The Barefoot Queen

by Ildefonso Falcones

  “Go, Father,” she urged. “You will only make things worse,” she insisted when Fray Joaquín refused. “Can’t you see? This is a gypsy matter.”

  “I can go to the Chief Magistrate in Seville,” offered Fray Joaquín. “I know people …”

  Ana looked him up and down as he spoke. His appearance was as deplorable as his words were fiery.

  “I don’t know what interest you have in my daughter … although I can guess.”

  Fray Joaquín confirmed her suspicions with a sudden flush.

  “Listen to me: if a constable shows up here, the entire gypsy settlement would join forces with Rafael García in defense of gypsy law. They wouldn’t listen to reason or arguments then …”

  “What reason?” he exploded. “There is no sentence on Milagros like there is on Melchor … and Caridad. Let’s suppose she had become a harlot, that it were true, why keep her? What will they do to her?”

  “They will hand her over to her husband. And after that nobody will worry about what might happen to her; nobody will ask about her.”

  “Pedro …” muttered the priest. “He may have already killed her.”

  Ana Vega remained in silence for a few seconds.

  “We must trust that he hasn’t,” she finally whispered. “If they are hidden here, on the alley, neither El Conde nor the other patriarchs would let them do that. A corpse always brings problems. They will demand that it’s done outside of Triana, in secret, with no witnesses. Leave, Father. If we have any chance …”

  “Leave? From what you say, if Milagros is in the alley, Pedro will have to take her out of here. I will wait at the entrance until Judgment Day if necessary. You do what you need to do.”

  Ana didn’t argue. She couldn’t have, because Fray Joaquín turned his back on her, headed toward the entrance and leaned against the wall of the first building; his expression made it clear that he had made up his mind to stick it out there as long as he had to. Ana shook her head and wondered whether she should go over and tell him that there were many other ways to leave the alley: the windows and some of the back gates … Yet, she observed him and saw the blindness of someone in love. How long had it been since she’d seen passion in a man’s eyes, the fear of his beloved being hurt, rage even? First a García and now a friar. She didn’t know whether Milagros returned his feelings. In any case, that was the least of her worries. She had to do something. She didn’t have the Vega men here to back her up. The women in the settlement at La Cartuja had always been hated by the people in the alley, who wanted to keep the peace with the payos, do business with them; it would do her little good to go to them with this problem.

  She tightened her lips and began a pilgrimage that was much more difficult than the long, hard road from Saragossa. Forges, homes and courtyards where children played and women wove baskets. Some didn’t even bother to turn their heads and listen to her pleas: “Let my daughter defend herself from her husband’s accusations.” She knew that she couldn’t plead for her father. Gypsy law would be fulfilled: they would kill him, but the terrible anguish she felt over it was eased by the opportunity to fight relentlessly for her daughter despite the weakness she felt. She got some reactions.

  “If what you say is true,” replied a woman from the Flores family, “why did your daughter allow it? Answer me, Ana Vega, wouldn’t you have fought to the death to defend your virtue?”

  Her knees were about to fail her.

  “I would have ripped my husband’s eyes out,” muttered an old woman who seemed to be dozing beside the first. “Why didn’t your daughter do that?”

  “We shouldn’t interfere in other people’s marriages,” she heard at another house. “We already gave your daughter another chance after the death of Alejandro Vargas, remember?”

  “I won’t lift a finger.” “She deserves what she gets.” “You Vegas have always been troublemakers. Look at your father.” “Where’s your haughtiness now?” The recriminations followed her wherever she went. Her hands were trembling and she felt a crushing pressure in her chest.

  “Besides,” admitted a woman from the Flores family, “you won’t find anybody willing to challenge the Garcías. Everyone’s afraid of going back to the arsenals, and El Conde has gained a lot of power with the payos and the priests.”

  “Kill me instead!” Ana ended up screaming in the middle of the alley, defeated, desperate, when the sun was starting to set. “Don’t you want Vega blood? Take mine!”

