The Barefoot Queen Page 73

  “You have to tell him.”

  Milagros shook her head as she made a dismayed face. “I can’t. I don’t want to hurt him. He gave up everything for me.”

  Ana Vega made a meaningful gesture toward one of the Vega women, who instantly took their place at the foot of the straw mattress, and she gently pushed her daughter toward the door of the house. The heat of the night was oppressive and humid. They walked through the courtyard in silence and then they sat down on two rickety chairs.

  “The friar will understand,” said Ana.

  “And what if he doesn’t?”

  “Milagros, you have already made one mistake in your life. Don’t make another.”

  Milagros played with a ribbon she wore around her wrist. She was dressed in a simple red skirt and a white shirt, which she had swapped for the black clothes she’d brought from Madrid. They had also given her several colorful ribbons.

  “A very big mistake,” she admitted after a little while. “I didn’t heed your warnings then. I should have—”

  “It was probably my fault,” her mother interrupted her. “I didn’t know how to convince you.” Ana put her hand over Milagros’s. Her daughter grabbed it.

  “You know?” Her voice was trembling. “Things change when you’re a mother. I hope that someday my daughter is as proud of me as I am of you today. All of Andalusia came to your aid! No. It wasn’t your fault. When you have a daughter, things look differently than they did when you were fifteen. Now I understand: your family comes first, the ones who won’t let you down; nothing and no one else exists. I trust I’ll be able to teach that to María. I’m sorry, Mother.”

  The ones who won’t let you down echoed in Ana Vega’s ears as she shifted her damp eyes toward the house where her father lay. El Galeote is strong; all sinew, the healer had said to cheer her up as Melchor struggled to curse all the women who were badgering him. Don’t give up, gypsy, she had heard Caridad say when his teeth chattered from the fever. She remembered the almost superhuman effort that Melchor had made when he found out that Pedro had killed Old María, as if he wanted to get up off the straw mattress to run and kill him again. They had hesitated over whether to tell him about it after Milagros had told them the story. And what if he dies without knowing that he also avenged Old María? said Caridad, ending the debate. It was Milagros who told him. Your family, the ones who won’t let you down.… Ana hugged her daughter.

  “Fight, my father, fight!” she whispered.

  THE SUN was high in the sky the following day when Martín entered the house looking for the women.

  “I’ve got everything prepared,” he announced.

  Caridad made no motion to leave, as she was busy feeding Melchor a cold broth. Ana sensed Fray Joaquín perking up his ears.

  “You go and have a look,” she then said to Milagros.

  The friar soon followed her to the alley, where they found a ramshackle cart with two wooden wheels, without sides or a driver’s seat, and a miserable old donkey yoked to its shaft.

  Milagros examined the straw on which Melchor would travel.

  “Back to Barrancos,” said Fray Joaquín.

  Martín looked the friar up and down before leaving him alone with Milagros, who continued moving the straw around as if she were looking for something.

  “Yes,” she confirmed, still rummaging through the straw. “That’s what Grandfather wants.”

  The silence extended between them.

  Finally, Milagros turned.

  “What does my hand foretell?” Fray Joaquín surprised her by holding it out for her to read.

  She didn’t touch it.

  “Fortune telling … You know that’s all just bunk.” Her voice scratched at her throat; she didn’t want to cry.

  “It depends on what the gypsy who reads it wants to see,” insisted Fray Joaquín, extending his hand further, encouraging her to take it in her own.

  Milagros wanted to lower her head, hide her gaze. She didn’t because of the memory of her childhood in Triana, his help in Madrid and on the way to Barrancos, his having saved her life and all the tenderness and affection he had showed her afterward. Yet she said nothing.

  Fray Joaquín pulled back his hand at the commotion raised by Melchor’s exit; he was walking very slowly, held up by Martín on one side and Caridad on the other. Ana walked behind him with the girl and the others. All that, however, wasn’t enough for Milagros to take her eyes off the friar’s face: tears were running down his cheeks.

  “Don’t cry, please,” she begged him.

  They stood there motionless, in the way of Melchor getting into the cart.

  “You are a good man, Father,” put in the old gypsy with a reedy voice when he reached them. “Don’t ask for more,” he advised him then. “Continue with your God and your saints. The gypsies … as you can see, we come and we go.”

  Fray Joaquín questioned Milagros with his gaze. “Don’t leave me again,” he pleaded in the face of her silence.

  “I’m sorry,” she managed to say.

  The friar didn’t have time to respond before Melchor intervened again, as they tried to lift him onto the straw in the cart. “Oh, Father!” Melchor called him over as if he wanted to tell him a secret.

  The friar priest looked at him. He didn’t want to leave Milagros’s side, but the old gypsy’s eyes—as glassy as they were penetrating—convinced him to go over.

  “Don’t let them cheat you with the snuff,” whispered the old gypsy with feigned gravity. “If it looks red, no doubt about it, it’s cut with ocher.”

