I’ve got him! the gypsy said to himself when he saw how El Gordo turned, with his face flushed and blood flowing from his chest, stabbing at the air. Melchor dodged his blind attacks once, two, three times. He wounded him again, on his left thigh, and then he let out a guffaw that broke the silence the smugglers maintained.
“And your wife’s pearls …” The gypsy jumped from one side to the other, confusing his enemy even further. He felt young and strangely agile. He dodged a new attack and jammed his knife into El Gordo’s right armpit, forcing him to take the knife with his left hand. “My granddaughter is flaunting them, you filthy dog!” shouted Melchor after moving several paces away from him.
“I’ll kill her when I’m done with you,” answered the other, refusing to give up, “but first I’ll give her to my men to enjoy. Did you bring her with you?” he added, pointing with his knife past the road, toward the trees.
Melchor decided to finish him off, grabbed his weapon tightly and approached his opponent ready to deal the final blow.
“When we’re done with her she’ll wish she’d been arrested last month in Triana along with all the other gypsy riffraff …”
El Gordo didn’t finish his sentence. The decisiveness with which Melchor approached him faded at his words. The smuggler sensed the confusion in the gypsy’s face; his arms and legs were paralyzed. He didn’t know about it! He hadn’t heard about the roundup! El Gordo took advantage of his opponent’s hesitation, moved quickly and sunk the entire length of his knife into his belly.
Melchor, with surprise in his face, leaned forward, brought his free hand to his wound and stepped back a few paces.
“There are no gypsies!” screamed El Gordo excitedly amid the cheers and applause of his people after his stab. “He’s alone!”
“He’s all yours!” encouraged one of his lieutenants. “Finish him off!”
The shouting was deafening.
Bloodied, with his right hand hanging by his side, the smuggler pounced on Melchor, who, in his attempt to avoid the attack, tripped and fell to the ground, onto his back. The men, no longer afraid of an ambush, got up and started to run toward where El Gordo was standing above Melchor. The smuggler’s cynical grin was back. Many of his men could see how the gypsy was curled up and grabbing his stomach with both hands, submissive; others, however, could only manage to make out the fleeting trace of two large dogs that appeared out of nowhere and sprang on the captain. One leapt on his thigh, where he was bleeding from the wound Melchor had given him; the other went straight for his neck when El Gordo fell from the first dog’s attack.
Most of the men were frozen in place; some tried to approach the dogs, but stopped when the animals growled without releasing their prey. El Gordo was still close to Melchor. He was as motionless as the two huge dogs, bred to fight mountain wolves; both had their powerful jaws clenched just enough, as if they were waiting for the definitive order to sink their fangs into the smuggler’s flesh.
“Shoot them!” suggested someone.
Without daring to speak, El Gordo managed to frantically gesture in the negative with one hand, from beneath the animal that was clamped onto his thigh.
“You could wound El Fajado!” one of his lieutenants objected at the same time. “Nobody shoot, or even go near.”
“Bite,” Melchor struggled to mutter. The dogs didn’t obey but they greeted his voice with a wagging of their tails that the gypsy couldn’t see. “Bite, goddamnit!” he managed to howl in a cry of pain.
“They won’t do it.”
The smugglers turned toward Nicolasa, who had appeared on the edge of the road with her late husband’s gun in her hands.
“They won’t do it … unless I order them to.”
Her voice trembled as she spoke. The pain she had felt in her own stomach when she saw the smuggler sink his knife into Melchor’s had now transformed into a tremendous knot. She had set the dogs on El Gordo as soon as she saw Melchor fall to the ground and she understood that his die was cast. Then she went out to the road, blind, determined to fight for the gypsy, but suddenly she found herself surrounded by rough, grim-faced men, all enormous compared to her.
“If it’s the woman who has to give the order … let’s kill her!” proposed one of the smugglers, making a move to leap on Nicolasa.
The shot thundered and the man went flying backward, his face destroyed by the blunderbuss’s pellets.
