The Barefoot Queen

by Ildefonso Falcones

  Sitting at the door to the hut, Melchor kicked at the air again, and one of the dogs responded by getting up on his hind legs and prancing about. He had no doubt that Nicolasa would make good on her threat. He liked that woman. She wasn’t a gypsy, but she had the character of someone hardened by the solitude of the mountains … And, at night, she pleased him with a wild passion he never could have imagined when he saw her there in front of the used-clothing stall. He just missed one thing: Caridad’s singing in the dark silence of the night. That morena, she’s a good woman. Some nights he imagined her offering him her body the way Nicolasa did, demanding more and more, as he had wanted when he woke up holding her in the gypsy settlement. Except for those songs for which he had renounced enjoying Caridad’s body, he couldn’t ask for anything more. He had even come to an agreement with Nicolasa when she demanded he work.

  “As long as the knob you’ve got between your legs keeps up its end of the bargain,” she said, standing in front of him with her hands on her hips, “my body is free … but you have to earn the food.”

  Melchor looked her up and down, displeased: short, with wide hips and shoulders, exuberant flesh and a dirty face that made her look friendly when she smiled. Nicolasa tolerated the inspection.

  “I don’t work, woman,” he spat out.

  “Well, go hunt wolves. In Aracena they’ll pay you two ducats for every one you kill.”

  “If it’s money you want …” Melchor searched beneath his sash until he found the bag that held what he’d stolen from El Gordo. “Here,” he said, throwing a gold coin at her. She caught it in midair. “Is that enough for you to stop pestering me?”

  Nicolasa was slow to answer. She’d never had a gold coin before. She handled it and bit it to make sure it was real. “It’s enough,” she finally admitted.

  Since then Melchor had been free to do what he pleased. Some days he spent sitting at the door to the hut, drinking the wine and smoking the tobacco she brought him from Jabugo. Nicolasa would often sit with him, after she finished with the pigs and her other chores. She sat on the ground—they only had one chair—and respected his silence, letting her gaze wander around a setting she had never imagined she would enjoy again.

  Other days, when Nicolasa hadn’t been to Jabugo in some time, Melchor went out and checked the mountains to see for himself if El Gordo was approaching. That was the only information he had given Nicolasa.

  “Every time you go into town,” he told her, “find out if anyone knows about any large group of smugglers. I’m not interested in the little backpackers who cross the border and load up in Jabugo.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  The gypsy didn’t answer her.

  And that was how they spent the rest of the spring and part of the summer. Melchor felt the days growing long. After the initial weeks of passion, there had since been times when Nicolasa had rejected him with a vehemence equal to that of her lust. The woman’s ardor was replaced by affection, as if the relationship the gypsy considered temporary was for her permanent. So that was why, when the news of the gypsy roundup reached the town, Nicolasa decided to keep it to herself. Not only to protect him, but also because she was afraid, and rightly so, that the gypsy would leave in search of his family as soon as he found out.

  Every time he went out onto the road, Nicolasa watched him worriedly, with a distress she didn’t try to hide, and ordered one of her dogs to follow him, but Melchor didn’t go near the town. The gypsy had come to accept the canine company, which warned him with low growls when there was a person or animal on the deserted mountain paths.

  Nicolasa had given him an old army dress coat with epaulettes and gilding that still had some of their original yellow. Melchor smiled gratefully, touched by her childish nervousness when she handed it to him. “Casimiro told me what you were looking for at his stall in the Aracena market,” she confessed, trying to hide her anxiety behind a forced smile. The two dogs witnessed the scene, tilting their heads from one side to the other. Melchor put on the jacket, which was huge on him and hung from his shoulders like a sack, and adopted an expression of approval, pulling on the lapels and looking at himself. She asked him to turn around so she could see him. That night it was Nicolasa who sought out his body.

