The Barefoot Queen

by Ildefonso Falcones

  “My name is Caridad,” she introduced herself over the noise of the women lined up.

  “Jacinta,” answered the girl.

  Caridad smiled and the other made an effort to return it. With a wave of his truncheon, the sentry allowed them to begin handing the bread out.

  “Why are you here?” asked Caridad as they distributed the crusts of bread. She was curious. She was hoping the woman would say that it had been something petty, like so many others. She didn’t want to have to think of her as a bad woman.

  “What are you waiting for, girl?” One of the prisoners chivvied Jacinta, who had been distracted by Caridad’s question.

  She hadn’t wanted to lie with her employer. That was what Jacinta explained when they finish serving the bread and collecting the baskets as the others ate. Caridad questioned her with her gaze: it seemed a strange crime when most of them were condemned for just the opposite.

  “I gave in on other occasions and I got pregnant. Don Bernabe’s wife beat me and insulted me, she called me a whore and a slut and much more; then she forced me to give the child to the foundling hospital.” The explanation came out of the girl’s mouth as if she still was unable to understand what had happened to her. “Then … I didn’t want to have another child!”

  She stifled a sob. Caridad knew that pain. She stroked the girl’s forearm and felt her tremble.

  Thousands of girls like Jacinta suffered the same fate in the big capital; it was estimated that 20 percent of the working population of Madrid was made up of servants. Young girls were sent by their families from all over Spain to serve in Madrid’s homes or workshops. Most of them were hounded by their employers or their employers’ sons and they couldn’t refuse. Later, if they got pregnant, some of them dared to go to court to get a dowry if the man who had impregnated them was married or a nobleman, or to marry them if he was single. The wives and mothers accused the maids of tempting the men to gain money and position, and that was what Don Bernabé’s wife charged Jacinta with after insulting and beating her. She was just a girl from a small town in Asturias who’d been sold by her parents. She lowered her gaze toward her young, full breasts when the woman pointed to them as the cause of her husband’s lust and resulting mistake. And she felt guilty, standing there, under attack, in the parlor of a house that seemed like a palace compared to the miserable shack she came from. What were her parents going to say? What would the Asturian relative who lived in Madrid and had recommended her think? And so she allowed it. She kept quiet. One night she gave birth in the hospital of Los Desamparados, on Atocha Street as well. There they took in orphans older than seven, piled up in forty beds the decrepit, terminally ill old ladies who came to die in the only place in the capital for them, and there was also a room where the disgraced like Jacinta could give birth. Many women died in childbirth; many babies suffered the same fate. Jacinta survived. The Congregation of God’s Love hid the fruit of her womb in the foundling hospital, where the boy ended up passing away, and the girl went back to service.

  “But if you didn’t want to lie with your master …” insisted Caridad. “Why did they lock you up?”

  “Don Bernabé decided to do it. He said he didn’t want me working in the house, that I was a bad maid and that I was disobedient.”

  That was how Caridad found out that, along with the criminals and the desperate, there was another group of inmates whose only crime had been being born a female subordinate to a man. Women who, like Jacinta, had been locked up simply by the will of a husband, father or employer. Like María, almost an old lady, imprisoned for having sold a shirt without the consent of her man; Ana, who was there for having left her conjugal home without permission; and a third whose only crime was having struck up a friendship with a fisherman. Most of these decent women who ended up in jail because of an accusation from their husbands were sent to the San Nicolás and Pinto jails, but some of them ended up in La Galera. The only difference between them and those who had committed some crime was that the High Court consulted the man who’d asked that they be put away regarding the sentence they should receive. That man also had to pay the costs of maintaining the inmate while she was imprisoned. In some occasions, after some time, they were pardoned and left the jail.

  “Don Bernabé warned me, before I was put in here,” Jacinta confessed, “that when I was ready for him, he would pardon me.”