  When the friar rushed to search out Milagros’s eyes again, he was unable to find them.

  HE WILL get better in Barrancos. They wanted to believe it. They had repeated it to each other over the long, laborious journey through the mountains, trying to lift their mood as they walked behind the cart where Melchor lay in the straw. Martín led the donkey that he had swapped in Triana, together with the cart, for his horse.

  When they reached the foot of the hill, Caridad looked up at the house that touched the heavens, her house. They went up and stopped at the peak. Martín helped Melchor to get down from the cart. Ana and Caridad tried to help also but he refused, trying to hide his pain.

  The day was clear; the summer sun outlined fields, rivers and mountains, emphasizing their vivid colors. Silence pervaded the scene. Melchor hobbled toward the edge of the cliff that opened out onto the vastness. Milagros handed the girl to Martín and prepared to follow her grandfather, but Caridad stopped her by extending an open palm, with her gaze on her man, who now leaned against the large rock that had been witness to the dreams and hopes they had shared.

  “Sing, gypsy,” she then murmured, her voice catching in her throat.

  A few seconds passed.

  It began with a whisper that gained strength until it became a long, deep wail that echoed against the very heavens themselves. A shiver ran down Caridad’s back; her whole body shook and her fine hairs stood on end. Milagros hugged her mother, to keep from falling. None of the three women sang, all bewitched by the cracked voice that melded with the breeze to fly off in search of freedom.

  “Sing, Grandfather,” whispered Milagros. “Sing until your mouth tastes of blood.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  “A lirí ye crayí, nicobó a lirí es calés.”

  [The King’s law destroyed the law of the gypsies.]

  “El Crallis ha nicobado la lirí de los calés.”

  [Charles has destroyed the gypsies’ law.]

  In 1763, fourteen years after the big roundup, by which time the Marquis of Ensenada had fallen into disgrace, King Charles III pardoned the gypsies for being born gypsies. There were still about 150 of them held in the various arsenals, and it would take years for them to be freed. In the Royal House of Mercy in Saragossa there were only a few remaining gypsy women without any family. Those who hadn’t run away, more than 250, got their freedom by taking advantage of King Ferdinand VI’s long demise, after wh
ich that institution settled the gypsy problem and could devote itself to recovering its original mission.

  Twenty years later, in 1783, Charles III himself passed a proclamation aimed at assimilating the gypsies. It reiterated the prohibition of the use of the term “gypsy”—“those who call themselves gypsies are not, either by origin or by nature”—as had been ordered in previous resolutions, albeit with little success. But besides that reiteration, the King established that the gypsies did not come from “tainted roots,” which granted them the same rights as the rest of the population. Despite continuing to outlaw their clothing and their language, he allowed them to choose their profession freely—with some exceptions, such as innkeeper in a desolate location—the ban on moving about the kingdom was lifted and they were allowed to live in any town, except in the capital and royal seats, where, in spite of everything, they continued to do so, as Minister Campomanes had been careful to underscore when lamenting the failure of attempts to banish them from Madrid.

  The enlightened spirit behind the 1783 proclamation was supported by reports from several courtrooms, some of which pointed out the constant discrimination, harassment and unfair treatment that the gypsies had been subject to by the public, in particular officers of the law and clergymen, owing to their lifestyle and the fact that they lived outside of society.

  Suffice it to remember the paragraph with which Cervantes began his novel The Little Gypsy Girl:

  It seems the gypsies were born into the world merely to be thieves; they are born of thieving parents, they are raised with thieves, they study to be thieves and, finally, they end up polished and perfect thieves, in whom the desire to steal and stealing are inseparable, and only eliminated by death.

  According to the courtroom reports, the gypsies preferred to live alone and isolated than alongside those who mistreated them.

  Even taking that into account, it is still true that gypsy society is an ethnocentric one. There is no written tradition in that community, but there are many authors who agree on a series of values that characterize the gypsies: racial pride and certain guiding principles: “Li e curar, andiar sun timuñó angelo ta rumejí” (freedom to work, according to their own wishes and benefit); “Nothing belongs to anyone, everything belongs to everyone,” attitudes that are difficult to reconcile with habitual social norms.

  From that, the two quotes that begin this note are understandable. It seems that the legal comparison between payos and gypsies established by King Charles III’s proclamation disappointed the latter. “Charles has destroyed the gypsies’ law.” Is this victimismo—a tendency to see themselves as being victimized? Rebellion, perhaps? That is for the scholars to decide.

  The gypsy capacity for adaptation, if not assimilation, into diverse environs, is a constant demonstrated by scholars of this people. In the eighteenth century in Seville, counting Triana, there were almost fifty penitent brotherhoods, most of them with a long tradition, including the Negritos, although this was probably a common name and doesn’t appear in books until the 1780s, after the ending of this novel. The Gypsy Brotherhood, so beloved today, wasn’t founded until after the big roundup, and didn’t appear in the Holy Week processions until 1757. Around that same time the missionaries emphasized the great devotion and penitence of the gypsies of Triana in the general confessions that were held.