  But time continued to pass and Nicolasa shook her head every time she came back from Jabugo. Melchor, who knew the contraband routes, only came across a few miserable backpackers transporting merchandise from Portugal to Spain by foot, under cover of night. “Where are you, Gordo?” he muttered whenever he went out. The dog, glued to his calf, let out a long howl that broke the silence and made its way through the trees; he had heard that new master mention the name El Gordo many times, with a hatred so bitter it could cut through stone. “Where are you, you son of a bitch? You’ll come. As sure as the devil exists, you’ll come! And on that day …”

  “I brought you cigars,” announced Nicolasa on her return from Jabugo, almost a week later, as she extended a small bundle of papantes tied with their characteristic red string: the medium-size cigars made in the factory in Seville, considered among smokers to be the best.

  She kept her eyes hidden, looking at the floor. Melchor furrowed his brow and grabbed the bundle, still seated at the door to the hut. Nicolasa was about to go inside when the gypsy asked her, “You have nothing more to tell me?”

  She stopped. “No,” she answered.

  That time she was unable to avoid his gaze. Melchor saw that her eyes were watery.

  “Where are they?” he asked.

  A shiny tear slid down Nicolasa’s cheek. “Near Encinasola.” She didn’t dare to lie about that. Melchor had asked her to inform him if she found out anything, so she added with a shaky voice, “Some of the men from Jabugo have gone to join them.”

  “When are they expected in Encinasola?”

  “One, two days at the most.”

  Standing in front of him, her legs together, her hands intertwined over her belly, with her throat seized and tears now running freely down her face, Nicolasa saw the transformation of the man who had changed her life: the wrinkles that lined his face grew tense and the sparkle in his gypsy eyes, beneath their furrowed brows, seemed to sharpen as if it were a weapon. All the fantasies of a future that the woman had naively entertained faded as fast as Melchor got up from the chair and pulled on the tails of his yellow jacket, his gaze lost in the distance, all of him lost.

  “Keep the dogs with you,” he said in a whisper that to Nicolasa sounded deafening. Then he searched in his sash and pulled out another gold coin. “I never thought that the first one I gave you was enough,” he declared. He grabbed one of her hands, opened it, placed the coin in her palm and closed it again. “Never trust a gypsy, woman,” he added before turning his back on her and beginning his descent down the hill.

  Nicolasa refused to admit the end of her dreams. Instead, she focused her blurry gaze on the bundle of papantes with their red strings that Melchor had forgotten on the chair in front of the hut.

  IT DEPENDED where they decided to spend the night. There were barely two leagues between Encinasola and Barrancos, and Melchor knew that El Gordo—if it was his party—would do everything possible to get to Barrancos. Unlike Spain, in Portugal there was no government tobacco store. There the trade was leased out to the highest bidders, who, in turn, opened two types of establishments: those that sold to the Portuguese and those devoted to selling to Spanish smugglers. Melchor remembered the large building in Barrancos with warehouses for the smoking tobacco from Brazil, rooms, places for the smugglers to rest and many well-appointed stables. Méndez, the owner, didn’t charge for all those comforts he lavished on his customers, especially if they were large parties like those from Cuevas Bajas and the surrounding area, although he didn’t charge the modest backpackers either, and sometimes he even financed their shady dealings, or gave them tobacco on credit.

  Yes, El Gordo is going to try to reach Barrancos to fill up his belly with good food, get drunk and lie
with women, well sheltered from those inept but always annoying royal patrols, concluded Melchor as he sat on a tree stump halfway between Encinasola and Barrancos. The two towns seemed to be having a distant face-off, both located on bluffs, with their castles, the one in Encinasola in the town itself and the one in Barrancos at a slight distance, rising high to overlook the valley that separated them: a valley that had little in common with the wild nature of Jabugo and its surrounding area.

