The Barefoot Queen

by Ildefonso Falcones

  On September 13, 1752, three years after the big gypsy roundup, 551 gypsy women plus more than a hundred children arrived at the Royal House of Mercy in Saragossa. All of them had boarded at the port of Málaga for Tortosa, in Tarragona, at the mouth of the Ebro River, from where they went upriver in barges to Saragossa, always in the custody of a regiment of soldiers.

  Ana Vega squeezed little Salvador’s hand when they saw the houses of the city and the towers that peeked out above them. The boy, almost nine years old, responded to his aunt’s squeeze with one of his own, as if he were the one trying to give her strength. Salvador was a Vega and Ana had adopted him a little more than a year ago, after his mother’s death in the typhus epidemic that devastated Málaga. It had ravaged the population of the coastal city and the gypsy women locked up on Arrebolado Street were no exception. The deaths ran into the thousands, more than six thousand they said, so many that the bishop forbade the ringing of the bells at the end of the viaticum and at burials. The priests distributed mutton rations in the houses of the sick, but none to the gypsy women and their children. Once the epidemic had passed, the famine of 1751 came, owing to the poor harvest. None of the numerous rogations and penance processions that the friars and priests convoked throughout Andalusia managed to put an end to that terrible drought.

  Ana let go of the little boy’s hand, tenderly stroked his shaved head and pulled him toward her. Saragossa opened out before them; the over five hundred gypsy women contemplated the city in silence as it drew closer. Most of those women, haggard, wasted, sick, many of them naked, without even a rag to cover their modesty, had no idea what fate awaited them. What other torments did His Majesty Ferdinand VI have in store for them?

  The Marquis of Ensenada had the answer. The nobleman had not wavered in his obsession to exterminate the gypsy race. Many of those arrested in La Carraca had been taken from Cádiz to the El Ferrol arsenal, on the opposite coast, in northern Spain. As for the gypsy women, the marquis had to fight with the council that governed the House of Mercy in order to move them there. The Royal House of Mercy had been established to assist the poor and the vagrants who lived in the capital of the kingdom of Aragón. It deprived them of their freedom, forced them to work to be useful to society and in some cases even applied corporal punishment, but still the council didn’t want to see it converted into a jail for delinquents. Saragossa had always considered itself an extremely charitable city, a virtue that only attracted more indigents to its streets. The “father of the orphans” took care of the defenseless children and, every once in a while, organized the rounds of the “poor cart”: a barred wagon that went through the city to arrest the beggars and vagrants who loitered or asked for alms, and locked them up in the House of Mercy. How were they going to fit in these five hundred lost causes, plus another two hundred Aragonese gypsies who were still in the jail of the Aljafería castle and whom the marquis also wanted to send to that institution, when it was already packed with almost six hundred beggars?

  The tussle between the council and the marquis was settled in the nobleman’s favor: the State would take responsibility for the gypsy women’s maintenance. Likewise, it would build a new building to house them, make sure that they were always separate from the rest of the inmates and the field marshal would send twenty guard soldiers to watch over them.

  The long line of dirty naked women, escorted by soldiers, caused so much excitement that a crowd joined the procession headed to the Portillo Gate, in front of the castle, where they entered the city. Not far from that gate was the Campo del Toro, onto which the grounds of the House of Mercy opened. Long brick and wooden buildings, one and two stories tall, with pitched roofs and barred windows placed in no apparent order, made up the compound. Scattered among them were courtyards and open spaces, small service buildings and, on one end, a humble church with a single nave, also of wood and brick.

  The warden of the House of Mercy shook his head at the sight of the women and children who came through the gate escorted by the soldiers. The priest, beside him, crossed himself repeatedly at the naked bodies, the gaunt faces, the bones jutting from hunger, the withered breasts revealed without modesty; squalid arms, legs and buttocks.

  As soon as they had entered, they were pushed toward the building constructed expressly for them. Ana and Salvador, holding each other tightly by the hand, entered amid the mass of women and children. A simple glance was enough for the gypsies to see that they weren’t all going to fit in there. The place was dark and narrow. The dirt floor was damp from stagnant water, and the unhealthy stench that came from it in the September heat without ventilation was unbearable.

