The Barefoot Queen

by Ildefonso Falcones

  Amid vivacious Celeste’s singing and the applause and shouts of the fickle audience, again devoted to the leading lady, Fray Joaquín interrupted the woman, who turned toward him and unconsciously began to fan her face. She knew that he was sensitive—all his acquaintances praised him for that quality—although she had never suspected that the news of a simple gypsy girl’s dalliances could turn him almost as pale as a corpse.

  Fray Joaquín was thinking of Milagros: beautiful, cheerful, charming, clever, joyful … clean … virginal! The memories came flooding back to stab his stomach and paralyze the flow of his blood. She filled his nocturnal fantasies and made him feel that guilt he had so often tried to atone for with prayer and punishments: her rejection, after he suggested she run off with him, had driven him to the roads, doubting that there was a sacrifice capable of purifying him in God’s eyes. Since then, that dark face had followed him wherever he went, overwhelmingly beautiful: encouraging him, smiling at him in moments of adversity. But now, what had happened to that strength of spirit? She was a drunk. He had seen that. And a prostitute, from what he had heard …

  BEFORE THE evening when Milagros collapsed onstage at the Coliseo del Príncipe, her image came to Fray Joaquín’s mind every night as he walked with all his senses alert along the dangerous streets of Madrid toward his house. When that happened, the memories of Milagros took hold of him. Fray Joaquín lived in an apartment on a tiny block with only three buildings, all narrow and so long that they stretched from the façade overlooking the silversmiths on Mayor Street to the San Miguel Plaza at the back. Francisca, the old servant who took care of him, got up sleepily to help him despite knowing how he would respond: “May God reward you, Francisca, but you can go back to bed.” Still, the woman insisted every single night, eternally grateful for having a roof over her head, food and even the meager salary that the friar gave her for the efforts she put into her limited tasks. Francisca had never been a servant before. Widowed, with three ingrate children who had abandoned her in her old age, she had devoted her life to washing clothes in the Manzanares River. “I washed so much,” she had bragged to Fray Joaquín, “that I needed a porter to help me deliver them to their owners.” But as happened to all those women who, day after day, year after year, went into the river with their washboards to clean other people’s dirt—whether it was wintry cold and the water frozen, or in the heat of the summer—her body had paid a high price. She had swollen, stiff hands, atrophied muscles, and permanently aching bones. And Fray Joaquín would run to pick up the saucepan that had slid from her awkward hands to avoid the torment it gave her to kneel down. The priest had rescued her from the streets when the coin he gave her as alms slipped through the washerwoman’s atrophied fingers, clinked on a stone and rolled far away. They had looked at each other: the old woman, unable to chase the coin; Fray Joaquín glimpsing death in her dull eyes.

  After ordering her back to bed, the friar compared the slow movements that would take Francisca to her straw mattress, at the feet of the marvelous statue of the Immaculate Conception, with the vitality and happiness of the movements that Milagros had offered her public. He was watching from one of the boxes, like the noble and rich women did almost every day with their suitors and escorts. Marvelous! Prodigious! Enchanting! Such was the praise that echoed in his ears when he first set foot in the Coliseo del Príncipe, soon after he’d arrived in Madrid from Toledo. The Barefoot Girl. And that first day he jumped in his seat.

  “Is something wrong, Father?” they asked him.

  Something? It was Milagros! Fray Joaquín was almost on his feet. He stammered out something unintelligible.

  “Are you feeling poorly?”

  Why am I standing up? he asked himself. He apologized to his pupil, took his seat again and listened to Milagros sing, rapt, as he discreetly fought to stop the tears that filled his eyes.