  It was past midday and the sun was beating down. Melchor had got far enough ahead of the smugglers and he’d been sitting on that uncomfortable stump since dawn, by the shore of the Múrtiga River, where he’d found a grove of trees that protected him from the sun. Sometimes he looked toward the town, even though he knew there was no need: their uproar would precede them. It wouldn’t even take much noise, since the silence was so absolute that Melchor could hear his own breathing. A few country folk paraded past him on their way to their fields and labors. Melchor barely moved his head in reply to their frightened greetings in the local dialect. They already knew how close the smugglers were, and that gypsy with large hoops hanging from his ears and wearing a faded yellow jacket could only be one of them. Meanwhile, between fleeting glances toward Encinasola and evasive nods to the peasants, Melchor remembered Uncle Basilio, young Dionisio and Ana. His daughter had never blamed him for anything before, no matter what he had done! What would he do when El Gordo’s party arrived? He tried not to worry; he’d decide that later. His blood was boiling. Nobody was ever going to say that Melchor Vega, of the Vega family, hid from anybody! They would kill him. Perhaps El Gordo wouldn’t even let him challenge him: he would order one of his lieutenants to shoot him right there and then continue along his way with a smile on his lips, maybe a laugh. He would probably spit down on his corpse from way up on his horse, but Melchor didn’t care.

  A small group of women loaded down with baskets of bread and onions for El Gordo’s men passed by him in silence, their heads downcast. He had lived too long, he thought, gazing at their backs. The gypsy gods—or maybe the priests’ God—had given him a few years. He was living on borrowed time. He should have died in the galleys, like so many others, but he hadn’t perished rowing in the King’s service … He pursed his lips and looked at his hands, covered in dark spots that stood out even on his dark gypsy skin. He tried to get comfortable on the stump but all his muscles hurt, stiff from the hours of waiting; perhaps he was nothing more than an old man, like the one who had given up his bed in the settlement for a lousy coin. He felt an eerie itching in the scars left by the galley slave driver’s whip on his back. He sighed and turned his head toward Encinasola.

  “If I didn’t die in service to the son-of-a-bitch King,” he said aloud to himself, addressing some place far beyond the town in front of him, “what better way to do it now that I’m nothing more than a shell? This way I’ll silence all those who would compare me to a woman.”

  AS HE’D suspected he heard them long before they were visible, on the road leaving Encinasola in the late afternoon. A long and chaotic column of men: some on horseback; most leading horses, mules and donkeys by their halters. Among them were many simple backpackers. Shouts, insults and laughter accompanied them, but the rejoicing in Melchor’s eyes ceased as soon as he recognized El Gordo, flanked by his lieutenants, leading them. Morena, he then thought with a half-smile on his lips, what a mess you’ve gotten me into. The murmur of Caridad’s mournful, monotone singing filled Melchor’s mind, driving out all other sounds. The gypsy, with his eyes locked on the approaching column, widened his smile.

  “The only thing I’m regretting is that I’m going to die without having tasted your body, morena,” he said out loud. “I’m sure we would have made a good couple: an old galley slave and the blackest woman in the Spanish empire.”

  El Gordo and his men soon reached him but were slower to recognize him because the sun was in their eyes. The column of men crowded together behind their captain when he and his lieutenants halted suddenly in their saddles.

  Melchor and El Gordo challenged each other with their eyes. The lieutenants, after their initial surprise, looked at their surroundings—trees and thickets, stones and uneven ground—to see if it was an ambush. Melchor saw how uneasy they were. He hadn’t thought about that possibility: they thought he wasn’t alone.

  “El Galeote …” The murmur ran through the rows of smugglers. “El Galeote’s here,” they whispered to each other.

  “So you’ve come out of your hidey-hole?” asked El Gordo.

  “I’ve come to kill you.”

  A low sound rose through the smugglers until El Gordo let out a laugh that silenced them.

  “You alone?”

  Melchor didn’t answer. He didn’t even move.

  “I could finish you off without even dismounting,” El Gordo threatened him.

  The gypsy let a few seconds slip away. He hadn’t done it. He hadn’t shot him. El Gordo was hesitating; the others were, too.

  “Just you and I, Gordo,” said Melchor after a pause. “We have nothing against the others,” he added, pointing to the other two.