  Caridad looked the girl’s body up and down. How long would it be before she lost the beauty that the gentleman was so attracted to, locked up in a place like this?

  The day that Herminia asked if she had anyone outside the jail, Caridad, knowing she was being observed by her fellow inmates, kept sewing the hospital gown in silence. Her fingers, so expert in rubbing tobacco leaves and then twisting them delicately, quickly grew accustomed to sewing. She was fine inside there: she was surrounded by many women she could talk and even laugh with; most of them were good people. They fed her, although not much and badly. Some of the inmates complained and even rebelled, which brought them severe punishment. Caridad tried to understand their attitude: she had heard them talk about the hunger and misery that many blamed on their imprisonment and she couldn’t see why they were complaining. She remembered the gruel and never-ending cod that she had eaten, day in and day out for years, in the tobacco plantation.

  And freedom … thought Caridad. That thwarted freedom, which many of them spoke so much of, had only brought her to inhospitable lands and offered her the company of strange people who had eventually abandoned her. What had become of Milagros? Sometimes she thought of the young gypsy girl, although each time she seemed further away. And Melchor … She felt her eyes grow damp and she hid it from the others by feigning a coughing fit. No, freedom wasn’t something that she missed.

  Seville, 1752

  Milagros hadn’t returned to the palace of the Count and Countess of Fuentevieja since the day she had done so to request help in freeing her parents. Almost three years had passed and that girl whom the dour secretary to his excellency had not allowed past the gloomy hallway that led to the kitchens was now at ease in its luxurious rooms. Among those rich noblewomen who regularly bled themselves just to make their cheeks paler and who wore dresses plumped out with crinolines, women with corseted waists and torsos and tall, complicated and profusely ornate hairdos, which threatened to win out over the wire framework that held them up and collapse onto their bejeweled and beribboned heads, the gypsy felt observed and desired by the men invited to the count’s party. His secretary, when receiving her that late February night along with one of the doormen, had directed a lascivious look at her breasts.

  “You.” The gypsy wanted to get revenge on him, as she wondered if he recognized in her the girl he had mocked years earlier. “What are you drooling over?”

  The man reacted by straightening his head, embarrassed.

  “These pearls are not for such swine,” Milagros spat at him.

  Some of the gypsies who accompanied her showed their surprise. The doorman stifled a laugh. The secretary was about to respond when Milagros fixed her eyes on him and challenged him in silence: Do you want to offend me and risk my leaving? How would that make your lord and lady look in front of their guests? The secretary gave in, not before directing a disdainful look at the group of gypsies.

  Of course he hadn’t recognized her! Three years and the birth of a lovely daughter had transformed the splendid body of the eighteen-year-old woman, still young but now full-bodied. Tanned, with pronounced, beautiful features and long chestnut-brown hair falling wildly down her back, everything about her emanated pride. Milagros didn’t need corsets or elegant clothes to show off her charms: a simple green shirt and a long flowered skirt that almost covered her bare feet hinted at the voluptuousness of her legs, shoulders, hips, stomach … and her firm, turgid breasts. The tinkling of her many beads followed the steps of the doorman and the secretary to the large salon where, after dinner, the count and countess and their illustrious guests were wait
ing as they chatted, drank liquors and snorted snuff. After greeting the hosts and all the curious who came over to meet the famous Milagros of Triana, while the gypsies got settled and tuned their guitars, she wandered around among the people, looking at herself in the huge mirrors or indifferently touching some figurine, displaying herself before men and women in the light of the imposing crystal chandelier that hung from the ceiling, flaunting that sensuality that would soon explode.

  The already rhythmic strumming of several guitars demanded her presence in one corner of the parlor expressly cleared for the group of four men and a few other women. La Trianera remained vigilant, her abundant flesh lodged in a wooden armchair carved with gold and upholstered in red silk, as if it were a throne. As soon as she’d seen it her eyes had grown wide and she had forced a couple of servants to bring it over to her from the other side of the room.