  SINCE HIS arrival in Madrid, the Coliseo del Príncipe and Milagros’s performances had become a site of pilgrimage for Fray Joaquín. If some evening, Dorotea—the young woman from Toledo whom, at her father’s insistence, the priest had accompanied to the capital after she married the widower Marquis of Caja—decided not to attend, Fray Joaquín excused himself and paid, out of his own pocket, for a ticket in the pit or the upper gallery with the other religious men. The first time he felt lost at the eight doors that led to the different self-contained areas—the pit, the upper gallery, the boxes, the door just for women that led to their balcony—but soon he had won the regard of the ticket sellers and the honeyed-wine vendors beneath the women’s balcony. The friar sat through the whole show and many times, while watching a bad play with even worse acting, he struggled not to join in the surge of people mocking the comedy’s final act and leaving the theater after the Barefoot Girl’s performance. He didn’t want to be known as yet one more of those who just went for the sainetes or intermissions. When it ended, he praised the author and the players even though he only had the gypsy girl’s voice in mind, her measured dances that—without striving to—aroused the desire and fantasies of the public with their voluptuousness. He trembled at the memory of her insolent remarks toward the audience, to the groundlings among whom he hid. And he shrank back when Milagros ran her gaze over them, afraid she would recognize him.

  “What do you say about the unjust Chief Magistrate?” she asked, interrupting her song in which a poor peasant was jailed by the King’s magistrate.

  The booing and whistles, with arms raised, allowed the priest to stand up straight again in the confusion.

  “Louder, louder! I can’t hear you!” shouted Milagros, encouraging them with her hands before launching herself into the next song, competing with the crowd’s shouts.

  And she won. Her voice lifted above the fray and Fray Joaquín felt himself grow faint as his throat clenched. One evening, perhaps after too much wine at the meal with the Marquis and his wife, the friar got a bit closer to the stage and didn’t move when Milagros looked out over the theater’s seats. His knees shook and he didn’t have time to turn his head when she ran her gaze over the groundlings who cheered her on, right where he was standing. Maybe he wanted her to discover him. But she didn’t see him and Fray Joaquín surprised himself by relaxing as he released the air he’d been holding in his lungs. He didn’t know why he’d done it, but that day he felt her near, as if he could even smell her.

  After that visit to the theater, before dinner and the gathering he would attend with Dorotea, Fray Joaquín locked himself in the clock room of the marquis’s home, overwhelmed by conflicting emotions. He scolded himself for the fact that the room the marquis used to display his power and his good taste, confirmed by all who admired his collection, and where the priest usually sought refuge, soothed him more than prayer or reading holy books. He stopped in front of a grandfather clock as tall as he was, in ebony adorned with engraved gilded bronze. The Englishman John Ellicott had made it; he had signed its face, which depicted a lunar calendar and a celestial globe.

  Milagros was happy, he had to admit as the second hand ticked. She was a success! Why should I intrude on her life? he asked himself later, before an elaborate table clock with bucolic figures by Droz, a Swiss watchmaker according to what the marquis had told him. How did they make such marvels? More than a dozen were displayed in the room. Musical clocks. Would Milagros like them? Some even had a dozen little bells … How would her voice sound beside them? Pendulum clocks, huge with a mechanism of gears and perpetual movement; there was one that even did arithmetic calculations. Automatons that played the flute: he loved to listen to the shepherd’s flute or the barking dog …

  Milagros had refused him once already. What did she say then? I’m sorry.… It just could never be. Yes, those had been her words before she fled toward the Andévalo. Why do you insist, you idiot? he said to himself. If in that moment of desperation, at the time of the big roundup, frightened at having to flee Triana, with her parents arrested and her grandfather missing, Milagros had been unable to find
a scrap of affection for him inside her, what could he expect now, when she was a star and adored by all of Madrid?

  Even so, he never stopped going to the theater, not even when, months after his arrival, he had to leave the house of the marquis and the woman who had been his pupil and move to the narrow, long house on Mayor Street that he shared with Francisca. During that time, Dorotea had gradually become caught up in the capital city’s seductive habits, so different from those in Toledo, and she stopping needing the friar, who up until that point had been her teacher, confidant and friend. Don Ignacio, the marquis, father of three children from his previous marriage, was a man as rich as he was carefree.

  “It pains me to say this, Don Ignacio,” explained Fray Joaquín—both men were seated in the clock room one morning, having coffee and sweets, “but I consider it my duty to warn you that your wife is on a worrisome path.”

