The Barefoot Queen

by Ildefonso Falcones

  “What about my mother? And my father?”

  “Arrested,” answered Caridad. “They took everybody, tied with a rope, escorted by soldiers. The men went one way, the women and children the other. Your mother asked me about you …”

  Milagros stifled a sigh, imagining proud Ana Vega being treated like a criminal.

  “Where are they?” she asked. “What are they going to do with them?”

  Caridad’s round face turned toward the friar in search of help.

  “Tell them what your God has in store for them,” muttered the healer.

  “God has nothing to do with this, woman,” said Fray Joaquín, this time defending himself. He spoke in a low voice, however, without confronting the old gypsy. He knew that what he’d said wasn’t true; there was a rumor that the confessor of King Ferdinand VI had approved the raid on the gypsies to calm the monarch’s conscience: “The King will be making a great gift to Our Lord God,” answered the Jesuit to the question posed, “if he manages to wipe out those people.”

  But the words caught in the friar’s throat, with Milagros and Caridad listening, one afraid of knowing, the other afraid she knew.

  “What is going to happen to our people?” pressed Old María, convinced that he would give her an answer.

  And he did, the words tumbling out of him.

  “The men and boys over seven years old will be sent to forced labor in the arsenals, the Sevillians to La Carraca, in Cádiz; the women and others will be locked up. They are planning to send them to Málaga.”

  “For how long?” asked Milagros.

  “For life,” stammered the friar, sure that his revelation would bring on a new outburst of tears. He hated to see Milagros cry, yet he also felt close to tears himself.

  But, to his surprise, the girl gritted her teeth, moved away from Caridad and planted herself right in front of him. “Where are they now? Have they taken them already?”

  “The men are in the royal jail; the women and children in a shepherd’s shed, in Triana.” They were both silent. The girl’s sweet eyes were now irate, steady, penetrating, as if blaming the friar for her misfortune. “What are you thinking, Milagros?” he inquired, besieged by guilt. “It’s impossible for them to escape. They are guarded over by the army. There isn’t a chance.”

  “And Grandfather? Does anyone know anything about my grandfather?”

  Grandfather will know what to do, she thought. He always …

  “No. I have no news of Melchor. None of the tobacco men have seen him.”

  Milagros lowered her head. The boy from Camas approached her, anxious over the turn the situation was taking and about the bracelet he’d been promised. Fray Joaquín was about to push him aside, but the girl stopped him.

  “Here,” she whispered after removing the bracelet.

  The boy had come through. What did a bracelet matter now? she concluded when the boy ran off with his treasure without even saying goodbye.

  The three women and the friar watched him go, each immersed in the whirlwind of worries, hatred, fears and even desires that hung over them.

  “What are we going to do now?” asked Milagros when the boy disappeared among the fruit trees.

  Caridad didn’t answer, nor did Old María; they both kept their eyes on the distant horizon, where the boy must still be running. Fray Joaquín … Fray Joaquín had to jab the fingernails of one hand into the back of the other and swallow hard before speaking.

  “Come with me,” he suggested.

  He had thought it out. He had decided it as soon as the boy from Camas had come to him with the message from the girl. He had weighed it during the walk to the chapel and his steps had lightened and he’d smiled at the world as he convinced himself of that possibility, but when the moment arrived his arguments and desires sank under the weight of the surprise jolt he saw in Milagros’s shoulders, who didn’t even turn, and the shouts of the old woman, who pounced on him like a woman possessed.

  “Wicked dog!” she barked into his face, on her tiptoes, still gesticulating wildly with her arms.

  The young friar wasn’t listening to her, he didn’t see her; his attention remained fixed on Milagros’s back, until she finally turned with confusion on her face.

  “Yes,” insisted the friar, taking a step forward and away from the healer, who stopped shouting. “Come with me. We will escape together … To the Indies if need be! I will take care of you now that—”

  “Now that what?” interjected María from behind him. “Now that her parents have been arrested? Now that there are no gypsies left?”

  The old woman continued to curse him while Milagros’s gaze met the friar’s and she shook her head, upset. She knew that he liked her, she had always been aware that he was attracted to her, but he was a friar. And a payo. She went to stand by Caridad, who was watching the scene with her mouth agape, for support.

