The Barefoot Queen Page 72

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  He was going to say something, but she was already absorbed in her girl’s sweet features again.

  Despite her sadness over Luisa’s death, Ana Vega didn’t let herself get swept up in the dismal atmosphere looming over the courtyard. Fray Joaquín had told her about the relationship between her father and the morena, but she’d had trouble really believing him until she had seen the bond that clearly united them. She found Caridad, alone, just a few steps away from Melchor.

  “I don’t want Pedro to kill him,” Ana said to her after going to her side.

  “Neither do I,” answered Caridad.

  They both looked at Melchor, standing in a corner, still, expectant.

  “But he will,” avowed Ana.

  Caridad was silent.

  “You do realize that, right?”

  “What would you choose, his life or his manhood?” Caridad asked.

  “If he loses his life,” replied Ana, “his manhood will be of no use to me … or to you.”

  Ana waited for Caridad to react to her acknowledgment of their relationship, but she didn’t. She continued contemplating Melchor as if spellbound.

  “You know that isn’t true,” Caridad then responded. “I felt him tremble when Milagros told him how she had been prostituted by her husband. I feared he would burst. Since then he hasn’t been himself. He lives to avenge her—”

  “Vengeance!” Ana interrupted her. “I have spent five years locked up, suffering, only to escape and return to my homeland, with my people. I know what happened to Milagros was terrible, but just one day ago I had given both of them up for dead … all three,” she corrected herself. “Now we have the chance to start again—”

  “What?” Now it was Caridad who interrupted her. “Five years locked up? What’s that? I’ve been a slave my whole life, and even when I gained freedom, I continued to be one, right here in Triana and in Madrid, too. You know something, Ana Vega? I’d rather have a second of life beside this Melchor … Look at him! That is what I learned from him, from you all! And I like it. I prefer this moment, this second of gypsy pride, than spending the rest of my days with a man full of resentment.”

  Ana couldn’t find the words to answer. She noted her father’s impassive figure blurring as tears came to her eyes, and she left. She searched for Milagros, and she saw her absorbed in her little girl and with the friar close by, but the other Vega women approached Ana as soon as they saw her blend into the group. They accompanied her over to Luisa, where the gypsy women who continued to stream into the alley from various towns in Seville gathered. She knew some of them, from Málaga, from Saragossa; others introduced themselves as relatives or friends. She tried to smile at them, aware that they had come to support her. Many had even argued with their men to do so. They had risked being arrested by traveling to Triana without passports, and they had done it for her. Gypsy women! She looked at Luisa’s squalid, shrunken corpse. Yet how great she had been! They can never take away our pride, Luisa had said to them in the House of Mercy to spur them on. That is your beauty, she had flattered her later. And that very night, breaking her promise, Ana had run to watch Salvador coming back from the fields. Her stomach shrank at the memory. Then they had sent him to the arsenals, perhaps because of her stubbornness, but Salvador, like the other boys, had left with his head held high.

  “Are you feeling ill?” asked one of the Vega women.

  “No … No. I have something to do.”

  She left them all behind and ran toward Melchor.

  KILL HIM, Father. Finish him off. Do it for Milagros, for all of us.

  Ana’s words of encouragement to Melchor not long before were still echoing in Caridad’s ears. At that moment they all left the courtyard and went out onto the alley. She didn’t need to tell him anything. She’d had the feeling that Ana had come to take her place when she’d returned to the corner where Melchor was, to ask for her father’s forgiveness. Ana had cried as she reproached herself and encouraged him with all her heart before embracing him. However, during that hug, Melchor had turned toward Caridad and smiled at her, and with that smile she knew that she was still his morena.

  Caridad let Ana be the one to accompany Melchor. She walked behind, with Martín, who had shown up at the alley on a different horse—“The other one didn’t last,” confessed the young man—with an old gypsy woman, from the Heredia clan in Villafranca, on its hindquarters. That had been shortly before Ana Ximénez arrived in the courtyard to report that the council had made a decision: the fight would end it all. There would be no more revenge taken and Milagros would be free with her daughter. The Garcías had accepted, and the Carmonas—even though Pascual wasn’t there—had as well. She didn’t tell them that it had been easy to achieve that pledge because no one believed that Melchor would be victorious. “Just another way to carry out the sentence anyway,” the matriarch had heard one of the Carmonas saying before the others nodded in satisfaction.

