; and when Milagros’s luminous and phantasmagorical face appeared before him he punished his flesh harshly at the sight. But the more he flagellated himself, the more the girl smiled at him, and she would wink an eye and mock him by sticking out her tongue mischievously.

  AFTER LEAVING San Jacinto without getting any more information about Fray Joaquín’s whereabouts, María was only able to keep Milagros collecting herbs for a couple of hours. November wasn’t a good time of the year, although they found rosemary and dried elderberry; in any case, thought the healer, Mother Earth would offer them nothing good with one of them oozing hate, cursing and crying, since the girl had moved from grief and sobs to insulting the Church, Jesus Christ, the Virgin and all the saints, the King, the payos and the entire world. The old woman knew that that wasn’t the way to approach nature. Illness originated with the demons or the gods, so one mustn’t displease the earth spirits that gave them the remedies against the wishes of those superior beings.

  She couldn’t get Milagros to stop. The first couple of times that she remonstrated with her, the girl didn’t even answer.

  “What do I care about the spirits and their damn herbs!” Milagros spat the third time the old woman scolded her. “Ask them to set my parents free!”

  Caridad crossed herself three times at that affront to nature; María decided that they would return to Triana.

  Once they were there, however, she wondered if it wouldn’t have been better to stay in the fields, even at the risk of offending the spirits.

  “DO I know anything about your mother?” repeated Anunciación, a Carmona whom they ran into in the courtyard they shared with their neighbors, near the well.

  Before answering, the gypsy questioned María with her gaze. The old woman nodded: whatever that look meant, the girl would find it out sooner or later.

  “They arrested her and jailed her for sedition when they reached Málaga. They shut the rest of us up in a neighborhood on the outskirts that was closed off and guarded.” Anunciación grew quiet for a few seconds, lowered her eyes to the ground, sighed as if gathering strength and looked up again to face Milagros. “I saw her a month before they freed me: they had whipped her … not too badly!” she added quickly when she saw Milagros’s terrified expression. “Twenty or twenty-five lashes from what I understand. And … they had shaved her head. They brought her to us and they put her in the stocks for four days.”

  Milagros closed her eyes tightly, trying to banish the image of her mother in the stocks. María, however, saw it vividly: her back bleeding, kneeling on the ground, with her wrists and throat trapped between two large blocks of wood with holes, her head shaved and her hands hanging on either side.

  An agonizing lament thundered through the building. Milagros brought both hands to her hair and, as she screamed, she pulled out two thick clumps. When she was about to do it again, as if wanting to share in her mother’s shame, Anunciación came over and stopped her.

  “Your mother is strong,” she said. “No one made fun of her in the stocks. No one spat on her or hit her. We all …” Her voice choked. “We all respected her.” Milagros opened her eyes. Anunciación let go of the girl’s hands and brought a finger to her face to wipe away a tear that ran down her cheek. “Ana didn’t cry despite the fact that many did when they saw her. She always stayed strong, with her teeth clenched, when she was in the stocks. N
ot a single lament left her mouth!”

  Milagros sniffled.

  Anunciación kept quiet the fact that she had often been gagged.

  “How many times did they punish her?” asked María, surprised.

  “Quite a few,” admitted Anunciación. Then she pursed her lips in a half-smile and swiped at the air. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she was back in the stocks right now.” Even Caridad straightened when she heard those words. “Yes, she confronts the soldiers if they go too far with any woman. She demands more and better food, and that the surgeon treat the sick women, and clothes that we needed and … everything! She’s not afraid of anyone; nothing intimidates her. That’s why it’s not surprising they punish her in the stocks.”

  “Didn’t she give you any message for the girl?” inquired María after a brief silence.

  “I know she spoke with Rosario before they freed us.”

  María nodded, remembering Rosario: the wife of Inocencio, the Carmona patriarch.

  “Where is Rosario?”

  “In Seville. She’ll be back soon.”

  NEVER FORGET that you are a Vega. That was the terse message that Rosario Carmona gave her at the entrance that led to El Conde’s courtyard. Almost all the freed gypsies had already returned to the San Miguel alley and El Conde—Rafael García—had called together the council of elders.