The Barefoot Queen

by Ildefonso Falcones

  They passed the first line of buildings and reached the church of Santa Ana; they continued two blocks further from the river, the cabin boy nervous, pulling Caridad along, dodging the people who looked at them curiously, until they were in front of La Cava.

  “These are the Minims,” indicated the boy, pointing to a building across from La Cava.

  Caridad followed the boy’s finger: a low, whitewashed building with a modest church; then she directed her gaze to the old defensive moat that stood in her way, sunken, filled with refuse at many points, precariously level in others.

  “There are some places where you can cross,” added the boy, imagining what was going through Caridad’s head. “There’s one in San Jacinto but it’s a bit far away. People cross wherever they can, see?” He pointed to some people who were going up or down the sides of the trench. “I have to get back to the boat,” he warned Caridad when she didn’t react. “Good luck, Negress.”

  Caridad didn’t say anything.

  “Good luck,” he repeated before heading off as fast as his legs could carry him.

  Once she was alone, Caridad looked at the convent, the place Don Damián had told her to go to. She crossed the trench along a small open path among the rubbish. There were no dumps on the plantation, but there were some in Havana; she’d had the chance to see them when her master had taken her to the city to deliver the tobacco leaves to the warehouse in the port. How could white people throw away so many things? She reached the convent and pushed on one of the doors. Locked. She knocked and waited. Nothing happened. She knocked again, timidly, as if she didn’t want to be a bother.

  “Not like that,” said a woman passing by, who, almost without stopping, pulled on a chain that made a small bell ring.

  Soon a latticed peephole opened in one of the doors.

  “May the peace of Our Lord be with you,” she heard the caretaker say; from the voice, she was an elderly woman. “What brings you to our house?”

  Caridad removed her straw hat. Although she couldn’t see the nun, she lowered her gaze. “Don Damián told me to come here,” she whispered.

  “I don’t understand you.”

  Caridad had spoken rapidly and incoherently, the way newly arrived blacks in Cuba do when addressing white men. “Don Damián …” she struggled, “he told me to come here.”

  “Who is Don Damián?” inquired the nun after a few moments of silence.

  “Don Damián … the priest on the boat, on The Queen.”

  “The queen? What did you say about the queen?” exclaimed the nun.

  “The Queen, the boat from Cuba.”

  “Ah! A boat, not Her Majesty. Well … I don’t know. Don Damián, you said? Wait a moment.”

  When the peephole opened again, the voice that emerged was authoritative and firm. “Good woman, what did that priest say you should do here?”

  “He only told me to come.”

  The nun didn’t speak for a few seconds. Her voice was then sweet. “We are a poor community. We devote ourselves to prayer, abstinence, contemplation and penitence, not charity. What could you do here?”

  Caridad didn’t answer.

  “Where do you come from?”

  “Cuba.”

  “Are you a slave? Where are your masters?”

  “I am … I’m free. I also know how to pray.” Don Damián had urged her to say that.

  Caridad couldn’t see the nun’s resigned smile. “Listen,” she said. “You have to go to the Brotherhood of Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles, do you understand?”

  Caridad remained in silence. Why did Don Damián have me come here? she wondered.

  “The Brotherhood of the Negritos,” explained the nun, “yours. They will help you … or give you advice. Take note: walk to the church of Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles, near Cruz del Campo. Continue northward along La Cava, toward San Jacinto. There you can cross La Cava, turn to the right and follow Santo Domingo Street until you reach the pontoon bridge, cross it and then …”

  Caridad left the Minims trying to retain the itinerary in her head. “Los Ángeles.” They had told her she had to go there. “Los Ángeles.” They would help her. “In Cruz del Campo,” she recited in a soft voice.

  Absorbed in her thoughts, she went on her way unaware of how people stared: a voluptuous woman with black skin, dressed in grayish rags and carrying a small bundle, who murmured to herself incessantly. In Altozano, awed by the monumental castle of San Jorge by the bridge, she bumped into a woman. She tried to apologize but the words didn’t come out; the woman insulted her and Caridad fixed her gaze on Seville, on the other bank. Dozens of carts and pack animals crossed the bridge in one direction or the other; the wood creaked on the pontoons.