  They were saying that the Garcías were searching for Pedro in Seville. Caridad prayed to the Virgin of Candlemas, and right there, from the tobacco Martín had given her, she tossed some leaf pieces to the ground begging her Orishas to have Pedro fall into the Guadalquivir drunk, or get arrested by the constables, or stabbed by a cuckolded husband. But none of that happened, and she knew he had arrived when the murmurs in the alley grew.

  Melchor didn’t wait, nor did Ana. Milagros refused to go.

  “He is going to die because of me,” she tried to offer as an excuse to her mother.

  “Yes, my daughter, yes. He will die for his family, like a good gypsy, like the Vega he is,” Ana objected, forcing her to stand up and go with them.

  “Don’t worry, Father, Luisa isn’t going to run away,” quipped a gypsy woman when she saw the doubt in Fray Joaquín’s face as he realized that everyone was leaving the wake in the courtyard where the corpse lay.

  Some laughing was heard, though it couldn’t break the tension that reached its highest point at the series of clicks Melchor’s knife made as it opened; those clicks seemed to rise above every other sound, including the laughter. Caridad took a deep breath. The gypsy didn’t even wait for people to make way for him. Caridad saw him grip his knife and cross the alley toward the Garcías’ apartments. Men and women moved aside as he walked.

  “Where are you, you son of a bitch?”

  Caridad realized that Melchor didn’t even know him. He probably hadn’t seen his face the night he jumped into the pit, she thought, since she hadn’t either. And, when they lived in Triana, why would Melchor notice a young García boy? She was tempted to point Pedro out to him herself.

  It wasn’t necessary: Pedro García separated from his family and walked toward Melchor. The gypsies opened into a circle. Many were still talking, but they fell quiet when the two men began to jab their knives into the air, their arms outstretched: one with rolled-up sleeves, young, tall, strong, agile; the other … the other one old, skinny and wasted, with a haggard face and still wearing his red jacket trimmed in gold. Many wondered why he didn’t take it off. It seemed to be interfering with his movement.

  Caridad knew it wasn’t the jacket. The wound from his fight with El Gordo burned, and his movements registered the pain. She had cared for him tenderly, in Torrejón, in Barrancos. He’d resented her attentions, but in the end they’d laughed together. She looked over at Ana and Milagros, both in the front row: one cowering, on the point of collapse at the terrible odds; the other crying, hugging her little daughter’s face tightly against her neck to keep her from seeing the scene unfolding before them.

  Pedro and Melchor continued to circle around, insulting each other with their eyes. Caridad felt proud of that man, her man, willing to die for those he loved. A shiver of that pride ran down her back. Just as she had felt upon her arrival at the San Miguel alley, when they’d captured them, she felt in herself the power that Melchor radiated, the power that had attracted her from the first time she laid
eyes on him.

  “Fight, gypsy!” she then shouted. “The devil is waiting for us!”

  As if they had been holding themselves back, the crowd watching the duel broke out in cheers and insults.

  Pedro attacked, spurred on by the throng. Melchor managed to dodge it. Their eyes challenged each other again.

  “Conceited braggart,” spat out Pedro García.

  Conceited braggart … Pedro’s words set off a spark in Milagros’s mind and she saw an image of Old María. Pedro had confessed to it in Madrid, but she had been drunk and unable to remember it. Conceited braggarts, those were the words he had said to her that night. Pedro had killed the old healer! She felt weak; luckily someone managed to take the little girl from her arms before she fell to the ground.

  “Careful, Melchor!” warned Caridad when Pedro García launched toward him, taking advantage of his shifting his gaze toward his granddaughter.

  He dodged his thrust again.

  “The Vega line ends with you,” muttered Pedro, “all your descendants are women.”

  Melchor didn’t answer.

