The Barefoot Queen

by Ildefonso Falcones

  She never knew what happened to the runaway—Sebastiana she seemed to remember was her name—not even in La Galera when the doctors decided to send her back there. She inquired about her, but nobody could tell her anything. “Good luck, Sebastiana!” she repeated to herself, as she had that Sunday night when the sister who guarded over them noticed her absence and sounded the alarm. She envied her. As she got better she even considered running away herself, but she didn’t know where to go, what to do … Tears slid down her face when she was reunited with Frasquita and the other inmates, who received her with tenderness, feeling sorry that she had suffered a punishment that all of them equally deserved. She searched for Herminia with her gaze and found her to one side, hidden among the others. Caridad gave her a smile. Many of the inmates turned their heads toward the small blonde and opened a path through the group. After a few moments of silence, some encouraged her; others, who were behind Herminia, pushed her gently; they all applauded once the two women were standing face to face. The blonde went to embrace her, but Caridad stopped her—she couldn’t bear having her back touched; instead they kissed amid tears and heightened emotion, both theirs and that of many of the other women.

  What was I thinking? What would I do outside of here? Caridad asked herself in that moment. La Galera was still her home and the prisoners her family. Even the sentry and the ever-dour warden treated her with a certain benevolence, recalling the trail of blood she had left behind when she was taken to the hospital. Caridad hadn’t instigated the mutiny or participated more than the others, they both knew that. That compassion translated into her exemption from the harder tasks and a certain tolerance when the prisoners paid with their own money for some oil and rosemary branches to prepare a salve they used to soothe Caridad’s deformed and still badly damaged back.

  It was Herminia who offered to massage her friend after the guards extinguished the few smoky tallow candles that struggled to illuminate the women’s gallery.

  The scars that crossed her back didn’t hurt her, what hurt her were her friend’s hands slipping gently over her back: the sweetness with which she did it brought to her mind feelings that she thought she had forgotten. Gypsy! she thought, night after night, What has become of you?

  “You needn’t go on,” Caridad told her one night. “The wounds have scarred over; the oil and the herbs cost money and they won’t make them any better.”

  “But …” objected Herminia.

  “Please, I beg of you.”

  ONE DAY Herminia was freed. Someone claiming to be her cousin came to get her as soon as her sentence was up. Caridad knew who that cousin was, the same one who had given her the two strings of garlic she’d been arrested and sentenced for. Some of the brotherhoods that helped the unfortunate showed an interest in placing Caridad somewhere as a maid, but she remained stubbornly silent, head bowed, when they asked her about her domestic abilities, wondering what sense it made to leave there only to fall into the hands of some other white man who would mistreat her. “She’s nothing more than a stupid Negro,” those who had offered to help her ended up concluding.

  Herminia had also abandoned her.

  “Dance for us, Cachita,” begged Frasquita one night; she was worried about her friend, who had been depressed for a couple of months now.

  Caridad refused, but Frasquita insisted, and many others joined in. Seated on her straw mattress, she continued to shake her head. Frasquita shook her by the shoulder; she wriggled out of her grasp. Another woman tousled her hair. “Sing,” she requested. A third pinched her side. “Dance!” Caridad tried to get away from the clumsy slaps of the women surrounding her, but two prisoners pounced on her and started to tickle her.

  “Do it, please,” insisted Frasquita, watching the three women wriggling around on the straw mattress.

  The two women kept it up until they got Caridad to stop fighting and join in the laughter, panting, their tattered clothes disheveled.

  “Please,” Frasquita then repeated.

  From that day on, Caridad decided to search for her gods through the frenetic, voluptuous dances that frightened even the most hardened prisoners. Whom else could she commend herself to? Sometimes she thought that her gods were indeed mounting her, and then she fell to the floor, unhinged, kicking and screaming. The sentry warned her once, twice, three times. Finally the warden was forced to put her in the stocks because of the uproar she was creating. Yet she continued to do it.

  “And the little black girl did it,” sang Caridad then in a monotone, kneeling, her neck and wrists held in the planks of the stocks installed in the prison courtyard the last time she was punished by the warden, remembering the night when she gave in to the pleading of Frasquita and the others. Just like the slaves on the tobacco plantation, she sang out her pain when they punished her in the stocks. “The little black girl danced for her friends.” Motionless in the courtyard on those endless nights, her laments broke the silence and reached the upper galleries, disturbing the dreams of her fellow inmates.

  “Shut up, morena,” shouted the sentry from the entrance, “or I’ll end up whipping you!”

  “And the sentry came,” she continued in a whisper, “the bad sentry! And he grabbed the little black girl by the arm …”

  Dawn came and surprised her; she was defeated, her head hanging between the planks in an uncomfortable slumber. Her back hurt. Her skinned knees hurt, and her neck, and her wrists … Every second of that ill-fated life hurt her, bringing happiness so close she could reach out and touch it only to then refuse to make it hers! Drowsy, she thought she could hear the first movements in La Galera: the prisoners walking to mass, breakfast. When the others went up to the gallery to work, Frasquita brought her water and a crust of bread that she pulled into pieces to put it patiently and lovingly into her mouth. “You shouldn’t defy the sentry,” she advised her.

