The Barefoot Queen

by Ildefonso Falcones

  “Caridad Hidalgo, what were you doing in the small hours of the morning, alone, on the streets of Madrid?”

  She stammered.

  “Answer!” shouted the magistrate.

  “I … was thirsty,” she mumbled.

  “She was thirsty!” It echoed through the room. “And you hoped to quench your thirst with two men? Is that what you were thirsty for?”

  “No.”

  “They arrested you almost naked with two men kissing and groping you! Is that true?”

  “Yes,” she stammered.

  “Were they forcing themselves on you?”

  “Yes. I didn’t want to …”

  “And this? What is this?” howled the public prosecutor.

  Caridad looked up from the floor and at the prosecutor. In his hand shone the fake sapphire.

  A few seconds passed before she tried to answer.

  “That … no … It’s a gift.”

  The prosecutor let out a laugh. “A gift?” he asked cynically. “You want us to believe that someone would give stones, even fake ones, to a woman like you?” He lifted his hand and showed the sapphire to the members of the court.

  Caridad shrank before them, barefoot, dirty, wearing only her slave shirt.

  “Isn’t it really true,” spat the prosecutor, “that this stone was the payment for giving your body to those two men?”

  “No.”

  “So?”

  She didn’t want to talk about Melchor. Those men who governed Madrid mustn’t know anything about him … if he was still alive. She was silent and lowered her gaze. She didn’t see how the prosecutor shrugged and opened his hands toward the magistrates who presided over the room: not much more to decide, he transmitted with that gesture.

  “What is your job?” asked one of the magistrates. “How do you make a living?” he insisted without giving her time to answer.

  Caridad remained silent.

  “Are you free?” they inquired.

  They said she maintained she was free.

  “Where are your documents?”

  The questions came one after the other, stinging, shouted. Utterly dejected, she didn’t answer any of them. Why had Melchor left her alone? By that point tears had been streaming down her cheeks for some time.

  “Only comparable to the most unspeakable of sins!” she heard the prosecutor shout at the end of a short speech he began as soon as they had finished interrogating her.

  “Does the honorable defender of the poor have anything to say?” asked one of the magistrates.

  For the first time since the trial had begun, the lawyer for the poor looked up from the papers he had been immersed in. “The woman refuses to speak before this illustrious room,” he pointed out in a monotone. “What argument could I give in her defense?”

  The magistrates exchanged a look. That was all it took.

  “Caridad Hidalgo,” the president pronounced her sentence, “we condemn you to two years of imprisonment in the Royal Woman’s Prison of this city. May God take pity on you, protect you and lead you along the righteous path. Take her away!”

  Milagros dropped into a chair and squeezed her hand over her belly, as if trying to keep the baby she carried inside from coming out too soon. She calculated that she was five or six months from giving birth, but the succession of brusque, violent contractions she’d had when she found out that her grandfather had been arrested in Madrid made her fear she would lose it. The news had traveled from mouth to mouth in the San Miguel alley until it reached the Garcías’ forge and from there to the upper floors, where it was celebrated with cheering and hugs. The gypsy girl breathed deeply. The pain lessened and her heartbeat started to calm.

  “Death to El Galeote!” she heard from one of the adjoining rooms.

  She recognized that high-pitched, shrill voice: it belonged to a boy, one of Pedro’s nephews; he couldn’t be more than seven years old. What could that little brat have against her grandfather? She was gripped by conflicting feelings again, now that her fury over her father’s death had given way to deep, lonely, tormenting grief. Yes, her grandfather had killed him, but should he die as well for what he had done? A fit of rage, that’s what it was, a fit of rage, she often said to herself as she fought against her grief. She admitted that he deserved to be punished, but the idea of seeing him dead terrified her.

  She pricked up her ears to listen to the conversations in the next room, which was full with the arrival of the men who worked in the forge. A trusted courier who made the route between Madrid and Seville, one of those men who transported packages and ran errands for others, had brought the news: “The relatives in Madrid have seized Melchor Vega,” announced the courier. How could you let yourself get caught, Grandfather? lamented Milagros amid the shouts of joy. Why did you allow it? Someone commented that the family members wanted to know what to do with him: they couldn’t bring him in a wagon, with other people, and the voyage to Seville with a shackled man would be slow and dangerous. “Kill him!” “As soon as possible!” “Have them castrate him first!” “And rip out his eyes!” added the little nephew amid the other’s shouts.

  “The revenge is for the Carmonas. Have them bring him here, however they can, no matter how long it takes. The sentence must be carried out here, in Triana, before all those present.”

  Rafael García’s order put an end to the discussion.

