The Barefoot Queen Read online

  That yearning that ran up and down her back was interrupted by Bartola and their little girl, whom they ran into as soon as they turned the corner onto Amor de Dios Street. The old gypsy was looking after María as she played. Pedro grabbed the little girl and lifted her above his head, where he swung her around for a while as her mother looked on tenderly. Her man seemed content; perhaps coming to Madrid had been the right thing to do. Later, both laughing, Pedro handed the girl to her mother.

  “I have to go,” he announced.

  “But … I … thought … Come up with us, please.”

  “Listen,” he cut her off. “I have business to attend to.”

  “What busi …?”

  Her husband’s features tensed for a split second and Milagros was silent.

  “Take care of the girl,” he said in farewell.

  What business? wondered Milagros with her eyes fixed on his back as it headed into the distance. How could Pedro be doing business if they had no money?

  PEDRO GARCÍA sighed in pleasure as fingertips slid down his back. Naked, satisfied after copulating, he remained lying face down in Celeste’s bed.

  “I wouldn’t have done it for any other player,” whispered the leading lady just then, smoothing her blonde hair. “Although I didn’t really do it for her, but for you. I don’t want them to fire her.”

  “So,” the gypsy interrupted her, “you helped Milagros so you could continue to enjoy me. Therefore, actually, you did it for yourself.”

  Sitting beside him, she gave him a loud slap on the buttocks.

  “Big-head!” she scolded him before going back to running her fingers along his spine. “I have all the men I could possibly want.”

  “And have any of them given you the same pleasure I do?”

  Celeste didn’t answer.

  “In the end your little gypsy girl did a good job of defending herself …” she commented instead.

  “She’s smart. She’ll learn. She knows how to provoke, arouse desire.”

  “I’ve seen that, but she’ll have to be careful about it, or the magistrate or one of the censors will denounce her.”

  “Isn’t it all about having fun?” asked Pedro before letting out a long moan when she began to stroke the nape of his neck.

  Celeste, also naked, sat astride the gypsy’s back to continue massaging his shoulders and neck.

  “That is the fun the theater aspires to, just like at a party and even in church when noble ladies or maids flirt with their lovers while they pretend to be listening to mass; that’s the story of humanity. Priests don’t really approve of the comedies … even though many of them come to see them. The King and his councillors allow them to keep the people entertained, since if they are entertained and happy and at peace, they will have a lot to lose by rebelling against authority. You understand?” she asked as her hands squeezed his shoulders. The gypsy murmured in agreement. “It’s just one more way of keeping his subjects under control. But we can’t go too far: we have to find the balance between what the authorities ask and what the clergy and censors are willing to allow. All the performances, even the one-acts, have to obtain permission from the city’s ecclesiastical judge. Then they go to the High Court where they are censored again. And even then, the theater magistrate controls the performance on the stage. It is only the authorities’ interest in keeping the people entertained and all the money that the theaters make for the hospitals that allows us certain license that we would otherwise never be able to take in this Spain of inquisitors, priests, friars, nuns and lay brothers and sisters. That balance is the most important thing for a player to know: if you don’t reach it, you get booed and insulted; if you go too far, they clip your wings. Do you understand, my sweet little bird?”

  Celeste leaned over the gypsy’s back until she could nibble on the back of his neck. Then she lay down on top of him.

  “I know your constable is keeping a lookout on the street, but I think my husband will be home soon. Make me fly up to the heavens one more time,” she whispered into his ear, “and I will teach your little gypsy girl.”

  The last thing I want is for her to learn, Pedro would have liked to reply as he felt her struggling to get her arms beneath his body. Maybe then they would let us go back to Triana.

  “What are you mumbling about?” asked Celeste.

  Pedro realized that he’d been thinking aloud. He turned over with difficulty, flipped Celeste over and settled on his side on one elbow.

  “I said,” he answered, shifting his eyes from her large breasts, “that the only heaven is between your legs.”

  She smiled, purred like a cat, grabbed him by the neck and pulled him toward her.

  Less than half an hour had passed and Pedro García was leaving Celeste’s house along Huertas Street. Blas, the constable, who had already been waiting at the door when he arrived after leaving Milagros, approached him.

  “You took too long,” he reproached him. “I have to continue my rounds.”

  “Your leading lady is an insatiable slut.”

  The gypsy rushed to dig in his purse to contain the rage he saw in the officer’s face, as always happened when he was rude about Celeste. He enjoyed provoking him. How is it possible that this fool, he thought the first time it happened, is waiting on the street as a lookout while I fornicate with the object of his desire and then gets mad if I speak disrespectfully about her? He pulled a couple of small coins out of his purse and handed them to Blas. Celeste gave him money: she was the only player in the company who had any to spare, because the others lived in misery, as he and Milagros did. The constable has to be paid for his work … and his silence, Pedro had demanded, but he kept most of it. Even though Blas hadn’t yet got any women out of the deal, he settled for the few coins; he would have done it anyway just to be nearer to Celeste. She must be why he gets angry, concluded Pedro after the first few days. Blas adored her, accepted her fickleness as if she were a goddess, but he didn’t allow anyone else to scorn her for her whims.

