The Barefoot Queen

by Ildefonso Falcones

  “Tell that coward, El Galeote, that El Fajado does not forgive. Tell him to stop hiding among his people like a frightened woman.”

  Stop hiding among his people like a frightened woman. The boys’ words, repeated thousands of times since they appeared at the settlement with Dionisio’s corpse, stuck like red-hot needles in Melchor’s brain while many of the gypsies avoided his eyes when they passed him. They think the same thing! Melchor tortured himself with the thought. And they were right: he had hidden like a coward, like a woman. Was he getting old? Was he like Antonio, who for a mere coin had given up his prized bed so Melchor could sleep with the morena? The wake lasted three days, the women howling incessantly, tearing their dresses and scratching at their arms and faces. Melchor kept apart even from Milagros and Ana, who couldn’t keep the recrimination out of their eyes; he even came to believe he saw scorn on his own daughter’s face. Nor did he have the courage to join the parties of gypsies who, fruitlessly, went out in search of El Gordo’s men. Meanwhile he tormented himself over and over with the same question: had he turned into someone like old Antonio, a coward who could cause the death of boys like Dionisio? Even his own daughter tried to avoid him!

  He witnessed the burial, in a nearby open field, crouched among the other gypsies. He saw how the boy’s father, accompanied by Uncle Basilio, put an old guitar in Dionisio’s limp arms. Later, in a heartbroken voice, addressing his son’s lifeless body, he cried out, “Play, son, and if I have done wrong, let your music deafen me; but if I have acted correctly, be still and I will be absolved.”

  In the earsplitting silence, Basilio and his son waited a few moments. Later, when they turned their backs on the corpse, the other men buried him along with his guitar. When the earth completely covered the simple pine coffin, Dionisio’s mother went over to the head of it and carefully piled up the dead boy’s few personal possessions: an old shirt, a blanket, a knife, a small silver horn that he had worn around his neck as a child to ward off the evil eye and an old two-cornered hat that the boy had loved and which his mother kissed tenderly. Then she set fire to the pile.

  As the flames began to die out and the gypsies leave, Melchor went over to the bonfire. Many stopped and turned their heads to watch El Galeote take off his sky-blue silk jacket, pull the money out of its pockets and put them in his sash, and throw the jacket onto the fire. Then he offered his hand to Uncle Basilio with the heavens as his witness.

  Pain, anguish and guilt led his feet to the Triana bank of the Guadalquivir. He needed to be there!

  “Where’s he going?” Milagros asked her mother in a whisper.

  The two women, and Caridad with them, hastened to follow Melchor as soon as he bowed his head to Basilio with a resigned expression and headed off toward Triana. They did so at a distance, making sure he didn’t see them, not imagining that Melchor wouldn’t have noticed their presence even if they were walking right beside him.

  “I think I know,” answered Ana.

  She said no more until Grandfather passed the pontoon bridge and the bank and stopped in front of the church of the old Seafarers’ University, where they taught boys about the sea and took care of sick seamen.

  “It was there,” whispered the mother, keeping a close eye on the silhouette of her father set against the last lights of the day.

  “What was there?” inquired Milagros, with Caridad behind her.

  Ana was slow to respond.

  “That is the church of Our Lady of Bonaria, the patron saint of seafarers. Look …” She began to address her daughter, then corrected herself to include Caridad as well. “Look at the main entrance. Do you see the uninterrupted balcony looking onto the river above it?” Milagros nodded; Caridad said nothing. “From that balcony, on days of precept, they said mass to the boats in the river; that way the seamen didn’t even have to disembark …”

  “And neither did the galley slaves.” Milagros finished the sentence for her.

  Ana sighed. “That’s right.”

  Melchor continued to stand tall before the door to the church, his head lifted toward the balcony and the river almost licking the heels of his boots.