  Then: “My grandfather would kill you,” Milagros managed to say.

  “He wouldn’t find us,” the friar let slip.

  He instantly understood his mistake. Milagros stood tall, her chin lifted and firm. Old María stopped growling. Even Caridad, waiting for her friend, turned her face toward him.

  “It is impossible,” the girl declared.

  Fray Joaquín sighed deeply. “Flee, then,” he said, trying to feign a serenity and a composure he didn’t feel. “You can’t stay here. The soldiers and constables of every kingdom are looking for gypsies that escaped arrest. They have declared pain of death on the spot, without trial, for those who don’t turn themselves in.”

  Two gypsies, Old María thought then, one a lovely, desirable young one, the other an old woman unable to remember when was the last time she had run like that little boy from Camas, if she had ever been able to. And with them, walking the roads, a Negro woman, so pitch black she would attract attention from leagues away. Flee? She sketched a sad smile.

  “First you want to run away with the girl and now you’re trying to get us killed,” she spat out cynically.

  Fray Joaquín looked at his hands and pursed his lips at the four small, long cuts that showed on the back of his right one. “Would you rather turn the girl over to the soldiers?” he suggested, switching his gaze from the old woman to Milagros, who remained defiant, as if her mind had frozen at the possibility of never seeing her grandfather again.

  A silence followed.

  “Where should we flee to?” asked the old woman after a while.

  “Portugal,” he responded without hesitation.

  “They don’t want gypsies there either.”

  “But they’re not arresting them,” alleged the friar.

  “They just banish them to Brazil. Does that sound welcoming to you?” Old María regretted her words as she realized they didn’t have many alternatives left. “What do you say, Milagros?”

  The girl shrugged her shoulders.

  “We could go to Barrancos,” proposed the healer. “If there is any place we can find Melchor or get news of him, it’s there.”

  Milagros started: she had heard that name from her grandfather’s lips a thousand times. It was a nest of smugglers on the other side of the Portuguese border. Caridad turned toward the old healer with her eyes bright: finding Melchor!

  “Barrancos,” Milagros confirmed.

  “And you, morena?” asked María. “You’re not a gypsy, no one is after you, would you come with us?”

  Caridad didn’t hesitate for even a second. “Yes,” she said emphatically. How could she not go in search of Melchor? And with Milagros, besides.

  “Then we’ll go to Barrancos,” decided the old woman.

  As if trying to cheer each other up, María smiled and Milagros nodded her head. Caridad seemed euphoric. She looked at Milagros beside her, and draped an arm over her friend’s shoulders.

  “I will pray for you,” intervened Fray Joaquín.

  “Do so if you desire,” replied Milagros before Old María had a chance to blow up at him. “But if you t
ruly wish to help me, keep an eye on what happens to my parents: where they are taken and what becomes of them. And if you see or hear of my grandfather, tell him that we will be waiting for him in Barrancos. We will also try to send that message through the smugglers; everyone knows Melchor Vega.”

  “Yes,” the friar whispered then, focusing his attention on the wounds on the back of his hand. “Everyone knows Melchor,” he added with a voice that trembled between regret and irritation.

  Milagros slipped out from under Caridad’s arm and went over to the friar; she was sorry to have hurt his feelings. “Fray Joaquín … I …”

  “Don’t say anything,” he begged her. “It’s not important.”

  “I’m sorry. It just could never be,” she declared anyway.

  They had been on the road for four days, rationing the water and salted pork that Fray Joaquín had given them before they left. Even Old María doubted whether the preacher could have been right about his gods and devils when, after they decided to flee to Portugal, they drew up their itinerary along with a downcast Fray Joaquín who, nonetheless, insisted on helping them as if it were a way to purge the mistake he had made.

  “There are two main routes you should avoid,” he advised, “the Ayamonte road, toward the south, and the Mérida one to the north. These have the most traffic. There is a third one that forks off the Ayamonte road near Trigueros to head to Lisbon through Paymogo, near the border. Search for that, the one that crosses the Andévalo, always heading west; go around the mountain range toward Valverde del Camino and then further west. There you’ll have fewer possibilities of running into the constables or soldiers.”

  “Why?” asked Milagros.