  “Where do you think you’re going, darkie?”

  She was startled by the man who blocked her way.

  “To the Los Ángeles church,” she answered.

  “Congratulations,” he said sarcastically. “That’s where the Negroes are. But to get to your kind, you’ll have to pay me first.”

  Caridad surprised herself by looking straight into the toll keeper’s eyes. Alarmed, she corrected her attitude, removed her hat and lowered her gaze.

  “I … I don’t have money,” she stammered.

  “Then you don’t get any Negritos. Get out of here. I’ve got a lot of work.” He made a gesture of heading over to a muleteer who was waiting behind Caridad, but seeing that she was still standing there, he turned toward her again. “Get out or I’ll call the constables!”

  After getting off the bridge she was aware that eyes were on her. She didn’t have the money to cross over to Seville. What could she do? The man on the bridge hadn’t told her how she could get money. In her twenty-five years, Caridad had never earned a single coin. The most she’d ever had, besides the food, clothing and sleeping quarters, was the “smoke,” the tobacco that her master had given her for personal consumption. How could she earn money? She didn’t know anything besides tending tobacco …

  She moved away from the other people, retreating toward the river and sitting on its bank. She was free, sure, but that freedom was of little use to her if she couldn’t even cross a bridge. She had always been told what to do, from sunrise to sunset, day after day, year after year. What was she going to do now?

  There were many folk from Triana who observed the black woman sitting on the bank, stock-still, with her gaze on the horizon … looking at the river, at Seville, or perhaps lost in her memories or meditating on the uncertain future opening out before her. Some of them passed again an hour later, others after two or even three and four, and the black woman was still there.

  As night fell, Caridad realized she was hungry and thirsty. The last time she had had anything to eat or drink was with the cabin boy, who shared a hard, moldy cake and some water with her. She decided to smoke to cover up her craving, as all the slaves on the tobacco plantation did when waylaid by weariness or hunger. Perhaps that was why the master was generous with the “smoke”: the more they smoked, the less food he had to give them. The tobacco replaced many assets and was even bartered for new slaves. The smell of the cigar attracted two men who were walking along the bank. They asked for a smoke. Caridad obeyed and handed them her cigar. They smoked. The men chatted between themselves, passing the cigar, both standing. Caridad, still seated, asked for it back by extending her arm.

  “You want something in your mouth, darkie?” said one of the men, laughing.

  The other let out a chuckle and pulled on Caridad’s hair to lift her head as the first man lowered his pants.

  Caridad offered no resistance and fellated the man.

  “Looks like she likes it,” the one who had her by the hair said nervously. “You like it, Negress?” he asked as her pushed her head against his friend’s penis.

  Then they both mounted her, one after the other, and left her lying there.

  Caridad readjusted her dress. Where was the rest of her cigar? She had seen one of them toss i
t before grabbing her hair. Maybe it hadn’t landed in the water. She brushed through the grasses and rushes, feeling along the ground carefully in case the tip was still burning.… And it was! She grabbed it and, with her belly flat against the ground, right at the water’s edge, she inhaled with all her strength. She sat down again and let her feet go into the water. It was cold, but in that moment she didn’t notice; she didn’t feel anything. Was she supposed to like it? That was what one of them had asked her. How many times had she been asked that same question? The master had asked when she was just fresh off the boat, recently plucked from her homeland. Then she hadn’t even understood what she was being asked by that man who groped her and slobbered before tearing her open. Later, after many more times, after her pregnancy, he replaced her with a new girl, and then it was the overseer and the other slaves who asked her that between their puffing and panting. One day she gave birth again … to Marcelo. The pain she felt that time, when her womb tore after hours of labor, told her that she would never have another child. “Do you like it?” they would ask her on Sundays, at the dance, when some slave took her by the arm out of the hut, there where other couples were fornicating as well. Later they would go back to singing and dancing frenetically, in the hopes that one of their gods would mount them. Sometimes they would leave the quarters again for a repeat. No, she didn’t like it, but she didn’t feel anything anyway; they had gradually robbed her of her feelings, bit by bit, from the first night her master had taken her by force.

