The Barefoot Queen

by Ildefonso Falcones

  However, the days passed and Fray Joaquín didn’t fulfill his promise. “Give me time,” he asked her one morning when she insisted. “The marquis will help us,” he assured her the next day knowing that he wouldn’t be able to go to his house. “I wrote a letter to the prior of San Jacinto, he will know what to do,” he lied the third time she reminded him what he had promised.

  Fray Joaquín was afraid of losing her, of her getting hurt or killed; but to avoid facing up to her questions he left her alone in a filthy room with a rickety bed and a broken chair as its only furnishings. “You shouldn’t go out, people know who you are and Pedro will have the Garcías looking for you.” Echoing his excuses, with the laughter of her little girl ringing constantly in her ears, Milagros gave in to her tears. She was sure that the Garcías would mistreat her. The images of her daughter in the hands of those heartless people were too much for her. Sober, she couldn’t bear them … She asked for wine, but the widow refused to give her any. She argued in vain with her. “You can leave if you like,” the woman replied. “Where?” Milagros asked. Where could she go?

  He always came back with something: a sweet; white bread; a colorful ribbon. And he would chat with her, cheering her up and treating her with affection, but that wasn’t what she needed. Where was his gypsy pluck? Fray Joaquín was unable to hold her gaze the way the men of her race could. Milagros sensed that he followed her with his eyes the entire time they were together, but when she faced him, he pretended he hadn’t been. He seemed content with her mere presence, with smelling her, brushing past her. Her nights were filled with bad dreams: Pedro and the parade of nobles attacking her. Yet she began to reject the idea that Fray Joaquín could act like them.

  In a couple of weeks they were out of money to pay the exorbitant rent charged by the widow to guarantee her silence.

  “I never thought we would need it,” said the friar, contrite, as if he had failed her.

  “And now?” she asked.

  “I will find—”

  “You’re lying!”

  Fray Joaquín wanted to defend himself, but Milagros didn’t allow him to.

  “You lie, you lie and you lie,” she shouted with her fists clenched. “There’s nothing, isn’t that right? No marquis, no letters to the prior, nothing.” The silence confirmed her doubts. “I’m going to Triana,” she decided then.

  “That would be crazy.”

  Milagros’s decision, the need to leave those squalid rooms before the widow threw them out or, even worse, denounced them as adulterers, the lack of money and, above all, the mere possibility that she would leave him, made Fray Joaquín react.

  “This is the last time I’m putting my trust in you. Don’t let me down, Father,” she relented.

  And he didn’t. The truth was that he did nothing else for the next few days except think about how to resolve the situation. It was a preposterous idea, but he had no alternative: he had been dreaming about Milagros for years and he had just given up everything he had for her. What could be more preposterous than that? He went to a secondhand clothing shop and exchanged his best habit (of the two he owned) for coarse black women’s clothes, including gloves and a mantilla.

  “You want me to put that on?” Milagros tried to refuse.

  “You can’t walk along the roads as a gypsy without papers. I’m just trying to keep us from getting arrested on our trip … to Barrancos.” The clothes slid from Milagros’s hands and fell to the floor. “Yes,” he said before she could speak. “It’s not that far out of our way. It’s just another road, a few days more. Remember what the old healer woman said? She said something like if there was any place your grandfather could be found, it was Barrancos. The day we spoke, you told me that you didn’t make it there after the roundup, and things haven’t changed much since then. Perhaps …”

  “I spat at his feet,” Milagros then said, reminding him of the rage she had shown toward her grandfather. “I told him—”

  “What does it matter what you did or said to him? He always loved you and your daughter has Vega blood. If we can find him, Melchor will know what to do, of that I’m sure. And if he isn’t there anymore, maybe we can find some other family member who wasn’t arrested. Most of them deal in tobacco and we can probably find news of someone.”

