The Barefoot Queen Read online

  As he mused Melchor polished off his first glass in one gulp.

  “Good wine!” he said aloud to anyone who wanted to listen.

  He ordered another, and then a third. He was on his fourth when a woman came up to him from behind and put an affectionate hand on his shoulder. The gypsy lifted his head to find a face that tried to conceal its true features behind rancid, smudged makeup. Nevertheless, the woman had generous breasts emerging from her plunging neckline. Melchor ordered a glass of wine for her as well while he gripped one of her buttocks with his right hand. She complained with a false and exaggeratedly modest pout, but then she sat down with him and the rounds began to flow.

  IT WAS two days before Melchor showed up at the San Miguel alley.

  “Can you take care of the Negress?” Ana begged her daughter when she noticed that her father hadn’t returned that afternoon. “It seems Grandfather has decided to take off again. Let’s see how long it’s for this time.”

  “And what do I do with her? Should I tell her she can leave?”

  Ana sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t know what he was planning … what your grandfather is planning,” she corrected herself.

  “She is determined to cross the pontoon bridge.”

  Milagros had again spent most of the morning in the small courtyard. She rushed there as soon as her mother allowed her to, with a thousand questions on the tip of her tongue about all Caridad had told her, everything she’d been wondering about throughout the night. She felt drawn to that black woman, to her melodious way of speaking, to the deep resignation that emanated from her entire being, which was so different from the proud, haughty character of the gypsies.

  “Why?” asked her mother, interrupting her thoughts.

  Milagros turned, confused. They were in one of the two small rooms that made up the apartment they lived in, on the first floor of apartments off the courtyard. Ana was preparing lunch on a coal stove lodged in an open niche on the wall.

  “What?”

  “Why does she want to cross the bridge?”

  “Ah! She wants to go to the Brotherhood of the Negritos.”

  “Is she over her fevers?” asked Ana.

  “I think so.”

  “Well, after lunch, take her.”

  The girl nodded. Ana was tempted to tell her to leave her in Seville, with the Negritos, but didn’t.

  “And then bring her back. I don’t want Grandfather to come back and find his Negress gone. That’s the last thing I need!”

  Ana was irritated: she had argued with José. Her husband had scolded her harshly over the fight she’d had with La Trianera, but he especially condemned her slapping the old woman’s grandson.

  “A woman hitting a man. Who does that? And he’s the grandson of the head of the council of elders!” he shouted at her. “You know how vindictive Reyes can be.”

  “As for the first, I will hit anyone who insults my daughter, whether they’re grandsons of La Trianera or the King of Spain himself. Otherwise, you take care of her and keep a close eye out. As for the rest, I don’t know what you can tell me about the Garcías’ character …”

  “I’ve had enough of the Vegas and the Garcías! I don’t want to hear anything more about it. You married a Carmona and we’re not interested in your disputes. The Garcías rule in the settlement and they are influential with the payos. We can’t let them take a disliking to us … especially not over the old feuds of some crazy old man like your father. I’m fed up with my family throwing it in my face!”

  On that occasion, Ana bit her lip to keep from answering back.

  The never-ending argument! The same old song and dance! Ever since her father had come back from the galleys ten years earlier, her relationship with her husband had gradually deteriorated. José Carmona, the young gypsy taken by her charms, had been willing to forgo the religious wedding to have her. “I will never submit to those dogs who didn’t move a finger for my father,” she had said. The humiliating disdain with which the priests had treated her and her mother was burned into her memory. Yet, José hadn’t been able to stand Melchor’s presence, accusing him of stealing Milagros’s affection. Milagros saw her grandfather as indestructible: a man who had survived the galleys, a smuggler who outsmarted soldiers and authorities, a free, rambling gypsy. José felt he couldn’t compete: he was a simple blacksmith forced to work day in and day out under the orders of the head of the Carmona family and he didn’t even have a son to boast about.

  José envied the affection between grandfather and granddaughter. Milagros’s immense gratitude when Melchor gave her a bracelet, a trinket or the simplest colorful ribbon for her hair, her spellbound look as she listened to his stories … With the passing of the years José ended up taking out the bitterness and jealousy that was eating away at him on his own wife, whom he blamed. “Why don’t you say that to him?” Ana had replied one day. “Is it that you don’t dare?” She didn’t have time to regret her impertinence. José had slapped her across the face.

  And at that moment, as she was talking to her daughter about the black woman her father had brought home, Ana was cooking food for four on that small, uncomfortable stove: the three people in her family plus young Alejandro Vargas. After keeping her mouth shut when her husband once again threw the disputes between the Vegas and the Garcías in her face, she was surprised at how easy it was to convince José that Milagros’s problem lay in that she was no longer a girl. Ana thought that if they engaged her to be wed, the girl would put aside her feelings toward Pedro García, since she was sure that the Garcías would never court a Vega. José told himself the bond between Milagros and her grandfather would fade once she was married, and he supported the idea: the Vargas family had been showing an interest in Milagros for some time, so José lost no time and the next day Alejandro was invited over to eat. “For the time being there is no commitment, I just want to get to know the young man a little more,” his wife had announced. “His parents have agreed to it.”