  “You’ll see. They say that when God created the earth, he was tired after the effort of making the Andalusian coasts and decided to rest, but so as not to interrupt creation he let the devil continue his work. And that was how the lands of the Andévalo were born.”

  And indeed they did see.

  “Why couldn’t your friar’s God have had just a little more energy, girl!” Old María complained yet again, dragging her feet—bare just like those of the other two—along the dry, barren paths beneath the August sun.

  They avoided the roads and towns and walked without a single tree beneath which to take shelter, for the flocks of sheep and goats and the herds of pigs gathered where the holm-oak woods and cork oaks grew, and they were watched over by shepherds, and the women didn’t want to run into anyone.

  “Of all the luck! We had to get a lazy God!” muttered the old woman.

  But except for those pastures, most of the fields that weren’t near towns were fallow: large stretches of uncultivated land. Beyond Seville there were only a few occasions when they had spotted a laborer from a distance, who would always lean on his hoe, using his hand as a visor, wondering about those who walked by—but never came near.

  They traveled in the early morning and at dusk, when the suffocating heat seemed to lessen. Four or five hours each stretch, which wasn’t nearly enough time to cover the four or five leagues they’d set out to, but they had no way of knowing that. Walking through those barren fields, alone and without points of reference, they began to be somewhat discouraged: they didn’t know where they were or how long it would be until they arrived; they only knew—this Fray Joaquín had told them—that they had to cross the Andévalo heading west until they reached the Guadiana River, whose course marked most of the border with Portugal.

  They walked in single file; Milagros headed the march. At one point, when Caridad was trying to match her pace, she had ordered her: “Take care of María,” pointing back with one of her thumbs.

  Milagros didn’t have a chance to regret the tone she used or notice the disappointment her friend was unable to hide. Her thoughts were too full of her parents, separated from each other, separated from her … she was afraid to even imagine where they were and what they were doing. And she cried. She picked out the paths with her eyes flooded in tears and she didn’t want anyone to bother her in her pain. Forced labor for the men, Fray Joaquín had said. She didn’t know what they did in the arsenal of La Carraca in Cádiz. What were they forcing her father to do? She remembered the last time he had forgiven her, like so many other times throughout her life! “Until you get every gypsy in this settlement to kneel before your charms,” he had demanded. And she had danced in search of his approval, moving her body to the rhythm of the pride sparkling in her father’s eyes. And her mother? Her throat tightened and her legs seemed to refuse to go on at the mere thought of her, as if she were betraying her by fleeing. A thousand times she thought of going back, turning herself in, searching for her and throwing herself into her arms … but she didn’t dare.

  When the sun beat hard or when night fell, they searched for somewhere to take shelter. They ate salted pork, they drank a few sips of hot water and they smoked the cigars that Caridad still had in her bundle. Then, exhausted by the heat, the girl would sob in silence; the others respected her grief.

  “Fray Joaquín must have been right: this land could only have been the work of the devil,” she commented with disgust at the end of that day as she pointed to a lone fig tree silhouetted against the sunset.

  From behind, the old woman groaned. “Girl, the devil has tricked us: he was reincarnated into the friar who set us off on his paths. May that damn priest rot in his own hell!”

  The girl didn’t respond; she had quickened her step. Caridad, behind her, hesitated and turned toward the healer: she was limping and hunched over, cursing under her breath at every step. She waited for her.

  Old María, exhausted from the effort, slowly reached Caridad, stopping with an exaggerated groan and tilting her head to one side. She looked up at the worn straw hat Caridad wore.

  “Morena, with that mat of hair you’ve got on your head, I don’t know what you want with a hat.”

  Caridad took it off and held the hat in front of her grayish dress of coarse burlap, along with her bundle.

  “You are so dark!” exclaimed the healer. “Were you sent by the devil, too?”

  “No!” she quickly replied, with fear in her face.

  A sad expression crossed the old woman’s face at Caridad’s denial: the morena was obviously innocent. “Of course not,” she tried to reassure her. “Help me.”

  María went to offer her her forearm, but Caridad put her hat back on and, before the old woman could protest, she lifted her up in the air, held her in her arms like a little girl and started marching behind Milagros, who was substantially ahead of them by that point.