  Milagros was no longer listening. Thinking of her grandfather filled her with both hope and fear. She hadn’t heeded his warnings, or her mother’s. They had both known what would happen if she gave herself to a García. The last thing she had heard about her grandfather was that he had been captured in Madrid and had managed to escape. Maybe … yes, maybe he was still alive. And if anyone could face up to Pedro, it was Melchor Vega. But …

  She knelt down to pick the black clothes up off the floor. Fray Joaquín stopped speaking when he saw her. Milagros didn’t want to think about the possibility that her grandfather had disowned her and would refuse to help her out of spite.

  “HAIL MARY, full of grace.”

  “Conceived without sin,” said Milagros, downcast, to the young maid who opened the door to the house. She knew what she had to do next, the same thing she had done a league back, in Alcorcón: intertwine the fingers of her gloved hands, showing Fray Joaquín’s rosary that she carried between them, and murmur what she could remember of those prayers Caridad had taught her for her baptism, which the friar repeated insistently along the way.

  “Alms to send this poor, miserable widow to the Dominican convent in Lepe,” begged Fray Joaquín, lifting his voice over her chanting.

  Through the black mantilla that covered her head and hid her dark face, the gypsy looked at the maid out of the corner of her eye. She would respond like all the others: refusing at first only to end up opening her eyes incredibly wide when Fray Joaquín revealed the beautiful face of the Immaculate Virgin he was carrying. Then she would stutter, tell them to wait, close the door and run in search of her mistress.

  That was what had happened in Alcorcón and in Madrid as well, before they went through the Segovia Gate. Fray Joaquín decided to alleviate their poverty by joining the army of pilgrims and alms-seekers who carried saints through the streets of Spain. The former dressed in capes adorned with shells, sackcloth, staffs taller than they were, gourds and hats for supposed pilgrimages to Jerusalem or countless other foreign locations. The latter were friars, priests or abbots asking for a mite for all sorts of pious works. The people gave alms to the pilgrims in exchange for kissing their relics or scapulars that they claimed came from the Holy Land. With those who carried saints, they prayed before the images, stroked them, kissed them and drew them close to children, the elderly and especially the sick before dropping a few coins into their almsbox or bag.

  And of all the sacred images, there was none like the Immaculate Virgin that Fray Joaquín unveiled to the shock of the maids in the wealthy homes. As Milagros had foreseen, the same thing that had happened in Alcorcón happened again in Móstoles, little more than three leagues from Madrid. Soon after, the lady of the house opened the door, spellbound before the beauty and opulence of the statue of the Virgin, and invited them in. Milagros did so cowering, as Fray Joaquín had instructed her, murmuring prayers and hiding her bare feet beneath the long black skirt that dragged along the floor.

  Once inside, the gypsy sought out the furthest corner from the makeshift altar where Fray Joaquín placed the Virgin, while he introduced her as his sister who had just been widowed and had promised to enter the convent. They didn’t even look at her; all eyes were on the Immaculate Virgin. “Can she be touched?” they asked cautiously. “And kissed?” they added excitedly. Fray Joaquín led prayers before allowing them to do so.

  And while they made enough money to continue their journey, eat and sleep in the inns or in those same houses if there were none—Milagros always separated from the rest, taking refuge in her supposed vow of silence—their progress was slow, irritatingly slow. For safety they always looked for someone to travel with, and sometimes they had to wait, as
when the ladies of the house insisted on demanding the presence of their husbands, children and, on occasion, even the village’s parish priest, with whom Fray Joaquín would converse until he had convinced him of their good intentions. The shows of devotion and the prayers dragged on endlessly. When they needed money they spent entire days showing the Virgin, like in Almaraz, before crossing the River Tagus, where they were well paid for allowing the statue to protect a sick man in his room.

  “And what if he doesn’t get better?” Milagros asked Fray Joaquín when he brought her food to eat in the room they had given her so she could remain in her self-imposed silence.

  “Let Our Lady be the one to decide. She will know.”

  Then he smiled and Milagros, surprised, thought she could make out a hint of mischievousness in Fray Joaquín’s face. The friar had changed … or was it she? Perhaps both, she told herself.

