The Barefoot Queen

by Ildefonso Falcones

  He sat down beside her. He didn’t understand what she was saying, but that weary voice, that timbre, the monotony, the resignation that impregnated her voice revealed immense pain. Melchor closed his eyes, hugged his knees and let himself be transported by the song.

  “Water.”

  Caridad’s request broke the silence of the night. Her singing could no longer be heard; it had died out like an ember. Melchor opened his eyes. The song’s sadness and melancholy had managed to take him back to the galley benches. Water. How many times had he asked for the same thing? He thought he could feel the muscles of his legs, arms and back tensing, just as when the galley master increased the pace of the rowing to chase some Saracen ship. His torturous whistle goaded their senses as his whip tore off the skin on their bare backs to get them to row harder and harder. The punishment could last hours. Finally, with all the muscles in their body about to burst and their mouths bone-dry, from the rows of benches there arose a single plea: Water!

  “I know what it is to be thirsty,” he murmured to himself.

  “Water,” begged Caridad again.

  “Come with me.” Melchor got up with difficulty, numb from an hour sitting beneath the orange tree.

  The gypsy stretched and tried to orient himself to find the road to La Cartuja—the Carthusian monastery. He had been heading toward its gardens, where many of the Triana gypsies lived, when the soft singing had attracted his attention.

  “Are you coming or not?” he asked Caridad.

  She tried to get up, grabbing on to the orange tree’s trunk. She had a fever. She was hungry and cold. But, more than anything, she was thirsty, very thirsty. Would he give her water if she went with him, or would he trick her like so many others had over the course of her days in Triana? She walked behind him. Her head was spinning. Almost everyone she’d met had taken advantage of her.

  A series of lights coming from a cluster of shacks on the road lit up the gypsy’s sky-blue silk jacket. Caridad struggled to keep up with him. Melchor didn’t pay her special attention. He walked slowly but erect and proud, leaning just for show on the two-pointed staff that marked him as the patriarch of a family; sometimes he could be heard speaking into the night. As they approached the settlement, the beads on Melchor’s clothes and the silver edging on his socks shone. Caridad took the shimmering gleam as a good omen: that man hadn’t laid a hand on her. He would give her water.

  That night, the partying in the San Miguel alley went on for a long time. Each of the smithing families insisted on demonstrating their talents at dancing, singing and playing the guitar, castanets and tambourines, as if it were a competition. The García family was there, along with the Camacho family, the Flores family, the Carmonas, the Vargases and many more of the twenty-one surnames that inhabited that alleyway. All the traditional gypsy songs were heard—romances, zarabandas, chaconas, jácaras, fandangos, seguidillas and zarambeques—and they danced in the glow of a bonfire fed by the women as the hours passed. Around the fire, sitting in the first row, were the gypsies that made up the council of elders, headed by Rafael García, a man of some sixty years, gaunt, serious and curt, whom they called El Conde.

  The wine and tobacco flowed. The women contributed food from their homes: bread, cheese, sardines and shrimp, chicken and hare, hazelnuts, acorns, quince jam and fruit. These parties were for sharing; when they sang and danced they forgot about the bickering and the atavistic enmity, and the elders were there to guarantee that. The smithing gypsies of Triana were not rich. They were still those same people who had been persecuted in Spain since the time of the Catholic Kings: they weren’t allowed to wear their brightly colored clothes or speak in their dialect, walk the roads, tell fortunes or deal in horses and mules. They were banned from singing and dancing, they weren’t even permitted to live in Triana or work as metalsmiths. On several occasions the non-gypsy guilds of smiths had tried to keep them from working in their simple forges, and the royal proclamations and orders had insisted on it, but it was all in vain: the gypsy smiths guaranteed the supply of the thousands of horseshoes essential for the animals that worked the fields of the kingdom of Seville, so they continued smithing and selling their products to the same non-gypsy smiths who wanted to stop them but were unable to meet the enormous demand.

