The Barefoot Queen

by Ildefonso Falcones

  The people of Barrancos received them with curiosity and suspicion: a friar carrying a parcel and a lovely, haughty gypsy woman who was looking around curiously at everything around her. Fray Joaquín hesitated. Not Milagros: she confronted the first man she came across.

  “We are looking for the person who sells tobacco to smuggle into Spain,” she said; the man was elderly and overwhelmed by her. He stammered out some words in the local language, unable to take his eyes off the face interrogating him as if he were guilty of some crime.

  Fray Joaquín sensed Milagros’s tremendous anxiety and decided to intervene. “May peace be with you,” he greeted the older man calmly. “Do you understand us?”

  “I do,” he heard someone else behind the man say.

  “IT’S VERY dangerous,” repeated Fray Joaquín a dozen times as he approached the group of buildings that had been pointed out to them as making up Méndez’s establishment. The place was a nest of smugglers. Milagros walked decisively, with her head held high.

  “At least cover your face up again,” he begged her, quickening his step to offer her the mantilla.

  She didn’t even answer. Countless possibilities, all of them terrifying, were going through the friar’s head. Melchor might not be there; he could even be this Méndez’s enemy. He feared for himself, but above all for Milagros. Few people failed to notice her presence; they stopped, they looked at her, there were even some who complimented her in that strange language they spoke in Barrancos.

  What have I got Milagros into? he lamented just as they went through the gates of Méndez’s establishment. Several backpackers were lazing around the large dirt courtyard that opened out in front of the smuggler’s headquarters; one of them whistled when he saw Milagros. A couple of shady-looking women, peeking out of one of the windows of the bedroom that extended over the stables, screwed up their faces at the friar’s arrival and a band of half-naked little kids who ran among the sleepy mules tied to posts stopped to go over to them.

  “Who are you?” asked one of the children.

  “Have you got any sweets?” inquired another.

  They had already reached the main house. None of the men who were watching them made any motion toward them. Milagros was about to swat away the pestering kids when Fray Joaquín intervened again.

  “No,” he said before she could deal out the brusque gesture, “we don’t have sweets, but I do have this,” he added, showing them a two-real coin.

  The children milled around the friar with their eyes bright at the sight of the copper coin.

  “I will give it to you if you let Mr. Méndez know that he has visitors.”

  “And who is asking for him?”

  The children were silent; some of the backpackers stood up and the prostitutes in the window stuck their heads out even further.

  “The granddaughter of Melchor Vega, El Galeote,” Milagros answered then.

  Méndez, the smuggler, appeared in the door of the main house. He looked the gypsy woman up and down, cocked his head, scrutinized her again, let a few seconds pass and then smiled. With a snort, Fray Joaquín let out all the air he had been holding in his lungs.

  “Milagros, right?” the smuggler asked then. “Your grandfather has told me a lot about you. Welcome.”

  One of the children demanded Fray Joaquín’s attention, pulling on the sleeve of his habit.

  “For that coin I’ll take you to El Galeote,” he offered.

  Milagros jumped and leapt on the little boy.

  “He’s here?” she shrieked. “Where? You know where …?” Suddenly she was wary. What if the kid was tricking them just to get the coin? She turned to the smuggler and questioned him with eyes that could penetrate the entire building.

  “He arrived a couple of weeks ago,” confirmed Méndez.

  With the smuggler still in front of her, Milagros stammered something that could have been a thank-you or a farewell, grabbed the end of her long black skirt, revealing her ankles and, with it hiked up on one side, prepared to follow the little kids, who were already waiting for them amid laughter and shouts beside the entrance gates to the smuggler’s establishment.

  “Let’s go!” one of them urged.

  “Let’s go, Fray Joaquín,” Milagros hurried him, already a few steps ahead.

  Unlike Milagros, the priest said goodbye in a clear voice. “I can’t go carrying the Virgin,” he then complained.

  But Milagros didn’t hear him. A girl had grabbed her by the hand and was pulling her toward the road.