  The women began to complain.

  “They can’t put us in here!”

  “Even animal stables are better than this!”

  “We’ll get sick!”

  Many of the gypsies looked toward Ana Vega. Salvador squeezed her hand to encourage her.

  “We won’t stay here,” she declared. The boy rewarded her with a brilliant smile. “Let’s leave!”

  She turned around and led the exit. The gypsy women who were still coming in backed up as they came up against Ana Vega. A few minutes later they were all on the esplanade that opened up in front of the building, complaining, shouting, cursing their lot, challenging some soldiers who questioned their captain. The officer turned toward the alderman, who again shook his head: he knew it; he had foreseen that problem. It hadn’t even been two months since the government council had warned the Marquis of Ensenada of the new construction’s unhealthy conditions: there was no drainage and the waters stagnated in the gypsy building. There couldn’t have been a worse beginning.

  “Get them inside!” he then ordered over the din.

  The roar hadn’t stopped echoing when Ana Vega started hitting and biting a sergeant beside her. Little Salvador attacked another soldier, who threw him off with a slap before dealing with many of the gypsy women who followed Ana’s lead. Others, unable to fight, cheered their companions on. After a few moments of confusion, the soldiers retreated, regrouped and fired some shots into the air that managed to halt the women’s rage.

  The solution offered by the riot satisfied the alderman: he would demonstrate his authority and resolve the housing issue. Ana Vega and another five women who were identified as troublemakers would be whipped and then locked in the stocks for two days; the others could sleep outside the building, under the stars, in the courtyards and in the garden, at least as long as the heat that was turning the stagnant water bad lasted. After all, it was already September; the situation couldn’t last that much longer.

  In sight of the women and their children, Ana presented her bare back to the sentry; her jutting shoulder blades, spine and collarbones couldn’t hide the scars from the many punishments she had received in Málaga. The whip whistled through the air and she gritted her teeth. Between whip strokes she turned her gaze toward Salvador, who was in the front row as always. The little boy, his fists and mouth clenched, closed his eyes every time the leather lashed her back. Ana tried to give him a smile, to reassure him, but all she managed was a forced grimace.

  The tears she saw running down the little boy’s face hurt more than any whiplash. Salvador had taken her as the substitute for his dead mother and Ana had taken refuge in the little one as the recipient of feelings that everyone seemed to want to steal from her. Twice she had disowned her own daughter. She had found out about what had happened in the San Miguel alley: La Trianera made sure to let her know. Milagros’s wedding to Rafael García’s grandson, that young troublemaker she’d once smacked, sank her further into despair. Her girl handed over to a García! On the other hand, her indifference to the news of her husband’s murder, not feeling anything after so many years of sharing their lives, surprised and worried her, but she concluded that José hadn’t deserved a different fate: he had agreed to that marriage. And as for the death sentence against her father …

  “Do you have anything to say?”

 
; The memory of that conversation with the soldier in Málaga interrupted her thoughts.

  “Are they expecting a response?” she asked in turn.

  The man shrugged.

  “The gypsy told me that he would return once I had spoken with you.”

  “Tell him that my daughter is no longer a Vega.”

  “Is that all?”

  Ana half closed her eyes.

  “Yes. That is all.”

  Some time later Milagros had sent the Camacho to her. “Tell her that I no longer consider her my daughter,” she’d declared. Was it true? Ana asked herself many nights. Was that what she truly felt? Sometimes, when her anger at the thought of Milagros in the arms of a García surfaced, the family hatred, the gypsy pride made her answer yes, that she was no longer her daughter. On most other occasions, what blossomed inside her was only infinite, indulgent, blind mother’s love. Why had she said such a horrible thing? she would then torment herself. Rage alternated or mixed together with grief in her long dark nights of captivity, yet, either way, Ana ended up having to hide her tears and sobs from her fellow prisoners.

