The Barefoot Queen

  Caridad obeyed. As she crossed the alley and returned with Milagros, worried by the Negro woman’s persistent silence in response to her questions, Melchor dragged José’s corpse with great difficulty over to the next room to hide it. How would Milagros react? Carmona was her father and she loved him, but he had asked for it … Melchor didn’t have time to clean up the trail of blood that streaked the floor, or the large stain that shone damply in the middle of the room, or his knife blade, or his yellow dress coat; Milagros only saw him and leapt into his arms.

  “Grandfather!” she screamed. Then her words caught in her throat, mixed with sobs of joy.

  Melchor hesitated, but in the end he hugged her too, and rocked her. “Milagros,” he whispered again and again.

  Caridad, behind them, couldn’t help following the trail of blood with her eyes, before focusing again on granddaughter and grandfather, and then back at the bloodstain in the middle of the room.

  “Let’s go, girl,” said Melchor suddenly.

  “But you just arrived!” responded Milagros, leaning back from him with a wide smile on her lips, her arms still holding him, to get a better look at him.

  “No …” corrected Melchor. “I mean let’s leave … Triana.”

  Milagros saw her grandfather’s stained coat. Her expression soured and she checked her own clothes, impregnated with blood.

  “What …?” The girl looked beyond Melchor.

  “Let’s go, girl. We’ll go to Madrid, to beg for your mother’s freedom—”

  “What’s that blood?” she interrupted him.

  She pulled away from her grandfather and kept him from tugging her back. She discovered the trail. Caridad saw her first tremble and then bring her hands to her head. Neither Caridad nor Melchor went into the next room, from which a shriek emerged, blending with the hammering of the blacksmiths who had already begun their working day. Caridad, as if her friend’s heart-rending scream was pushing her, backed up until she was against the wall. Melchor brought a hand to his face and closed his eyes.

  “What have you done?” The accusation emerged cracked from Milagros’s throat; the girl searched for support in the lintel of the doorway between the rooms. “Why …?”

  “He betrayed us!” reacted Melchor, raising his voice.

  “Murderer.” Milagros was dripping with rage. “Murderer,” she repeated, dragging out each syllable.

  “He betrayed the Vegas by marrying you—”

  “It wasn’t him!”

  Melchor straightened his neck and squinted his eyes toward his granddaughter.

  “No, it wasn’t him, Grandfather. It was Inocencio. And he did it to free Mother from prison in Málaga.”

  “I … I didn’t know … I’m sorry …” Melchor managed to say, awed by his granddaughter’s pain. Yet he rallied instantly. “Your mother would never have accepted that arrangement,” he declared. “A García! You married a García! She would have chosen prison. Your father should have done the same!”

  “Families and their quarrels!” sobbed Milagros, as if detached from her grandfather’s words. “He was my father. He wasn’t a Vega or a García or even a Carmona … he was my father, do you understand? My father!”

  “Come with me. Leave behind those—”

  “He was all I had,” she lamented.

  “You have me, girl, and we will get your mother’s free—”

  Milagros spat at her grandfather’s feet before he could finish his sentence.

  The contempt in that gob of spit, from the person he most loved in the world, made his face quiver and his eyelids tremble. Melchor was silent even when he saw her shout and pounce on Caridad.

  “And you?”

  Caridad couldn’t move; frozen in that spot as she was, she wouldn’t have anyway. Milagros screamed in her face.

  “What did you do? What did you do?” she demanded again and again.

  “The morena didn’t do anything,” intervened Melchor in her defense.

  “That’s it!” shrieked Milagros. “Look at me,” she demanded. And since Caridad didn’t lift her eyes, she smacked her. “Fucking nigger! That’s it: you never do anything. You’ve never done anything! You let him murder him!”

  Milagros started to beat her breasts with both fists, up and down. Caridad didn’t defend herself. Caridad didn’t speak. Caridad couldn’t look at Milagros. “You killed him!”

  For the first time in her life Caridad felt pain in all its intensity and she realized that, unlike the wounds inflicted by the overseer and the master, these would never heal.

  One girl screamed and hit; the other cried.

  “Murderer,” sobbed Milagros, letting her arms fall to her sides, unable to hit her even one more time.

  For a few seconds the only sound to be heard was the hammering that came from the forges. Milagros collapsed on the floor at the feet of Caridad, who didn’t dare move; nor did Melchor.

