The Barefoot Queen

by Ildefonso Falcones

  The repentant women had to pay one hundred reales de vellón and four pounds of wax to enter the Mary Magdalene Home and be locked up for life! One had to pay to repent. He didn’t even have that much money. So he couldn’t repent, he concluded, finding a certain satisfaction in the argument: the poor couldn’t do it. Besides, he didn’t want to renounce the money he was hoping to make that day.

  He continued on, turned to the right at Panaderos Street and headed toward Regueros Street.

  “Hail Mary,” he called as he opened the door to a small single-story house, whitewashed on the outside, neat and clean on the inside, with a vegetable patch out the back, crammed among nine similar dwellings.

  “Full of Grace …” was heard from inside. “Ah! It’s you.” A pretty young gypsy woman came out of an inner room. A girl’s head peeked out from behind her.

  “Pedro?” was all the constable asked.

  The young woman had gone back into the room but not the girl, who remained still, with her large eyes fixed on Blas.

  “At the tavern,” shouted the gypsy women from the room she was rummaging around in, “where else?”

  The constable winked at the little girl, whose expression didn’t change at all.

  “Thank you,” he answered with a disappointed look.

  The girl no longer smiled the way she used to, when she lived with her mother, on Amor de Dios Street. Blas tried again with the same results. He frowned, shook his head and left.

  Regueros Street was a single block that was just a few paces from the tavern on the corner of San José and Reyes Alta, beside a patch of open ground bordering Madrid’s wall; there rose the monastery of Santa Bárbara with its discalced Mercedarians and the Carmelite convent of Santa Teresa. Beside them, Queen Barbara of Portugal, wife of Ferdinand VI, often ill and a book lover, had ordered a new convent built, devoted to teaching noble girls under the auspices of Saint Francis de Sales, in 1748. It was said that the Queen had planned the part of the building that overlooked the gardens as a private residence to escape her husband’s stepmother, Elisabeth Farnese, and as a place to retire to if the King died before her, since they had no issue and the crown would pass to Charles, Elisabeth’s son, then King of Naples. In 1750 construction began; it was to be the largest and most sumptuous convent ever built in Madrid: alongside the new church devoted to Saint Barbara was erected a colossal palace with French and Italian influences using the finest materials. The compound would be surrounded by gardens and vegetable plots that would extend alongside the wall, from the Recoletos Meadow and Gate, almost all the way to the Santa Bárbara Gate.

  That spring of 1754, Blas observed the construction, which was already quite far advanced. The Queen was sparing no expense. It was rumored to have cost more than eighty million reals in total, although there were also those who lamented (Blas among them) that it was spent on the Queen’s glory and tranquillity instead of on a great cathedral. There were nearly 140 churches that celebrated mass daily, thirty-eight monasteries and almost as many convents, plus hospitals and schools packed into the walls that surrounded Madrid … Yet despite all that religious magnificence, the largest and most important city in the kingdom had no cathedral.

  Blas cleared his way into the tavern with blows of his truncheon until he found Pedro, sitting at a table and drinking wine with various chisperos who were working as blacksmiths on that vast construction.

  The gypsy, always vigilant, noticed the constable’s presence as people moved to avoid his truncheon. Something important must be happening for Blas to show up there, so far from his district. They both stepped away from the crowd as soon as they were able to.

  “She’s been released,” whispered the constable.

  Pedro maintained his gaze on his companion’s face; his lips were pursed, his teeth were grinding.

  “Is she still under contract at the Príncipe?” he asked after a few moments.

  “No.”

  “That’s just going to cause me problems,” he commented to himself. “She needs to be finished off.”

  Blas had been sure that would be the gypsy’s reaction. Almost two years by his side were more than enough for him to know his character. Violent rows, revenge to the point of murder. He had even sold his own wife!

  “Are you sure …?” He hesitated.

  “If they let her go it’s to avoid a scandal that could taint some grandees. Do you think that anyone will care what happens to a drunken whore?”