  Less than an hour had passed before one of the men returned and interrupted her thoughts.

  “Do you want a job in my workshop?” he asked her, illuminating her with an oil lamp. “I’m a potter.”

  What is a potter? wondered Caridad, trying to make him out in the darkness. She only wanted …“Will you give me money to cross the bridge?” she inquired.

  The man saw the hesitation on her face. “Come with me,” he ordered.

  That she understood: an order, as when some Negro grabbed her by the arm and took her out behind the hut. She followed him toward Cava Vieja. At the height of the Inquisition Castle, without turning around, the potter questioned her.

  “Are you a runaway?”

  “I’m free.”

  In the castle lights, Caridad could see the man nodding his head.

  His was a small workshop, with a living space on the upper floor, on the street of the potters. They went in and the man pointed to a straw mattress in one corner of the workshop, beside the woodpile and the kiln. Caridad sat down on it.

  “You’ll start tomorrow. Sleep.”

  The warmth of the kiln’s embers eased Caridad, frozen stiff from the Guadalquivir’s dampness, into slumber, and she slept.

  SINCE THE Muslim period, Triana had been known for its fired-clay production, especially for its glazed low-relief tiles; the masters sank a greased cord into the fresh clay and achieved magnificent drawings. However, some time ago that artisanal ceramic work had degenerated into repetitive, charmless pieces, which now had to compete with English flint stoneware and people’s changing tastes, which leaned toward Oriental porcelain. So the trade was in decline in Triana.

  The next day, at dawn, Caridad began to work alongside the man from the night before, a young man who must have been his son and an apprentice who couldn’t take his eyes off her. She loaded wood, moved clay, swept a thousand times and took care of the ashes in the kiln. The days passed that way. The potter—Caridad never saw a woman emerge from the upstairs floor—visited her at nights.

  “I have to cross the bridge to get to the church of Los Ángeles, where the Negroes are,” she wanted to say to him one night, when the man, after taking her, was preparing to leave. Instead she just stammered, “And my money?”

  “Money! You want money? You eat more than you work and you have a place to sleep,” answered the potter. “What more could a Negress like you want? Or would you rather be on the street begging for alms like most free Negroes?”

  In those days, slavery had almost completely disappeared from Seville; the economic and demographic crisis, the 1640 war with Portugal (which was the major supplier of slaves to the Sevillian market), the bubonic plague that the city had suffered a few years later (which showed no mercy to the black slaves), along with the constant manumissions ordered in the wills of pious Sevillians: all contributed to a significant decline in slavery. Seville was losing its slaves at the same rate it was losing its economic strength.

  You eat more than you work echoed in Caridad’s ears. She then recalled what Master José’s overseer on the plantation always used to say: “You don’t work as much as you eat,” was his accusation before letting the whip fall onto their backs. Not much had changed in her life; what good had being freed done her?

  One night, the potter didn’t come down the stairs. The next night he didn’t show up either. On the third night, when he did come down, he headed toward the door instead of toward her. He opened it and let in another man, then pointed him over to Caridad. The potter waited by the door while that man satisfied his desires, charged him and then bade him farewell.

  From that night on, Caridad stopped working in the shop. The man locked her up in a miserable little room on the lower floor, with no ventilation, and he placed a straw mattress and a chamber pot beside some debris.

  “If you make trouble, if you scream or try to escape, I’ll kill you,” the potter threatened the first time he brought her food. “Nobody will miss you.”