  “Morena,” she heard him say. “Gather your things. We’re leaving.”

  Caridad looked at Milagros, hoping, yearning for her to say something …

  “Go,” was all she spat out. “I never want to see you again as long as I live.”

  “Gather your things,” insisted the gypsy.

  Caridad went to find her bundle, red outfit and straw hat. While she grabbed her few belongings, Melchor, without daring to look at his granddaughter, calculated what effect his actions would have: if they caught them in the San Miguel alley or in Triana, they would kill them. And even when they fled, the council of elders would pronounce a death sentence against him and most likely the morena as well, and they would let all the families in the kingdom know about it. It was in Milagros’s hands whether they would be able to escape Triana alive.

  Caridad returned with her things and looked for the last time at the only friend she had ever had. She hesitated as she passed by her, huddled, crying, cursing between moans. She couldn’t have stopped Melchor. She remembered running toward him, and the next thing she had seen was José’s badly injured body.

  Milagros had told her that she didn’t want to ever see her again. She tried to tell her that it hadn’t been her fault, but at that moment Melchor pushed her out of the apartment.

  “I’m sorry for you, girl. I trust that someday your pain will ease,” he said to his granddaughter before leaving.

  Then they both left the building, hastily. They needed time to flee. If Milagros sounded the alarm, they wouldn’t even make it out of the alley.

  They fled Triana over the pontoon bridge and entered the streets of Seville. Melchor headed to the house of an old notary public who no longer practiced.

  “We need fake passports to get to Madrid,” Caridad heard him asking the old man, openly.

  “The Negress, too?” he inquired, pointing at her from behind a solid wood desk piled with books, folders and papers.

  Melchor, who had sat in one of the chairs on the other side of the desk, turned his head toward her. “Are you coming with me, morena?”

  Of course she wanted to go with him! But … Melchor guessed at the thoughts going through Caridad’s mind.

  “We’ll go to Madrid to get Ana freed. My daughter will fix everything,” he added, convinced.

  How is Ana going to fix José’s death? wondered Caridad. Yet she clung to that hope. If Melchor trusted in his daughter, she wasn’t going to be the one to object, so she nodded.

  “Yes,” confirmed Melchor to the notary, “the Negress too.”

  The old man took half the morning to forge the documents that would allow them to travel to Madrid. Using an old provision of the Royal Court of Seville he elevated Melchor to the rank of “old Castilian” based on the merits of his ancestors in the wars of Granada, in which some gypsies had accompanied the armies of the Catholic Kings as blacksmiths. He added a second document: a passport that authorized him to go to Madrid to procure his daughter’s freedom. He turned Caridad, who showed him the manumission documents that they had given her on the boat, into a
maid. Even though she wasn’t a gypsy, she still needed a passport.

  As he put together the documents, the couple waited in the front hallway of the house. Caridad leaned on the wall, exhausted, yet not daring to slide down the tiles until she was seated on the floor, to hide her face and try to make sense of what she had experienced that morning. Melchor seemed to be trying to get away from the blood staining his dress coat as he paced up and down in the small space.

  “He’s a good man,” he commented to himself, without looking to see if Caridad was listening. “He owes me a lot of favors. Yes, he’s good. The best!” he added with a laugh. “You know what, morena? Notaries public make their living off the fees they charge for trial papers: so much per page, so much per letter. Those damn letters get expensive! And since they charge for the papers, many notaries provoke lawsuits, quarrels and rows between people. That way there are trials and they make a profit. Every time I passed through his district, Eulogio would ask me to start up some trouble: denounce someone; steal from somebody and stash the booty in somebody else’s house … Once he gave me the address of a ruffian who was exploiting his wife’s charms. A magnificent female!” he exclaimed after stopping, lifting his head and shaking his chin. “If she were mine …”

  He interrupted himself and turned toward Caridad, who kept her gaze on her trembling hands. The ruffian’s wife had never been his, but Caridad … When he had surprised her in bed with José he had felt as if she had indeed once been his and that Carmona had stolen her from him.

  Caridad didn’t take her eyes off her hands. She didn’t care about Melchor’s shady dealings with the notary public. She could only think of the terrible scene she had witnessed. It had all happened so quickly …! Melchor’s appearance, her own shame at being naked, the fight, the stabbing and the blood. Milagros had followed her to her father’s house, all the while asking why, as she stammered excuses, and then … She clasped her hands tightly together to keep them from shaking.

