The Barefoot Queen

by Ildefonso Falcones

  “Yes,” two of them answered in unison.

  “I heard them say they were going to San Jacinto,” added an old, toothless gypsy woman.

  The prior shook his head, as did two of the friars who accompanied them. Fray Joaquín’s face was still enraged, his fists clenched.

  “Your reverences can search the alley,” El Conde then suggested. “Every house if you wish! You will see that they are not here. We have nothing to hide.”

  “Would you like to start with my house?” offered the old gypsy woman with feigned earnestness.

  Fray Joaquín was about to accept her offer when the prior’s voice stopped him.

  “Rafael García, the truth always comes out, keep that in mind. I will be watching, and you will pay dearly if anything happens to them.”

  “I already told …”

  The prior lifted one hand, turned his back and left him with the words still on his lips.

  THAT NIGHT, guitars were heard in the San Miguel alley. The weather was splendid; the temperature, mild; and the gypsies, mainly the Garcías and the Carmonas, were in the mood for celebrating. Men and women sang and danced fandangos, seguidillas and zarabandas.

  “Just kill them,” La Trianera urged her husband. “We’ll bury them far from here, beyond the lowlands, where no one can find them,” she added at Rafael’s silence. “No one will ever know.”

  “I agree with Reyes,” declared Ramón Flores.

  “Pascual Carmona has to kill them,” stated Rafael, who still remembered the rage and violence with which Pascual, the head of the Carmonas since old Inocencio’s death, had burst into his house after Melchor’s escape in Madrid. He shook him and threatened him, and if it weren’t for the intervention of his own relatives, he would have hit him. “I’d like to do it myself, I would pay to execute El Galeote, but the revenge belongs to the Carmonas; it is theirs by right of blood. It was a Carmona El Galeote killed, Pascual’s brother in fact. We should wait for his return. I don’t think he’ll be long. Besides …” El Conde pointed with his chin past the dancing gypsies, where Fray Joaquín remained leaning against the wall of one of the buildings. “… what’s he still doing here?”

  Fray Joaquín had refused to return to San Jacinto with the prior and the other friars. He stayed in the alley, asking everyone he met and always getting the same answer.

  “Father,” complained a gypsy women when he grabbed a boy by the shoulders and shook him after he answered him with hesitation in his eyes, “leave the little one alone. I already told you what you want to know.”

  He went into some of the apartments clustered around the courtyards. The gypsies allowed it. He walked through them with children and old ladies observing him closely. He inspected the squalid rooms and, desperate, even shouted out Milagros’s name: his words echoed strangely in the courtyard. Someone started tapping a hammer to mock the impertinent friar’s heartbroken screams. The incessant, monotone banging of the hammers accompanied some verses that urged the friar to leave. “I won’t go,” he decided nonetheless. He would remain there, in the alley, alert, for as long as it took: someone would make a mistake; someone would tell him where to find them. He began to pray, contrite, repentant at turning to divine help that he didn’t believe he deserved after having run off with Milagros and having used the Virgin to cheat people.

  “The friar?” spat La Trianera. “We’ll see if he stays there once Pedro comes back.”

  Hearing the name of La Trianera’s grandson, Ramón Flores made a face that didn’t go unnoticed to Rafael, who in turn shook his head, his lips pursed. He had sent a couple of boys to try to find him and let him know about Milagros’s arrival. He told them to search for him in the many inns and bars of Seville where he whiled away the hours and spent the plentiful money he had brought back from Madrid, wine and women flowing. Where had he got so much money? El Conde wondered. The boys had come back in the mid-afternoon with no news. Rafael insisted, sending two young men who could continue searching by night, but they still didn’t know where he was.

  “Melchor Vega is a lucky man,” pointed out La Trianera, interrupting her husband’s thoughts. “He survived the galleys. For years he’s been smuggling tobacco and the patrol hasn’t caught him, and he even escaped from the Garcías in Madrid. It seemed impossible, but he did it. I wouldn’t wait another minute before finishing him off.”

