The Barefoot Queen

by Ildefonso Falcones

  “Everyone in Triana knows that I’m your granddaughter.” She laughed. Her white teeth stood out against her dark skin, the same shade as her mother’s, the same shade as her grandfather’s. “Who would dare?”

  “Lust is blind and daring, girl. There are many who would risk their lives to have you. I would only be able to avenge you and there isn’t enough blood in the world to mend that pain. Always remind her of that,” he added, addressing her mother.

  “Yes, Father,” she replied.

  Both women waited for a word of farewell, a gesture, a sign, but the gypsy, hieratic in his corner, was silent and still. Finally Ana took her daughter by the arm and left the house. It was a cold morning. The sky was overcast and threatened rain, which didn’t seem to be an obstacle for the people of Triana who were heading to San Jacinto to celebrate the blessing of their candles. There were also many Sevillians who wanted to join the ceremony and, carrying their altar candles, they went over the bridge or crossed the Guadalquivir aboard one of the more than twenty boats that took people from one shore to the other. The crowd promised a profitable day, thought Ana before recalling her father’s fears. She turned her head toward Milagros and saw her walking with her head held high, arrogant, attentive to everything and everyone. As a pure-bred gypsy should, she then acknowledged, unable to suppress her pleased expression. They couldn’t help but notice her girl! Her thick chestnut hair fell down her back and blended into the long fringes of the scarf she wore over her shoulders. Here and there, her hair was adorned with a colorful ribbon or a pearl; large silver hoops hung from her ears, and necklaces of beads and silver lay over her young breasts, captive in the boldly plunging neckline of her white shirt. A blue skirt clung to her delicate waist and almost reached the floor, where her bare feet could sometimes be seen. A man looked at her out of the corner of his eye. Milagros realized instantly, with feline instinct, and turned her face toward him; the girl’s chiseled features softened and her bushy eyebrows seemed to arch in a smile. The day begins, her mother said to herself.

  “Shall I tell you your fortune, strapping lad?”

  The strong man attempted to continue along his way, but Milagros smiled openly and approached him, getting so close that her breasts almost brushed against him.

  “I see a woman who desires you,” added the gypsy girl, staring into his eyes.

  Ana reached her daughter in time to hear her last words. A woman … What more could a man like him desire, big and healthy but obviously alone, who carried a small candle? The man hesitated for a few seconds before noticing the other gypsy woman who had come over to him: older, but just as attractive and proud as the girl.

  “Don’t you want to know more?” Milagros regained the man’s attention as she looked deeper into his eyes, where she had already seen his interest. She tried to take his hand. “You also desire that woman, don’t you?”

  The gypsy girl could tell that her prey was starting to give in. Mother and daughter, in silence, coincided in their conclusion: easy work. A timid, spineless character—the man had tried to hide his eyes—in a large, bulky body. Surely there was some woman, there always was. They only had to encourage him, insist that he overcome the embarrassment that was holding him back.

  Milagros was brilliant and convincing: she ran her finger over the lines on the man’s palm as if she were really reading that gullible man’s future. Her mother watched her, proud and amused. They got a couple of copper coins for her advice. Then Ana tried to sell him a contraband cigar.

  “Half the price they sell them for in the Seville tobacco shops,” she offered. “If you don’t want cigars, I have snuff, too, of the highest quality, clean, no dirt in it.” She tried to convince him, opening the mantilla she wore to show him the merchandise she had hidden, but the man just sketched a simpleminded smile, as if in his mind he were already courting the woman he had yet to dare speak a word to.

  All day long, mother and daughter moved through the crowd that traveled from Altozano, near the Inquisition Castle and the church of San Jacinto, which was still under construction on top of the old chapel of the Candelaria, reading fortunes and selling tobacco, always on the lookout for constables and the gypsy women, many of them from their own family, who stole from the unsuspecting. She and her daughter didn’t need to run such risks, and they didn’t want to find themselves mixed up in one of the many altercations that came about when those pickpockets were caught: the tobacco gave them enough of a profit.

  Which was why they tried to move away from the throng when Fray Joaquín, of the Order of Preachers, began his open-air sermon in front of what in time would be the imposing entrance of the church. At that moment, the pious Sevillians crowded on the stretch of ground weren’t interested in their fortunes or tobacco; many of them had come to Triana to listen to another of the controversial sermons given by that young Dominican, born of an era in which clear thinking was struggling to forge a path through the darkness of ignorance. From his improvised pulpit outside of the temple, he went beyond the ideas of Fray Benito Jerónimo Feijoo; Fray Joaquín spoke loudly in Spanish and without throwing in Latin phrases, sharply criticizing the atavistic prejudices of the Spaniards and inciting people with his defense of the virtue of work, even as a mechanic or an artisan, against the misunderstood concept of honor that drove Spaniards to laziness and idleness; he aroused women’s pride by opposing conventual education and supporting their new role in society and in the family; he affirmed their right to an education and their legitimate aspiration to intellectual development for the good of a civilized kingdom. Women were no longer servants to men, nor could they be considered imperfect males. They weren’t evil by nature! Marriage must be founded on equality and respect. In our century, maintained Fray Joaquín, quoting great thinkers, the soul no longer had a sex: it wasn’t male or female. People crowded together to hear him and it was then, Ana and Milagros knew, when the gypsy women took advantage of people’s fascination to steal their bags.