  “And they’re all whores,” those who were closest to Pedro heard him say.

  Melchor swallowed his rage, Caridad could tell, then she saw him provoke his enemy with his free hand. Come on, it said. Pedro accepted the invitation. The crowd broke out in whispers when the García’s knife cut El Galeote’s forearm open. In just a moment the blood dyed Melchor’s sleeve dark and he responded to the wound with a couple of ineffective charges. Pedro smiled. He attacked again. Another stab, this one to the wrist that Melchor used to protect himself. The crowd fell silent, as if they could foresee the outcome. Melchor attacked clumsily. Pedro’s knife reached his neck, near the nape.

  Caridad looked at Ana, who was on her knees, lifting her head with difficulty, her hands intertwined between her legs. Behind her was Milagros. She brought her gaze back to the fight just in time to feel, as if in her own flesh, the stab that Melchor got in his side. As the blade went into him it was as if it were wounding her. Beyond the knives, she saw Reyes, and her husband, and the Garcías and the Carmonas smiling. Melchor was dragging one leg, panting … and bleeding profusely. Caridad recognized that her man was going to die. Pedro was playing with his rival, delaying his death, humiliating him by dodging his weak thrusts easily, and laughing heartily. Devil, thought Caridad, how does one go down to hell? She turned toward Martín, who was motionless by her side, and tried to grab the handle of the knife that emerged from the young man’s sash.

  “No.” He stopped her.

  They struggled.

  “He’s going to kill him!” moaned Caridad.

  Martín didn’t yield. Caridad finally gave up and she was about to jump in to help Melchor with her bare hands when Martín grabbed her. They struggled again, and he hugged her as tightly as he could.

  “He’ll kill him,” she sobbed.

  “No,” he assured her into her ear. Caridad wanted to look at his face, but he didn’t let up on his grip and continued speaking. “He doesn’t fight like that. I know. He taught me how to fight, Caridad; I know him. He’s letting him get a few stabs in!”

  A second passed. She stopped trembling.

  Martín let Caridad go, and she looked back at the fight when Pedro, exultant, sure of himself, looked at his grandparents as if he wanted to dedicate the end of this enemy to them, now that he was about to strike the definitive blow. La Trianera was slow to grasp what was going on, and tried to react when she saw her grandson attack El Galeote languidly, filled with vanity. The warning died in her throat when Melchor dodged the stab aimed right at his heart and, with a vigor born of rage, hatred and even pain itself, sank his knife to the hilt in Pedro García’s neck, who stopped short with a grimace of surprise, before Melchor viciously dug deeper, until he finally pulled it out with a spurt of blood.

  In the most absolute silence, the old gypsy spat on the body lying on the ground, still gushing blood. He wanted to look over at the Garcías, but he was unable to. He tried to stand up straight. He couldn’t do that either. He only managed to look into Caridad’s eyes before collapsing. She ran to his side.

  Two days had passed since the fight. Melchor woke up in the middle of the night and adjusted his eyes to the faint light of the candles in the empty apartment on the alley where they had set themselves up; he looked at Ana and Milagros, who stood at the foot of the straw mattress.

  Then he asked them to take him to Barrancos.

  “I don’t want to die near the Garcías,” he managed to mutter.

  “You aren’t going to die, Grandfather.”

  Carmen, a gypsy healer whom Ana had called from Osuna, turned toward her and shrugged.

  “Whatever will be, will be,” she confirmed. “Here, in Barrancos … on the road to Barrancos,” she said, anticipating Milagros’s question.

  Melchor seemed to be listening to her.

  “You shouldn’t stay in Triana,” he managed to say. “Never trust the Garcías.”

  Several of the gypsy women in the room nodded their heads to the sound of Melchor’s labored breathing.

  “And the morena?” he asked.

  “Dancing,” answered Milagros.

  The answer didn’t seem to surprise Melchor, who moaned as he smiled.