  EVERYTHING HAD happened the way Pedro had imagined: they dragged Milagros off the stage at the Príncipe after the theater magistrate ordered her arrest. The constables brought her straight to the royal jail, where she slept it off. The next morning, excited, nervous, restless from the lack of alcohol but sober, Milagros entered the court of law.

  “Your highness should ask the Baron of San Glorio,” she challenged the magistrate who was presiding over her trial for scandalous behavior and a long string of other crimes, after the process had begun by asking her name.

  “Why should I do that?” The magistrate immediately regretted that spontaneous question, but he’d been confused by the gypsy woman’s cheekiness.

  “Because he raped me,” she answered. “He must know my name. He paid a lot of money for it. Ask him.”

  “Don’t be impertinent! We have nothing to ask the baron.”

  “Then ask the Count of Medin—”

  “Silence!”

  “Or the Count of Nava—”

  “Sentry! Make her shut up!”

  “They all forced themselves on me!” Milagros managed to shriek before the sentry and his truncheon reached her.

  The man covered her mouth. Milagros bit his hand, hard.

  “Do you want me to tell you how many more of your aristocrats have raped me?” she spat when the sentry pulled his hand away in pain.

  The gypsy woman’s last question floated over the courtroom. All three magistrates looked at her. The prosecutor, the notary and the lawyer for the poor waited for their response.

  “No,” replied the president. “We don’t want you to tell us. Session adjourned!” he then decided. “Take her to the dungeons.”

  Milagros spent several days in the royal jail, enough for the court magistrates to consult with the councillors to the King and eminent noblemen. Although not all were in agreement, most rejected the idea that such illustrious surnames were mixed up in such a disagreeable matter. Finally, someone maintained that the matter tainted the King himself, because one of his councillors was a relative of a nobleman who’d been implicated, so they ordered the matter buried and Milagros was set free.

  Despite the magistrates demanding discretion and the notary destroying the records of the trial proceedings and all references to her arrest, the matter got out and reached many ears, including those of Constable Blas.

  “THIS VERY night,” ordered Pedro as they walked back to the house on Regueros Street. “We will do it this very night.”

  We will do it? That statement surprised the constable. He was about to object, but kept silent. He remembered the gypsy’s promise the day he had arrived in Madrid: women. He had enjoyed some in the nocturnal adventures he’d shared with Pedro; however, he was less interested in those idle pursuits than in the money he got out of the arrangement. Despite that … would he take part in a murder? Was the gypsy right about no one caring?

  With those thoughts running through his head, he went into the house that Pedro shared with his new companion.

  “Honoria!” he shouted in greeting. “We’re here for lunch!”

  They ate stew and, for dessert, chestnut compote and quince jelly that the gypsy woman had made. Blas watched how Honoria tried to control little María’s sweet tooth. She failed; her nervousness grew as the girl disobeyed. As hard as she tried, thought the constable, watching María push away the young gypsy woman’s hands with her own, she couldn’t replace her mother. Although officially she was her mother! Pedro had got false papers that listed Honoria as the gir
l’s mother. He had shown them to the constable: “Pedro García and Honoria Castro. Married with one daughter.”

  “Are you insane?” Blas had asked him when he saw them.

  The gypsy waved off his question.

  “And what if someone finds out? People know Honoria; they know she isn’t married to you. Anyone could …”

  “Denounce me?”

  “Yes.”

  “They wouldn’t dare.”

  “Even so …”

  “Blas. We are gypsies. A payo will never understand. Life is a moment: this one.”

  That was the end of the conversation, although Blas tried to work out why the gypsy behaved as he did. He was unable to, just as Pedro had said, but he did manage to understand why the gypsy people always had a sparkle in their eyes: they bet it all on every hand.

  After lunch, Pedro satisfied the constable’s expectations of his generosity and promised him more after the “job” was done.

