The Barefoot Queen

by Ildefonso Falcones

  “That’s all?” asked Milagros, surprised.

  “Yes,” answered the old Carmona woman. “Think about it, girl,” she added before turning her back on her.

  As the people went into the courtyard and passed her by, some even pushing her, Milagros remained still. She tried to understand her mother’s words. What should she think? She already knew she was a Vega! I love you, is what she would have said to her, that’s the first thing she would have conveyed. She would have liked …

  “That includes it all,” she heard María say as the healer grabbed her by the forearm and pulled her away from the entrance.

  “What?”

  “Those words include everything your mother wanted to tell you: that you are a Vega. That you are a gypsy, from a family proud to be gypsies, and that you must be strong and brave like her. That you must live like a gypsy, and with the gypsies. That you must fight for your freedom. That you must respect the elders and follow their law. That—”

  “Doesn’t she love me?” interrupted Milagros. “She didn’t say that she loves me or misses me … not even that she wanted to be with me.”

  “Does she need to tell you that, girl? Do you doubt it?”

  Milagros turned her head toward Old María. Caridad was listening to the conversation in front of the other two, who were now up against the wall of El Conde’s house as the parade of men and women continued.

  “Why not? I know that I’m a Vega, what need was there for her to remind me of that?”

  “Yes, girl, but that, that you are a Vega, you could forget someday. But you will take your mother’s love to the grave with you, whether you want to or not.” The girl furrowed her brow pensively. María let a few seconds pass and then said, “Let’s go inside or we won’t get a spot.”

  They joined the gypsies who were already gathered in front of the door and were entering gradually, packed tightly together.

  “You, no,” the old woman warned Caridad. “Wait for us in the house.”

  The courtyard was full; the stairs to the upper floors were filled; the corridors that led to the patio were full. Only the central circle, where the elders sat presided over by El Conde, had any breathing room. Three chairs stood empty as evidence of those who remained in the arsenals. When not a single person more could fit in, and some were even climbing up on bars and windows, Rafael García started the council.

  “We calculate …” He lifted a hand and waited for silence. “We calculate,” he then repeated, “that close to half of the arrested gypsies have been freed.”

  A murmur of disapproval greeted his words. El Conde waited again, running his gaze over those present and coming across Old María and Milagros, who had managed to slip into the front rows. He pointed to the girl; the finger that once flaunted an impressive gold ring was now bare, since the seizure of goods.

  “What are you doing here?” His voice silenced the comments that could still be heard.

  Many turned toward the women; others, from behind, asked what was going on, and some leaned over the corridor railings to be able to see better.

  “You cannot be in the alley,” he added.

  Milagros felt herself shrink and she moved even closer to the old healer.

  “Rafael,” intervened María, “you have to put aside your grudge. Don’t you think the situation merits it? The girl’s parents are still imprisoned and—”

  “And they’ll stay that way!” interrupted El Conde. “It’s their fault we’ve been arrested and find ourselves in this situation, without goods, without tools, without food or money, without … without clothes even.” El Conde indicated his raggedy shirt, pulling on it with both hands. The murmurs rose again. “And all because of the Vegas, and others like them, insisting on staying away from the payos and not following their laws.”

  “The only law that we have to follow is gypsy law, our law!” screamed the healer, silencing everyone.

  The gypsies debated among themselves: they felt that it should be that way, that it had always been that way. That was what they all wanted! But …

  “Leave her be.” It was Rosario who spoke, addressing her husband, the Carmona patriarch seated to the left of El Conde. “That law of which María Vega speaks is what led the girl’s mother to defend us in Málaga. And she will continue to do so, I know it.” Then Rosario searched among those present for Josefa Vargas, Alejandro’s mother, the young man who had lost his life because of Milagros’s whim. “What do you say?” she asked her after finding her in the crowd.