  No one answered. Only Fray Joaquín, at the other end of the alley, came to her, but before he reached her, another gypsy did. Ana didn’t recognize him until he was quite close: it was Pedro García, who had returned, disobeying his grandfather’s orders, when he found out that Ana Vega had shown up in the alley. In his arms he held a small girl who struggled and tried to hide her face in his neck, ever more anxiously as her father brought her closer to the madwoman screaming with her hands held high in the middle of the alley. The friar had told her about her granddaughter, and Ana recognized herself in that girl. Pedro García stopped a few paces from her, stroked the little girl’s hair, pulled her to him and then smiled. It had been worth arguing with his grandfather just to see the pain in the face of the woman who had dared to smack him in public some years ago; that was what he told El Conde, and Rafael García had finally understood and allowed it, with the promise that he would disappear again until El Galeote had been executed.

  Ana fell to her knees on the ground, defeated, and broke down in tears.

  After a night of grieving, Ana came to believe that she had no tears left in her. Fray Joaquín was awkward in his consolation because he too was struggling to hold back his emotion. The temperate summer sun didn’t improve her mood. The gypsies in the alley passed them by without even a glance, as if what had happened the day before had put an end to any dispute. Ana Vega saw the backs of those leaving the alley as she waited for the arrival of Pascual Carmona. When the head of the Carmona family arrived the sentence would be carried out, they had told her in one of the forges. Pascual was her last hope: he wouldn’t yield on her father’s death sentence, that she knew. José had hated Melchor, Pascual did too, many of the Carmonas had made her husband’s feelings their own, but even so Pascual was Milagros’s uncle. She was the only daughter of his murdered brother, and Ana trusted that there was still some affection left in the gypsy for the little girl he used to play with.

  “Pray in silence, Father,” she urged Fray Joaquín, tired of his constant murmur, which only increased her anguish as it mingled with the blacksmiths’ irksome hammering.

  She was planning to approach Pascual before he entered the alley, begging him on bended knee; humiliating herself, throwing herself at his feet, promising him anything he asked for in exchange for her daughter’s life. She didn’t know if she would recognize him after five years. He looked somewhat like José, but taller, considerably stockier … surly, dour … but he was the head of the family and as such should defend Milagros. She looked at the people passing, between La Cava, the Minims and San Jacinto, and she envied the laughter and the seemingly carefree way they went about their lives on that magnificent sunny day that was witness to her misfortune. She saw a couple of gypsy girls following after a payo asking for a coin and her expression soured. The man brushed them off rudely and the youngest fell to the ground. A woman ran to help her while the others chided the payo, who hurried on. Ana Vega felt the tears she thought had run out return to her eyes: her friends from captivity. Old Luisa was the first to see her; the others were still insulting the man. Luisa hobbled over to her, pain showing in her face at every step. The others soon joined her, though none of them dared to pass the old woman: seven women in rags walked toward her, filling her blurred vision, as if nothing else existed.

  “Why are you crying, girl?” asked Luisa in greeting.

  “What … what are you doing here?” she sobbed.

  “We came to help you.”

  Ana tried to smile. She was unable to. She
wanted to ask how they had found out, but the words didn’t come. She took a deep breath and tried to calm herself down.

  “They hate us,” she replied. “They hate the Vegas, my father, Milagros, me … all of us! What can we do, just us?”

  “Just us?” Luisa turned and pointed behind her. “The Ximénez came too, from Carmona; some others from El Viso and a couple from the Cruz family in Alcalá de Guadaira. You remember Rosa Cruz?”

  Rosa peeked out from behind the last of the Vegas and blew her a kiss. This time, Ana’s mouth widened into a smile. It was the same gesture that Rosa had made when Ana stayed behind, in the night, watching her back as the other fled through a hole in the wall of the House of Mercy. That had been two years ago.

  “There’s one from Salteras,” continued Luisa, “and another from Camas. Soon they’ll be arriving from Tomares, Dos Hermanas, Écija …”

  “But—” Ana Vega managed to say before the old woman interrupted her.