  “Remember,” he said in parting, “tonight, after the chiming of the bells.”

  THEY FOUND Milagros prostrate and dejected in a corner of her room, with her gaze fixed on a single point on the ceiling and an empty bottle of liquor by her side.

  “Aunt,” announced Pedro to Bartola, “we’re going back to Triana; gather your things and wait for me downstairs.”

  Bartola García motioned toward Milagros with her chin. “What about her?”

  Pedro let out a guffaw. “Don’t worry, no one will miss her.”

  His laughter broke the long silence that had stretched out between the two women all day, since Milagros had compulsively polished off the liquor.

  Milagros reacted and looked at them with bloodshot eyes. She stammered something. No one understood what she was saying.

  “Shut up, you drunken whore!” spat Pedro.

  She waved a hand clumsily through the air and tried to get up. Pedro ignored her; he waited impatiently for Bartola to gather her things and leave.

  “Come on, come on, come on,” he urged.

  The constable, at a distance, standing almost in the doorway, watched how Milagros tried to use the walls to help her stand up, but, weak, fell again. He shook his head as he watched her try once more. She leaned precariously on the wall, struggling to stay on her feet, as Blas tried to remember if he had ever witnessed a young woman’s murder. He searched through his memories of the city, where a motley horde of nobles, rich men, beggars and criminals—arrogant people quick to fight—mingled. As a constable he was familiar with all sorts of crimes and wickedness, but he had never witnessed the murder in cold blood of a beautiful young woman. His stomach shrank when he moved aside to let Bartola out, with a straw mattress beneath her arm and bundles of clothes and goods in her hands. The old woman didn’t say a word; she didn’t even look back. The few seconds it took her to drag her feet out of the room multiplied in the constable’s senses. Then he turned and blanched as Pedro reacted immediately, going over to Milagros and lifting her up mercilessly by the hair.

  “Look at her!” he said, holding her upright. “The biggest whore in Madrid!”

  Blas couldn’t take his eyes off the woman: beaten, helpless, lovely in spite of her filth and raggedness. If Pedro let go of her hair she would be unable to stand. Is it really necessary to finish her off? he wondered.

  “I promised you women,” he was surprised to hear the gypsy say then, reminding him of their first conversation. “Here’s one: the great Barefoot Girl!”

  The constable managed to shake his head. Pedro didn’t see him, he was too busy ripping off Milagros’s shirt.

  “Fuck her!” he shouted when he got it off, pulling Milagros’s hair back to show off her turgid breasts, which were surprisingly magnificent.

  Blas was disgusted. “No,” he objected. “Stop this. Kill her if you want to, but don’t keep up this … this …”

  He couldn’t find the word and he just pointed to her breasts. Pedro looked daggers at him.

  “I’m not going to take part in such vileness,” Blas added in response to the gypsy’s challenge. “Finish it, or you’re on your own.”

  “I pay you well,” Pedro retorted.

  Not enough, Blas thought to himself. And if the gypsy really was going back to Triana, there would be no more money. He looked at Milagros, trying to see some pleading in her eyes. He couldn’t even find that. She seemed resigned to her fate.

  “Up yours, gypsy!”

  Blas turned and went down the stairs, expecting to hear Milagros’s death throes and feeling sorry for her. But he didn’t hear anything.

  With his free hand, Pedro García pulled his knife from his belt and opened it. “Whore,” muttered the gypsy as soon as the constable’s footsteps disappeared in the distance.

  He slid the blade from Milagros’s neck to her bare breasts.

  “I have to kill you,” he continued, “just like I killed the healer. The old lady fought more than you will, surely. Braggarts … The Vegas are nothing more than conceited braggarts. I’m going to kill you. What would happen if you showed up in Triana? Honoria would be furious with me, you know?”

  Milagros seemed to react to the touch of the knife tip on her nipples. The gypsy smiled cynically.

  “You like that?” He played with the tip of the knife, feeling his own excitement grow as her nipple hardened.