  The woman spoke slowly, as if she was reliving the scene. “Ana Vega fought with a soldier who dared to touch my daughter.” Milagros felt her little hairs stand on end and her throat seize up. “It cost her a beating. I don’t know whether the Garcías or the Vegas are right about what law we should follow, but leave her daughter alone.”

  “So be it,” added the Vargas patriarch, Alejandro’s great-grandfather.

  Those words meant Milagros was pardoned; Rafael García could do nothing. Near him, La Trianera, his wife, shot him a critical look. I warned you, it seemed to be saying. El Conde stammered for a few seconds, but he took up the thread of the meeting again.

  “I do know what laws we should follow. The gypsy law, of course, our law. Nobody will put the García blood in doubt!” he exclaimed, challenging María. “But we also must follow the payo laws. There is no contradiction in that. Above all, we must go to their church, even if it is a trick. We thought about it,” he added, pointing to the other patriarchs, “and we decided that we should create a brotherhood …”

  “A brotherhood?” cried out an indignant voice.

  “It was the priests who arrested us!” shouted another. “They are the ones who free us or keep us imprisoned.”

  María shook her head.

  “Yes,” stated El Conde as if he were answering her directly. “A brotherhood of penitents. The Gypsy Brotherhood. Just like the payos have, like the Brotherhood of All-Powerful Christ, of the Five Stigmata of Christ or of the Holy Christ of the Three Falls; like any of the many brotherhoods that participate in the Holy Week processions. It won’t be easy, but we have to do it. And all this”—he pointed to María, who continued shaking her head—“while still complying with our laws and without renouncing our own beliefs, do you understand, crone?”

  “And how are we going to pay for all that?” asked a gypsy.

  “The brotherhoods are very expensive,” warned another. “You have to get a church to accept us, buy the statues, take care of them, provide the candles and lanterns, pay the priests … A procession can cost up to two thousand reals!”

  “That’s a different question,” answered El Conde. “We are just talking about establishing it. It will take us time, years probably; besides which, the way things are now, they won’t allow us to. And it’s true, we don’t have money. They aren’t going to return the goods they seized from us.”

  El Conde used his speech to deliver that bit of news. That was the real reason they were holding this council meeting: the gypsies wanted to be updated on the negotiations with Seville’s chief justice officer. Now the audience started shouting.

  Rafael García and the other patriarchs waited for everyone to calm down. “Let’s get everything back ourselves!” he said finally.

  “No.” It was Inocencio, the head of the Carmonas, who objected. “One of us stabbed a baker from Santo Domingo because he didn’t give back two mules. He was imprisoned.”

  “We aren’t going to get anything,” lamented the Vargas patriarch.

  Rafael García took the floor again. “They threated to lock us up in La Carraca again if we reclaim our goods.”

  “But the King said …!”

  “It’s true. The King said they should give them back to us. And? Are you planning on going to get them?”

  The gypsies started arguing amongst themselves again.

  “This is the law you want us to comply with, Rafael García?” It was María’s voice, again, that rose above the arg
uments.

  El Conde waited, his eyes fixed on the old healer. “Yes, crone,” he spat angrily after a moment. Milagros shrank with fear. “That’s the one. The same law they’ve been applying to us all our lives. Does it really surprise you that much? The payos have always done what they want. Whoever wants to can go to the Royal Court to reclaim their goods. I won’t do it. You already heard what’s happening in Málaga with the women. In La Carraca they treated us worse than the Moorish slaves. No, I won’t claim them; I would rather work for the Sevillian blacksmiths. They need us. They will give us what we need. My grandchildren won’t rot in that arsenal working their entire lives, like dogs, for the King and his damn Armada.”

  Milagros followed Rafael García’s hand, which he had pointed toward his family as he was speaking. Pedro! Pedro García! She hadn’t noticed his presence among so many people. Just like his Carmona cousins, he was gaunt and frail, and yet … his entire being radiated strength and pride.