  While the half-naked kids tried to emulate their parents at the end of the alley, Ana and Milagros started up a lively zarabanda along with two relatives from José’s family, the Carmonas. Mother and daughter, one beside the other, smiling when their eyes met, twisted their hips and played with the sensuousness of their bodies to the sounds of the guitar and voice. José, like so many others, watched, clapped and shouted words of encouragement. With each dance movement, as if casting out a net, the women incited the men, following them with their eyes, suggesting an impossible romance. They moved closer and backed away again, they spun around them to the shameless rhythm of their hips, flaunting their breasts, the mother’s, lush and the daughter’s, pert. They both danced erect, lifting their arms above their heads or twirling them around their sides; the scarves that Milagros wore tied around her wrists took on a life of their own in the air. Some women, in a ring, accompanied the guitars with their castanets and tambourines; many men clapped and crowed at the two women’s voluptuousness; more than one failed to contain a lustful glance when Ana grabbed the edge of her skirt with her right hand and continued dancing while revealing her bare calves and feet.

  “Look up at the heavens, gypsies, God wants to come down and dance with my daughter!” shouted José Carmona.

  The shouts of encouragement kept coming.

  “Olé!”

  “That’s the way!”

  “Olé, olé and olé!”

  Milagros, spurred on by her father’s compliment, imitated Ana, lifting her skirt, and they both circled their dance partners again and again, wrapping them in a halo of passions as the music reached its peak. The gypsies burst into cheers and applause as the zarabanda ended. Mother and daughter immediately dropped their skirts and smoothed them with their hands. They smiled. A guitar began to play, tuning up, preparing for a new dance, a new song. Ana stroked her daughter’s face and, when she drew near to kiss her cheek, the strumming stopped. Rafael García, El Conde, kept his hand slightly lifted over the guitar. A murmur traveled through the gypsies and even the children approached. Reyes “La Trianera,” El Conde’s wife, a fat woman close to sixty years old, with a coppery face scored with a thousand wrinkles, had got one of the other elders out of his chair with a simple, emphatic chin gesture and she had sat down in it.

  In the firelight, only Ana was able to make out the look that La Trianera gave her. It lasted a second, perhaps less. The gaze of a gypsy woman: cold and hard, able to penetrate your soul. Ana straightened up, about to face the challenge, but her eyes met El Conde’s: Listen and learn! his face told her.

  La Trianera sang a cappella, without music, without anyone shouting, clapping or goading her on. She sang a debla: a song to the gypsy gods. Her hoarse old voice, weak, out of tune, nevertheless touched those who heard it deep inside. She sang with her hands trembling and partially open in front of her breasts, as if she were gathering strength through them, and she sang of the many sorrows of the gypsies: the injustices, jail, heartbreak … in verses without meter that only found their meaning in the rhythm that La Trianera’s voice wanted to give them, always ending with praise in the gypsy tongue. Deblica barea, magnificent goddess.

  The debla seemed endless. La Trianera could have made it go on as long as her imagination or memory allowed, but she finally let her hands drop on her knees and lifted her head, which she had kept tilted to one side as she sang. The gypsies, Ana among them, her throat hoarse, broke out in applause again; many with their eyes flooded with tears. Milagros applauded too, looking at her mother out of the corner of her eye.

  In that moment, when she offered her applause and saw her daughter do the same, Ana was glad Melchor wasn’t there. Her hands hit each other slackly
for one last time and she took advantage of the clamor to slip through the crowd. She rushed as she felt El Conde’s and La Trianera’s eyes on her back; she imagined them smiling smugly, them and theirs. She pushed aside the gypsies who were still celebrating the singing and, once outside of the circle, she headed to the entryway of her house, and leaned against one of the doorposts.

  The Garcías! Rafael García! Her father spat when he heard that name. Her mother … her mother had passed away two years after Melchor was fettered to the bench of a galley, and she did so swearing vengeance from the world beyond.