  Caridad watched over Melchor during the day. She followed the healer’s instructions and, with Ana and Milagros, changed bandages and dressings, and replaced the damp cloths on his forehead to combat the fevers. She sang softly as if Melchor could hear her. One of the gypsy women tried to stop her, making a displeased face when she heard the Negro songs, but Ana shot her a severe look and Caridad kept on singing. When night fell she slipped away and ran to the orange grove where she had first met the gypsy. There, timidly at first, and later with wild abandon, a convulsive shadow among the shadows, hitting sticks together in her hands, she sang and danced to Eleggua, he who decides men’s fates. She hadn’t earned his favor, but the supreme god hadn’t yet decided to take her man either. Melchor had made her a woman; he had taught her how to love, how to be free. Could it be this was the lesson she was missing? Knowing the real pain of losing the man she loved? She had been just a girl when they took her away from her mother and siblings; the pain was then blended with her childish lack of understanding, and it was tempered by the distractions of new experiences. Years later Don José had sold her first son and he ended up separating her from the second, Marcelo; Caridad was a slave and slaves didn’t suffer, they didn’t even think, they just worked. On that occasion, the pain came up against the impenetrable scab with which slaves covered their feelings in order to keep on living: that’s how things were; their children didn’t belong to them. But now … Melchor had destroyed that scab, and she knew, and felt; she was free and she loved … And she didn’t want to suffer!

  “Don’t let her go to the fields alone,” said Melchor.

  “Don’t worry, Father, Martín is watching out for her.”

  The gypsy was satisfied, nodded and closed his eyes.

  “It doesn’t seem prudent to take Melchor to Barrancos.”

  The comment, directed at both mother and daughter, came from Fray Joaquín. Once the fight was over, the priest had followed them discreetly, as if he were part of the family, blending in with the other Vegas who had nowhere to go and some of the gypsy women who were delaying their departure awaiting what they saw as an imminent denouement. Many gathered around the house. With Melchor’s anguished situation as he hovered between life and death, the burials of Luisa and Pedro, the crying and moaning in the funeral, the tension over what could happen with the Garcías despite their promises … nobody was paying much attention to Fray Joaquín.

  “Prudence has never been one of my father’s virtues, wouldn’t you agree, Fray Joaquín?”

  “But now … in his state, you are the one who should decide.”

  “While he still has a single breath of life, he will decide, Father.”

  “It isn’t a good i
dea,” insisted the friar. He words were addressed to Ana, but his gaze was fixed on her daughter. “You should find a good surgeon who—”

  “Surgeons cost a lot of money,” interrupted Ana.

  “I could …”

  “Where would you get the money from?” interjected Milagros.

  “From the statue of the Immaculate Virgin. Selling it. It was valuable before, but now it’s even more so. It seems the locusts jumped into the river at the sight of her.”

  “Thank you, Fray Joaquín, but no,” Ana refused his offer.

  Milagros studied her mother carefully. No, Ana repeated with her head. If you let the friar make another sacrifice for you, you won’t be able to refuse him, she wanted to explain to her.

  “But …” Fray Joaquín started to say.

  “With all due respect, I think my father would feel humiliated if he knew that a Virgin had had to help him out with money,” Ana said as an excuse, while thinking it was probably true.

  “Are you sure, Mother?” asked Milagros after the downcast friar left them alone.

  Ana hugged her, and they both looked at Melchor, lying down with cloths and bandages all over; the worst injury, the worrying one according to the healer, was the stab in his side, near where El Gordo had wounded him. Ana squeezed Milagros’s shoulder before answering.

  “Are you sure, my daughter?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Her mother’s look was explanation enough.

  “Fray Joaquín has treated me very well,” said Milagros. “He saved my life and then …”

  “That’s not enough. You know that.”

  She did know it. Milagros shivered.

  “In Madrid,” she whispered, “when he saved me, I thought … I don’t know. Then later, on the way to Barrancos … you can’t imagine how well he took care of me, his attentiveness, his efforts to get money, food, places to sleep. All I had was him and I thought … I felt … But then I found Grandfather, and Cachita, and you, and I got my girl back.” Milagros sighed. “It’s … it’s as if the love I thought I felt for him has been diluted by the others. Now I look at Fray Joaquín with different eyes.”