  He cut her skirt and continued slipping his knife along her belly and pubis until she sighed and a fetid cloud of liquor smell reached his face.

  “You’re putrid. You smell worse than an animal. I hope you meet up with all the Vegas in hell.” He raised his knife to her neck, now ready to slit her jugular.

  “Halt!” suddenly echoed through the room.

  A week earlier

  “She’s drunk!”

  “She can’t stand up.”

  “What a disgrace!”

  The comments of the ladies who accompanied him in one of the side boxes at the Coliseo del Príncipe joined the booing and shouting from the groundlings and the women’s balcony. The orchestra had attempted the tonadilla several times without Milagros managing to sing along to the music. The first two times she gestured furiously at the side curtain behind which were the musicians, blaming them in clumsy gestures; the other times, as the words stuck on her thick tongue and her arms and legs refused to follow her orders, Milagros’s rage transformed into dismay.

  Fray Joaquín, his stomach churning and his throat clenched, tried to hide his trembling hands from the ladies and their escorts as he looked at Milagros. There was no longer any music on the stage that the day before had seemed barely large enough to contain her dancing, smiles and brazen remarks, but which now seemed vast with her kneeling in the middle, defeated and downcast. Someone threw a rotten vegetable at her right arm. The groundlings came prepared. Rumors had gone around Madrid in the last few days about the state of the Barefoot Girl: her recent performances had showed signs of her deterioration. Some said she was sick; many others recognized the effects of alcohol on her cracked voice and disjointed movements. Milagros didn’t even react to the rotten vegetable, or when a tomato burst onto her shirt and set off laughter throughout the theater. Above the stalls, leaning on the box’s railing, Fray Joaquín shifted his gaze to find who had thrown the tomato.

  “Stupid!” he muttered.

  “Did you say something, Reverend?”

  The friar ignored the question from the lady sitting beside him. From the stalls they were now throwing all sorts of rotten fruits and vegetables, and the people were tearing off the green ribbons that had adorned their hats and dresses in a sign of admiration for the Barefoot Girl. The magistrate assigned to the theater sent two constables to take Milagros offstage. She seemed resigned to the punishment. “Why doesn’t she leave?” the priest asked himself.

  “Go, girl!” exploded Fray Joaquín.

  “Girl?” asked the lady, surprised.

  “Ma’am,” he answered without thinking, his attention focused onstage, “we are all children.
Wasn’t it Jesus Christ who declared that he who was not like a little child would not enter the kingdom of heaven?”

  The woman was about to question the priest’s words but instead she opened up a lovely mother-of-pearl fan and waved it in front of her face. Meanwhile, the two constables dragged Milagros offstage by her elbows amid a rain of fruit and vegetables. As soon as the gypsy disappeared behind the curtain and the shouts from the stalls and the balcony transformed into a murmur of indignant conversations, Celeste appeared on the stage while three men continued cleaning up. Victory gleamed in her eyes.

  “The Marquis of Rafal,” commented one of the noblemen who was standing at the back of the box, referring to the Chief Magistrate of Madrid, “should never have replaced the great Celeste.”

  “And certainly not with a gypsy who sells her body for two reals!” exclaimed the other.

  Fray Joaquín gave a start when Celeste began to sing and the two noblemen joined in with the audience’s warm applause.

  “Didn’t you know, Reverend?” The lady with the fan spoke with her face hidden behind it, leaning slightly back in her chair, “If your reverence would honor us more often with your presence at our gatherings …”

  I would have heard, he finished to himself, in silence, the sentence she left hanging in the air.

  “Personally,” said the woman, “I can’t imagine what Our Lord Jesus Christ would say about that girl.” She stretched out the last two words in disdain. Then, bringing her chair closer to the clergyman’s and using the fan as cover for her brazenness, she began to list the Barefoot Girl’s affairs, multiplied in the whispers of such gatherings.