Nicolasa didn’t dare to look at the others. She had shot the way she did when wolves came close to the shack: without thinking. She had never shot a man before, as much as she threatened it when anyone came close to her territory. The dogs’ growling brought her back to reality. El Gordo was again frenetically beating his free hand against the road. She reloaded her weapon, trying to control the trembling in her hands, keeping one eye on the men who surrounded her.
“Nobody do a thing,” one of the lieutenants again ordered.
Nicolasa breathed hard as she tamped the barrel of the blunderbuss for the second and last time with the ramrod. Then she began to place the fine gunpowder in the weapon’s flash pan. They were all watching her closely … her and the dogs. She cleared her throat.
“If anyone tries to hurt me …” She cleared her throat again; she was having trouble speaking. “The dogs will come to my aid, but first they will finish off that wretch just as they do with wolves. They never leave an enemy alive.” She checked the gun, nodded and took it up again. Some of the men moved away and she felt strong. “A single squeeze of that jaw and your captain will die,” she added, addressing the place where Melchor lay. Then she lifted her gaze toward one of the lieutenants, still on his horse, and found a face that seemed to encourage her. What was that she saw reflected in his eyes? Ambition! “Or perhaps you’d like him to die?” she speculated in a lower voice, directly to the lieutenant. “What are you going to do with a cowardly, obese captain who only has the use of one hand? I saw the fight. That wound in his armpit isn’t going to heal.”
The lieutenant brought a hand to his chin, thought for a few seconds, grabbed his weapon tightly and nodded.
Nicolasa sketched a half-smile as she realized she was going to make it out of that sticky situation alive.
“What …?” the second lieutenant tried to object when a sudden shot from the other silenced his complaints and took him off his horse with a bullet to the chest.
A murmur ran through the men, but none of them raised their voices: it was between the leaders, as they had seen many times before.
“You and you”—the woman addressed two nearby smugglers and then pointed to Melchor—“load him up …” She gasped for breath when she saw the gypsy’s hands, soaked in blood and tense against his stomach. “Load him on a horse!” she managed to finish.
“Do it,” confirmed their new captain, pointing to El Gordo’s horse.
Melchor couldn’t keep himself in the saddle. They put him across it like a bundle, his head hanging down.
“You are going to die, Gordo,” the gypsy spat out before his face contorted in pain.
And while El Gordo beat on the ground again with his hand, Nicolasa grabbed the reins of the horse that carried Melchor and headed off into the trees with him.
No one dared to move for a long time. The two dogs remained on top of their prey, who now accompanied his weakened banging with moans. After a while a high-pitched whistle was heard from among the trees. Then one of the dogs pulled on his leg, as if trying to rip it off his torso, and the other sunk his teeth into El Gordo’s neck. All the animal had to do was jerk its head violently a couple of times to know that its prey had perished. Unlike the wolves, who fight for their lives, the man had let himself be killed like a pig. Then the two dogs ran off in pursuit of their owner.
Before the animals reached Nicolasa, in the thicket, Melchor spoke. “Did you know about the gypsies?”
She didn’t answer.
“Let me die,” he whispered.
“Shut up,” said the woman. “Don’t
strain yourself.”
“Let me die, woman, because if you manage to heal me, I will leave you.”
The dogs’ arrival, with bloodied snouts, allowed Nicolasa to relax her throat, which had seized up when Melchor’s life was threatened.
“Good boys,” she whispered to the animals as they ran through the horse’s legs. “You’re lying, gypsy,” she then said.
Málaga was a town of little more than thirty thousand inhabitants that formed part of the kingdom of Granada and had been established on the shores of the Mediterranean by the Phoenicians in the eighth century BC. After the passage of the Carthaginians, Romans, Visigoths and Muslims, the town of Málaga of the eighteenth century, busy demolishing its magnificent Nazarite walls, took the shape of a cross, with the Plaza Mayor in the center and numerous large religious buildings along the arms.