  The use of the plural forced the lieutenants to look around the area again; the scamper of some animal running off, the whisper of the wind amid the foliage: the slightest noise attracted their attention, just as El Gordo’s eye was drawn to the simple flutter of a little bird. There could be gypsies hiding, aiming their guns at him. He knew about the massive roundup but he also knew that many from the settlement had managed to escape, and that most of them were from the Vega family, who were loyal to the death when it came to their blood. All it would take was one of them aiming at his head right then! El Galeote couldn’t have come alone to challenge an entire party of men, he wasn’t that crazy. Where could they be? Among the branches of the trees? Lying behind some rock?

  Melchor took advantage of that moment of indecision and got up from the stump. His muscles responded as if the risk, the proximity of the fight and its uncertain outcome had injected them with a strange vitality.

  “You can run away, Gordo,” he shouted so that everyone would hear him. “You can spur your horse on and maybe … maybe you’ll get lucky. Do you want to try it, you disgusting sack of blubber?” he yelled again.

  Only the brushing of the men’s restless feet on the dirt road and the snort of a horse broke the silence that followed his insult.

  “I came here to kill you, son of a bitch. You and I alone.” The gypsy pulled his knife out of his sash and opened it slowly, until the shining blade emerged from its bone handle. “Nobody else has to get hurt. I came here to die!” howled Melchor with the open knife in his hand. “But there will be consequences for many of you if I die any way other than hand-to-hand with your captain. Isn’t that the best way to solve problems?”

  Among the few murmurs of agreement behind him, El Gordo noticed that his two lieutenants weren’t reining in their horses enough; they were now a significant distance away from him.

  Melchor, standing firmly a few paces from his horse, the faded yellow of his jacket revived by the sun that shone behind his back, noticed it as well. “Are you thinking about running away like a scared woman?” he challenged him.

  If he tried that, he would lose the respect of his men and with it all possibility of leading a party ever again, and El Gordo knew it. He exhaled a long, weary snort, spat at the gypsy’s feet and dismounted with difficulty.

  He hadn’t even touched the ground when the men broke out into cheers and started placing bets. The lieutenants moved to one side of the road. The others tried to place themselves in a circle around the contenders, but Melchor didn’t allow it; he had to maintain the pretense of an ambush. If the men surrounded El Gordo … Melchor stepped back a few paces with his hand extended, indicating to the approaching crowd that they should stop.

  “Gordo!” he shouted when the first few obeyed him. “Before your men can surround us, someone will blow your head off! Do you understand? Everyone beh
ind you, on the road … Now!”

  The smuggler made an authoritative gesture to his lieutenants, who made sure the others stayed on the road. Many of them mounted the animals they had been leading by the halter, for a better view. These in the last few rows shouted for those in front to sit down, and then, in a sort of crescent moon that extended beyond the road as their amphitheater, they applauded and cheered on their captain when he opened up a large knife and pointed it at the gypsy. Some peasants and their women, on their way back from town, watched in amazement from a distance.

  The two contenders sized each other up, moving in a circle, arms and knives extended, trying to keep the sun out of their eyes. El Gordo moved with surprising agility, observed Melchor. He shouldn’t underestimate him. He wouldn’t be the captain of a party of smugglers from Cuevas Bajas if he didn’t know how to fight and defend his position day after day. These thoughts were running through his mind when El Gordo pounced on him and launched a stab at his liver, which Melchor avoided but not easily. He stumbled as he moved away from the attack.

  “You’re old, Galeote,” El Gordo said as Melchor tried to regain his balance and the shouts and applause from the crowd died down. “Didn’t you just compare me to a woman who wanted to run away? Have you fought with them so much that you’ve forgotten how real men do it?”

  The smugglers’ laughter at their captain’s words infuriated the gypsy, but he knew he shouldn’t get carried away with his rage. He frowned and continued moving around the other, testing him with his weapon.

  “The last woman I fought with,” he lied as he prepared himself for the next attack, which was surely coming, “was the whore I paid with your wife’s medallion. Do you remember it, you sack of fat? I fucked her on your account, thinking about your wife and daughters!”

  His answer, as Melchor expected, was quick in coming. El Gordo paid more attention to the tense silence of his men than to prudence and he launched his knife, cutting through the air. Melchor swerved, went around him and wounded him with a gash at chest height that turned his white shirt the color of the red sash around his enormous belly.