  Reyes and Milagros exchanged cold, hard looks; however, all disquiet disappeared from the young gypsy’s mood as soon as she began her first song. That was her universe, a world in which nothing and no one mattered in the slightest. Music, song and dance bewitched her and transported her to ecstasy. She sang. She danced. She shone brightly. She enchanted the audience: men and women who, as the night went on, shed their rigid bearing and their aristocratic airs to join in with the gypsies’ shouts, hoots and clapping.

  In the short breaks, the gypsies from the García family put down their guitars and surrounded her as she flirted with the men who approached her. Pedro wasn’t there; he never was. And Milagros scrutinized the men, seeking in their faces, and in the desire she could smell, which of them was willing to reward her in exchange for a naughty wink, a daring gesture, a smile or a bit more attention than she gave the others. Some coins, a small jewel or whatever accessory they had on them: a silver button, perhaps a well-carved snuffbox. Those civilized, cultured noblemen satisfied their vanity by wooing her shamelessly in front of their wives, who, off to one side as if it were another performance, whispered and laughed at the enormous efforts their husbands made to rise above the others and claim the spoils.

  A pocket watch. That was the trophy she won that night, and it passed quickly into La Trianera’s hands, who weighed it and hid it among her clothes. Milagros allowed the winner to take her hand and brush his lips on the back of it. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a woman with a large gold bow at her neckline that matched a number of other small bows adorning her hair, which was caught up in a bun; she was being congratulated by some of her companions as she gestured in an offhand manner, as if to make light of the fact that her husband had just given away such a jewel. They enjoy it, thought Milagros: affluent nobles, courtly and civilized, united by marriages of inclination.

  The gypsies continued playing their guitars, clapping castanets and palms, and Milagros sang and danced for the nobles. They would keep it up until Don Alfonso and his illustrious guests grew weary, although seeing the soups, cakes, sweets and chocolate that the servants continued to serve, Milagros knew it would go on for a long time. And it did: the party lasted until dawn, long after she had grown exhausted and had given up her spot to the women who accompanied her, who struggled in vain to emulate her.

  La Trianera, who was dozing on her throne, got up for the first time in the whole night when Don Alfonso brought the party to a close. The old gypsy woman woke up instinctively the minute the count directed a barely perceptible look toward his butler. The count had to pay them, although it was he who decided on the price. Many guests had already retired. Among those who remained, some had lost their noble bearing owing to the liquor. Don Alfonso, the bag of money in his hand, didn’t seem to be too drunk and neither did the man with whom he approached the group of gypsies.

  “An enjoyable evening,” the count congratulated them, extending the bag.

  Reyes ripped it from his hand.

  “An interesting night,” added his escort.

  Without paying attention to La Trianera, Don Alfonso addressed Milagros. “I believe I have already introduced you to Don Antonio Heredia, Marquis of Rafal, here visiting in Seville.”

  The gypsy observed the man: old, powdered white wig, serious face, open black dress coat, narrow and embroidered on the cuffs, waistcoat, lace tie, britches, white stockings and low shoes with silver buckles. Milagros hadn’t noticed him; he hadn’t been one of those who had besieged her.

  “Don Antonio is the Chief Magistrate of Madrid,” the count added after giving the gypsy a few seconds.

  Milagros acknowledged his words with a slight bow of her head.

  “As Chief Magistrate,” Don Antonio then explained, “I am also the exclusive Judge Protector of Madrid’s comic theaters.”

  Before the Chief Magistrate’s expectant expression, Milagros wondered if she should act impressed by his revelation. She arched her eyebrows to signal her lack of comprehension.

  “I was impressed by your voice and”—the Chief Magistrate turned a couple of fingers in the air—“your way of dancing. I want you to come to Madrid to sing and dance in the Coliseo del Príncipe theater. You will form part of the company—”

  “I …” the gypsy interrupted him.