  “Your grandfather never wanted to tell me anything about his years in the galleys, but I know, I overheard some conversations he had with the few others who survived that torture. Bernardo, for example. During the years that Grandfather was at the oars, there was nothing that hurt him more, of all the hardships and disasters he had to endure, than being chained to the galleys listening to mass docked at Triana.”

  Because Triana was freedom incarnate and there was nothing more precious to a gypsy. Melchor endured the lashings of the slave driver, suffered thirst and hunger covered in his own excrement and urine, with ulcers all over his body, rowing through exhaustion. So what? he wondered in the end. Wasn’t that the gypsies’ fate, be it on land or on sea? To suffer injustice.

  But when he was there before his Triana … when he could smell, practically touch, that air of freedom that naturally drove the gypsies to fight against all the ties that bind, then Melchor ached from all his wounds. How many blasphemies had he repeated in silence against those priests and those sacred images from the other side of freedom? How many times right there, on the river, in front of the retablo of Our Lady of Bonaria flanked by paintings of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, had he cursed his fate? How many times had he sworn that he would never again lift his eyes toward that balcony?

  Suddenly, Melchor fell to his knees. Milagros wanted to run toward him, but Ana held her back.

  “No. Leave him be.”

  “But …” the girl complained. “What is he going to do?”

  “Sing,” Caridad whispered behind them, to their surprise.

  Ana had never heard her father sing his “galley lament.” He had never sung it once he was free. Which was why, when the first long, doleful wailing flooded the dusk, Ana fell to her knees just like him. Milagros felt all the little hairs on her body stand on end. She had never heard anything similar; not even the heartfelt deblas of La Trianera, El Conde’s wife, could compare to that lament. The girl shivered, searched out her mother and rested her hands on her shoulders; Ana grasped them. Melchor sang without words, weaving moans and whimpers that sounded deep, cracked, broken, all tinged with the taste of death and misfortune.

  The two gypsies remained cowering inwardly, aware how that profound and indescribable song, marvelous in its melancholy, cut them to the quick. Yet Caridad was smiling. She knew it: she was sure that everything the grandfather was incapable of putting into words he could express through music; like her, like the slaves.

  The galley lament lasted several minutes, until Melchor ended it with a final mournful cry that he let die on his lips. The women saw him get up and spit at the chapel before starting to walk downriver, away from the settlement. Mother and daughter remained still for a few more moments, drained.

  “Where is he going?” asked Milagros when Melchor vanished into the distance.

  “He’s leaving,” Ana managed to choke out, her eyes flooded with tears.

  Caridad, with the laments still echoing in her ears, tried to keep the gypsy’s back in sight. Milagros felt her mother’s shoulders convulse with sobs.

  “He’ll come back, Mother,” she tried to console her. “He’s not … he’s not carrying anything; he has no jacket, no musket, not even his cane.”

  Ana didn’t speak. The murmur of the river’s water in the night surrounded the three women.

  “He’ll come back, won’t he, Mother?” added the girl, her voice now cracked.

  Caridad perked up her ears. She wanted to hear yes. She needed to know that he would come back!

  But Ana didn’t answer.

  Seville, July 30, 1749

  Devastated by the unbearable summer heat, city life passed languidly. Those who could had already moved their furnishings, clothes and essentials from the upper floors of their homes to the lower ones, where they tried to fight against the heat and the wind from th
e east. The rest, who were most of the population, moved closer to either of the Guadalquivir’s banks, the Seville side or the Triana side, where at least they could find a glimmer of life in the people bathing in the river, looking to cool off a little, beneath the watchful gaze of the guards sent there by the city council to avoid the frequent deaths by drowning. The people were whiling away the day when a rumor began to spread through them: the army was taking the city. It wasn’t constables or the chief justice of Seville, but the army! Suddenly, armed soldiers stationed themselves at the thirteen gates and in the two side doors of the capital’s walls and warned those people who were outside the city walls to get inside. Swimmers, merchants, seamen and dock workers, traders, women and children … The crowd hastened to obey the orders of the military men.