  “And they’re coming from Osuna, from Antequera, from Ronda, from El Puerto de Santa María, from Marchena … from the entire kingdom of Seville! Just us, you say?” Luisa stopped speaking to catch her breath. No one in the group surrounding the two gypsy women added to the conversation; some had their teeth clenched, others already had tears in their eyes. “Many of them shared jail with us … with you, Ana Vega,” continued the old woman. “They all know what you did. I told you one day: your beauty is in the gypsy pride you have never lost. We are grateful to you; we all owe you something, and those who don’t are in debt to you through their mothers, their sisters, their daughters or their friends.”

  WHILE MELCHOR, Caridad, Milagros and Fray Joaquín had taken a week to travel from Barrancos to Triana, Martín Vega took just three days to gallop from the Portuguese border to the city of Córdoba. The people Méndez sent to find him ran into him already on his way back to Barrancos, two days after Melchor and the others left. He listened to the smuggler’s explanations, aware that El Galeote was headed to certain death. No one would defend him; there were no Vegas in Triana, nor in Seville. Most of the Vegas from the settlement of La Cartuja had been arrested in the big roundup and they were still prisoners in the arsenals, unable to prove they had lived according to the laws of the kingdom and particularly the Church; the few who had escaped the King’s soldiers were scattered along the roads. There were some, however, in Córdoba, one of the cities with the most gypsies. Distant relatives, but with Vega blood. Martín knew about them from the sale of a good shipment of tobacco. He knew how to ride a horse from when he used to help out his brother Zoilo, and he almost rode the one that Méndez gave him into the ground. He was searching for help from the Vegas in Córdoba, a help they refused him.

  “By the time we get to Triana,” said the patriarch as an excuse, “Melchor will already be dead.”

  He knew he shouldn’t insist. In Córdoba, just as in Seville, Murcia, El Puerto de Santa María and many other places where gypsies resided, the men knew the arsenals; the women the incarcerations; they all knew the separation of married couples, children and loved ones. Some had managed to return to their homes, and they were forbidden to leave the city. How were they going to go to Triana to fight with the families there? There would be bloodshed, injuries and perhaps deaths. The authorities would find out. Don’t ask us for such sacrifice, pleaded the old gypsy’s eyes.

  “I’m sorry, boy,” the patriarch lamented. “By the way,” he added, “three days ago one of our women came across a group of famished gypsy women trying to get discreetly across the bridge over the Guadajoz River.”

  “So?”

  “They told her they had escaped from the House of Mercy in Saragossa and they were headed to Triana.”

  When he heard Saragossa, Martín sat up straight in the chair he had collapsed into after the patriarch’s refusal. Could it be?

  “They were Vegas. All of them,” the old man said, confirming his premonition.

  “Was … was Ana Vega among them?”

  The patriarch nodded.

  “I remember very well,” affirmed a woman whom they had called over right away. “Ana Vega. I couldn’t tell you the other names, but Ana Vega’s for sure. She was the one in charge: Ana this and Ana that.”

  “Where could they be now?” asked Martín.

  “They were exhausted and they were even carrying an old woman—I don’t know if she was sick, but I’d swear she was. They were arguing over whether to rest here for a while, but Ana Vega said they shouldn’t stop in the large cities, that they’d stop in Carmona, with the Ximénez family. Maybe they’ve arrived. We fed them and they continued on their way.”

  Martín didn’t hesitate; he took off at a gallop toward Carmona. If they had stopped there, it wouldn’t be hard to find them. The Ximénezes were well known among gypsies throughout all of Andalusia because their family was one of the few, perhaps the last, still ruled by the matriarchy. Ana Ximénez, the matriarch, like her mother, demanded that all the daughters in the family continue to use their maternal last name: the sons were given their husbands’ name, but the girls proudly bore their maternal ancestors’.

  He found them and was unable to recognize in any of those scrawny women the daughter whose virtues Melchor extolled. “Ana continued on to Triana,” they explained. The two old women, Ana Ximénez and Luisa Vega, were the first to sense problems when they saw the expression on the young man’s face upon hearing the news. “Melchor Vega … that crazy old man!” blurted out the Ximénez matriarch after hearing Martín’s hasty explanations. “A real gypsy!” murmured Luisa proudly. Martín was unable to clear up the many questions they all posed. “Caridad says …” “Caridad warned …” “Who is this Caridad?” the Ximénez leader burst in again. “She says they will kill them all: Melchor, Milagros and her,” was his only response.