  “It was him!” muttered her mother again and again as they begged for alms on the streets of Málaga, in front of the jail where Melchor was waiting to be led to the Port of Santa María to board the galleys. “Rafael denounced him to the sergeant of the tobacco patrol. Wretch. He violated gypsy law. Son of a bitch! Swine! Mangy dog …!”

  And when little Ana saw that people were moving away from them, she would elbow her so she wouldn’t scare off the parishioners with her yelling.

  “Why did he denounce him?” the girl asked one day.

  Her mother squinted her eyes and twisted her mouth scornfully before answering.

  “The fighting between the Vegas and the Garcías goes way back. Nobody knows exactly why. There are those who say it was over a donkey, others say it was over a woman. Some money? Perhaps. No one knows any longer, but the two families have always hated each other.”

  “Just over—?”

  “Don’t interrupt me, girl.” Her mother smacked her on the back of the neck, hard. “Listen well to what I am going to say to you, because you are a Vega and you will have to live as one. We gypsies have always been free. Every king and prince of every place in the world has tried to make us submit and they have never been able to do it. They never will; our race is better than all of them, smarter. We don’t need much. We take what we need: what the Creator put in this world isn’t anyone’s property, the fruits of the earth belong to all men and, if we don’t like some place, we just move to another. Nothing and no one ties us down. We don’t care about the risks; what do laws and decrees mean to us? That is what we Vegas, and everyone who considers themselves gypsy by blood, have always defended. And that is how we have always lived.” Her mother had paused before continuing. “Shortly before they arrested your father, the head of the council of elders died. The Garcías pressured the others to choose one from their family and your father opposed it. He accused them of not living like gypsies, of working in the forge like payos, in accord with them, doing business with them, marrying in the church and baptizing their children. Of renouncing freedom.

  “One day Rafael showed up at the settlement; he was looking for your father.” Ana thought she remembered that day. Her mother and aunts had ordered her to move aside, like the other little ones, and she had obeyed … but she sneaked back to the place where Rafael had planted himself, threatening, surrounded by members of the Vega family. “He came armed with a knife and looking for a fight, but your father wasn’t there. Someone told him that he’d gone to Portugal for tobacco. The smile that crossed that bastard’s face then was proof enough.”

  In the San Miguel alley, as the elders got up from their chairs, the men and women began to leave, some to their homes, others scattered through the inner courtyards of the clusters of apartments, in groups, chatting and drinking. The guitars, castanets and tambourines were still heard, but now in younger hands; girls and boys took over and made the party their own.

  Ana’s eyes swept over the alley: Milagros was dancing happily with other girls her age. She was so pretty! Her grandfather had said the same thing the first time they showed her to him. Less than a day passed between Melchor Vega’s return from the galleys—barely a few hours, during which Melchor learned of his wife’s death and met his four-year-old granddaughter whom he didn’t dare touch, fearing his filthy and cracked hands could hurt her—and his taking up of a large knife and heading, still weak and disheveled, in search of the man who had informed on him. His daughter had wanted to hold him back, but she didn’t dare.

  Rafael came out to meet him, armed as well and accompanied by his family. They didn’t exchange a single word; they knew what was at stake and why. The men goaded each other, their arms and knives extended, the weapons mere extensions of their bodies. Rafael did it with strength and agility, keeping his hand firm. Melchor’s trembled slightly. They spun around each other as their family members remained silent. Few focused their attention on Melchor’s trembling knife; most watched his face, his bearing, the anxiousness and decisiveness his entire body displayed. He wanted to kill! He was going to kill! His weakened state didn’t matter, or his wounds, his shabby clothes, his filth or his shaking. Melchor would kill Rafael: that much was clear.

  That certainty was what led Antonio García, Rafael’s uncle and then head of the council, to come between the contenders before either of them launched the first stab. Ana, with Milagros in her arms, held tight against her chest, sighed in relief. After Antonio García’s gesture, the elders intervened; the men of the Vega family were warned to deal with the matter before it came to blood. The council, despite opposition from the Vegas and the representatives of two other families who lived in the settlement on the Carthusians’ grounds, ruled that there was no proof that Rafael had informed on Melchor, so if he killed Rafael, they would come out in defense of the Garcías and start a war against the Vegas. In addition, they decided that if Melchor killed Rafael, any gypsy could take vengeance and kill another member of the Vega family; in that case gypsy law wouldn’t punish him, the council would stay out of it.