  “We’re going to close the gates of the city!” shouted corporals and sergeants heading armed detachments.

  But beyond the warnings, none of the officers gave any other explanations; the soldiers used their rifles to push away the Sevillians crowded around the gates, asking what was going on. The agitation reached crisis point when someone shouted that the army had the entire city surrounded. Many looked toward Triana and saw that it was true: there on the other side of the river, they saw people running among the white soldiers’ uniforms, and the pontoon bridge was a throng of horses rushing back and forth, incited by the soldiers.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Is it war?”

  “Are they attacking us?”

  But instead of replies the people got shoves and blows—because the soldiers didn’t know why either; they had merely received the order to force the inhabitants inside and close the gates to the city. Only two were to be left open: Arenal and Carne.

  “Go home!” shouted the officers. “Go to your homes!”

  Various patrol units had been giving the same order on the streets inside Seville and Triana, an order that on that July 30, 1749, was proclaimed through the entire length and breadth of Spain in a meticulous secret military operation devised by the Bishop of Oviedo and Don Gaspar Vázquez Tablada, President of the Council of Castile, and the Marquis of Ensenada, who a few years earlier had toughened the sentences for gypsies arrested outside of their hometown: death. By virtue of that new proclamation of 1749, that same day, the royal troops took every city in the kingdom where they knew gypsies lived.

  After a few hours, the gates of Seville had been shut except for the Arenal and Carne gates, which were heavily guarded. Triana had been besieged by the army; the good citizens ran to take refuge in their homes and the pickets stationed themselves strategically on certain streets. That was when the soldiers finally received direct instructions from their superiors: arrest all gypsies as dangerous and despicable persons, regardless of their gender or age, and confiscate all their assets.

  Previously they had dispatched the pertinent secret official letters to the Chief Magistrates of all the towns in the kingdom where the census data registered gypsies, so Seville’s chief justice, as the city’s highest-ranking magistrate, had already pointed out to the military authorities the homes and places where they should proceed with the arrests.

  As was happening all over Spain, the gypsies were in shock as they witnessed the vile measure being implemented: in Seville they were arrested without opposition, as were the blacksmiths of San Miguel alley and those who lived on La Cava and the surrounding area in Triana. Those in the settlement of La Cartuja had better luck, however; many of them managed to escape, leaving behind their meager belongings. Two were shot and killed by soldiers as they fled, another was wounded in one leg and a fourth drowned in the river while his wife looked on impotently, his small children wailed and the contemptuous troops did nothing.

  Close to 130 gypsy families were arrested in Seville in the massive raid of July 1749.

  INSIDE THE shack, Caridad heard the shouts of army officers rising above the tumult.

  “Arrest them all!”

  “Don’t let them get away!”

  She stopped working Fray Joaquín’s tobacco. Frightened by the commotion of gypsies and soldiers running, the shrieks of children and women and the occasional shot, she got up from the table and rushed toward the door just as Antonio and his wife ran limping in the other direction, helping each other.

  “What …?” she tried to ask them.

  “Out of the way!” The old man pushed her.

  She stood there, frozen, transfixed, watching as the soldiers pounced on women and threatened men with rifles. Many managed to escape and ran fearlessly through the line of soldiers surrounding the settlement. She looked all around for Milagros without success, and saw how Uncle Tomás was distracting a group of soldiers so that one of his sons could flee, taking his family with him. There was no trace of Milagros. Some gypsies escaped by jumping over the roofs of shacks in order to fall behind the monastery’s garden wall and start a frenetic race toward freedom. Antonio and his wife pushed her again as they left the hut. Caridad followed them with her gaze: the old woman was dropping tobacco and cigars that she had stolen. She watched them run with difficulty toward … the soldiers! One of them laughed as he saw them approach, old and bumbling, but his face changed when Antonio brandished the large knife in his hand. A blow with the rifle butt in the old man’s stomach was enough to get him to drop the knife and fall to the floor. The soldier and his two companions laughed as if they considered the fight over just as the old woman dropped her bag and surprised them, leaping with an astonishing strength and agility born of hatred and rage, her claw-like hands as her only weapon, on the soldier who had hit her husband. The men were slow to react. Caridad saw some furrows of blood on the soldier’s face. They struggled to subdue the old woman.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Absorbed in what was happening to Antonio and his wife, Caridad hadn’t realized that the operation was almost finished and that the rest of the soldiers were already entering the shacks. The arrested gypsies were in groups on the street and surrounded. She lowered her gaze before the soldier who had addressed her.