  Fray Joaquín followed them unhurriedly, exaggerating the weight of the statue he had carried with no problem over half of Spain. Melchor was in Barrancos, thanks be to God. He had never really believed they would find him. I would kill for her. You are a payo … and a friar as well. You could renounce your vows, but not your race. The warning the gypsy had given him one day on the banks of the Guadalquivir, at the possibility of a relationship with his granddaughter, had gripped his stomach as soon as Méndez had confirmed his presence in Barrancos. El Galeote would do anything for her! Hadn’t he already killed Milagros’s father for allowing her to marry a García?

  “What are you doing?”

  Two of the kids were fighting to help him with the weight of the statue of the Virgin.

  “Give it to them!” ordered Milagros, ahead of him. “Or we’ll never get there!”

  He didn’t hand it over to them; he wasn’t sure he wanted to meet Melchor Vega face to face.

  “Get out of here!” he shouted to the pair of runny-nosed kids who, despite everything, continued to try to help him to carry the parcel. They were more of a nuisance than anything else.

  Milagros waited for him, holding up the hem of her skirt, impatient. The girl accompanying her stayed by her side, hands on her hips, imitating the gypsy woman’s stance.

  “What’s going on with you?” Milagros asked him, puzzled.

  I’m going to lose you, that’s what’s going on. Don’t you realize? he wanted to say.

  “What are a few minutes after we’ve come so far?” he answered instead, more gruffly than he would have liked.

  She misinterpreted his tone and her expression soured. She looked at the kids, who continued running happily ahead, silhouetted against the sun. She was overcome by doubts.

  “Do you think …?” She let her arms drop to her sides. Her skirt fell. “You told me that my grandfather would forgive me.”

  “And he will,” Fray Joaquín assured her, to keep himself from suggesting they run away together again, that they take to the roads with the statue of the Virgin.

  But the friar’s despondency came through in his voice. Milagros sensed it and adapted her pace to match his.

  “She is a García too,” she murmured.

  “What?”

  “My little girl. My girl, María. She is a García too. My grandfather’s hatred of them is greater than … everything! Even the affection he once had for me,” she added in a thin voice.

  Fray Joaquín sighed, aware of the contradictions that lashed his soul. When he saw her happy, excited, he despaired, terrified at the idea of losing her, but when he saw her suffering, then … then he wanted to help her, encourage her to go to her grandfather.

  “A lot of time has passed,” he said without conviction.

  “What if he doesn’t forgive me for marrying Pedro García? Grandfather …”

  “He will forgive you.”

  “My mother disowned me for it. My mother!”

  They reached the foot of a hill, outside the town. The oldest of the children was waiting for them there; the others were already running uphill.

  A single solitary house atop the hill overlooked the lands; several of the kids pointed in that direction.

  “He’s up there?” asked Fray Joaquín, taking advantage of the pause to place the statue on the ground.

  “Yes.”

  “What’s Melchor doing up there, alone?” he wondered, surprised.

  “He’s not alon
e,” said the boy. “He lives with the Negress.”

  Milagros wanted to say something but the words didn’t come out. She trembled and sought out the friar for support.

  “Caridad,” he whispered.

  “Yes,” confirmed the boy. “Caridad. They are always there, see them?”

  Fray Joaquín sharpened his gaze until he could make out two figures sitting in front of the house, on the edge of a cliff.

  Milagros, her eyes damp and her senses clouded, couldn’t see a thing.

  “Since they arrived,” the boy continued explaining, “they’ve gone out a few nights to smuggle. Both times they came back with sweets! Caridad loves sweets … and she shared them with us. And Gregoria, the girl …” The boy scanned the path. “… that one, you see her? The first one, the little one who runs the fastest, well, they brought Gregoria some sandals because she couldn’t walk, she had huge gashes on the soles of her feet. Look how she’s running now!” Fray Joaquín watched little Gregoria leap. “But the rest of the time they spend sitting up there, hugging each other, smoking and looking out on the fields. We sneak up a lot, but they always catch us. Gregoria can’t keep still!”

  “Hugging?”

  The question came from Milagros, who tried to dry her eyes to focus them on the top of the hill.