  Caridad had again raised her voice in the night; she did it as she remembered Melchor, Milagros, Herminia. Caridad didn’t answer; she chewed with no appetite.

  “Don’t dance again.” Frasquita continued giving her advice. “Do you want some water?”

  Caridad nodded.

  Frasquita searched for the best way to bring the ladle to her mouth, although she spilled most of it on the floor.

  “Don’t do it, no matter who asks you to. Do you understand? I’m sorry I did …”

  “What is it you’re sorry for, Frasquita?”

  The woman turned. Caridad tried to lift her head. The sentry and the warden were behind Frasquita.

  “Nothing,” she answered.

  “That is the problem you all have: you never repent for anything that you’ve done,” replied the warden rudely. “Move aside,” he added as he gave the sentry a signal.

  The man approached one side of the stocks and fiddled with the old lock that held the planks firmly in place. Frasquita watched, surprised; Caridad still had two days of punishment left. A sudden sweat made her body cold while the sentry lifted the upper plank on its hinges and freed her. Had they decided to whip her for singing during the night? Caridad wouldn’t put up a fight.

  “No—” she started to say.

  “Silence!” ordered the warden.

  Caridad got up slowly, stiff, leaning on the planks that had held her captive.

  “But—” insisted Frasquita.

  “Get to work.”

  That time it was the sentry who interrupted her, beating her legs with his truncheon, which he’d retrieved just as soon as he’d finished opening the stocks.

  “Not the whip, your worship,” implored Frasquita, dropping to her knees before the warden. “The dancing is my fault. I am the guilty one.”

  The warden, stern, kept his gaze on the women for a good long while, then shifted it toward the sentry.

  “In that case,” he ordered, “let her be the one to fulfill the two days of stocks left to the Negress.”

  “It’s not true,” Caridad managed to say. “It wasn’t her …”

 
The warden swatted the air with one hand and, while Caridad continued stuttering, she watched as the sentry indicated with his truncheon for her friend to get on her knees and place her neck and wrists in the holes of the lower board. The hinges creaked again and the upper board fell onto Frasquita.

  “And you,” the warden then announced, addressing Caridad, “get your things and leave. You are free.”

  Frasquita scratched her neck as she instinctively turned her head toward her friend. Caridad gave a start.

  “Why?” she asked innocently, in a thin wisp of voice.

  The warden and the sentry laughed heartily.

  “Because that is what the High Court ordered, Negress,” answered the first in a mocking tone. “The judges have taken pity on us and are liberating us from your Negro dancing and singing.”

  They didn’t allow her to say goodbye to Frasquita. The sentry used his truncheon again to stop her.

  “Good luck, Cachita,” she nevertheless heard being shouted from the stocks. “We will meet again.”

  “We will meet again,” answered Caridad as she crossed the courtyard on her way to the stairs. She turned her head but the sentry, behind her, blocked her view. Caridad doubted that her friend had heard her. “We will meet again, Frasquita!” she repeated.

  The truncheon hitting her side kept her from looking back. She went up the stairs with her stomach clenched and tears in her eyes because she knew it was unlikely that their wish to meet again would be fulfilled. After more than two years in that prison, what did she know about Frasquita? How could they find each other again?

  “Who …?” She cleared her throat. “Who has vouched for me?” she asked the sentry before going through the door that led to the gallery.

  “How would I know?” he answered. “Some guy almost as dark as you. I don’t care who he is. He brought the official letter from the High Court; that’s the only thing I need to know.”

  Almost as dark as she was? A single name came to her mind: Melchor. The gypsy was the only person she knew, thought Caridad as she obeyed the truncheon and entered the room. Stares from the prisoners, who stopped their sewing, surprised to see her out of the stocks, distracted her thoughts. She didn’t know how to respond; she pursed her lips, as if she felt guilty, and ran her eyes over the gallery. Many others who were only now realizing what was happening also put down their work. Some stood up despite the orders of the guards.

  “Don’t dawdle,” urged the sentry. “I have a lot to do. Grab your things.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  It was Jacinta who asked the question. Caridad nodded with a sad smile. The girl had chosen not to give in to Don Bernabé’s desires and seek a pardon that, her beauty now faded, she would probably not be offered again.

  “Free, free?”

  Caridad nodded again. She had them all before her, crowded together at a distance they seemed not to dare cross.

  “Your things,” insisted the sentry.

  Caridad ignored him. She had her eyes fixed on those women who had been her companions for more than two years: some old and toothless, others young, naively trying to protect their freshness, all dirty and dressed in rags.

  “Negress …” the man warned her.