  “What are you doing here, Negress?” he repeated when Caridad didn’t reply. “Are you a gypsy?” Then he looked her up and down. “No. How could you be a gypsy? Hey!” he shouted to a corporal who was passing by on the street. “What do we do with this one?”

  The corporal approached and asked her the same questions. Caridad still didn’t answer or even look at them.

  “Why are you in the gypsy settlement? Are you the slave of one of them?” He himself rejected the idea, shaking his head repeatedly. “You ran away from your masters, right? Yes, that’s what it must—”

  “I’m free,” Caridad managed to say in a reedy voice.

  “Are you sure? Prove it.”

  Caridad entered the hut and returned with her bundle, which she rummaged through until she found the documents that the notary on The Queen had given to her.

  “It’s true.” After examining and handling them, as if he could recognize by touch that which he was unable to read, he accepted them as valid. “What have you got there?”

  Caridad handed him the bundle, but just as had happened in the seaport of Cádiz, the soldier stopped looking as soon as his hand came across the rough, worn blanket she used to protect herself from the cold in winter and just weighed up and shook the bundle to see if something inside jingled, but the contents—the blanket, her red clothes, some cigars that Fray Joaquín had given her in payment for her work and the straw hat that was tied to it all—didn’t weigh much or jingle.

  “Get out of here!” he shouted at her then. “We’ve got enough problems with this scum.”

  Caridad obeyed and started walking toward Triana. She lingered on the street when she passed the arrested gypsies. Was Milagros among them? The soldiers took their weapons and their jewels and beads while a new army, this time of notaries, tried to write down their names and their belongings.

  “Whose is this mule?” shouted a soldier with the tet
her of a scrawny mule in his hand.

  “Mine,” screamed one of the gypsies.

  “Shut up, liar!” spat out a woman. “That belongs to a laborer from Camas!”

  Some gypsies laughed.

  How can they laugh? thought Caridad, astonished, as she continued searching for Milagros among them. She saw Uncle Tomás, and Basilio and Mateo … most of the older Vegas. She also saw Antonio and his wife, hugging each other. But she didn’t see Milagros.

  “OK,” said the soldier with the mule, holding his ground, “who does it belong to?”

  “To him,” answered someone, pointing to the first gypsy.

  “To the guy from Camas,” said another.

  “Mine,” was heard from somewhere in the group.

  “No, it’s mine,” laughed another voice.

  “No, the other one is yours.”

  “No, that’s the one that belongs to the guy from Camas.”

  “The guy from Camas had two mules?”

  “It’s the King’s!” added a young man. “The King’s,” he repeated to the soldier’s exasperation. “It’s the one we save for him to ride when he comes to Triana!”

  The gypsies burst into laughter again. Caridad widened her lips in a smile, but her eyes still expressed her concern over Milagros.

  “They didn’t arrest her,” shouted Uncle Tomás, imagining what was worrying her. “She’s not here, morena.”

  “Who’s not here?” rudely interrupted the same corporal who had interrogated Caridad; he’d now come over to the chaos.

  Caridad stammered and lowered her eyes.

  “The King’s mule, captain,” Tomás then answered with mock seriousness. “Don’t let them trick your excellency: really the mule the guy from Camas has is the King’s.”