The Barefoot Queen Read online

  “They prefer, if it has to happen, to just be shown the corpse!” Caridad remembered Herminia’s outburst, her green eyes sparkling with rage, perhaps lamenting some personal experience. Caridad hadn’t asked her about the fate of the child she’d told her about on their way there and even less who the father was, since for some time now she had been fairly certain it was her cousin Antón. It was a tacit agreement among all the members of that family: Rosario didn’t want to get pregnant again, since that would mean the prosecutor taking his son out of her care and losing money; meanwhile, Antón brazenly approached Herminia, who was uncomfortable in her friend’s presence and cheerful and obliging otherwise. Some nights Caridad hastened her steps toward the fields when she heard their frolicking. Then, in the moonlight, with the lovers’ whispering drumming in her ears, she missed Melchor and cried remembering the nights beneath the stars when the gypsy had made her feel like a woman for the first time in her life.

  IN THE months that had passed since her arrival, she’d met Don Valerio, the parish priest of Torrejón. She also met Fermín, the old sacristan who could no longer take care of the tobacco crops. Don Valerio had scrutinized her, as everyone did, while she tried to dispel the sacristan’s misgivings. Fermín bombarded her with questions as if it pained him to leave his plants in the hands of a strange Negress.

  “Sir,” Caridad eventually interrupted him with certain harshness, tired of all the questions. “I know how to grow and work with tobacco. I’ve done it all my life …”

  “Watch your pride!” scolded Don Valerio.

  Herminia was about to intervene, but Caridad beat her to it.

  “It’s not pride,” she replied to the priest, sweetening her tone. “It’s called slavery. White men like your lordship stole me from Africa as a girl and forced me to learn to grow and work tobacco. Everything I once was got lost because of that plant: my family, my children … I had two; one is still there, I sense it,” she added squinting her eyes for a few seconds. “The other was sold very young to a sugar mill owned by the Church …”

  “Your attitude is not that of a slave,” the clergyman scolded her again.

  “No, Father. It is that of a prisoner who gave two years of her life to the King for letting those who call themselves good Christians treat her like a slave.”

  “You’ve got a very free tongue,” persisted Don Valerio, raising his voice.

  Herminia grabbed Caridad by the forearm, insisting that she stop, but it was the priest who overruled her that day.

  “Let her go on,” he requested. “I want to hear her.”

  However, Caridad couldn’t get past the sudden feeling brought on by that touch on her arm and her friend’s pleading look. Perhaps it was true, perhaps she did have a very free tongue … Much had changed after two years in La Galera, she knew it, but at that moment she decided to keep quiet.

  “I’m sorry to have offended you,” she apologized.

  “Something you’ll have to confess.”

  She lowered her gaze.

  That same afternoon Herminia accompanied her to the tobacco field. The vineyards Marcial cultivated were by where the Toroto Brook emptied into the Henares River and the flat landscape was broken by some little hills, olive trees and vines that replaced the extensive wheat fields in Alcalá de Henares, Torrejón’s neighboring town, which it had been separated from in the sixteenth century. A gully behind Marcial’s vineyards served as a refuge for the tobacco farm, keeping it hidden.

  Caridad looked at it from above: messy, wild, poorly maintained. It was July when she arrived in Torrejón and Marcial, following instructions from the sacristan, was harvesting; the man didn’t even notice her presence. Caridad saw how he cut down the plants at the stem, with a machete, almost violently, like the slaves cut sugarcane. Then, with the leaves still on the stalk, he piled them up one on top of each other on the ground, in the sun.

  “What do you think?” Herminia asked her.

  “Back on the plantation we chose leaf by leaf, each day choosing the ones that were ready, perfectly ripe, until the plant was just a clean standing stalk.”

  Marcial turned when he heard their voices and signaled for them to come down.

  “Caridad says that in Cuba they harvested leaf by leaf,” announced Herminia as soon as she reached the man.

  To both of the women’s surprise, the man nodded. “I’ve heard that, but everyone who knows anything about tobacco assures me that in Spain it’s always been done this way. The truth is, since all the farms are secret, nobody can prove it, although Don Valerio maintains that they follow this procedure in the monasteries and convents. He must know something about how the clergy do it.”

  “What difference does it make—?” Herminia started to ask.

  “The upper leaves get more sun than the lower ones,” Caridad answered before she could finish.

  “That happens with all plants,” put in Marcial, adding with a smile, “they grow upward. The problem is that collecting leaf by leaf takes a lot of work … and knowledge.”

  As if she wanted to demonstrate it, Caridad had gone off and was feeling and smelling the leaves of the plants that were still standing. She pulled off little bits and chewed them. Marcial and Herminia let her do it, spellbound by the transformation in her as she moved among the plants, enraptured and in her own world, touching one, cleaning another, speaking to them …

  They decided not to change the harvesting system for the few plants that were left. “It’s not worth it,” confirmed Caridad. Marcial trusted her and let her choose some to obtain the seeds for the next year and, with the cart overflowing, they waited in the vineyards until it was night to transport the tobacco to the town. They shared bread, wine, cheese, garlic and onions and chatted and smoked, enjoying watching the immense sky above them fill with stars.