Nevertheless, the former Phoenician city wasn’t prepared to take in the arrested gypsy women. The roundup had taken place in late July, but the secrecy with which it had been carried out meant that the order that had designated that city as the repository for the gypsy women and their children didn’t reach the authorities until August 7, with no time to make any preparations. And to the despair of the city council, caravans of wagons loaded with women were arriving at the capital from Ronda, Antequera, Écija, El Puerto de Santa María, Granada, Seville …
La Alcazaba, the castle chosen by the Marquis of Ensenada as a prison, turned out to be dangerous because the army’s gunpowder was stored there, something that the nobleman hadn’t taken into account. So, the first women were locked up in the royal jail, but the constant influx meant that it was soon full. Then the city council requisitioned some houses on Ancha de la Merced Street, and they weren’t enough either. And while their space calculations had been way off, their estimates for maintaining that huge number of people were even worse. The council presented a formal request to the marquis to stop sending women while he asked for the funds necessary to deal with those who had already arrived. The nobleman decreed that the new parties of gypsy women be diverted to Seville: “Directly and safely,” he ordered.
In the end, on the outskirts of the city, outside the walls, the authorities requisitioned the houses on Arrebolado Street and closed off the exits, thereby creating a large jail into which they crammed more than a thousand ragged, hungry and sick gypsy women with their children under seven. Ana Vega, however, was locked up in the royal jail awaiting trial as the instigator of the riot on the way to the city.
AND WHILE the situation in Málaga was desperate, the same could be said of the arsenal in La Carraca. José Carmona, along with six hundred gypsies—five hundred men and a hundred boys—from various places, arrived in Cádiz in late August. But unlike Málaga, where the city council could requisition houses to lodge the unforeseen arrivals, the arsenal in La Carraca was nothing more than an enclosed military shipyard that was constantly guarded to keep the convicts from running away and to make sure the slaves carried out their forced labor. As in Cartagena, the gypsies didn’t fit in La Carraca; however, while in the arsenal in Murcia they could put them into useless, disgusting old beached galleys, in the one in Cádiz they grouped them into courtyards and all kinds of outbuildings. The briefs the governor of the arsenal presented to the council, stressing the inadequacy of the facilities and the risk of mutiny, did him little good.
In that age of reason and civility, the response from the authorities was absolute: where before they had fitted so many convicts, they could now fit the gypsies. The governor was ordered to fire the hired laborers and replace them with that dangerous, lazy human mass; in that way they would obtain the results sought by the Bourbon monarchy, who wished to transform Spanish society. Until that point, the poor had endured their plight with pious resignation, their only relief being through alms. The Bourbons believed that work was honorable. These days, when Spaniards were starting to leave behind the age-old concept of honor that had kept them from devoting themselves to manual—and therefore base—labor, no one was allowed to be idle, least of all gypsies, who should be useful to the nation like the vagrants who were arrested throughout the kingdom and destined to forced labor.
Much against his will, the governor of La Carraca obeyed: he increased the security troops, installed stocks and gallows in the arsenal as deterrents for the gypsies; he fired the hired laborers and proceeded to replace them with the new arrivals. However, terrified of the possibility of rebellions, he refused to take off their shackles and chains.
The measures produced no results. The arsenal in La Carraca, the oldest of the Spanish shipyards, stood in the narrow channels and navigable tributaries that headed inland from the Bay of Cádiz; it was a swampy area because of the sedimentation around an old carrack sunk in the region. The Marquis of Ensenada himself had decided to expand those shipyards by incorporating the island of León, which was also on a bed of mud.
José Carmona, like the other gypsies, was forced to work up to his hips in mud preparing the pilings of the docks and helping the pile-driving machines force the long, sturdy oak trunks into that unstable bottom. The gypsies struggled to move in the quagmire, and their chains made something that seemed impossible from the outset even harder. They were trying to extract as much mud as possible from the previous marked-off piling site, in order to drive in the pilings that would support a framework of logs to create the base of the construction. As the overseer shouted and whipped, José, like many others, struggled valiantly with sludge up to his stomach to move with a basket filled with mud. They could have faked that effort and loafed in the mire, but they all wanted to get away from the pile driver’s dangerous drop hammer, which was hoisted again and again and then dropped heavily on the head of the pile. They had already witnessed one accident: the unsteady ground had made the pile twist from the impact of the large iron hammer and the two operators next to it had been seriously injured.