  “The only one who came to Triana to die was me.” With those words, Luisa broke her silence following her praise of the old gypsy. “You forced me to come,” she chided the others. “You told me that we would find our people; you promised me that I could die in my homeland. You dragged me across half of Spain, over leagues and leagues to the torment of my legs. Why are you silent now?”

  “What do you want us to do?” answered one of the Vegas. “You see that those in Córdoba are unwilling—”

  “Men!” Luisa interrupted her, her eyes shining as they hadn’t in years. “Did we need them to survive in Málaga or in Saragossa?”

  “But gypsy law …” one of them began to object.

  “What law?” shouted Luisa. “Gypsy law is the law of the roads, of nature and the earth, the law of freedom, and not the law of some gypsy men who allowed those of their race to be locked up for life while they lived liked cowards among the payos. Cowards!” repeated the old woman. “They don’t deserve to call themselves gypsies. We have suffered humiliations while they obeyed the payos. They’ve forgotten the real law, the law of our race. We have put up with blows and insults, and suffered hunger and illnesses that have ruined our bodies. They separated us from our families and we never stopped fighting. We have defeated the King and his minister. Aren’t we free? Well, we should now fight against those who call themselves gypsies and aren’t really!”

  “Ana helped one of my daughters,” the Ximénez matriarch then murmured.

  “That is the only law,” declared Luisa as she saw how the faces of her relatives were starting to light up. “She also helped La Coja. Remember La Coja? The one from Écija, near here. She escaped Saragossa a year before us. And the two from Puerto de Santa María? The ones with the first pardon …”

  Old Luisa continued listing all those who had been freed before them. However, it was Ana Ximénez who made the decision.

  “Martín,” she said, addressing the young man and silencing Luisa. “Ride to Écija. Right now. Look for La Coja and tell her that Ana Vega needs her, that we all need her, that she should head to Triana without delay, to the San Miguel alley. Urge her to send word to the other
gypsy women she knows in the nearby towns, and have each of them spread the message.”

  Marchena; Antequera; Ronda; El Puerto de Santa María … Martín received similar instructions for each of those places.

  IT WAS the third time that the people of the San Miguel alley were surprised by an unexpected arrival: first it was El Galeote with his group; then Ana Vega; and now almost fifty gypsy women headed by Luisa Vega, with her spirits and her strength renewed, and Ana Ximénez, the matriarch of Carmona, who tried to walk upright while leaning on a lovely two-pointed gold staff that sparkled in the sun.

  “What are we going to do?” Ana Vega asked in a whisper as she continued walking beside the two old women.

  “Never let men,” replied Ana Ximénez in the same hushed tone, “take the initiative; it makes them bolder.”

  “Wouldn’t it be wise to wait until there are more of us? Yesterday …”

  “Yesterday no longer exists,” replied Luisa. “If we wait, it will be Rafael García who will have the chance to decide. We could be too late.”

  As they talked, the women following them looked at the people of the alley. They knew many of them. Some were even relatives, the product of marriages between families. There were a few smiles, some greetings, incredulous men’s faces in the distance, because the women didn’t hesitate to approach them and ask what they were doing there, what they were planning. Fray Joaquín followed a few paces behind them, praying for that motley group to pull off the seemingly impossible.

  They reached the door of the Garcías’ house and shouted for El Conde to come and receive them.

  “Rafael García,” Ana Ximénez confronted him when El Conde finally appeared in the alley, flanked by the heads of some families, “we have come to free El Galeote and his granddaughter.”

  Ana trembled. Freeing her father wasn’t something she had even dreamed of. She didn’t think it was possible that the death sentence could be annulled, but as she turned her head and saw the gravity in the faces of Luisa Vega and Ana Ximénez, she began to nurture some hopes.