  Rafael García turned his gaze to Fray Joaquín again. He was wary of his presence, the prior of San Jacinto’s threat still present in his memory.

  “I told you that Pascual is the one who should kill him. We will wait for him.”

  THE DAWN found Fray Joaquín sleepy, sitting on the ground and resting against the wall, in the same place he had been standing until well into the early hours, when the gypsies went back to their homes. Some even wished him a sarcastic good night; others mocked him with a greeting in the morning. The friar didn’t answer in either case. He felt as if he hadn’t slept a wink, but he had; enough to not realize that Pedro García had returned. The darkness was almost absolute. Pedro had looked at him in shock, sprawled out there. He didn’t see his face, so he couldn’t be sure it was him. He thought about kicking him, but decided against it and headed toward the apartments.

  “Is that friar who I think he is?” he asked his grandfather after waking him up rudely.

  “It’s Fray Joaquín, from San Jacinto,” he answered.

  “What’s he doing here?” Pedro wanted to know.

  La Trianera, who was sleeping beside her husband, closed her eyes tightly after seeing her grandson’s nervousness. Although Bartola consistently backed his story, and the García and Carmona families insulted Milagros and repudiated her, La Trianera had doubted Pedro as soon as she saw him show up with that pretty gypsy girl from Madrid, little María … and his purse filled with money. “He must have stolen it from the whore when he found her out,” answered her husband when she revealed her doubts. But La Trianera knew that wasn’t the case. After escorting her to all those performances and parties, she knew the Vega girl … and she never would have prostituted herself voluntarily; she had been raised with gypsy values. Days after their arrival, she questioned Bartola, just the two of them; her evasive answers were enough to convince her.

  “Where is Milagros?” asked Pedro before his grandfather had finished explaining.

  Rafael García violently shook off the hand his grandson had around his arm and got up from the straw mattress with surprising agility. Pedro almost fell to the floor.

  “Don’t you dare touch me,” El Conde warned him.

  Pedro García, his balance regained, took a step backward. “Where is she, Grandfather?” he repeated without hiding his anxiety.

  Rafael García turned his head toward La Trianera.

  “The pit in the forge,” guessed Pedro, “that’s where you’re keeping them, right?”

  A simple hole in the ground, covered with planks where the Garcías hid goods and chattels, especially stolen goods, in case a constable came into the forge. It wasn’t the first time they had used it to hide someone, they’d even tried it during the big roundup, but they had crammed so many in that the King’s soldiers had laughed when they arrested them.

  Milagros lifted her head as she heard the planks moving. The faint light of an oil lamp revealed the three of them sitting on the ground, hands and feet tied, packed together in the meager pit. Above, she could make out the shapes of three men arguing. The oil lamp made one of their jackets glitter and Milagros screamed. Caridad could see the terror in her friend’s eyes before she pulled her knees to her chest and tried to hide her head between them. Then she looked up toward where Melchor was: the argument was getting worse and the men were starting to tussle. It took them a while to recognize Pedro, who got free of the others and jumped into the pit with a gleaming knife in his hands.

  “Don’t kill her!” they heard Rafael García say.

  “Whore!”

  Pedro’s shouting was lost amid Caridad’s and Melc
hor’s.

  One of the gypsies leapt in and managed to grab Pedro’s wrist just as he was about to stab his wife. A moment later there were two more holding him back.

  “Bring him up here!” ordered El Conde.

  A brutal kick in the face clouded Milagros’s vision. Her head hit the wall violently.

  “Leave me be! She’s a whore! Let me finish her off!” shouted Pedro García. Unable to free his arm, he kicked her furiously.

  Amid the blows and screams, Milagros thought she heard her grandfather’s battle cry.

  “Bastard dog!” she reacted and lifted her feet, still tied together, to kick back at her husband. She hit him on one thigh, not hard, but the blow calmed the pain of the others she received: on her face, chest, neck … She tried to land another one, but the two young men who were guarding the pit were already lifting Pedro up, as he kept kicking the air.

  Milagros and Pedro exchanged a glance. He spat; she didn’t even move. Her eyes oozed hatred.