  The girl didn’t hear the rest of the council meeting. Selling out to the Sevillian blacksmiths? They’d bleed them dry. But what other choice did they have? Milagros couldn’t take her eyes off Pedro García. His grandfather, Rafael, surprised everyone by announcing that he was negotiating with the payos so his family could start working as soon as possible. Finally, the young man realized he was being observed. How could he fail to notice that gaze, which seemed to want to reach out and touch him? He turned toward Milagros. “What will happen to those who are still in custody?” someone asked. The elders couldn’t hide their pessimism; they shook their lowered heads or pursed their lips as if unable to answer. “We will insist that they are freed,” promised El Conde without conviction. Pedro García remained hieratic on the other side of the courtyard, in front of Milagros, who was feeling slightly faint-kneed with anxiety. “How are we going to insist on their freedom if we can’t even claim what belongs to us?” cried out a fat gypsy woman. When the gypsies again started arguing, the girl thought she saw Pedro squint his eyes briefly before looking away from her. Did that mean something? Had he noticed her?

  They had no food. The two coins that Santiago had given them only lasted a few days. Nor could they go to the other gypsies: everybody was in the same boat; few had any money and they all had many mouths to feed in their own families. The negotiations with the Sevillian blacksmiths were dragging on and the smiths on the alley continued working with portable ram-skin bellows. The authorities, however, had decided to give the gypsies coal and they worked the iron, hammering it over simple rocks that eventually broke. They were also intimidated: the threat of being arrested and returned to Málaga or La Carraca dissuaded men and women from stealing—even though there were those who still risked it—and from the rest of their tricks. Women and children just joined the army of beggars that populated the streets of Seville to await the meager coin the Church gave out. But to get any—except on one narrow street where the Carthusian monks managed to get them to line up for their alms and exit on the other end once they had received it—they had to fight not only with the truly lost causes, but also with the innumerable artisans, bricklayers and laborers who preferred living off the charity of the generous city to working up a sweat. Seville was swarming with the voluntarily unemployed. Even what had previously been the surest thing—stealing tobacco powder—had failed.

  In the old tobacco factory in San Pedro, in front of the church of the same name, more than a thousand people worked in shifts night and day. It was the largest manufacturing industry in Seville and one of the most important in the entire kingdom: it had stables for two hundred horses who worked the mills, its own jail, chapel and all the spaces needed for working the tobacco: receiving and storing the bundles of leaf tobacco, opening up the bundles, stretching the tobacco out on the roofs, storing it again once it was dry, grinding it in the mills, sifting it in the sieves, washing, drying again and then giving it a very fine last grinding with stone mills. However, since the seventeenth century, the factory had been growing haphazardly with the increasing demand for tobacco, which in fifty years had multiplied six times for powder consumption and fifteen times for cigars. The factory had become a neighborhood inside the city, composed of a confusing network of passageways and narrow streets and not very useful rooms, so they had begun to build a new factory outside the city walls, beside the port of Jerez, which would be able to deal with the surge in cigar demand, but the construction, begun twenty years ago, still hadn’t got past the base. Meanwhile, the San Pedro factory had to continue operating and, above all, controlling the stealing and fraud. Their security procedures were routine but effective: when they left work, in a line, one by one, all the workers were thoroughly searched by the door guards looking for tobacco. In addition, the superintendent named one or more workers to choose some of those who had already been searched for a second control. If they found tobacco on a worker, the guard who hadn’t found it in the first control would be fired and substituted by the one who had; and the well-paid guard jobs were highly sought after.

  The recently freed gypsies were the ones most often subject to second searches. And one of them, thinking only of the need to feed his family, didn’t take the necessary precautions when creating the sleeve of pig intestine that, jammed with tobacco powder, he had introduced into his anus. “Take off your clothes. Come here. Sit down. Now stand. Your shoes, take them off too. Bend over so we can see your hair. Bend down more. Get on your knees.” And the compressed block of tobacco powder, with all that moving around, ending up tearing. The gypsy howled in pain, doubled over with his hands gripping his stomach. The guard was surprised to see powdered tobacco diarrhea sliding down the thief’s bare thighs. Some time later, the gypsy was condemned to death, which was the punishment from then on for all who stole tobacco using that method.