  “If you talk that way about Celeste again—” the constable started to threaten him before the other interrupted.

  “What? I’d say the same thing to her. Insatiable slut,” Pedro said slowly. “My little whore. I whisper a thousand things like that into her ear when she’s beneath me …”

  He didn’t have a chance to finish the sentence. Blas turned red and marched up the street without saying goodbye. The tapping of his truncheon hitting the walls faded into the distance, giving way to Madrid’s church bells’ call to prayer. Pedro grumbled. After the pealing of the bells people would emerge from their homes praying the rosary: all the pious citizens praying simultaneously before going to bed, as proper behavior dictated. He was hungry. Celeste shared her bed with him but she said that she only shared her stewpot with her husband, since if she was cheating on him the least she could do was feed him well. “Good consolation,” laughed Pedro as he went along Huertas Street in search of a tavern where he could have a few glasses of wine and some dinner, maybe even with her husband. He knew him: he worked in the company as the third male lead and he had run into him on other occasions in the month or so since they had come to Madrid; the man didn’t seem too interested in the stewpot with which his wife attempted to restore his sullied honor.

  Before reaching the side street called León, Pedro shifted his gaze to the left, where it led to Amor de Dios Street, where he lived with Milagros, their daughter and old Bartola in two miserable, damp and dark rooms on the third floor of an old house of malice whose rent ate up most of the wage his wife earned. Huertas, León, Amor de Dios, San Juan, El Niño, Francos and Cantarranas: all were narrow streets piled with very old buildings where, since the previous century, actors, poets and writers had lived.

  “Cervantes lived in one room, in worse conditions!” replied the doorman of the theater, who had accompanied them to their new home from the Príncipe, when Pedro complained. “Lope de Vega, Quevedo, Góngora, they all graced these streets and build
ings by living here. Are you going to compare yourselves—a band of gypsies—with the greatest of Spanish literature—what am I saying, of world literature?”

  And the doorman left them there, marching off as they shouted and gestured wildly. From that day, Milagros had begun the comic players’ routine: rehearsals in the morning and the afternoons devoted to learning the roles of the main production, plus the one-acts, dances and tonadilla songs. Once the season began, as Don José had already told them, they would continue to rehearse in the mornings, directed by Celeste as leading lady and by Nicolás Espejo, the one who had fought with Celeste that first day they arrived, as the leading man. The evenings were devoted to the performances, which had to last at least three hours, and the nights, to studying.

  Milagros barely appeared in the main comedy, or the one-act farce that took place during one of the intermissions. She had been called there to sing and dance, but to take some of the work off other actors they would give her some minor role, even if it wasn’t a speaking part: serving some jugs of wine, appearing as a washerwoman or as a street vendor … In any case, and as Celeste had predicted before storming out of the Coliseo del Príncipe that day, the show that had opened the season didn’t last more than two days, so the very night it premiered, Milagros had to learn the role and the tonadillas of the show that would replace it.

  “Once the theater season starts,” Celeste had explained to Pedro, “the actors have to work incredibly hard. The shows last as long as the audience is willing to keep the seats warm. Some only last one day, others two or three, most five or six, and if they last ten they’re considered a big hit. Meanwhile, we have to learn new shows—or relearn them—at lightning speed, as well as the intermission pieces.”

  “And how do you learn them?” asked the gypsy.

  “That’s even more complicated. As if having to learn them isn’t enough, often we have only one copy of the author’s manuscript to work with, which we all have to share and which will have been corrected by various censors. The same thing happens with the one-acts and tonadillas. We get together … there are some that don’t even know how to read.”

  Pedro García entered a tavern that was still open on San Juan Street. Milagros was one of those who didn’t know how to read, so she had to work many more hours than Celeste, who didn’t seem to worry too much about learning her roles. What are the prompters for? she would say. Until the start of the season, his wife’s huge workload had given him a freedom that now …

  “Gypsy!”

  Pedro shook off the thoughts that had been filling his mind as he entered the tavern. He looked around him. Guzmán, Celeste’s husband, and another couple of company members were sitting at a table, looking at him.

  “Buy us a round!”

  Pedro’s smile was accompanied by an assenting hand motion toward the tavern keeper. He looked for a seat with the others and, when the man served them the wine, he lifted his jug, looked Guzmán in the eyes and made an ironic toast: “To your wife, the greatest of them all!”

  And who is paying for this wine, the gypsy added to himself as the glasses clinked. However, as he sipped that watered-down wine, he was forced to recognize that things had changed. Although not exactly for the better: in Triana he was the one who satisfied women’s whims with the money Milagros made. In Madrid, however, he had to give pleasure to a woman twice his age just to get a few miserable reals. All … all to ingratiate himself with the payos!

  “Barman!” he shouted as he crashed the jug violently against the table, splashing the others. “Either serve us some quality wine or I’ll slice you open right here!”

  “LA DESCALZA—THE Barefoot Girl.” That was the nickname the groundlings at the Coliseo del Príncipe ended up giving Milagros. The gypsy refused to wear the dresses that Celeste and the other women in the company wore.