  “Have you gone mad?” Rafael García accused his grandson even before his body was entirely out of the pit. “Silence!” he demanded, putting an end to the resistance with which Pedro returned to the surface. “Don’t let him anywhere near here again, do you understand?” he ordered the two guards. And turning to his grandson he added, “Leave Triana. I don’t want to see you here again until you get a message from me.”

  While El Conde headed toward the door of the forge to look out at the alley, Milagros and Caridad communicated in a glance. Melchor remained downcast, mortified at not having been able to defend his granddaughter. We are going to die, the two women said to each other silently. Their faces hardened, since they didn’t want those bastards to hear them cry.

  Rafael García checked that the alley was deserted and in silence. He pricked up his ears and heard how that stillness was broken by a murmur the patriarch was slow to recognize: Caridad and Milagros’s muffled singing down below in the pit. One began to softly sing her Negro songs and the other followed along, trying to overcome her fear with a fandango. A monotone rhythm joined by an upbeat one. The planks over their heads didn’t allow them to see the gleams of the oil lamp.

  “Shut up!” the gypsies guarding the pit ordered.

  They did not.

  Melchor listened to the songs of the two people he loved most and he shook his head, his throat choked. Why did it have to be here, now, when he finally heard them sing together? They continued in the darkness, Caridad gradually adding joy to her songs and Milagros drinking in the sadness of the slave melodies. Then they matched their rhythms. A shiver ran down Melchor’s spine. Without music, without words, without shouting and clapping, the now fused, single song sung by the two women bounced off the planks that covered the pit, filling it with pain, friendship, betrayals, love, experiences, lost hopes …

  Up above, when Pedro had left the smithy far behind, the two young guards questioned the patriarch with their gaze. Rafael didn’t answer, transfixed by the women’s voices.

  “Silence!” he shouted nervously, as if he had been caught out. “Be quiet or I will finish you off myself,” he added, kicking the planks.

  They ignored him. El Conde eventually shrugged, ordered the young men to bolt the doors of the smithy and went home. Caridad and Milagros kept singing until dawn broke, though they couldn’t see even a glimpse of its light.

  SITTING ON the ground, Fray Joaquín felt how the passing hours transformed the space that surrounded him: the din of hammering and the clouds of smoke that came from the lower levels of the forges; the shouts and playing of children and the gypsies coming and going, or simply chatting and loafing about.

  He couldn’t stop what he was sure was going to happen. He couldn’t even count on his religious community. A plague of locusts was destroying the Sevillian crops, and the friars were needed to recite rogations against that divine punishment that so frequently laid waste to the harvests, leaving hunger and epidemics in its wake. The prior, spellbound by the statue of the Immaculate Virgin, had asked to carry it in the procession. It would always be better than excommunicating the locusts, as some priests did. Fray Joaquín wondered about appealing to the authorities, but he desisted at the thought of the questions they would ask him. He didn’t know how to lie, and the officials weren’t interested in gypsy quarrels. Giving himself up to them would do no good.

  Reyes and Rafael watched him from the window of their home.

  “I don’t like having him there,” commented the patriarch.

  “And Pedro?” she asked.

  “He left. I ordered him not to return until I say so.”

  “When is Pascual Carmona coming back?”

  “I’ve already sent for him. According to his wife, he’s in Granada. I trust they will find him soon.”

  “We have to resolve this quickly. When are you going to hand the Vega girl over to Pedro?”

  “When I’ve finished with the others. El Galeote is what concerns me. I don’t want anything to get in the way of Pascual slitting his throat. After that, Pedro can do what he likes with the granddaughter.”

  “Fine.”

  Those were her last words before falling silent, looking out pensively on the alley, just as her husband did, and just as Fray Joaquín did. Suddenly, like everyone there, they focused their attention on a woman who had stopped at the entrance to the alleyway. “Who …?” some wondered. “It can’t be!” doubted others.

  “Ana Vega,” murmured La Trianera in a halting voice.

