The Barefoot Queen

by Ildefonso Falcones

  The music began with liturgical hymns: music and songs in the Italian style that, since the arrival of the Bourbons to the Spanish throne, sought more to please the parishioners than to inspire them to spiritual passion as composers had done before with their use of counterpoint; reason versus ear, that was the fashionable discussion among the choirmasters of the large cathedrals. Milagros found the serenity she needed in the light melody. Standing still beside the musicians, it was as if they were speaking to her before anyone else; their notes reached her ears clearly, free of whispers, noises or murmurs. She closed her eyes, and let herself be carried away by the marvelous polyphony of voices from the boys’ choir until she was wrapped in a musical delirium of which, for the first time in a long while, she wasn’t the protagonist.

  Then, suddenly, the marvelous choir that filled the church stopped singing and gave way to the words of the officiants. When Milagros heard the voice—supposedly gentle but actually gruff—she opened her eyes, which were damp with tears she hadn’t even felt well up. She looked around her. Her vision was blurred but she did nothing about it, as if she wanted to extend the moment she had just experienced. Then she sensed his presence; she sensed it just as a few moments earlier she had vibrated to the sound of the violins. Although her eyes kept showing her a blurry spot between Rafael and Inocencio, she knew it was he. Finally she wiped them with her forearm and there he was: her father’s smile lessened the effect of his emaciated appearance, the dried wound that crossed one of his cheeks to his forehead, his swollen black eye and the improvised, absurd clothes it was clear he had been lent to wear to the church. Milagros wanted to run to him, but he stopped her with a gesture. Sing, he mouthed. And Mother? she mouthed back to him. His expression froze her blood. Suddenly Milagros realized: the choirmaster was looking at her incredulously, as were those in the chapel and even the priests in front of the high altar; the singers.… The entire church was staring at her! She hadn’t come in when she should have. She trembled.

  “Sing, my girl,” encouraged her father before the people’s whispering broke the silence.

  Milagros, spellbound by the immense, enveloping love she felt in those three little words, took a step forward. The choirmaster signaled for the musicians to begin again. The first note came out of the gypsy girl’s throat cracked and timid. The second swelled when she heard her father’s sobs as he listened to that voice he thought he’d never hear again. She sang to the newborn child. When the choirboys launched into the chorus she had a chance to run her eyes over the faithful and she could tell they were captivated. Later, when the choir stopped, she extended her hands and straightened up as if she wanted her voice to come from the very ribs of the arches of Santa Ana’s vaulted ceiling to continue singing the miracle of Jesus’s birth.

  The parish priest had to clear his throat a couple of times before continuing the mass when Milagros ended the Christmas carol, but she only paid attention to her father, who struggled to hold back his tears and remain dignified.

  At the back of the church, crammed between two men in the huge crowd, Caridad, with gooseflesh, wondered what had happened to Old María and Melchor. Even though it was in a church, she was sure they would have enjoyed hearing Milagros sing.

  He could just disappear, as he used to do in Triana. Nobody had ever asked him for any explanations. He could do it right then, while Nicolasa was in Jabugo. She would return, find the shack empty and she would understand that he had finally followed through on his threats. Didn’t you tell me never to trust a gypsy? You’re lying, you’ll stay with me.… Those were the woman’s replies, sometimes when she wanted to downplay the importance of Melchor’s threats, and other times as if she were searching in his eyes for his true intentions. He had told her to let him die. He had actually said that! He was prepared for it. He’d warned her that he would leave her and she’d decided to ignore him: she’d brought him to the shack, at death’s door, as Nicolasa told him when he regained consciousness after quite a few days of fevers and flirting with death. She had found a surgeon for him, she also said, and she’d spent all of the money from El Gordo that Melchor had left on paying him.

  “All of it?” shouted Melchor from the mattress he was lying on. The pain over the loss of his stash was worse than the excruciating tear he felt in the sutures of his wound.

  “Surgeons don’t want to heal gypsies,” she answered. “In the end, what does it matter? If you had died you wouldn’t have it either. I did what I thought was best.”

  “But I would have died rich, woman,” he complained.

  “So?”

  “Who knows what lies beyond death? I’m sure they let us gypsies come back for what’s ours so we can pay the devil.”

  Two months later, when Nicolasa could carry him from the mattress to the chair beside the door to the shack for some air and the surgeon stopped visiting because he considered him cured, the woman confessed to Melchor that she had also had to give him El Gordo’s horse … and her two gold coins.

  “He threatened to denounce you to the constable.”

  Enraged, Melchor made as if to get up from the chair, but he couldn’t even move his legs and almost fell to the floor. The dogs barked before Nicolasa scolded him. It would still be another couple of months before he was walking with ease.

  “Wait until spring arrives,” she recommended after another attempt to leave. “You are still very weak, winter is hard and the mountains dangerous. The wolves are hungry. Besides, perhaps they’ve freed some of your people; take your time.”