  “Yes. All the time! They pull each other close and then El Galeote says to Caridad, ‘Sing, morena!’ ”

  Sing, morena! Milagros was starting to be able to make out the peak. Cachita! That friend whom she’d hit and insulted, whom she’d said she never wanted to see again for as long as she lived.

  “Gregoria is already at the top!” exclaimed the boy. “Let’s go!”

  Both Fray Joaquín and Milagros straightened up. The two seated figures stood when the little girl reached them. Gregoria was pointing at the foot of the hill. Milagros felt Melchor’s gaze on her as if, despite the distance, he was right beside her.

  “Let’s go!” insisted the boy.

  Fray Joaquín knelt to pick up the statue of the Virgin.

  “I can’t,” Milagros groaned.

  CARIDAD GRABBED Melchor’s hand and squeezed it. The touch of his coarse, rough palm, hardened by ten years rowing on the galley ship, calmed her. They were the same palms that had run over her body countless times since Melchor had showed up in Torrejón; the same ones that she had bathed in tears as she kissed them; the ones that he had brought to her cheeks waiting for a reply when just a few days later Don Valerio forbade her to live in mortal sin with a gypsy. “This setup with the ragmen isn’t going to work,” Melchor warned her. “They will catch us; they’ll end up arresting us. Let’s go far from here. To Barrancos.” Caridad’s smile sealed the pact between the former slave and the gypsy with a gleam in his eye and a face grooved with lines. Barrancos, where they’d first fallen in love, where she’d felt like a woman for the first time, where the law couldn’t reach them. They paid plenty, traveling quickly in a covered wagon to Extremadura, eager to leave it all behind.

  Melchor, stock-still, expectant, with his gaze and his other senses trained on the foot of the hill, responded by squeezing her hand in return. On that occasion, the gypsy’s touch didn’t calm her: Caridad knew she was part of his whirlwind of worries, because she felt them too. Milagros! After so many years … Without letting go of his hand, she shifted her gaze from that figure dressed in black to the universe that opened up at her feet: fields, rivers, valleys, untilled lands and forests; each and every one of them had absorbed her songs as they sat, looking out on the horizon, in that new life that fortune had afforded them. She would oblige Melchor and lift her voice, a voice that she often left hanging in the air to follow its reverberation along the paths they had traveled together, loaded down with tobacco and a love that quickened their steps, their movements, their smiles. They had gone out again by night with their backpacks filled with tobacco. They didn’t need the money; they had more than enough. They only wanted to travel those paths again, cross the river again, run and hide at the crunch of a twig, sleep out in the open … make love under the stars. They lived for each other, with nothing better to do than look at each other while they smoked. Nights of caresses, smiles, conversations and long silences. They consoled each other over bad memories; they promised each other, with a simple touch, that nothing and no one would ever separate them again.

  “Why doesn’t she come up?” she heard the gypsy ask.

  Caridad felt a shiver: the breeze from the fields hitting her face warned her that Milagros’s arrival would affect her happiness. She didn’t want her to come up, she wished she would turn around and retrace her steps … She looked again at the foot of the hill just as the gypsy woman began her ascent. Melchor squeezed her hand harder and held it while they approached.

  “Fray Joaquín?” he said in a surprised tone. “Is that Fray Joaquín?”

  Caridad didn’t answer, although she too recognized the friar priest. Even the children grew silent and moved to the side, serious, solemn, at Milagros’s arrival. The stifled sobs of the gypsy woman masked any other sound. Caridad noticed a tremble in Melchor’s hand, in his entire body. Milagros stopped a few paces away, with Fray Joaquín behind her, and she looked up toward her grandfather; then she shifted her gaze to Caridad and then back to Melchor. The situation dragged on. Caridad stopped feeling El Galeote trembling. She was the one who trembled now at Milagros’s tears, at the storm of memories that came rushing to her mind. She heard again those first words from the gypsy girl as she lay in the small courtyard on the San Miguel alley after Melchor found her feverish beneath an orange tree; the pontoon bridge and the church of the Negritos; the gypsy settlement on the grounds of the Carthusian monastery; the cigars and her red outfit; Old María; the roundup; the flight through the Andévalo … She spurned her fears and let go of Melchor’s hand. She stepped forward, a small, indecisive step. Milagros’s eyes begged her to take another, and Caridad ran into her arms.