  That’s true, lamented Caridad as she listened to the man turn the key in the door again: who was going to miss her? She sat on the straw mattress with the bowl of thin vegetable stew in her hands. She had never before had her life threatened: masters didn’t kill slaves; they were worth a lot of money. A slave was useful for its whole life. Once trained, as Caridad was as a girl, Negroes reached old age on the tobacco plantations, in the sugar mills or cane factories. The law prohibited selling a slave for more than it had been bought for, so no master, after having taught them a trade, would get rid of them; they’d lose money. One could mistreat them or force them to work to the point of exhaustion, but a good overseer knew his limits and usually stopped short of death. There were those slaves who took their own lives; sometimes at dawn, the light would gradually, unexpectedly, reveal the silhouette of an inert black body hanging from a tree … or perhaps several who had together decided to escape their lives once and for all. Then the master would get very angry, as he did when a mother killed a newborn to free it from a life of slavery or when a Negro injured himself to avoid work. The following Sunday, at mass, the priest from the sugar mill would shout that it was a sin, that they would go to hell, as if a hell worse than that existed. Die? Maybe, thought Caridad, maybe the time has come to escape this world where no one will miss me.

  That same night it was two men who enjoyed her body. Then the potter closed the door again and Caridad was left in the most absolute darkness. She didn’t think about it. She sang softly through what was left of the night, and when the first rays of light made their way through the cracks in the planks of the miserable little room, she searched among the junk until she found an old rope. This could work, she concluded after pulling on it to test its strength. She tied it to her neck and climbed onto a rickety box. She threw the rope over a wooden beam above her head, pulled it taut and knotted the other end. There had been times when she’d envied those black figures hanging from the trees, interrupting the landscape of the Cuban tobacco plantation, freed from their suffering.

  “God is the greatest of all kings,” she called out. “I only hope not to become a lost soul.”

  She leapt off the box. The rope held her weight, but not the wooden beam, which cracked and fell on top of her. The noise was such that the potter soon appeared at Caridad’s cell. He put her in irons and, from that day on, Caridad stopped eating and drinking, begging for death even as the potter and his son force-fed her.

  The visits from men off the street continued, usual
ly one, sometimes more, until one night an old man who was clumsily trying to mount her got up and off her with shocking agility.

  “This Negress is burning up!” he shouted. “She has a fever. Are you trying to give me some strange illness?”

  The potter came over to Caridad and put his hand on her sweaty forehead. “Get out of here!” he ordered, pressuring her with a foot in the ribs as he struggled to force open and recover the chains that held her captive. “Right now, this minute!” he yelled once he had managed to free her. Without waiting for her to get up, he grabbed Caridad’s bundle and threw it out onto the street.

  WAS IT possible that he had heard a song? It was just a murmur mixed in with the sounds of the night. Melchor pricked up his ears. There it was again!

  “Yemayá asesú …”

  The gypsy remained still in the darkness, in the middle of the fertile lowlands of Triana, surrounded by garden plots and fruit trees. The murmur of the Guadalquivir’s waters reached his ears clearly, as did the whistle of the wind among the vegetation, but …

  “Asesú yemayá.”

  It seemed like a dialogue: a whisper sung by the soloist who then responded like a chorus. He turned toward the voice; some of the beads that hung from his jacket jangled. It was almost completely dark, except for the torches from the Carthusian monastery, a bit further on.

  “Yemayá oloddo.”

  Melchor left the path and entered an orange grove. He stepped on rocks and fallen leaves, he stumbled several times and even loudly cursed all the saints, and yet, despite his shouts echoing like thunder in the night, the sad soft singing continued. He stopped in a patch of trees. It was there, right there.

  “Oloddo yemayá. Oloddo …”

  Melchor squinted his eyes. One of the persistent clouds that had covered Seville during the day allowed a faint glimmer of the moon to come through. Then he could make out a grayish form on the ground, before him, just a few paces away. He approached and knelt until he could make out a woman as black as the night dressed in gray clothes. She was sitting with her back against an orange tree, as if seeking refuge in it. Her gaze was vague, unaware of his presence, and she continued singing softly, in a monotone, repeating the same refrain over and over again. Melchor noticed that, despite the cold, her forehead was beaded with sweat. She was shivering.