  Nicolasa had been passing along to him the news she’d gathered in Jabugo about the gypsies’ fate; backpackers and smugglers knew things. First she was forced to confirm El Gordo’s words that had almost cost Melchor his life: yes, all the gypsies in the kingdom had been arrested at the same time; Seville, and Triana with it, had been no exception. Melchor didn’t ask her why she hadn’t told him at the time: he already knew the answer. In November, however, Nicolasa came running to tell him the good news: they were freeing them!

  “I’m positive,” she reiterated. “People are talking about parties of gypsies from Cáceres, Trujillo, Zafra and Villanueva de la Serena who have returned to their people and to the tobacco trade. They have seen them and talked to them.

  “Take your time,” she again begged him that day.

  Nicolasa was only asking for time. Why? she asked herself—to no reply. Melchor’s mind was made up; she saw it in his eyes, in the efforts that the lazy gypsy, who used to spend hours sitting by the door of the shack, made to walk again; in the melancholy tangible in him when he looked out onto the horizon. And what about her? She just prayed for one more day … she prayed that, when she returned from wherever she’d gone, she would still find him there. Secretly, she had ordered the dogs to stay with Melchor, but the animals, sensitive to her uneasiness, disobeyed her and stayed glued to her legs, as if promising her that they would never let her down. What did she want that time for? she asked herself whenever she had a fateful feeling and came running from the pigpen or the salt house to make sure, hiding in the shadows, that he hadn’t yet abandoned her? But she loved him; she had cried over him the tears she had denied her own children during the endless days when she was forced to nurse their fevers and delirium; she had fed him like a baby bird; she had washed his body and dressed his wound and sores, made a thousand promises to Christ and all the saints if they let him live! Time … she would have given one of her hands for just another day by his side!

  “OK,” yielded Melchor after reconsidering. He felt he should leave even with the risk of cold and his weak state. His instinct told him that this was the moment, but Nicolasa … the woman’s dirty face convinced him. “I’ll leave when spring comes,” he stated, sure that would be the end of the discussion.

  “You aren’t tricking me?”

  “You don’t seem to want to understand, woman. How would you know that I’m not lying if I reassured you about that?”

  BEFORE SPRING arrived,
Milagros heard—without daring to look out of the window—the pandemonium grow in the San Miguel alley with the hundreds of gypsies who had come for her wedding. Despite the circumstances, the Garcías and the Carmonas inviting their scattered families brought on a massive influx of gypsies from all corners of Andalusia and even further: some had even come from Catalonia! Milagros looked at her simple dress: white, like the paya brides, adorned with some colorful ribbons and flowers; after the mass she would change it for a green and red one that her father had given her.

  A few tears ran down the girl’s cheeks. Her father came over to her and took her by the shoulders.

  “Are you ready?”

  José Carmona had supported the commitment made by Inocencio; he was aware that his freedom was a result of that wedding and he wouldn’t break the patriarch’s word.

  “I wish she were here with me,” answered Milagros.

  José squeezed his daughter’s shoulders, as if he didn’t dare come closer and dirty her white dress. Just as La Trianera had predicted, Ana had not been freed and José had received the news with concealed satisfaction. Ana Vega would never have allowed the wedding, and the arguments and problems would have multiplied. With Ana in Málaga and Melchor absent, José enjoyed his daughter as he never remembered having enjoyed her in his life. Overjoyed with her engagement to Pedro García, Milagros had shared her happiness with her father; since he had come back from La Carraca, José lived enraptured by the affection his daughter constantly showed him. Why would he want them to free his wife? Yet, in order to calm Milagros, they both went to make claims to the authorities, though their attempts were in vain. What did it matter that this Ana Vega was married and there were witnesses who swore that she had lived according to the laws? Impossible! They were lying! She had been condemned by the Málaga courts and since then the list of denunciations and punishments she had racked up was endless.

  “The day before the Chief Magistrate of Málaga answered our letter,” a functionary told them as he tapped on the papers spread out on his desk, “your wife pounced on a soldier and bit off half of his ear. How do you expect them to release such an animal? Be careful about what you say, girl!” the man said before Milagros replied. “Be careful it isn’t you who ends up in the city jail and your father back in La Carraca.”

  Milagros asked her father if they could go to Málaga to try to see Ana.

  “We aren’t allowed to travel,” he objected. “In a little while you are going to be married, what would happen if they arrested you?”

  She lowered her eyes. “But …”

  “I’m trying to get to her through third parties,” lied José. “We are all doing everything possible, my girl, don’t you doubt it.”

  José Carmona was one of the last gypsies freed. Beginning in 1750, reports of pressures from the gypsies to influence the secret files were brought before the Council, and the authorities considered that all those who hadn’t passed the test before the month of December, should be considered guilty … of being gypsies. From that point on, thousands of them, Ana Vega included, were facing lifelong slavery.

  “Your mother will always be with us,” said José on the day of her wedding, trying to sound convincing. “She’ll come back one day! I’m sure of it!”

  Milagros frowned; she wanted to believe her father. His assertion echoed strangely inside the Carmona house, unlike the rest of their conversation where they’d battled to hear each other over the noise. Father and daughter looked at each other: silence reigned in the alley.

  “They’re coming,” announced José.