  Why? cried Milagros in silence. Who were the Garcías to decide the fate of her grandfather? She felt seething hatred toward her new family: it was almost palpable; everything was impregnated with rancor. She stroked her belly, wanting to feel her child; not even that baby, fruit of the marriage between a Vega and a García, seemed to diminish the atavistic hatred between the two families. Her mother had warned her: Never forget that you are a Vega. She had argued with Old María about it. She hadn’t heard anything from the healer in so long but she thought of her increasingly often as her pregnancy advanced. Her mother’s words drilled into her conscience even at the altar, but she sought refuge in Pedro. How naive she had been. There was the answer: in the shouts of joy over her grandfather’s disgrace that continued in the next room! She hadn’t heard from her mother until her father had been killed. Reyes, La Trianera, had enjoyed sending to Málaga the news of Milagros’s marriage to a García and the death of José Carmona by Melchor’s hand. Tell my daughter she is no longer a Vega. La Trianera’s smug expression as she conveyed her mother’s message was burned into Milagros’s memory.

  She didn’t want to believe it. She knew that it was true; she was certain that that had been her mother’s response, but she refused to admit that she would disown her. She worked every night, nonstop. She sang and danced where El Conde decided she should: inns, homes and palaces, parties … Milagros of Triana was what people called her. She stole some of the coins, her own money, which was controlled by greedy La Trianera, who never left her side. Milagros secretly convinced a gypsy from the Camacho family to go to Málaga. “There is enough for you to bribe whomever you need to and then to give my mother a bit of money,” she told him.

  “I’m sorry. She doesn’t want to have anything to do with you,” he told her on his return. “She says you are no longer her daughter. She doesn’t want it,” he added as he gave her back the money intended for Ana.

  “What else did she say?” asked Milagros in a thin voice.

  “That you shouldn’t waste more money trying to contact her; that you should give the coins to the Garcías so they can pay someone to kill your grandfather.

  “She said it was ironic,” added the Camacho, shaking his head almost imperceptibly. “That a Vega was supporting the Garcías. And that she preferred to be in Málaga, in prison, suffering alongside women and their children who’d been unable to obtain their freedom because they were gypsies, than return to Triana to be with a traitor.”

  “Me, a traitor!” interrupted Milagros.

  “Girl …” The man’s face took on a serious expression. “The enemies of so
meone in your family, the enemies of your grandfather, your mother, are also your enemies, every member of that family is. That is gypsy law. Yes, I also consider you a traitor. And there are many who feel the same way.”

  “I am a Carmona!” she tried to defend herself.

  “Your blood is Vega, girl. The blood of your grandfather, El Galeote …”

  “My grandfather killed my father!” shrieked Milagros.

  The Camacho swatted at the air. “You shouldn’t have married the grandson of your enemy; your father shouldn’t have allowed it, even if only because of the blood that flows through your veins. 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.”

  She no longer had any of her family or close friends: her mother, her grandfather, her father, María … Cachita. She perked up her ears: nobody in the next room was talking about Cachita. She was also condemned to death, but they didn’t seem to care much about her. She would have liked to share her incipient motherhood with her friend. Her grandfather had said that she hadn’t done anything. It had to be true: Cachita was incapable of hurting anyone. She had been unfair to her. How many times had she regretted allowing herself to get carried away by rage! And now, when she found out that her grandfather had been caught, she couldn’t stop thinking about the morena: if she hadn’t been captured with him … Where was Cachita? Alone?

  Alone or not, she was probably doing better than Milagros was, she tried to convince herself. That very night she would sing, given that she couldn’t dance much in her condition. She would perform in an inn near Camas, La Trianera had told her in passing, without asking her opinion or much less her consent. She would go surrounded by members of the García family, but not Pedro, who never accompanied her: “I’m afraid I would end up killing one of those cocky men who drool watching you dance,” had been his excuse from the start of their marriage. “You’ll be fine with my cousins.” But he didn’t go with her when she wasn’t dancing for payos, either. Pedro barely worked in the forge anymore; he didn’t have to, what with his share of his wife’s earnings, which Rafael and Reyes made sure to claim for him. He loafed about in the inns and bars of Triana and Seville, and there were many nights when he arrived home at dawn. How many times had she had to block her ears to the whispers of harpies about her husband’s running around! She didn’t want to believe them! They weren’t true! It was just envy. Envy! What was it about Pedro that his mere touch destroyed her resolve? Just a trace of a smile on that beautiful dark face with its hard features, a compliment, a bit of flattery—“Pretty girl!” “Lovely!” “You are the most beautiful woman in Triana!”—some trifling gift, and Milagros forgot her anger and saw her bad mood over her husband’s abandonment transformed into pleasure. And making love … God! She felt as though she was dying, or going insane. Pedro brought her to ecstasy, once, twice, three times. Of course the other women whispered when her moans filled the Garcías’ house, the building, the entire San Miguel alley! But then he would disappear again. Milagros lived in an endless, desperate back and forth between loneliness and unbridled passion, between doubt and blind devotion.

  Milagros didn’t have anyone to talk to or to confide in. La Trianera controlled her day and night, and as soon as she saw her chatting with someone in the alley, she quickly came over to put in her twopenn’orth. Milagros often passed by San Jacinto and sadly contemplated the church and the friars coming and going. She would have been able to talk to Fray Joaquín, tell him about her life, her worries, and he would have listened, she had no doubt. But he had vanished from her life as well.