  “Do you think the devil would carry you in his arms?” asked Caridad with a smile.

  Old María smiled and nodded.

  “It’s not a litter in the style of the great Sevillian ladies,” commented the old woman once she’d recovered from Caridad’s sudden lift. She had run an arm around the black woman’s neck and even got comfortable. “But it’ll do. Thank you, morena, and as that deceitful friar would say, may God reward you.”

  María kept talking and complaining about the state of her feet, her old age, the friar and the devil, the payos and that rough, fallow land until Caridad stopped suddenly several paces from the fig tree. María felt the tension in Caridad’s arms.

  “What …?”

  She was silent as she looked toward the tree: against the reddish light that was already falling on the fields, Milagros’s figure was silhouetted in front of another taller one, a man’s, surely, who was grabbing her and shaking her.

  “Put me down on the ground, morena, slowly,” she whispered as she searched in her apron pocket for the knife she used to cut plants. “Have you ever fought?” she added, now standing with the knife in her hand.

  “No,” answered Caridad. Had she fought? She thought of the times she had been forced to defend her smoke or her daily ration of cod gruel from the other slaves: simple quarrels among the hungry. “No,” she reiterated, “I haven’t.”

  “Well, now’s th
e time for you to learn,” said the old woman, handing her the knife. “I no longer have the strength or the youth for such things. Stab him in the eye if you have to, but don’t let him touch the girl.”

  Suddenly Caridad found herself with the weapon in her hand.

  “Hurry up, demon Negress!” screamed the old woman, gesticulating wildly at the man, who was already pulling the girl toward him.

  Caridad stammered. Stab him in the eye? She had never … but Milagros needed her! She was about to take a step when María’s scream alerted the girl to their presence. Then she freed herself from the man, lifted an arm and greeted them with a wave.

  “Wait!” called the healer, seeing how calm the girl was. “Maybe today is not the day you’ll have to … prove your valor.” She dragged the last few words out.

  He was a gypsy named Domingo Peña, an itinerant blacksmith from the Puerto de Santa María, one of the towns where many gypsies had been arrested, and he had spent a couple of weeks shoeing horses and fixing farm tools in the Andévalo region.

  “Except for the big towns, of which there aren’t many,” explained the gypsy, as they all sat beneath the fig tree’s large leaves, “the blacksmiths have disappeared, even though they are essential to the work in the fields,” he added as he pointed to his tools: a tiny anvil, an old bellows made of ram’s skin, some tongs, a couple of hammers and some old horseshoes.

  The healer was still watching him with some suspicion.

  “What was that man doing to you?” she had accused Milagros in whispers as soon as she was close enough.

  “He was hugging me!” the girl said in her defense. “He had been in the Andévalo for some time and knew nothing about our raid. He was crying over the fate of his wife and children.”

  “Even so, don’t let men hug you. It’s not necessary. Let them cry on your shoulder.”

  Milagros accepted the reprimand and nodded, her head bowed.

  Beneath the fig tree, Domingo questioned them about the gypsies’ arrest. They were speaking in Caló, the gypsy tongue that Caridad had started to understand in the settlement. Yet what caught her attention was the desperate gesturing and the anguished expression on the face of the man; he was as gaunt as he was sinewy, with a smith’s strong arms with long veins that swelled in the tension of the moment. Domingo had left behind three boys over seven, the age at which, according to what the women had just told him, they would be separated from their mother and destined to forced labor. “Juan,” he enunciated in a thin voice. María and Milagros, cringing, let him speak. “The youngest, a lively lad. He liked to hit the iron scraps against the anvil and sometimes he would even softly sing something like a martinete to the rhythm marked by the hammer. Francisco, ten years old, introverted but intelligent, cautious, always aware of everything around him; and the oldest, Ambrosio, just a year older than his brother.” His voice cracked. The boy had fallen from a crag and his legs were deformed from the accident. Had Ambrosio also been separated from his mother and sent to forced labor in the arsenals? Neither the old woman nor the girl dared to respond, but Domingo insisted, obliviously repeating the question: Were they capable of that? And when he was answered by silence again he brought his hands to his face and broke out in sobs. He cried in front of the women without trying to hide his weakness. And he howled up at the already starry sky with screams of pain that split the warm air around them.