  Milagros found the nights particularly hard; she was abruptly awoken by nightmares, sweaty, confused, short of breath: men forcing themselves on her; the entire Coliseo del Príncipe laughing at her; Old María … Why was she dreaming of the old healer so many years since last seeing her? While her nights were torturous, during the day the mere possibility of seeing her grandfather again gave her the courage to tolerate those coarse black clothes that chafed her skin. The tedium of the prayers and the hours spent alone in homes and inns, so their hosts wouldn’t discover their lies, became time to fantasize about Melchor, her mother and Cachita. She often had to make an effort not to launch into singing those prayers that Caridad had taught her to the rhythm of fandangos. How long had it been since she had sung? “As long as it’s been since you last drank,” Fray Joaquín had answered her, ending the conversation when she brought it up. The sun and her yearnings managed to keep the bitter, torturous dreams at bay, as if enclosed in a bubble, and the hope of being reunited with her family opened out before her. That was the only thing that really mattered: her daughter, her grandfather. The Vegas. In the past she hadn’t understood that, although she consoled herself by using her youth as an excuse. Sometimes she also remembered her father. What had the Camacho told her when he came back from talking with her mother in the makeshift jail in Málaga? He knew what the deal was: his freedom for your engagement to the García boy. He should have refused and sacrificed himself. Your grandfather did what he had to do.

  When she recalled those words, Milagros struggled to banish the memories and think about her grandfather again. Only with his help could she get her little girl back and, with her, her joy in life. Each town they passed brought her a little closer to that goal.

  Sometimes, after hearing him lie to the naive, pious people who wanted to get close to the Virgin, Milagros also thought about Fray Joaquín, and when she did she was filled with conflicting emotions. The first days in Madrid, when they started using the Virgin to make money to pay off their onerous debt to the widow, she was exasperated with his stammering. She silently asked him for firmness and conviction, but she got even more nervous when she could see, through the lace of the mantilla, how he was constantly looking at her out of the corner of his eye to make sure she was playing her part. Worry about yourself, friar. How could anyone recognize me in these clothes that cover me from head to toe? As Fray Joaquín grew more confident in his role, his attitude toward Milagros changed, as if he took strength from his self-assurance. He didn’t seem as fraught over her presence and he sometimes even held her gaze. Then she would feel, even if only for a few moments, like a girl, as she had been back in Triana.

  “Aren’t you attracted to me when I’m dressed in black?” she asked him brazenly one day.

  “What …?” Fray Joaquín went red up to his ears. “What do you mean?”

  “Just wondering if you don’t like me in these … these rags you force me to wear.”

  “It must be the Immaculate Virgin, who strives to avoid temptation,” he joked, pointing to the sculpture.

  She was about to reply but didn’t, and he thought he understood why: inside her was still that mistreated woman, humiliated by men.

  “I didn’t mean—” Milagros started to apologize before he interrupted her.

  “You are right: I don’t like you in those widow’s clothes. But I do like,” he added quickly, seeing her sad expression, “that you are joking and worrying about your appearance again.”

  Milagros’s face changed again. A shadow of sadness marred her gaze. “Fray Joaquín, we women were brought into this world to give birth in pain, to work and suffer men’s perversion. Hush,” she said, seeing that he was about to reply. “They … you men rebel, struggle and fight against evil. Sometimes you win and become the triumphant hero; many other times you lose and then you turn brutally on those weaker than you to cover up your failure, and then vengeance becomes your only goal. We have to shut up and obey; it has always been that way. I finally learned that and it cost me my youth. I don’t even see how I can fight for my daughter without the help of a man. Yes, thank you,” she added before he could intervene, “but it’s true. All we can do is fight to forget our pain and suffering, to overcome them, but never to take revenge for them. We cling to whatever hope we have left, and in the meantime, once in a while, only once in a while, try to feel like women again.”

  “I don’t know what …”

  “Don’t say anything.”

  Fray Joaquín shrugged as he shook his head, his hands extended out in front of him.