  The news of the gypsy and the torn sleeve reached Milagros the same day she had decided to go to request the support of the Countess of Fuentevieja. On the way to the palace she remembered her grandfather, who had already foreseen that sooner or later that would happen. Where could he be? Was he even alive? She was surprised to find herself smiling at the memory of his warnings about the tobacco that came out of gypsy bums. She hadn’t smiled since arriving in Triana—they’d had nothing but bad news and problems—but, since they had exchanged glances during the council of elders, she’d had hopes about Pedro García. She spied on the alley from the window of her house to see him and she had even managed to come up with a way to cross paths with him, but the young man didn’t seem to notice her. Yet she didn’t smile when she imagined herself strolling and chatting with him; she only … she only felt a worrying, empty feeling in her stomach that disappeared as soon as María’s complaining woke her from her daydreaming.

  As for her friends, many of them had come back from the prison in Málaga, all of them dirty and without their adornments. Their clothes were in rags and sadness had taken hold in their souls. None of them laughed anymore. There was no place for parties in the alley or for gatherings or adventures with girlfriends; the only thing that interested them, just like their mothers, sisters, aunts and cousins, was the thought of getting their hands on some money.

  The countess wouldn’t see her. Old María waited out on the street. They had decided that Caridad would not go with them, and Milagros had trouble getting into the palace through the tradesman’s entrance.

  “The daughter of Ana Vega? Who is Ana Vega?” a servant girl asked her after looking her up and down peevishly.

  After much insisting, someone finally recognized the gypsy who read their palms and they allowed her into a hall that led to the kitchens. The countess was getting dressed, they told her. Wait? It would take hours; the hairdresser hadn’t even arrived!

  They left her there, and Milagros was forced to dodge the constant flow of servants and suppliers coming in and out. Her stomach growled over the baskets filled with meats and vegetables, fruits and cakes that passed by her: they could eat for an entire year with all that f
ood! Finally, someone must have complained about the barefoot, dirty little gypsy who was getting in the way, and then someone else must have remembered her and talked to a third, who in turn spoke to a butler so that, in the end, the count’s secretary appeared, grim-faced, as if she were a minor irritation that had to be dealt with rapidly. It was a cutting, quick conversation, right there in the hall, although no one dared to pass by while it was going on. “Their excellencies have already interceded on behalf of the gypsies,” affirmed the secretary after listening to Milagros nervously struggle to keep her tone of voice even. For whom? He didn’t know, he would have to review the correspondence and he was unwilling to do so, but there had been several letters, he had prepared them himself, he commented indifferently. “Two more? Your parents? Why? Friends of the countess?” he repeated incredulously.

  “Friends … no,” rectified Milagros at the scornful sneer with which the man dressed head to toe in black received the idea. “But they have been in her private drawing rooms, telling fortunes to her and the little counte … her excellency’s daughter and her excellency’s friends, and they danced for the count and countess and their guests in Triana, and they rewarded them with money—”

  “And if they’ve enjoyed such privileges from their excellencies,” said the secretary, interrupting the girl’s hurried speech, “why weren’t your parents freed along with the rest of the gypsies?”

  Milagros hesitated and the man sensed her indecision. She remained silent and the man in black insisted again. What does it matter? thought the girl.

  “They weren’t married by the Church,” she said.

  The secretary shook his head, failing to hide his smug expression at being able to get the lords out of the petitions of another detestable beggar.

  “Girl, it’s one thing interceding on behalf of gypsies who comply with the kingdom’s laws, that … that is nothing more than a hobby for their excellencies.” He humiliated her by fluttering a hand affectedly. “But they will never help those who violate the precepts of our Holy Church.”