  The tobacco drying room was none other than the attic of the church’s sacristy, which a sleepy Fermín let them into. In the light of the oil lamp carried by the sacristan, who remained outside the door to the attic, Caridad could make out a large pile of plants onto which they hastily added the ones they had brought. How could they expect to get good tobacco with such carelessness? She stood up inside the attic. She grabbed one of the plants and wanted to bring it close to the light to …

  “What are you doing, morena?” inquired the sacristan, moving aside the oil lamp.

  “I …”

  “You can’t work here at night,” he interrupted, “it’s dangerous with candles or lamps. Don Valerio only allows it to be done with natural light.”

  Caridad was tempted to reply that she didn’t think that one would be able to work any better in there with natural light, but she kept quiet and the next morning, early, she showed up at the sacristy. She argued with Fermín until Don Valerio came up to the attic to sort things out.

  “Didn’t you say that you couldn’t take care of it anymore?” he reproached the sacristan. “Then it will be as she decides.”

  And Fermín let Caridad decide what to do and do it, but he kept his eye on her, sitting on a box and criticizing her every movement under his breath.

  “Do you know what, Fermín?” said Caridad as she cut the leaves off a plant. “When I got to Triana I met an old woman who you remind me a lot of: she thought everything was wrong.” The sacristan grumbled. “But she was a good person.” Caridad let a few minutes pass in silence. “Are you a good person?” she asked him after a little while, without looking at him.

  That spring night, in the field, smelling of tobacco, Caridad was surprised to find herself thinking of Old María. Sometimes, in La Galera, she had come to her mind, fleetingly; now she believed she could feel her by her side and she could even hear her swearing break the silence.

  “Why did you say that the old woman was a good person?” the sacristan asked her the next morning, as soon as he saw her at daybreak.

  “Because I think you are as well,” she answered.

  Fermín thought for a few seconds and held back a
smile, before handing her the sticks that she had been wanting the day before. Unlike on the Cuban plantation, the attic was set up to hang the entire plant from some hooks stuck into the ceiling’s wooden beams. “In Cuba we string the leaves onto cujes,” she had told him, “which are long sticks, to dry them.” Caridad was hoping to choose the best leaves and cure them the way she knew how to, but she had nowhere to hang them.

  “Good cujes,” she lied, weighing the coarse, long sticks that Fermín handed her. “Now we have to find a way to hang them.”

  “I already know how.” The sacristan tried to add a wink to his statement, but his attempt was no more than the ungainly grimace of an awkward old man. Caridad looked at him tenderly and rewarded him with a smile.

  With the help of a revived Fermín, who had been infected by her enthusiasm, Caridad chose the leaves one by one and hung them up, strung together in pairs on those knotty sticks. She hung them in silence, comparing them to the cujes used on the plantation, which were carefully chosen in the mangrove swamps and patiently worked so that they didn’t imbue even the scent of wood onto the leaves. But what was the point of trying to keep that crude tobacco from smelling of wood when the incense that Don Valerio used to try to cover up their activities slipped in through every crack of the roof that led to the attic? She organized the leaves by their aroma, texture and dampness. She controlled the temperature and the atmosphere of the place by opening and closing the small windows, permitting or impeding air from running through depending on the moment. She incessantly ventilated and moved the leaves and the whole plants that hung from the roof to dry them better. She kept careful watch for insects and parasites. She devoted herself eagerly to it all until the midrib of the leaves was completely dry. Then she chose them from the cujes to pile up and tie together into small piles so they could ferment; Fermín knew very little about that procedure. Caridad calculated the temperature and dampness of the atmosphere, the water that the plants had had access to in the field, and the size of the piles grew, and she moved the tobacco that had been in the middle to the top and put the new leaves in the center, constantly tying up and untying the piles, smelling them, touching them, chewing the leaves, changing their location, moving them closer or further from the air currents, splattering the leaves with betún: a preparation she had made by fermenting the plant stalks in water.

  During that season, her life was limited to walking at dawn the few steps from the house of Herminia’s aunt and uncle to the church of San Juan. She went back for lunch, which she ate alone in the smelly, packed garden shed; Rosario didn’t want her around the house, and Herminia was falling more in love with her cousin Antón each day, so she paid little attention to her. Caridad would have liked to talk to her about that, but her reproaches vanished when she remembered that Herminia had got her out of La Galera. She owed her gratitude. So she was forced to respect her friend’s feelings and stopped seeking her out. As soon as she had finished the piece of bread and the bowl of chickpeas, haricot beans or broad beans, almost always without any meat, she went back to the church and when she left it again it was late at night and she blended in with the shadows.

  Don Valerio spread the rumor that a personage of the court—“How can I reveal his name?” the priest retorted when pressured—had begged him to take care of that poor Negro wretch who had been unjustly sent to the women’s prison. So he had sought out the help of Marcial and got her a place to sleep, and Caridad’s official documents fit with his story. He forced her to clean the church to justify her presence there, while the always willing parishioners gossiped, wondering which courtier it was and what his relationship was to the Negress. There were speculations about Don Valerio as well: some believed the priest; many others doubted him; and those who knew about the tobacco simply understood. The fact was that gradually that black woman, peaceful and solitary, who walked around barefoot and calm, became a part of the landscape; soon even the children stopped following her around and pestering her, and Caridad went out alone to stroll along the paths and fields, swaying in the breeze as she thought of Melchor, and Milagros, and Marcelo.