  It is surprising that in the Spain of the Inquisition, missions and religious fervor, the gypsies, who were constantly accused of being ungodly, impious and irreverent, weren’t persecuted by the Inquisition. Neither the Holy Office nor the Catholic Church seemed to pay them any attention. Unlike other communities similarly persecuted throughout history, the gypsies were able to withstand and get around difficulties, almost as if it were a game, mocking the authorities and their constant efforts to repress them.

  On the other hand, the gypsy community has contributed like none other to the art of flamenco, now declared part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO. I am not the person and this is not the place to go into depth about whether the gypsy people brought their own music—the zíngara—with them to Europe or not, or if it originated on the Hungarian plains; in any case the gypsies became virtuosi of its performance, as would happen in Spain with a music that during the eighteenth century, when this novel takes place, scholars now call “preflamenco.” Out of that grew a type of song that, since the late nineteenth century, with its palos and structure defined, would be known as flamenco.

  The scholars also seem to agree that those songs were probably the result of the fusion, by the gypsies, of their own music with the Spanish tradition, the Moorish tradition and the Negro tradition, whether of slaves or freed slaves: what is called the music of ida y vuelta [roundtrip], because it traveled from Spain to Latin America and back again.

  Three persecuted peoples, some enslaved, others exploited and banished, all scorned: Moors, Blacks and gypsies. What emotions could be born of the fusion of their music, singing and dancing? Only those that reach their climax when one’s mouth tastes of blood.

  Triana, in competition with other parts of Andalusia, is considered the birthplace of flamenco. The San Miguel alley, where the gypsy family forges were clustered, disappeared in the early nineteenth century.

  Perhaps the flamenco song as it is commonly recognized was born in the early twentieth century, but that shouldn’t detract from the depth and bitterness, the jondura of the eighteenth-century gypsy songs. El Bachiller Revoltoso, witness to life in Triana in the mid-eighteenth century, writes:

  A granddaughter of Balthasar Montes, the oldest gypsy in Triana, goes to the main homes of Seville to perform her dances, accompanied by two men with guitar and small drum and another who sings when she dances. These songs are begun with a long breath they call the galley lament, because a gypsy forced to row would thus moan and it would spread to the other benches and from there to other galley ships.

  It must be left to the reader’s imagination and sensibility the vision of that gypsy for whom freedom is the greatest treasure, singing to complain about living fettered to the oars of a galley that few would get out of alive; a long breath, as the contemporary author describes it, that was later reproduced in the parlors of the noble and illustrious.

  It is also El Bachiller Revoltoso who tells us of a gypsy who worked in a tobacco factory, who was smuggling some powder out—inside his body—when the pig intestine it was wrapped in burst. The smuggling of tobacco, a product that was monopolized by the royal tax office, was at the time—and continues to be—among the most lucrative activities, and the Portuguese town of Barrancos was one of its main hubs. Scholarly works are unanimous in including clergymen in this practice.

  The eighteenth century was also one of great change for the city of Madrid. The advent of the new Bourbon dynasty brought new tastes and customs to the court. The Enlightenment provoked the creation of Royal Academies, economic societies, state-owned factories and workshops and a series of urban reforms that reached their height during the reign of Charles III, nicknamed “the best mayor” because of the reforms he spearheaded in the capital.

  One of those was carried out by Philip V on what had originally been the open-air Corral de Comedias de la Pacheca to turn it into the Coliseo del Príncipe Theater, which later became the Teatro Español when it was reconstructed after two raging fires; it is located in the bustling Plaza Santa Ana, situated in turn on the site of the former convent of the Discalced Carmelites.

  While comedies were banned in Seville, they were performed daily in Madrid in the Príncipe and Cruz theaters. Many scholars agree that the people attended them not only for the dramatic works but also for the sainetes and tonadillas, which had replaced the classic Baroque intermission pieces and become autonomous one-acts between the larger pieces.

  The staged tonadilla reached its height in the eighteenth century, separating from the sainete over the course of the 1700s only to be completely forgotten by the end of the 1850s.

  The tonad
illas were short works, mostly only sung and danced. Their themes dealt with local customs and were satirical, exalting the common folk and criticizing the upper classes and their Frenchified ways. One of its most notable characteristics was the interaction the tonadilla players had with the public, which meant that their wit, self-assurance, sarcasm and, of course, sensuality were talents as important as their voices and grace as dancers.

  The humble people of Madrid extolled many of those tonadilla players who sang for them. Manolos and chisperos are typical representatives of those appealing Madrileños, so proud of their city.

  My thanks, as always, to my wife, Carmen, and my editor, Ana Liarás, to all those who helped and collaborated in the making of this novel and, above all, to you, the reader, who gives it meaning.

  Barcelona, June 2012