  “Someone who tells a woman that he doesn’t like her”—Milagros raised her voice—“no matter how black her clothes, how old or ugly she may be, has no right to say anything.”

  And she turned her back on him, trying to swing her hip enough for him to see it through her shapeless clothes.

  The proximity, the common goal, the constant anxiety over the danger that someone would discover that the respectable and pious widow beneath that disguise was nothing more than a young gypsy—the Barefoot Girl from the Coliseo del Príncipe in Madrid, in fact—and that the friar was lying when he asked for alms for her to enter a convent, brought them a bit closer each day. Milagros did nothing to avoid brushing up against him; she felt the need for that respectful, innocent human contact. They laughed; they opened up to each other—she as never before, observing the man who hid beneath his habit: young and handsome, although he didn’t seem strong. Except for that round bald spot on the top of his head, he could be considered attractive. Although maybe his hair would grow back … He was definitely no gypsy, he lacked decisiveness and haughtiness, but he showed plenty of devotion, sweetness and affection.

  “I don’t think we’ll get any alms here,” Fray Joaquín lamented in a low voice one evening, when they reached a miserable group of shacks that they had been led to by a couple of farmers returning from work, the only companions they found on the road.

  “Perhaps not with the Virgin, but surely we’ll find someone who would pay to have their fortune told,” she bet.

  “Nonsense,” replied the friar, dismissing the idea with a wave of his hands.

  Milagros grabbed one of them in midair, instinctively, just as she had done so many times in Triana with men or women who were reluctant to spend a few coins.

  “Would his eminent reverence,” she joked, “wish to know what the lines on his palm have in store for him? I see …”

  Fray Joaquín tried to pull his hand back, but she didn’t let him and eventually he gave in. Milagros found herself with the friar’s hand in hers, her gloved index finger already running along one of the lines on his palm. As she slid her finger, she felt a disturbing tingling in her belly.

  “Wow …” She cleared her throat and shifted restlessly.

  She tried to blame her nervousness on the uncomfortable clothes she was wearing. She took off her glove and swiped the mantilla away from her face. She took his hand in hers again and felt its warmth. She observed the white, almost delicate, skin of a man who had never worked in a forge.

  “I see …”

  Fo
r the first time in her life, Milagros lacked the effrontery to stare into the eyes of the man whose fortune she was reading.

  THEY WERE getting close to the Múrtiga River, with Encinasola at their backs and Barrancos rising over their heads. Milagros ripped off the mantilla and threw it; then she did the same with the gloves and lifted her face to the radiant late May sky as if trying to capture all the light she’d been denied over the almost month and a half on the road.

  Fray Joaquín contemplated her, spellbound. Now she forced the hooks and eyes of her black bodice open so that the sun’s rays could caress the top of her bust. The long pilgrimage, which in other circumstances would have been grueling, had had the opposite effect on Milagros: her weariness made her forget; the constant worry of being discovered eliminated any other concerns; and imagining the encounter to come softened her previously contracted and permanently tense features. She knew she was being watched. She let out a spontaneous shout that broke the silence, shook her head and turned toward the friar. What will happen if we don’t find Melchor? Fray Joaquín then asked himself, fearful at the wide smile Milagros was rewarding him with. She struggled to undo her bun and release her hair, which refused to fall free. The mere thought of not finding Melchor made Fray Joaquín put down the statue of the Virgin so he could pick up the mantilla and gloves.

  “What are you doing now?” complained Milagros.

  “We might need them,” he responded with the mantilla in his hand; the gloves were still lost among the brush.

  He had trouble finding the second one. When he stood up with it, Milagros had disappeared. Where …? He ran his gaze over the area in vain; he couldn’t find her. He went around a little hill that allowed him to see down into the Múrtiga riverbed. He exhaled. There she was, sleeves rolled up and on her knees, putting her head into the water again and again, scrubbing her hair frantically. He saw her get up, soaked, with her plentiful chestnut-brown hair falling down her back, sparkling in the sun in contrast to her dark skin. Fray Joaquín shivered as he contemplated her beauty.