  Many were slow to recognize her; some didn’t manage to at all. Reyes, however, could even sense the spirit of her enemy asserting itself on the skinny, wizened body that held it, in the haggard face and the gaze that emerged from deep eye sockets. She was barefoot and raggedy, her dirty hair white, and she wore old, stolen clothes.

  Ana ran her eyes over the alley. It all seemed the same as when she was forced to leave, years earlier. Perhaps there were fewer people … She stopped a second too long when she came across the friar, leaning on the wall, and for a brief instant she wondered what he was doing there. She recognized many others as she searched for Milagros: Carmonas, Vargases, Garcías … Where are you, my daughter? She sensed misgivings from the gypsies; some even lowered their heads. Why?

  Ana had been walking for almost two months since leaving Saragossa; she had fled the House of Mercy with the fifteen Vega women who were left, including girls, after Salvador and the other boys were sent to the arsenals. No one followed them, as if they were pleased they were running away, content to be rid of them; they didn’t even report their escape. They divided into two groups: one headed toward Granada; the other to Seville. Their thought was that that way some would make it. Ana headed the Sevillian party, which carried old Luisa Vega. “You will die in your homelands,” she promised her. “I’m not going to let you die in this disgusting jail.” They walked those two months before stopping in Carmona, just six leagues from Triana, where they were taken in by the Ximénez clan. Old Luisa was worn out and the others could barely continue carrying her. “We’re almost there, Aunt,” she tried to encourage her, but it was the old woman who objected. “Let’s rest here, where we’re protected and safe,” replied another Vega. “We’ve been gone for years, what could a few more days matter?” But they did matter to Ana: she needed to find Milagros, she wanted to tell her that she loved her. Five years of hunger, illness and punishments were enough. Gypsy women from historically embittered families had ended up helping each other and smiling at each other while they shared their misery. Milagros was her daughter, and if the quarrels between families had vanished over the years of adversity, how was she going to hold a grudge against someone of her own blood? What did it matter whom she had married? She loved her!

  She continued the path alone and when she arrived at the alley she was met with sullen looks; whispers; gypsy women who turned their backs on her and ran to their houses, stuck their heads out of the windows or doors and pointed her out to their relatives.


  “Ana …? Ana Vega?” Fray Joaquín approached that woman who was looking at the street, perturbed.

  “You still recognize me, Father?” she asked sarcastically. But something in the priest’s face made her change her tone. “Where is Milagros? Did something happen to her?”

  He hesitated. How could he recount so much misfortune in a few sentences? Even the hammering in the forges stopped as Fray Joaquín told her what had happened.

  Ana shouted to the heavens.

  “Rafael García!” she howled soon after, running toward the patriarch’s house. “Son of a bitch! Bastard! Mangy dog …!”

  No one stopped her. The people moved aside. Not even the Garcías, who remained in the door of their smithy, tried to keep her from entering the courtyard. She shouted to Rafael García at the foot of the stairs that led to the upper levels.

  “Shut up!” shouted La Trianera from above, leaning on the railing of the long gallery. “You are nothing more than the daughter of a murderer and the mother of a whore! Get out of here!”

  “I’ll kill you!”

  Ana flew up the stairs. She didn’t get to the old woman. The gypsy women in the gallery pounced on her.

  “Get out!” ordered Reyes. “Throw her down the stairs!”

  They did. Ana stumbled down a few steps before she managed to grab hold of the railing and slid down a few more. She recovered.

  “Your grandson sold my daughter!” she shouted, trying to go back up.

  The García women in the gallery spat on her.

  “That’s every whore’s excuse!” replied Reyes. “Milagros is nothing more than a common harlot, the shame of gypsy women!”

  “You lie!”

  “I was there.” It was Bartola who spoke. “Your daughter sold herself to men for a few cuartos.”

  “Lies!” repeated Ana with all her strength. The others laughed. “You lie,” she sobbed.

  AFTER A couple of attempts, she understood that no one would deal with her if the friar was there. Ana needed him: he was the only one who could speak in Milagros’s favor to contradict the story Pedro had spread and La Triana had exaggerated, but finally she was forced to yield to gypsy customs.