  “Go to Uncle Inocencio’s house and borrow a chair,” Ana ordered her daughter, interrupting her thoughts of the pontoon bridge Caridad wanted to cross and the Brotherhood of the Negritos that she wanted to reach.

  “A chair? For whom? Who …?”

  “Go get it,” insisted her mother. She didn’t want to tell her daughter about Alejandro’s visit beforehand, knowing it would surely lead to an argument.

  At lunchtime, Milagros realized why Alejandro was there and received the guest sullenly. She didn’t hide her dislike for him—he was timid and danced clumsily—although only Ana seemed to notice her rudeness. José addressed him as if neither of the women existed. The third time the girl used a curt tone, Ana’s expression twisted, but Milagros endured the censure and looked at her with her brow furrowed. You already know which boy I like! her look said. José Carmona laughed and banged the table as if it were an anvil. Alejandro tried to keep up, but his laughter came out shy and nervous. “It’s impossible,” was Ana’s almost inaudible refusal. Milagros tightened her lips. Pedro García. Pedro was the only boy she was interested in.… And what did she have to do with her grandfather’s and her mother’s old quarrels?

  “Never, my daughter. Never,” her mother warned her through her teeth.

  “What did you say?” her husband asked.

  “Nothing. Just—”

  “She says I won’t marry this …” Milagros moved her hand toward Alejandro; the boy’s mouth was agape, as if shooing away an insect. “Him,” she finished her sentence to avoid the insult that was already on the tip of her tongue.

  “Milagros!” shouted Ana.

  “You will do what you are told,” declared José gravely.

  “Grandfather—” the girl began to say before her mother interrupted her.

  “You think your grandfather is going to let you get anywhere near a García?” spat out her mother.

  Milagros got up abruptly and threw the chair to the floor. She remained standing, flushed, with her right fist tigh
tly closed, threatening her mother. She stammered out some unintelligible words, but just as she was about to start yelling, her gaze fell on the two men staring at her. She growled, turned around and left the room.

  “As you can see, she’s a filly who badly needs to be tamed,” she heard her father laughing.

  What Milagros didn’t hear, slamming the door with Alejandro’s stupid giggle behind her, was Ana’s reply.

  “Boy, I’ll rip out your eyes if you ever lay a hand on my daughter.” The two men’s faces shifted. “On my honor as a Vega,” she added, bringing her fingers in the shape of a cross to her lips and kissing them, just as her father did when he wanted to convince someone.

  CARIDAD WALKED stiffly, her gaze fixed on the bridge keeper who was collecting the tolls at the entrance to the pontoon bridge: the same man who had kept her from crossing the last time.

  “Come on,” Milagros had called to her shrilly from the corridor, at the entrance to the small courtyard.

  Caridad obeyed instantly. She jammed her straw hat on her head and grabbed her bundle.

  “Leave them!” The girl hurried her along when she saw her efforts to organize Old María’s wineskin, now empty, the colorful blanket and the mattress. “We’ll be back later.”

  And now she was again approaching the busy bridge, walking behind a girl as silent as she was determined.

  “She’s with me,” Milagros proffered, pointing behind her, when she saw the bridge keeper about to address Caridad.

  “She’s not gypsy,” stated the man.

  “Anyone can see that.”

  The man was about to turn on her for her impertinence, but he thought better of it. He knew who she was: the granddaughter of Melchor “El Galeote”—the Galley Slave. The gypsies had always refused to pay the toll—why would a gypsy pay to cross a river? Many years earlier the owner of the rights to the pontoon bridge had been paid a visit from several of them, grim-faced, armed with knives and willing to work out the problem their own way. There was no room for discussion, because really it didn’t matter much if a few mavericks crossed from Triana to Seville and vice versa among the three thousand on horse- or muleback each day.

  “What do you say?” insisted Milagros.

  All gypsies were dangerous, but Melchor Vega more than most. And the girl was a Vega.

  “Go ahead,” he conceded.

  Caridad released the air she had unconsciously been holding in her lungs and followed the girl.

  A few paces on, amid the bustle of sheep and mules, muleteers, porters and merchants, Milagros turned and smiled at her in triumph. She forgot about the argument with her parents and her attitude shifted.

  “Why do you want to go to the Negritos?”

  Caridad lengthened her stride and in a few paces she was beside her. “The nuns said they would help me.”

  “Nuns and priests, they’re all liars,” declared the gypsy girl.

  Caridad looked at her in surprise. “They aren’t going to help me?”

  “I doubt it. How can they? They can’t even help themselves. Grandfather says that before there were a lot of dark-skinned folk, but now there are only a few left and all the money they get they waste on Church nonsense and the saints. Before there was even a Negro brotherhood in Triana, but it didn’t have enough members and it folded.”