  “Am I really free?” she asked.

  “Didn’t I tell you that already?”

  Caridad left behind the sentry, his truncheon and his demands, and crossed those few paces that symbolized the abyss that was opening up between freedom and those who—most of them unjustly—would continue to be subject to the truncheon that was raised above her threateningly in that moment. Caridad sensed it in the frightened faces of her friends.

  “Cachita is free,” she heard a voice hidden among the women. “Are they going to punish us all? Like in a revolt?”

  Caridad knew that the truncheon had been lowered when the prisoner in front of her opened her arms. With her throat tight and tears springing to her eyes, she went to them. They surrounded her, patting her back, which was now healed. They hugged her and squeezed her. They congratulated her. They kissed her. They wished her luck. Caridad didn’t want to enrage the sentry, who was stifling his anger, so she grabbed a threadbare blanket and the even more deteriorated remains of her slave clothes, which she still saved although she’d managed to replace them with others, and she went down the gallery stairs amid the deafening applause and cheers of those who remained behind.

  IT WASN’T Melchor. For a moment she had imagined … but she didn’t know the man who, papers in hand, visibly uncomfortable, waited beside the sentry’s cubicle beyond the prison’s entrance doors. He was shorter than her, thin, sinewy, with a bit of black hair visible beneath the cloth cap he hadn’t removed. His unkempt beard was also black, on a harsh face with tanned weather-beaten skin. He dressed like a farmer: leather sandals tied at his ankles, brown flannel britches without stockings and a simple shirt that had perhaps once been white. The man looked her up and down openly.

  “Here she is,” announced the sentry.

  The other man nodded. “Well, let’s go then,” he ordered resolutely.

  Caridad hesitated. Why should she trust this stranger? She was about to ask, but the rays of sun that lit up the gloomy prison room as the sentry stood aside to let them pass confused her vision and even her will. She unconsciously followed the farmer and went through the door, leaving behind more than two years of her life. She stopped as soon as she set foot on Atocha Street and closed her eyes, dazzled by the July sun that seemed different from the one that slipped in through the high windows of the galleries or illuminated the prison courtyard: this was cleaner, more alive, more tangible. She spontaneously breathed deeply, once, twice, three times. Then she opened her eyes and discovered little Herminia smiling at her from across the street, as if she were afraid to get close to La Galera. She ran to her without thinking twice. Many on the street complained but Caridad didn’t hear them. She embraced her friend; her breathing accelerated and a thousand questions stuck in her throat as their tears blended together on their cheeks.

  “You …! Here? Herminia … Why …?”

  She couldn’t continue. She felt faint. The long night in the stocks, the farewell to Frasquita and the other inmates, the hugs, the cheering, the sobs, the freedom … Herminia grabbed Caridad just as her knees gave out.

  “Come on, Cachita. Let’s go,” she said as she held her by the waist and led her to a small cart filled with melons. “Grab on to this,” she added, bringing her friend’s hand to one of the wooden planks on the side of the cart.

  “Are we done?” asked the farmer brusquely.

  “Yes, yes,” answered Herminia. Then she turned toward Caridad, who was clinging to the wooden plank. “Now I have to help Marcial push the cart. Don’t let go. We will go to the Plaza Mayor to sell the melons and …”

  “We’re very late, Herminia,” urged the man.

  “Don’t let go,” she repeated, running toward one of the cart’s poles to push it along with Marcial along the steep slope of Atocha Street.

  Gripping the plank, Caridad let herself be dragged along. The hustle and bustle of people and carts coming and going was like a buzzing in her ears. She made out some places she had passed before: hospitals and churches, the fountain with the fish topped by an angel where she had been arrested, the immense prison building. More than two years in Madrid and that was the only place she knew in the city: Atocha Street. From the fountain with the little angel to La Galera, from La Galera to the High Court and back to the women’s prison.

  She had never been in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor, but she had heard a lot about it from the other prisoners. She awoke from her confusion in a place that seemed vast, with boxes and stands for the market set up in the middle, surrounded on all four sides by the tallest buildings she had ever seen: six stories high and narrow, covered in red brick, with wrought ironwork on the black and gold balconies on their façades. She was seduced by their harmony and uniformity, broken only by two sumptuous buildings that face
d each other, although she knew that the interiors of all those houses was not like their majestic façades. She had heard that they were small, narrow, gloomy dwellings, for rent or inhabited by the merchants who ran the businesses in the plaza’s arcades: one devoted to clothes, one to hemp cloth and one to silks, threads and sewing kits that covered two entire building fronts. It was there that they entered the plaza.

  “Better?” asked Herminia when Marcial left them alone and went through the stalls to sell the melons.

  “Yes,” answered Caridad.

  People were constantly passing by them. The July sun began to burn and they took refuge in the shadows of the arcades.

  “Why …?”

  “Because I care about you, Cachita,” she answered before the Negress could finish. “How could I leave you in there?”