On other occasions, José worked in the cranes used to load and unload the heavy artillery from the ships. Four men had to turn the wheel with levers that pulled the rope that ran along the crane’s wooden arm. The twenty-four-caliber cannons could weigh up to two and a half tons! The guards whipped them at the slightest hesitation while the cannons were moved through the air from the boat to the dock.
And when he wasn’t working in the mud or with the cranes, he had to work the bailing pumps or in the boats’ rigging, always in chains—the governor kept the gypsies in shackles even when they were sent to the infirmary—and then spent his nights lying out in the open, trying to take shelter among the rotted timber that was piled up in front of one of the arsenal’s warehouses. There José collapsed with exhaustion, but he had trouble falling asleep, like most of those who lay there amid the timber. On the esplanade that opened out in front of the warehouse, various stocks held the bodies of some gypsies who had revolted. And how could they rest with their gypsy brothers forced to watch them with their heads locked in a stock?
“They’re almost all from the settlement,” José heard one of the blacksmiths from the San Miguel alley say in an accusing tone one night. “They and their rebellion are the reason we’re all here.”
No one spoke out in agreement with him.
“I’d like to have your guts,” lamented another after a few seconds of silence when many of them exchanged glances with the punished men.
Guts? José held back a reply. Of course it had been them! And those others who wandered the roads and had escaped arrest. The Vegas. It had been people like the Vegas—Melchor, and even Ana—who were responsible for the fact that their ankles were bleeding right now beneath the fetters. José Carmona tried to adjust the irons so they did not chafe his wounded legs. Damn them all! He spat out at a stabbing pain.
The governor didn’t yield about the chains, but, to his desperation, the gypsies didn’t submit, neither the men nor the boys, because when they had sent the little ones to learn boat-repairing trades, the carpenters and caulkers outright refused to allow the gyps
y boys into their guild.
Meanwhile, the uprisings and revolts kept happening at the arsenal. They were all repressed cruelly. None of the attempts to flee were successful and the gypsies continued to be forced to work, even more than the Moorish slaves they shared their imprisonment with—because the Moors communicated with Algiers about the work conditions the Spaniards imposed on them and the Berber authorities reciprocated: the captive Spaniards in Barbary were treated equally as badly as the Moors in the Spanish arsenals. And Bourbon diplomacy endeavored to find a middle ground that would satisfy the interests of both sides.
Unlike the Moorish slaves, the gypsies had no one they could turn to. Their only defense was their solidarity. In rags, almost naked, hungry and in chains, wounded, many of them sick, they prevailed over the initial shock of their arrest until their proud, haughty character reasserted itself: they didn’t work for the King or for the payos, and there wasn’t a whip in the world that could force them to.
It was late October of 1749 and Old María felt the threat of winter traveling in the clouds as she rubbed her hands together. Her knotted fingers got tangled up in each other; they were starting to hurt. She and the others had stopped, when night had almost completely fallen, in a place that seemed remote and far enough from the road between Trigueros and Niebla, among the scarce bushes and pines characteristic of that region. Santiago Fernández had led them there. Santiago was the head of a family of almost two dozen members, and he knew the area intimately, as every patriarch of a group of nomads must.
María squeezed her fingers together to loosen them up. It was all perfectly planned, just like each time they stopped somewhere for the night: the men unharnessed and hobbled the horses, the kids ran here and there in search of dry branches to make a fire, and the women, toward whom the old lady headed, skillfully set up the tents that would be their shelter for the night, with fabric tied to stakes sunk into the ground, or simply to bushes and trees. That night, however, they all seemed to be in more of a rush than usual and they worked amid jokes and laughter.