  The buildings where Madrid’s aristocracy lived weren’t like the Sevillian noble houses, which had been erected at the height of the trade with the Indies and whose backbone and soul were their central courtyards filled with light and flowers and surrounded by columns. Except for a few exceptions, the many noblemen who settled in the capital—those whose titles had their roots in Spain’s history were the most exalted by the new Bourbon dynasty—lived in stately homes with austere exteriors that differed little from the many others that made up eighteenth-century Madrid.

  Philip V, grandson of the Sun King and the first Bourbon monarch—cultured and refined, timid and melancholic, pious, brought up in the submissiveness befitting the second son of the French royal house—spoke Latin fluently but took years to learn Spanish. He never liked the Royal Alcázar, which until his arrival had been the residence of his predecessors to the throne: the Habsburgs. How could that sober Castilian fortress squeezed atop a Madrid hill compare with the palaces that young Philippe had lived in during his childhood and youth? Versailles, Fontainebleau, Marly, Meudon, all surrounded by immense and well-tended forests, gardens, fountains and labyrinths. The Grand Canal built in Versailles, where young Philippe sailed and fished in a royal flotilla served by three hundred rowers, had more water by volume than the miserable Manzanares River that snaked at the foot of the palace. Surrounded by French servants and courtesans, the King alternated stays at the Castilian fortress with the Palace of Buen Retiro, until on Christmas Eve 1734 a fire started in the drapery of his court painter’s room devoured the entire Alcázar and led to the royal family moving definitively to the Buen Retiro. Despite the fact that Philip V himself had ordered a new palace to be built on the site of the fortress, some of the affluent followed the monarch’s footsteps toward the area around the Buen Retiro and the avenues that developed in the adjacent fields. Still, most of the noblemen continued to live in what had been the epicenter of the city: the surroundings of the new royal palace whose colossal stonework was already visible by 1753.

  It wasn’t the first time that Milagros had been to one of those stately homes in the last few months. For a long time she had refused the invitations she received, telling herself that the money would only support her husband’s dalliances, until there was one she couldn’t refuse: the Marquis of Rafal, Chief Magistrate of Madrid and Judge Protector of the theaters, ordered her to sing and dance in a party that he was organizing for some friends.

  “You can’t turn down this one, gypsy,” Don José, the director of the company, warned her, after communicating the marquis’s wishes.

  “Why not?” she asked haughtily.

  “You would end up in jail.”

  “I haven’t done anything wrong. Refusing to—”

  The director interrupted her with a swipe of his hand through the air. “There is always something that we are doing wrong, girl, always, and even more so when it depends on the decision of a nobleman whom you have scorned. First there would be a few days in jail for something petty … a rude remark to the audience or a gesture they consider inappropriate. And when you got out of jail, they would invite you again, and if you continued to decline, it would be a month.”

  Milagros’s features shifted from the initial scorn to intense fear.

  “And they will insist again as soon as they free you again; noblemen never forget. For them it will be a game. Your obligation is singing and dancing in the Príncipe. If you don’t do it or you intentionally do it badly, they will jail you; if you do it well, they’ll find something they don’t like—”

  “And they will send me to jail,” said Milagros before he had a chance to.

  “Yes. Don’t make your life any harder than it is already. You will end up singing and dancing for them, Milagros. You have a young daughter, isn’t that right?”

  “What about her?” she spat out angrily. “Don’t you start—”

  “The jails are full of women with their little ones,” he interrupted her. “It’s uncivilized to separate a child from her mother.”

  Milagros accepted; she had no choice. The mere possibility of her daughter going to jail horrified her. Pedro’s eyes sparkled when he heard the news.

  “I’ll go with you,” he declared.

  She tried to object. “Don José …”

  “I will talk to him; besides, weren’t you the one who said that you needed protection? I will find guitarists and gypsy women; the musicians at the Príncipe don’t understand what those people want, they don’t have the spark.”