  Reyes and Bartola for the Garcías; Rosario and another old woman named Felisa for the Carmonas. The four gypsy women had solemnly crossed the alley toward the house of the father of the bride. The people made way for them and fell silent as they approached the building. The moment their figures vanished beyond the shared courtyard at the entrance, men and women crowded around in silence beneath Milagros’s window.

  “I love you, my girl,” said José Carmona in farewell when he heard the gypsy women’s footsteps already at the open door. He didn’t need the women to send him away. “Let’s go, morena,” he added to Caridad, already heading down the stairs.

  Caridad gave Milagros a forced smile—she knew why the old women were coming, the girl had told her—and she followed in José’s footsteps. After finding out about how she’d helped his daughter during the arrest and subsequent flight, José had finally accepted Caridad’s living with them.

  La Trianera didn’t beat about the bush. “Are you ready, Milagros?” she inquired.

  She didn’t dare to look the women in the eyes. How different it would have been if Old María were among them! She would be grumbling and complaining, but in the end she would treat her with a tenderness Milagros wasn’t expecting from those women. She had begged her father to search for María, to find out what had happened to her. She also kept asking any new gypsies who appeared in Triana about the healer, in case she had decided to go somewhere else. Nobody knew anything; nobody confirmed her suspicions.

  “Are you ready?” repeated La Trianera, interrupting her thoughts.

  “Yes,” she stammered. Was she ready?

  “Lie down on the mattress and lift up your skirt,” she heard them order her.

  That young scoundrel in Camas had hurt her with his groping, when he stuck one of his disgusting fingers inside her. She had felt disgraced … and guilty! And at that moment she was overtaken by fear again.

  “Milagros,” Rosario Carmona spoke sweetly to her, “there are a lot of people waiting in the alley. Let’s not make them impatient, thinking that … Lie down, please.”

  And what if that boy in Camas had taken her virginity? She couldn’t marry Pedro; there would be no wedding.

  She lay down on the mattress and, with her eyelids trembling from the effort of keeping them closed, she lifted her skirt and petticoats and revealed her pubis. She felt someone kneel beside her. She didn’t dare to look.

  A few seconds passed and no one did anything. What …?

  “Open your legs,” La Trianera said, interrupting her thoughts again. “How do you expect …?”

  “Reyes!” Rosario reprimanded her for her tone. “Girl, open your legs, please.”

  Milagros half opened them timidly. La Trianera lifted her head and shook it in Rosario Carmona’s direction: What do I do now? she asked with an impertinent gesture. A few days earlier, Rosario had tried to talk to Milagros. “I already know what it is,” she answered, avoiding the conversation. Every gypsy girl knew that! Besides, Old María had told her what it involved, but she had never prepared her for it or gone into detail, and now, lying on the straw mattress, naked from the waist down, she was immodestly showing her private parts to four women who at that moment felt like total strangers to her. Not even her mother had seen her like that!

  “Girl …” Rosario was starting to beg.

  But La Trianera interrupted her, grabbing Milagros’s legs and opening them as best she could.

  “Now pull up your knees,” she ordered, accompanying her words with a firm hand movement.

  “Don’t bite your lip, girl!” warned another of the women.

  Milagros obeyed and stopped doing it just as La Trianera’s fingers, wrapped in a handkerchief, began touching her vulva until they found the entrance to her vagina, where she drove them in with such force that she felt like she’d been stabbed: she arched her back, with her fists tightly closed at her sides and tears mixing with the cold sweat that soaked her face. As she felt the fingers scratching at her vagina she held back a howl of pain. She opened her mouth extremely wide when La Trianera dug inside her.

  “Don’t scream!” demanded Rosario.

  “Bear it!” admonished another.

  A sharp prick. The fingers came out from inside her.

  Milagros let her back drop down onto the straw mattress. The heads of the four gypsy women hovered over the handkerchief while Milagros filled her lungs with the air s
he had desperately needed from the very beginning. She kept her eyes closed and moaned as she shook her head from side to side on the straw mattress.

  “Good, Milagros!” she heard Rosario say.

  “Bravo, girl!” the others congratulated her.

  And while Rosario pulled down her skirt and petticoats, Reyes García headed to the window and triumphantly showed the bloodstained handkerchief to the gypsies waiting below. The cheers were immediate.

  MILAGROS HAD kept them hidden and surprised Caridad with them before leaving for the church, after La Trianera and the other three gypsy women allowed her father and her friend back into the apartment: a coral necklace, a little gold bracelet and a mantilla of black satin patterned with colorful flowers that she had borrowed for the wedding. The girl’s mouth widened into a smile when she entered the Santa Ana church and saw Caridad, seated in the front row beside her father, trying to remain as erect as the gypsies who surrounded her. She was wearing her red dress, the mantilla over her shoulders and the jewels on her neck and wrist. What the girl didn’t notice was how forced the smile Caridad gave her was: the morena sensed that after she was married, their friendship would wane.

  “Will we still be friends after the wedding?” Caridad had dared to ask her, in a trembling voice, after a long circumlocution plagued with throat clearing and stammering, a few days before the wedding.

  “Of course!” declared Milagros. “Pedro will be my husband, my man, but you will always be my best friend. How could I forget what we’ve been through together?”