  FRAY JOAQUÍN had been on missions for almost a year, traveling all over Andalusia with Fray Pedro, surprising humble folk in the middle of the night, threatening them with every possible evil, forcing men to punish their bodies in the churches while the women were to do it in the privacy of their homes with stinging nettles hidden in their clothes, wormwood in their mouths, pebbles in their shoes and rough cords, knotted ropes and wires wrapped tightly around and cutting into their bellies, breasts and extremities.

  Milagros was never out of his mind.

  General confession, the ultimate goal of the missions, ended up breaking the friar’s will and spirit. The letter issued by the Archbishop of Seville allowed him to forgive all sins, including those whose extreme seriousness meant they were usually dealt with by higher-ranking officials of the Church. He listened to hundreds, thousands of confessions through which people strove to obtain general absolution of sins they had never told their usual parish priests, since the latter couldn’t forgive them. But, poor and humble as they were, they had no access to bishops and prelates to confess such sins as incest and sodomy. “With a child?” Fray Joaquín shouted on one occasion, piquing the curiosity of those waiting. “How old?” he added, lowering his voice. Then he regretted having asked. How could he forgive him after hearing the age? But the man remained in silence awaiting absolution. “Do you repent?” he asked without conviction. Murders, kidnappings, bigamy, a string of evils that were eroding his principles and bringing him closer, step by step, mission by mission, to believing, just as Fray Pedro did, that they were all irredeemable sinners, who only reacted out of fear of the devil and the flames of hell. What remained of the Christian virtues, of joy and hope?

  “You have been slow to realize that this is not the path that Our Lord has called you to,” Fray Pedro said when Joaquín told him he intended to abandon the missions. “You are a good person, Joaquín, and after all this time I have come to appreciate you, but your sermons do not call people to contrition and repentance.”

  Fray Joaquín didn’t want to return to Triana. His excitement over his last trip back, a few months after first leaving—when he’d heard the news of the return of the assimilated gypsies—had ended when he found out about Milagros’s marriage. He locked himself in his cell, fasted and punished his body as much as he had on the missions. Angry, disappointed, his fantasies frustrated, he came to understand the fits the penitents claimed as excuses for their mortal sins when it came time to confess: jealousy, rage, spite, hatred. He didn’t go back; he preferred to continue dreaming of the girl who mocked him by sticking out her tongue than face the torment of running into her one day with her husband on the streets of Triana. His next few breaks were spent with Fray Pedro, far from his home, while the preacher speculated about the reasons his assistant refused to reveal.

  “I’ve heard from a nobleman in Toledo, close to the archbishop, who needs a private Latin teacher and tutor for his daughters,” he suggested when Fray Joaquín admitted he didn’t know what to do.

  Fray Pedro took care of everything: his prestige opened doors. He got in touch with the nobleman, gave Joaquín documentation, both from the lay authorities and from the Church, a mule and enough money for the trip, and on the morning Joaquín was going to depart he showed up to say goodbye with a package beneath his arm.

  “Hold on to it so it can guide your life. May it soothe your doubts and calm your spirit,” Pedro wished him as he held it out.

  Fray Joaquín knew what it was. Still, he pulled away the canvas that covered the upper part. The crowned head of an Immaculate Virgin appeared in his hands.

  “But this—”

  “The Virgin wants to accompany you,” the priest interrupted.

  Fray Joaquín contemplated the sculpture and its perfect rosy face that looked at him sweetly: a valuable work of considerable size, masterfully carved, with a crown of gold and diamonds. The faithful thanked the missionaries with many gifts and a great deal of money for the absolution of their sins. Fray Pedro, moderate in his habits, refused all those that weren’t essential for his survival, but his integrity had wavered when a rich landowner placed this in his hands. “After all, what better place for Our Lady than working for the missions?” he told himself to justify breaking his rule of austerity. When he handed it over to Fray Joaquín, he felt that he was libera
ting himself of a burden.

  In the Barquillo district of Madrid, to the northeast of the city, in humble single-story houses, lived the chisperos, who were as haughty, proud and arrogant as the manolos from the Rastro and Lavapiés, but dedicated to blacksmithing and the trade in iron utensils. That was where the Garcías lived along with many other gypsies, and that was where young Martín Costes had been wandering for the last ten days, with his arm bandaged and trying not to attract attention to himself as he went up and down the deserted, dirty streets.

  His father and his brother Zoilo told him that they understood what he was doing, that they were with him, but that that was just the way things were. “It didn’t work out well,” admitted El Cascabelero, ashamed. Later they tried to convince the young man not to continue. “It’ll be a waste of time,” said one. “Uncle Melchor is already dead or on his way to Triana,” assured another. “What do I have to lose by trying?” replied the young man.

  He asked discreetly and found the house of Manuel García, on Almirante Street. From the first moment he knew that El Galeote was still inside: unlike the other homes, there were always a couple of gypsies going in and out and loitering around without ever getting very far from the door. At midday, they were replaced by others, just as if it were a changing of the guard: they whispered amongst themselves; they pointed at the house. Often one of the new arrivals would go inside, come back out and the whispering would start up again until the others left with smiles on their faces, patting each other on the back as if they were already savoring the wine they were planning on drinking.

  “Have you seen him?” El Cascabelero asked his youngest son.