  “Something scandalous?” queried the marquis, so shocked that he almost spilled coffee onto his waistcoat.

  “No, no. Well … I don’t know. I guess not, but in the gatherings … she is always whispering and laughing with someone or another. I know that they are courting her; she is young, beautiful, refined. Doña Dorotea isn’t like the other women …”

  “Why not?”

  It was the friar’s turn to be taken aback. “You allow her to be courted?”

  The marquis sighed. “Who doesn’t, Father? Men in our position can’t oppose it, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us. It would be … it would be uncivilized, impolite.”

  “But …”

  The marquis elegantly lifted one of his hands, asking for silence. “I know it’s not church doctrine, Father, but in these times marriage is no longer the sacred institution it was for our ancestors. Marriage, at least for the lucky such as ourselves, is based on courtesy, respect, politeness, sensitivity … They are nothing more than mere marriages of inclination.”

  “It’s not as though there were that many marriages of love before,” the friar tried to disprove him.

  “That’s true,” the marquis was quick to admit. “But we no longer have those terrified women locked up at home by their husbands. Today even destitute women, however humble they may be, want to show themselves off to men; perhaps they don’t have the sensitivity and culture of ladies, but that doesn’t stop them from displaying themselves on the streets, in theaters and at parties. True, they don’t have as many emotional needs either, their lives are too precarious for such luxuries, but the mother doesn’t exist who doesn’t want to teach her daughter, alongside the Christian virtues, to sing and dance, as well as the silent art of body language that they know full well dazzles men with its ‘will-she-won’t-she.’ ”

  Fray Joaquín cleared his throat, about to answer, but the marquis continued talking.

  “Think of Doña Dorotea. You taught her Latin in her father’s house; she knows how to read and she does. She is cultured, refined, sensitive; she knows how to please a man.” Don Ignacio picked up a piece of sponge cake and bit into it. “What do you think most pleases my wife about the courting game?” he then asked. The friar shook his head. “I’ll tell you: it is the first time in her life that she has the chance to choose. Her marriage was imposed upon her, like everything else since the moment she was born, but now she will choose her courtier and after a while she will leave him for another, and flirt with a third to arouse the first, or the second …”

  “And if …?” Fray Joaquín stuttered. “If it leads to adultery?” He immediately regretted the question. “Doña Dorotea is trustworthy and honest,” he hastened to add, swatting the air as if he had said something ridiculous. “However, the flesh is weak, and women’s flesh … even more so.”

  Yet the nobleman did not show the rage one might expect of someone who has just had his wife’s virtue questioned. Don Ignacio sipped coffee and for a few moments his gaze lingered on those clocks he so admired. He finished inspecting them with a grimace.

  “They say it’s sexless love, Father, and most courtships are. Don’t think that we haven’t discussed it extensively between us, but who knows what goes on inside a woman’s bedroom? Publicly it is merely gallantry, simple flirting. And that is what is important: what others see.”

  So, freed of the hindrance of that friar she’d brought from Toledo as a tutor, the marchioness learned to use her fan to communicate in a secret language that everyone employed to send messages to the dandies: touching it, opening it, fanning herself quickly or languidly, letting it drop to the floor, closing it violently … Each action meant something. She was also soon using beauty marks on her face to show how she felt inside: if she painted one on her left temple it meant she already had a suitor, if it was on her right it showed she was tired of him and accepting others; next to her eyes, lips or nose were all different ways to show her mood.