  “Go to him,” she said after the first embrace.

  Milagros shifted her gaze toward Melchor, stern and proud up on his hill.

  “He loves you,” added Caridad, sensing the young woman’s hesitation, “but, for as much as he hides or denies it, I know that he fears you haven’t forgiven him for … for your father. Forget what happened,” she insisted, pushing her gently from behind.

  Milagros left Caridad and Fray Joaquín and walked uphill. Her own tears prevented her from noticing Melchor’s damp eyes. How many times had she tried to convince herself that what had happened to her father had been in a fit of rage? She wanted to forgive him, but she couldn’t be sure if he had forgotten what he considered a worse betrayal of her Vega blood: her marriage to Pedro, another link in the chain of hatred that set the two families against each other. How was Melchor going to forget the Garcías? Just a few years ago the Garcías had tried to kill him …

  “Damn the Virgin of Bonaire!”

  The gypsy stopped at her grandfather’s curse. She looked at Melchor in horror and then behind her and to both sides. What was he trying …?

  “What are you doing dressed in sinister black?”

  She looked at her mourning clothes as if it were the first time she had seen them. When she looked up she saw Melchor was smiling.

  “I got the wrong man.”

  Melchor’s words made Caridad cower, even more than she had been doing as she listened to Milagros’s long, cruel story. The four of them were around the table: Melchor and Caridad in their regular chairs with willow-cane seats, while Milagros sat on the stool they kept for Martín’s visits each time his contraband brought him to the area; the friar was standing, uncomfortable, looking here and there for a place to lean, until Melchor pierced him with a look and he was still for a while.

  Caridad looked for a tiny bit of the tenderness in Melchor’s gaze, but she found his eyes pinched and his pupils ice-cold. The gypsy spoke few words over the course of his granddaughter’s story: a curt “thank you” to the friar when he found out
that he had saved Milagros’s life, and brief questions about the daughter she’d had with the García boy. His most important question, “Do you have any news of your mother?” was met with a sob from Milagros. Caridad sensed how her man was repressing his emotions. Start swearing! she wanted to encourage him, still shaken up by Milagros’s words, seeing the tension that gripped Melchor’s body, his fists clenched on the table. Damn all the gods in the universe! she was about to shout when she managed to stop listening to the horrible story of rapes that Milagros was telling them and she turned toward Melchor with her throat seized. The veins on his neck were swollen and throbbing. They’re going to burst, gypsy, she thought, growing even more distressed. They’re going to burst.

  She knew that she shouldn’t follow him when, after the conversation ended, he got up and headed toward the door to the house.

  “I got the wrong man,” he said before leaving.

  As those words echoed, Caridad watched the gypsy head out into the reddish dusk that floated above the peaks; he was challenging the entire world, even the air he was breathing had become his enemy. A thousand stabs then reminded her of the scars on her back, which Melchor had caressed and kissed. The whip cracked again in her ears. Slavery, the tobacco plantation, La Galera prison … She thought … she thought she had left all that behind forever. How naive she had been! She was enjoying happiness with the gypsy, in Barrancos, far from it all, “close to heaven,” as she had whispered with excitement and gratitude when Melchor showed her the house he had rented on the top of the hill. How stupid! What a fool! She fought against the tears that flooded her eyes. She didn’t want to cry, she didn’t want to give in … She felt Milagros’s hand on hers.

  “Cachita,” she sobbed, lost in her own pain.

  Caridad was slow to respond to her touch. She tightened her lips, although not even that managed to control her trembling. She felt weak, dizzy. She had listened to Milagros’s story with her spirit torn between the granddaughter’s pain, the grandfather’s rage, and the premonition of her own unhappiness, leaping frantically from one to the other following their words, gestures and silences. Milagros pressed on her hand, searching for a comfort that Caridad wasn’t sure she wanted to offer her. She met her gaze, her doubts fading when she saw her friend’s flushed face, her bloodshot eyes, the tears running down her cheeks. She surrendered to sobs.