  They got as close as they could to the place from which Fray Joaquín addressed the multitude. He was accompanied by the twenty-odd Dominican friars who lived in the San Jacinto monastery. Many of them looked up every once in a while toward the leaden sky that, luckily, resisted unleashing its water; the rain would have ruined the celebration.

  “I am the light of the world!” shouted Fray Joaquín so he could be heard. “That was what Our Lord Jesus Christ announced. He is our light! A light present in all these candles you have brought and that should illuminate …”

  Milagros wasn’t listening to the sermon. She stared at the friar, who soon noticed the mother and daughter near him. The gypsy women’s brightly colored dresses stood out in the crowd. Fray Joaquín hesitated; for a moment his words lost their fluency and his gestures no longer held the faithful’s attention. Milagros noticed how he struggled, in vain, not to look at her; in fact at times he couldn’t help letting his eyes linger on her just a bit too long. On one of those occasions, the girl winked at him and Fray Joaquín stammered; on another, Milagros stuck out her tongue at him.

  “Child!” her mother scolded, after elbowing her hard. Ana gave the friar priest an apologetic glance.

  The sermon, as the crowd had been hoping, went on for a long time. Fray Joaquín, once Milagros had stopped hounding him, managed to make an impression once again. When he finished, the faithful lit their candles in the bonfire that the friars had built. The people dispersed and the two women went back to their schemes.

  “What were you trying to do?” her mother asked.

  “I like him …” answered Milagros, gesturing flirtatiously. “I like that he stammers, makes mistakes, blushes.”

  “Why? He’s a priest.”

  The girl seemed to be thinking. “I don’t know,” she responded with a shrug and then smiled.

  “Fray Joaquín respects your grandfather and because of that he will respect you, but don’t play around with men … even if they are religious,” her mother warned.

&nb
sp; AS WAS to be expected, the day was fruitful and Ana sold all the contraband tobacco she carried hidden in her clothes. The Sevillians began to cross the bridge or take the boats back to the city. They could still have read a few more palms, but as the crowd thinned it was clear how many gypsies—some drawn and ancient crones, others young women, many boys and girls half-dressed in rags—were doing the same thing. Ana and Milagros recognized the women from the San Miguel alley, relatives of the blacksmiths, but also many of those who lived in the squalid shanties beside the Carthusians’ gardens in Triana’s fertile lowland and who stubbornly harassed people for alms, blocking their path and grabbing at their clothes while crying out loudly to a God they didn’t believe in and invoking a string of martyrs and saints whose names they had memorized.

  “I think that’s enough for today, Milagros,” announced her mother after moving out of the way of a couple fleeing a group of beggars.

  A snotty kid with a dirty face and black eyes who was following the Sevillians crashed into her while still invoking the virtues of Saint Rufina.

  “Here,” Ana said to him as she gave him a copper cuarto.

  They set off on their return trip as the mother of the little gypsy boy demanded he hand over the coin. The alley was feverish. It had been a good day for everyone; religious holidays softened people up. Groups of men chatted at the doors to their homes drinking wine, smoking and playing cards. A woman approached her husband to show him her earnings and an argument started when he tried to take them from her. Milagros said goodbye to her mother and joined a group of girls. Ana had to settle up the tobacco earnings with her father. She searched for him amid the men. She didn’t find him.

  “Father?” she shouted once inside the courtyard of the house where they lived.

  “He’s not here.”

  Ana turned and saw José, her husband, in the doorframe.

  “Where is he?”

  José shrugged and opened one of his hands; in the other he carried a jug of wine. His eyes sparkled. “He disappeared just after you two did. He must have gone over to the settlement of La Cartuja to see his relatives, like always.”

  Ana shook her head. Was he really with them? Sometimes she had gone there to look for him and not found him. Would he return that night or not for a few days, as he’d done so many other times? And in what state?

  She sighed.

  “He always comes back,” muttered José sarcastically.

  His wife straightened up, hardened her expression and frowned. “Don’t start in on him,” she muttered threateningly. “I keep warning you.”

  The man just made a face and turned his back on her.

  He usually came back, it was true; José was right; but what was he doing when he disappeared thus on the occasions when he wasn’t at the La Cartuja settlement? He never said, and when she insisted, he took refuge in that impenetrable world of his. He was so different now from the father she had known as a child! Ana remembered him proud, fiery, indestructible, a figure she could always depend on. Later, when she was about ten years old, he was stopped by the “tobacco patrol,” the authorities that policed contraband. He was only carrying a few pounds of tobacco leaf and it was the first time he was caught; it should have been treated as a minor offense, but Melchor Vega was a gypsy and they had arrested him outside of the areas designated for those of his race; he dressed like a gypsy, in clothes as expensive as they were flashy, all laden with silver or metal beads; he carried a cane, his knife, wore earrings and, to top it all off, some witnesses swore they had heard him speaking Caló, the gypsy dialect. All of that was illegal, even more than cheating the royal tax office. Ten years in the galleys. That was the sentence they gave the gypsy.