  Then it was the count who arched his eyebrows. The Chief Magistrate lifted his head. Milagros was silent, not knowing what to say. Go to Madrid? She turned toward the gypsies, behind them, as if waiting for some help from them.

  “Woman …”—the count’s voice sounded harsh in her ears—“Don Antonio has just made you a generous offer. You don’t want to offend the Chief Magistrate to His Majesty?”

  “I …” stammered Milagros again, having lost all traces of the haughtiness she had shown throughout the night.

  Reyes took a step forward. “Please excuse her, your excellencies. She is just overwhelmed … and confused. Your worships will understand that she is not used to such a great honor. She will sing in Madrid, of course,” she declared.

  Milagros couldn’t take her eyes off the Chief Magistrate’s face, whose rigid features gradually relaxed as he listened to La Trianera’s words.

  “Excellent decision,” he said.

  “My secretary and Don Antonio’s will take care of arranging everything,” the count then added. “Tomorrow …” He stopped, smiled and looked at one of the large windows through which the first rays of light were already coming in. “Well, today,” he corrected himself. “You are expected before nightfall.”

  The aristocrats allowed her no more time than that. They bade the gypsies farewell, and with one man resting his hand on the other’s shoulder, chatting, they headed toward the room’s large double doors. The count’s belly laugh woke Milagros from her shock; they were the only ones left in the parlor, except for the butler who was watching them and a couple of servants who, as soon as the echoes of laughter died down in the halls of the great palace, moved away from the walls where they had been standing solemnly still. One sighed; the other stretched to loosen his muscles. The sunlight and the candles that were still lit in the grand chandelier revealed a room begging to be returned to the splendor it had received them with: the furniture was jumbled; there were glasses here and there, cups stained with chocolate, trays, little plates with leftover food and even fans and articles of clothing left by the women.

  “Madrid?” Milagros managed to ask then.

  “Madrid!” La Trianera’s voice reverberated against the room’s high ceiling. “Or do you plan to offend the Chief Magistrate and cause another rift between us and the illustrious of the kingdom?”

  Milagros frowned at La Trianera. Yes, I will go to Madrid, she convinced herself. Anywhere that’s far from you and yours, she thought.

  THEY PREPARED to leave for Madrid in a large wagon that traveled between Seville and the capital once a week, covered with a canvas awning and pulled by six mules. The wagon was designed to transport fifteen passengers and their respective luggage, and they gathered around it that March morning of 1752.

  This time, the gypsies were going to leave Triana
with all their permits and passports in order, signed and sealed by as many authorities as were necessary, and with the safeguard of none other than the Chief Magistrate of Madrid himself, as stated in the letter his secretary had issued the day following the party—though not before he’d expressed his surprise at the old gypsy woman the Garcías tried to include in the retinue. “Otherwise who will take care of the girl while she sings for his excellency?” had argued Rafael the patriarch. The secretary had shaken his head, but he didn’t really care how many gypsies went to Madrid, so he agreed. However, he was quick to correct the reference made to his master.

  “Make no mistake,” he warned. “The woman will not sing for the Lord Chief Magistrate; she will do so in the Coliseo del Príncipe for all those who attend the comedies there.”

  “But some day his excellency will attend, right?” Rafael García winked an eye at the functionary, trying to make him complicit in the story that Reyes, his wife, had exaggerated when telling of the scene in the count’s palace.

  The secretary sighed. “And even the King,” he said sarcastically. “His Majesty, too.”

  Rafael García’s face fell and he held back his reply. “How much money will the Lord Chief Magistrate pay her?” he asked instead.

  The secretary smiled maliciously, annoyed at having to deal with gypsies. “I don’t know, but I’m sure she won’t take the leading lady’s place. I suppose she will receive a wage of some seven or eight reals per day she performs.”

  “Seven reals?” protested El Conde. The pocket watch Milagros had been given the night before was worth a hundred times that!