  “How do you expect me to dance in that?” she claimed, pointing to the corsets and crinolines. “You have trouble breathing,” she said to one actress, “and you can barely move with that hoop skirt,” to another.

  She did, however, agree to switch her simple garb for the attire of the manolas of Madrid: a yellow bodice that was close-fitting at the waist—with no boning—tight sleeves, a white skirt with green flounces that almost reached her ankles, an apron, green handkerchief knotted at the neck and a net pulling her hair back. No one could convince her to wear shoes. “I was born barefoot and I’ll die barefoot,” she declared over and over again.

  “What difference does it make?” Don José said to the magistrate, trying to put an end to the discussion. “Isn’t there already a strip at the edge of the stage so the public can’t see the actresses’ ankles? So why would it matter if she’s wearing shoes or not?”

  Milagros soon lost her awe of that imposing theater, which had managed to paralyze her muscles the day of the premiere, and she lost it because, except for the censors and the magistrates, no one else seemed to have any. The audience shouted and stamped. She found out about the rivalry between two Madrid theaters: the Príncipe and the Cruz, which weren’t far from one another. There was a third theater, the Caños del Peral, where they performed popular lyrical compositions. The people who liked the Príncipe Theater were called polacos and those who preferred the Cruz were the chorizos. They didn’t only fight each other, but they would also regularly attend the rival theater to wreck the show and mercilessly boo the comic actors and singers.

  And she not only understood that, no matter how well she sang, no matter how much passion she put into her songs and her dances, there would always be some chorizo fan who would dress her down, but she also discovered that there were players in the company who didn’t put much effort into their work. A simple white curtain at the back of the stage and another on each side was all the set there was for the daily comedies, although other performances such as the elaborate comedies or the liturgical dramas, whose ticket prices were higher, enjoyed a somewhat more sophisticated set design. Between the curtains, there was merely a table with some chairs around it and a well or a tree as decoration to set the scene.

  When she wasn’t on stage in the main show, Milagros watched it from one of the benches of the front rows. Just like any other audience member, she was disappointed with the reciting by the members of her company: their gestures and movements bombastic and affected; their voices monotonous and even unpleasant. Behind the scenery she saw the prompter’s shadow and the glow of the lamp that helped him read, as he moved incessantly from one side to the other to whisper the text the actors had forgotten or simply didn’t know. It wasn’t unusual to hear the prompter’s words over the voice of the actor repeating them. The spectators tolerated the tedium of a low-quality repertoire, or one of the infinite revivals of the illustrious Calderón, with actors who didn’t even make an effort to identify with their characters: Greek philosophers wearing waistcoats, knee-breeches and green stockings; mythological goddesses with panniers and feathered hats …

  They were bored until they reached the intermissions, which featured sainetes and tonadillas. That was when both the audience and the actors enjoyed themselves. The sainetes were short, funny, popular parodies of social and family relationships. In them, the comic actors played themselves, their friends, relatives or acquaintances; most of the spectators saw themselves reflected and carried the players through the entire one-act with their shouts, laughter, applause and whistling.

  As for the tonadillas … half of Madrid was now flaunting, as a sign of admiration for Milagros, green ribbons tied or sewn onto their clothes, the same color as the handkerchief she always wore around her neck! Don José’s advice had been hammering in her ears for days: “Restrained passion, restrained passion.” And Milagros had been running it over and over in her head until one evening, standing on the stage, before starting to sing, when her gaze met that of a dirty, poorly dressed man, the kind that spent the six quarter-reals that he couldn’t afford on a stalls ticket, probably before returning to his town near the capital�
�maybe Fuencarral, Carabanchel, Vallecas, Getafe, Hortaleza or some other … where he would brag about having gone to the theater to become the object of envy and attention from his neighbors. The farmer, because he had to be a farmer, perhaps of muscatel wine grapes in Fuencarral, was watching her, captivated. Milagros took a few steps forward while holding the man’s gaze, as he followed her gypsy stride with eyes like platters and mouth agape. Then she stood in front of him and gave him a faint smile. The man, entranced, was unable to react. The music of the two violins that came from behind one of the side curtains, where the meager orchestra hid, composed of those violins, a cello and two oboes, repeated itself waiting for Milagros to begin. But she delayed it a few more seconds, enough to run her gaze along the groundlings in the pit and find some other faces similar to the vintner from Fuencarral’s. Someone encouraged her to sing, other shouted compliments of “beautiful!” and “lovely!” Many asked her to begin. Finally she did, aware of their admiration and desire without needing to overstate her sensuality. Her dark skin, so different from the paleness that ladies insisted on even when it cost them their health; dressed as a manola, with clothes that symbolized the stubborn, silent fight against customs imported from France; proud like the Madrileños, just as haughty as those people who soon began to exalt her as a representative of the people.

  “Restrained passion.” She finally understood it. She sang and danced feeling beautiful, not revealing herself, rising above the entire theater like a goddess who had nothing to prove. She understood that a sigh, a wink or a droop of her eyelids toward the first few rows or the pit, a flutter of her hand in the air, a simple twist of her waist or the glow of the drops of sweat running from her neck to her breasts could ignite desire even more than cheek and effrontery.