  Ana felt her stomach shrink inside as she recalled the agony she went through with her mother during the trial and, above all, during the almost four years between when the first sentence was handed down until they actually carried her father off to the Port of Santa María to board him onto one of the royal galley ships. Her mother had kept up her efforts on his behalf every single day, every single hour, every single minute. That had cost her her life. Ana’s eyes grew damp, as they always did when she relived those moments. She saw her mother again, asking for mercy, humiliated, begging judges, officials and prison inspectors for a pardon. They begged for the intervention of dozens of priests and friars, who had refused to even give them the time of day. They pawned everything they had … they stole, swindled and cheated to pay notaries and lawyers. They stopped eating so they could bring a crust of bread to the jail where her father was waiting, like so many others, for his trial to end and his fate to be decided. There were those who, during that terrible wait, cut off a hand, or even an arm, to avoid going to the galleys and facing the fate of most of the galley slaves permanently fettered to the ships’ benches: a painful, miserably slow death.

  But Melchor Vega endured the torture. Ana dried her eyes with her shirt sleeve. Yes, he had survived. And one day, when nobody was expecting him any longer, he reappeared in Triana, wasted away, dressed in rags, broken, destroyed, dragging his feet but with his pride intact. He never again was that father who used to tousle her hair when she came to him after some childish altercation. That was what he always used to do: tousle her hair and then look at her tenderly, reminding her in silence who she was: a Vega, a gypsy! It was the only thing that seemed to matter to him in the world. Melchor had tried to foster that same pride in his race with his granddaughter Milagros. Shortly after his return, when the girl was only a few months old, Melchor anxiously waited for Ana to conceive a boy. “When’s the boy coming?” he would ask again and again. José, her husband, also asked her insistently: “Are you with child yet?” It seemed that the entire San Miguel alley wanted a boy. José’s mother, her aunts, her female cousins … even the Vega women at the settlement of La Cartuja! They all pestered her about it, but it wasn’t to be.

  Ana turned her head toward where José had disappeared after their brief exchange about Melchor. Unlike her father, her husband hadn’t been able to recover from what for him had been a failure, a humiliation, and the scant affection and respect there had been in that marriage arranged by the Carmona and Vega families gradually disappeared until it was replaced by a latent rancor that revealed itself in the harsh way they treated each other. Melchor invested all his affection in Milagros, as did José, once he had resigned himself to not having a son. Ana became a witness to the rivalry between the two men, always taking her father’s side, whom she loved and respected more than her husband.

  Night had fallen; what was Melchor doing?

  The strumming of a guitar brought her back to reality. Behind her, in the alley, she heard people bustling about, dragging chairs and benches.

  “Party!” shouted a boy’s voice.

  Another guitar joined in, trying out a few first notes. Soon the hollow tapping of a pair of castanets was heard, and another pair, and another, and even some old metal ones, getting ready, without order or harmony, just trying to wake up those fingers that would later accompany the dancing and singing. More guitars. A woman cleared her throat; hers was the cracked voice of an old woman. A tambourine. Ana thought about her father and how much he enjoyed the dancing. He always comes back, she tried to convince herself. Wasn’t that true? He was a Vega, after all!

  When she went out into the alley, the gypsies were arranged in a circle around a fire.

  “Come on, let’s go!” encouraged an old man sitting on a chair in front of the bonfire.

  All the instruments were silent. A single guitar, in the hands of a young man with an almost black face and a dark ponytail, started in on the first beats of a fandango.

  SHE WAS accompanied by the cabin boy with whom she’d shared her tobacco. They docked on a quay in Triana, past the shrimp boats’ port, to unload some goods destined for that part of town.

  “You get off here, darkie,” ordered the captain of the tartan.

  The boy smiled at Caridad. They had smoked togeth
er a couple more times over the voyage. Under the tobacco’s influence, Caridad had even answered the boy’s questions, mostly in timid monosyllables. He had heard many of the rumors swirling around the port about that distant land. Cuba. Was it really as wealthy as he’d been told? Were there a lot of sugar factories? And slaves, were there as many as they said?

  “Someday I will travel on one of those big ships,” he claimed, letting his imagination run rampant. “And I’ll be the captain! I will cross the ocean and see Cuba for myself.”

  Once the tartan was docked, Caridad, just as in Cádiz, stopped and hesitated before the very narrow strip of land between the riverbank and the first line of buildings in Triana, some of them so close that their foundations were exposed by the movement of the Guadalquivir’s waters. One of the porters shouted at her to move out of the way so he could unload a large sack. The shout attracted the captain’s attention, who shook his head from the gunwale. His gaze briefly met the cabin boy’s, who was also watching Caridad; they both knew where she was headed.

  “You have five minutes,” he conceded to the boy.

  The boy thanked him with a smile, jumped onto land and tugged at Caridad. “Run. Follow me,” he pressed. He knew that the captain would leave him on land if he didn’t hurry.