  Don José consulted with the marquis, who not only agreed to Pedro’s suggestion but accepted it enthusiastically. Don Antonio, the Chief Magistrate, remembered how Milagros had inflamed the audience gathered in the Sevillian palace of the Count and Countess of Fuentevieja, and that was exactly what he wanted from her: the voluptuous gypsy dances that the censors banned in the Príncipe, the lascivious zarabandas so reviled by the pious and the puritanical, and those other rhythms that Caridad had taught her to understand and above all to feel, Guinean dances, Negro dances that were daring and provocative in their celebration of fertility: chaconas, cumbés and zarambeques. No member of the theater company formed part of that group, not even Marina, despite Milagros’s insistence, nor the great Celeste, with whom Pedro had broken the last ties. Except for Marina, who accepted her excuses, the decision earned Milagros the antipathy of the rest of the company, but Pedro didn’t listen to her complaints. “You are the one the audience at the Príncipe cheers,” he argued.

  And it was true: people came to the theater to see her, and when the tonadillas ended and Celeste and the others appeared to perform the third and final act of the comedy, most had left and the comic players found the place half empty and distracted.

  After that first performance at the request of the Chief Magistrate, there were many occasions when nobles, the wealthy and high-ranking officials required the presence of the famous Barefoot Girl at their many parties. Don José sent them directly to Pedro, who accepted all the invitations, and Milagros, after her performance at the theater, went to those stately homes at night to indulge the sensuality of the civilized dignitaries of the kingdom and their wives.

  That was why, on that spring night of 1753, Milagros ignored the anodyne appearance of the house’s exterior. She knew that inside it would be crammed with luxury: huge living rooms, dining room, library, music and games room, sitting rooms, high-ceilinged parlors with spectacular crystal chandeliers that illuminated furniture embellished with mother-of-pearl, marble, bronze, painted glass or inlaid exotic woods, all against walls, almost always with a table in the center accompanied by a few chairs at most; cornucopia mirrors that reflected the light from the oil lamps on their arms; carpets, statues, paintings and tapestries with motifs that had nothing to do with the Bible or mythology like those she had seen in Seville’s noble homes. The same could be said of th
e fireplaces. In Madrid the large Spanish-style mantels were no longer fashionable. They preferred the French type, of marble and with delicate lines. The taste for French things reigned, to undreamed-of extremes.

  In addition to the rooms, furniture, and the endless stream of servants, there was also a profusion of objects and decorations in gold, silver, ivory or hardwoods; porcelain china sets and rock-crystal cups that vibrated shrilly above the din when clinked together, raised in toasts around a competition of silks, velvets, moirés and lamés; feathers, flounces, tassels, bows, ribbons and blond lace; perfumes; extravagant hairdos on the women, powdered wigs on their companions. Luxury, ostentation, vanity, hypocrisy …

  Milagros appeared indifferent to all that show. She didn’t even wear the dresses she flaunted in the Príncipe, but her simple, comfortable gypsy clothes, combined with colorful ribbons and beads. Since she had been forced to visit the homes of the nobility, she had received gifts, some of them valuable, although they had done no good to those who tried to flatter and seduce her. All the gifts and money she earned for the performances went into Pedro’s hands, who unlike her had significantly upgraded his wardrobe. That night he wore a richly embroidered bolero jacket, in the style of the manolos, silk stockings and shirt and shoes with silver buckles that he forced Bartola to polish time and again. Milagros, seeing him so splendidly turned out, elegant and dazzling, felt a stab of something. She wasn’t sure if it was pain or rage. Pedro, in true gypsy form, addressed the Marquis of Torre Girón as an equal: they chatted, laughed and even slapped each other on the back, as if they were old friends. She could tell that many of the ladies there whispered with their gazes brazenly fixed on her husband. Even the Frenchified dandies who courted the ladies seemed to envy him!

  Milagros passed before them with her nose in the air, as if challenging them. She knew the courtship game. Marina had explained to her that most of the ladies who filled the boxes at the Coliseo del Príncipe weren’t accompanied by their husbands, but rather by the chevaliers servants who were courting them.