  The rift between Fray Joaquín and that young woman from Toledo to whom he had taught Latin and the classics had grown as Dorotea learned the game of courtship. In the mornings, not even her husband could go into his wife’s bedroom. “The marchioness is with her hairdresser,” replied the maid like a warden, in front of the locked bedroom door. Fray Joaquín saw the current suitor enter, a young man, clean shaven and powdered, smelling of lavender, jasmine or violet, sometimes wearing a wig, other times with his hair molded with tallow and lard by a hairdresser, but always decked out with a thousand details: cravat, watch, eyeglasses, cane, rapier at his waist, lace, embroidery and even bows on colorful silk suits with golden buttons. The marquis, the friar also noticed, did his best not to run into the suitor who feigned dignity as he snorted snuff while waiting for the butler to be called to escort him to the bedchamber. What do they do inside there? wondered Fray Joaquín. Dorotea would still be in bed, in her bedclothes. What would they talk about for the hours it took the marchioness to emerge from her chambers? Why had he worked so hard to teach his pupil the most modern doctrines regarding the feminine condition? All those affected dandies who pursued ladies were as vainglorious as they were uncultured, something he had seen in the gatherings; he’d been shocked at the stupidity he heard.

  “Madam,” one of them boasted, “Horace was too dogmatic.”

  “Without Homer, what would Virgil have been?” said another.

  Names and quotes memorized just to impress: Periander, Anacharsis, Theophrastus, Epicurus, Aristippus, were dropped here and there in the ladies’ luxurious sitting rooms. And Dorotea smiled, mouth agape! They all haughtily disdained the slightest criticisms and mocked those that were presented as authoritative opinions, until, by using such tricks, some managed to gain a reputation as a sage in the eyes of a feminine audience, utterly taken in by their braggadocio.

  Ignorance. Hypocrisy. Frivolity. Vanity. Fray Joaquín exploded when he listened to a dandy, who was battling to win Dorotea’s favor, begging her to give him a bottle containing the water she had washed herself with in order to use it as medicine for a sick maid. The blood left the friar’s face and gathered in his stomach, all of it, a flood, leaving him livid, watching how the young woman with whom he’d declined Latin and enjoyed reading Father Feijoo was thrilled to comply with the ridiculous request, supported by some of the ladies who applauded the initiative and others who insisted, for the good of that poor ill maid, that she agree to the cure.

  Fray Joaquín was familiar with the controversial modern theories around treatments based on water. Their proponents were called “water doctors.” Not even Feijoo had been able to call them into question, but that was a long way from giving a sick girl a lady’s dirty bath water, no matter how young, beautiful and aristocratic she was.

  “I can no longer continue living in this house.”

  Don Ignacio curved his lips in something similar to a smile. Sad, melancholy? wondered Fray Joaquín.

  “I understand,” he said, understanding perfectly the reason that brought the clergyman to that decision. “It has truly been a pleasure to have you here and converse with you.”

 
“You have been really generous, Don Ignacio. As for your chapel—”

  “Continue with it,” interrupted the marquis. “I would have to find another priest and that would be a bother,” he added, screwing up his face. “And otherwise you wouldn’t be able to enjoy my clocks, and you know that satisfies my vanity.”

  The marquis smiled; the friar thought he was sincere. “I consider you a good person, Father. I’m convinced that the marchioness will not object.”

  Dorotea didn’t. In fact, she bade him farewell coldly and hurriedly—her friends were waiting, she excused herself, leaving him unable to say his piece—so Fray Joaquín continued looking after the marquis’s private chapel, generously compensated for the few masses he said for the souls of the nobleman’s ancestors, which were only attended by a few servants.

  WHERE WAS Milagros? In just one evening, Fray Joaquín saw all his principles come crashing down. Despite his desires, he had managed to remain on the margins: idolizing Milagros. However, after witnessing her fall, he was overcome with doubts over what he should do. She was married, but how could her husband allow …? Had she really sold her body? The expression on the Marquis of Caja’s face, when the friar finally made up his mind to ask him, confirmed it.

  “It can’t be!” escaped his lips.

  “Yes, Father. But not with me,” added the nobleman quickly, seeing the friar’s expression. “Why are you interested?” he inquired when Fray Joaquín asked him if he knew where the Barefoot Girl lived.

  The friar pursed his lips and didn’t answer.

  “Very well,” yielded Don Ignacio at his silence.

  The Marquis sent his secretary to find out about her situation and in a few days he called for the friar. He told him about the High Court’s sentence. “It is undoubtedly the easiest thing for them to do,” he added in passing. “They just released her today.” Then he gave him an address on Amor de Dios Street.