  As night fell, Uncle Basilio Vega headed over to Melchor and his family. Milagros was sleeping in her mother’s arms.

  “Melchor,” he said after telling him of the council’s decisions. “You know that we will all support whatever you decide. No one can make us back down!”

  And he handed him the girl, who woke up when placed into her grandfather’s arms. Milagros remained still, as if aware of the significance of that moment. Smile at him! begged Ana in silence, her hands crossed, stiff, but the girl didn’t do it. A few seconds passed before Basilio and Ana saw Melchor purse his lips and stroke the girl’s hair with a firm hand. They knew then what his decision was: to submit to the council for the good of the family.

  That girl who had thwarted a bloodbath was now dancing and singing in the San Miguel alley. From the door to her house, Ana enjoyed watching her daughter; she found her lovely, proud, decisive, ardent as she danced flirtatiously with a young man.… Suddenly the woman shook her head violently and moved out of the doorway, confused. The young man was watching her daughter’s dance steps unenthusiastically, indifferent to her effort, cold, almost mocking. Didn’t Milagros realize? That young man.… Ana squinted her eyes to focus her vision. He was older than her daughter, dark, attractive, strong, tough. And Milagros danced unaware of her partner’s disdain; she was smiling, her eyes twinkled, radiating sensuality. Then, positioned behind the chairs that surrounded the embers of a bonfire, she saw La Trianera, who was clapping with a mocking expression of victory at the girl—a Vega, Melchor’s granddaughter—displaying her obvious desire, in public, for one of her grandsons: Pedro García.

  “Milagros!” screamed Ana, running toward her.

  She grabbed her daughter by the shoulder and shook her until she stopped dancing. La Trianera’s mocking expression became a smile. When Milagros seemed about to respond, her mother silenced any complaint with a couple more shakes. The guitarists had almost stopped strumming when La Trianera urged them to continue. Some men approached. Young Pedro García, emboldened by his grandmother’s attitude, wanted to humiliate the Vega women even further and he continued dancing around Milagros as if her mother’s intervention was nothing more than a trivial setback. Ana saw him coming, let go of her daughter and, just as the gypsy approached, extended her arm and smacked him with the back of her hand. Pedro García stumbled. Milagros opened
her mouth but no words came out. The guitars were silent. La Trianera got up. Other gypsy women from various families came over quickly.

  Before they got into a fight, the men got between them.

  “Bitch!”

  “Hussy!”

  “Wretch!”

  “Slut!”

  They insulted each other as they struggled to get away from the men, pushing them away to get to the other women, Ana more than anyone. More men came over, José Carmona among them, and they managed to contain the situation. José shook his wife the way she had their daughter; then, with the help of two relatives, he managed to drag her to the other side of the alley.

  “Strumpet!” Ana kept shouting as they pulled her off, wrenching her head round to direct her words at La Trianera.

  THE GYPSY settlement by the grounds of the Carthusian monastery was just a bunch of squalid huts built with clay and pieces of timber—some no more than simple lean-tos made of reeds and fabric—that had gradually extended from the first ones built up against the wall surrounding the monks’ land, between the monastery and Triana. Melchor was well received. Many greeted him in the street as he passed; others peeked from the doors of those windowless shacks. The meager glow of candles illuminating the inside of the houses and a few fires that were lit along the street fought against the shadows.

  “Melchor, I have a donkey the tobacco patrol could never catch you on. Interested?” exclaimed an old gypsy seated on a chair at the door to a hut, while he pointed to one of the many pack animals tied or staked along the street.

  Melchor didn’t even look at the animal. “For that I’d have to carry him on my shoulders,” he answered, dismissively swatting the air.