  Caridad again fell behind as she turned the girl’s disappointing words over in her head, while Milagros continued past the bridge and resolutely southward along the wall on the way to the district of San Roque.

  At the height of the Torre del Oro, the girl stopped and turned suddenly. “What do you want them to help you with?”

  Caridad opened her hands in front of her body, confused.

  “What is it that you think they’ll do for you?” insisted the gypsy girl.

  “I don’t know … The nuns told me … They are Negroes, right?”

  “Yes. They are,” answered the girl resignedly before taking up the path again.

  If they are Negroes, Caridad thought, again following in the footsteps of the gypsy girl, keeping her eyes on the pretty colored ribbons in her hair and the bright scarves that twirled in the air around her wrists, then that place had to be something like the old living quarters where they’d gathered on holidays. There everyone was friends, companions in misfortune even though they didn’t know each other, even when they didn’t even understand each other: Lucumís, Mandingas, Congos, Ararás, Carabalís … What did it matter the language they spoke? There they danced, sang and enjoyed themselves, but they also tried to help each other. What else was there to do in a gathering of Negroes?

  Milagros didn’t want to go inside the church with her. “They’d kick me out,” she declared.

  A white priest and an old Negro, who introduced himself proudly as the elder brother and the caretaker of the small chapel of Los Ángeles, looked her up and down without hiding their disgust at her dirty slave clothing, so out of place in the pageantry they strove for in their temple. “What did you want?” the elder brother had asked her peevishly. In the flickering light of the chapel’s candles, Caridad wrung the straw hat in her hands and faced the Negro like an equal, but both her spirit and her voice were stifled by the cruel way they were staring at her. The nuns? continued the elder brother, almost raising his voice. What did the Triana nuns have to do with it? What did she know how to do? Nothing? No. Tobacco, no. In Seville only men worked in the tobacco factory. Yes, women worked in the Cádiz factory, but they were in Seville. Did she know how to do anything else? No? In that case … The brotherhood? Did she have money to join the brotherhood? She didn’t know she had to pay? Yes. Of course. You have to pay to join the brotherhood. Did she have any money? No. Of course. Was she free or a slave? Because if she was a slave she had to have her master’s authorization …

  “Free,” Caridad managed to state as she stared into the Negro’s eyes. “I am free,” she repeated, dragging the words, trying in vain to find in his eyes the understanding of a blood brother.

  “Well then, my daughter …” Caridad lowered her gaze when the priest, who had remained silent up until that moment, finally spoke. “What is it you expect from us?”

  WHAT DID she expect?

  A tear ran down her cheek.

  She went running out of the church.

  Milagros saw her cross Ancha de San Roque Street and enter the field that opened up behind the parish church, heading toward the Tagarete stream. Caridad ran confused, blinded by tears. The gypsy girl shook her head as she felt a stab in the stomach. “Sons of bitches!” she muttered. She hurried after her. A few steps further on she had to stop to pick up Caridad’s straw hat. She found it on the banks of the Tagarete, where she had fallen to her knees, ignoring the fetidness of the stream that absorbed the entire area’s sewage. She was crying in silence, just like the previous evening, as if she had no right to do so. This time she was covering her face with her hands and she rocked back and forth as she falteringly hummed a sad, monotone melody. Milagros scared off some raggedy little kids who approached curiously. Then she extended a hand toward Caridad’s black curly hair, but she didn’t dare to touch it. A tremendous shiver ran through her body. That melody … Her arm was still outstretched and she watched how the depth of that voice made its little hairs stand on end. She felt tears welling up in her eyes. She knelt down beside her, hugged her awkwardly and sobbed with her.

  “GRANDFATHER.”

  She had been waiting attentively for more than a day before she saw Melchor returning to the alley. She had run all the way to the settlement by La Cartuja to see if she could find him there, but they had given her no news of him. She came back and leaned against the door to the courtyard; she wanted to talk to him before anyone else did. Melchor smiled and shook his head as soon as he heard his granddaughter’s tone of voice.

  “What is it you want this time, my girl?” he asked her as he grabbed her shoulder and moved her away from the building, further from the Carmonas who were bustling about. />
  “What are you going to do with Caridad … with the black woman?” she clarified when she saw his confused expression.

  “Me? I’m tired of saying she’s not mine. I don’t know … she can do whatever she wants.”

  “Can she stay with us?”

  “With your father?”

  “No. With you.”

  Melchor squeezed Milagros against him. They walked a few steps in silence.

  “You want her to stay?” the gypsy asked after a short while.

  “Yes.”

  “And does she want to stay?”

  “Caridad doesn’t know what she wants. She has nowhere to go, she doesn’t know anybody, she has no money … The Negritos …”

  “They asked her for money,” he said before she had a chance to.

  “Yes,” confirmed Milagros. “I promised her I would talk to you.”

  “Why do you want her to stay?”

  The girl took a few moments to respond. “She is suffering.”