  The confinement of the gypsy women and their little ones at the Royal House of Mercy in Saragossa turned the charitable institution into a reform school, as much as the council regulating it refused to admit that. Punishments were widespread: whippings, stocks, fetters and being locked up with only bread and water. They suspended the practice of letting trusted women go out; they didn’t allow the sick to go to the hospital and they installed a basic infirmary; they separated the women from the children and from the girls who could work and they didn’t allow them even the slightest contact with the other prisoners; they even suspended the masses and sermons because there was no priest who dared to stand in front of hundreds of half-naked women. The soldiers watched over them to keep the gypsies from running away, but, despite that, they managed what their husbands and sons were unable to in the arsenals and they made holes in the adobe wall that tried to protect the place. Then they ran through Saragossa until they were arrested or managed to outwit the soldiers and constables and hit the roads.

  On one occasion about fifty of them managed to escape. The alderman, enraged, ordered all the gypsy women to be sent to the gallery basements, which had no windows to the outside. There was no money for bars; there was no money, despite what Ensenada had promised, to feed that ragtag army; there was no money to provide them with beds—they shared in threes—or food, or blankets, or even plates and bowls for eating.

  And the situation blew up. The gypsies complained about the execrable slop they gave them and the conditions of the basements they were crammed into: damp and unventilated, gloomy and unhealthy. No one paid attention to their demands and they took it out on everything around them: they destroyed the cots and threw them along with the straw mattresses into the two blind wells at the House of Mercy. The poor health that followed the obstruction of the well began with a scabies epidemic that tormented the women. The itching kept them from sleeping and began between their fingers and toes, moved to elbows, buttocks and especially their nipples, and turned into scabs of dried blood due to the scratching, beneath which hid thousands of mites and their eggs. The scabs had to be ripped off in order to treat them with a salve made of sulfur that the doctor used to try to stop the disease; they also tried bloodletting, but the gypsies refused. Months later, the scabies reappeared. Some old women died.

  Ana Vega was not one of those who fled that jail. Each day, morning and night, she tried to catch a glimpse of Salvador when, with other gypsy children and street kids, they took him to work on the properties owned by the House of Mercy. They left Saragossa to grow grain and take care of the olive groves and gather the olives to make oil. Despite the fact that all contact was banned, Ana and other gypsy women got as close as they could to the line of children heading off to the fields. They were punished for it. Some stopped, but she continued to do it. They punished the children; and they warned the women that they would do it again, saying: “Yesterday they had bread and water because of you.” Although the others stopped, Ana refused to be convinced: something compelled her to dodge the sentry and approach them time and again. Salvador rewarded her by widening his mouth into a splendid, proud smile.

  One morning the sentry who accompanied the children didn’t flail his arms at Ana as he usually did to get her away from them. She was surprised, and even more so when she heard laughter in the line. She searched for Salvador. One of the boys pointed to him hidden among the other laughing lads and moved aside so she could see: Salvador wore a wooden collar that wrapped around his entire neck and forced him to walk upright, with his chin grotesquely raised. The boy avoided meeting her eyes. Ana managed to see the boy’s gritted teeth between trembling lips that clenched at the others’ mocking.

  “You can take it off him,” she managed to say to the sentry with a trembling voice. The tears she hadn’t shed over her whippings and the thousand other punishments ran down her cheeks.
r />   Frías, the grim-faced and pot-bellied sentry, addressed her. “Will you stop coming over?”

  Ana nodded.

  “Do you promise?”

  She nodded again.

  “I want to hear you say it.”

  “Yes,” she yielded. “I promise.”

  Humiliation became the worst of the punishments that the cultured authorities of the period imposed on the minors. The gypsy girls who had been sent to the House of Mercy’s sewing workshops refused to work when they didn’t receive the food they were allotted. The alderman’s response was to take away the clothes and shoes they had been given and send them out with the others. Dozens of young gypsy girls suddenly found themselves naked in courtyards and galleries, ashamed, trying to hide their bodies, their montes pubis and their breasts, budding in some and turgid in others, from the gazes of their mothers and the other prisoners. After a few days the government council canceled the measure, but the damage was done.

  Ana Vega, like many others, suffered during those days not only for the girls’ disgrace but her own. Those young bodies, the modesty with which they defended their honor, led her to think about herself.

  “What have they done to us?” she lamented over her flaccid, dry breasts, the hanging skin of her belly, neck and forearms, marked by lash welts and the effects of the scabies.

  “I’m still young,” she told herself. It had been less than four years since her gait caught men’s eyes and her dancing aroused their passions. In vain, she tried to relive the sparks of vanity she’d felt at those impertinent looks when she passed by; or at the whooping, clapping and shouting of the audience after a voluptuous shake of her hips; at the quick breathing of some man when they danced together and she brushed her breasts against him. She looked at her peeling hands. She had no mirror.