  Melchor resumed his pacing along the hallway, now in silence.

  They obtained the documents plus a letter of recommendation that the old notary addressed to a colleague who worked in Madrid.

  “I think he’s still alive,” he commented. “And he is entirely trustworthy,” he added, winking at the gypsy.

  The partners in crime said goodbye to each other with a heartfelt embrace.

  To avoid going through Triana, they left Seville through the Macarena Gate and headed west, toward Portugal, along the same road that Milagros, Caridad and Old María had taken almost a year earlier. Whatever happened to her? thought the former slave as soon as her gaze took in the open field. If Old María had been there maybe Milagros, whom she loved so much, wouldn’t have sent her away after screaming and beating her. Caridad stroked one of her breasts—but what harm could her friend’s fists do to her? She hurt inside, in the deepest, most private part of her being. If at least María had been there … But the old woman had disappeared.

  “Sing, morena!”

  They took a lonely path among gardens and fields of crops. The gypsy was walking in front of Caridad with his huge, faded yellow dress coat hanging from his shoulders; he hadn’t even turned toward her.

  Sing? She had reason to sing, to use her voice, as the Negro slaves did, to cry out her sadness and lament her misfortune, but …

  “No!” she shouted. It was the first time she had refused to sing for him.

  After stopping for a second, Melchor took a couple of steps.

  “You killed Milagros’s father!” Caridad yelled at his back.

  “Who you were sleeping with!” screamed the gypsy, turning suddenly and accusing her with one finger.

  The woman opened her hands in a gesture of incomprehension. “What …? And what could I do? I lived with him. He forced me.”

  “Refuse!” replied Melchor. “That’s what you could have done.”

  Caridad wanted to respond that she would have done that if she’d had any news from him. She wanted to tell him that she had been a slave for too many years, an obedient slave, but her words contorted into a sob.

  Then it was the gypsy who opened his hands. Caridad was planted before him, just a few steps away. Her worn burlap shirt rose and fell to the rhythm of her sobbing.

  Melchor hesitated. He went over to her. “Morena,” he whispered. He made as if to hug her, but she took a step back.

  “You killed him!” she accused him again.

  “It wasn’t like that,” he replied. “He sought out his own death.” Before Caridad could interject, he continued. “For a gypsy there is a big difference.”

  He turned around and continued along the path.

  She watched him head off.

  “And Milagros?” she shouted.

  Melchor clenched his teeth tightly. He was sure that the girl would get over it. As soon as he freed her mother …

  “What’s going to happen to Milagros?” insisted Caridad.

  The gypsy turned his head. “Morena, are you coming or not?”

  SHE FOLLOWED him. With Seville at their backs, she dragged her bare feet behind the gypsy, allowing herself a dry, deep sobbing, just as when they separated her from her mother and from her little Marcelo. Then it had been the white masters who had sealed her sad fate, but now … now it was Milagros herself who had rejected her friendship. Her doubts about her guilt hounded her: she had only obeyed, as she always did. In pain she relived the applause with which Milagros had received her the first time she wore her red outfit. The laughter, the affection, the friendship! The suffering after the gypsies were arrested. So many shared moments …

  She continued such musing until they reached a monastery where Melchor forced her to wait at the door.

  He came out with money and a good mule fitted out with saddlebags.

  “More friars, like the ones in Santo Domingo de Portaceli,” commented the gypsy once they were on the road again, “who won’t ever trust me again when they see that I don’t bring them the tobacco I promised.”

  Caridad remembered the episode and the tall, white-haired prior who hadn’t had the guts to challenge the gypsies who had brought him fewer bags than they’d agreed on. All my fault, she said to herself accusingly.

  “But my daughter comes first,” continued the gypsy. “And we need this money to multiply it and buy favors in the court. Surely their God will understand it that way, and if their God understands it, they’ll have to understand it too, right?”

  Melchor spoke as they walked, not expecting a reply. However, when they stopped, he fell into the melancholy that Caridad knew so well. Then he talked to himself, even though sometimes he turned to her in search of an approval she didn’t concede.

  “Do you agree, morena?” he asked her again. Caridad didn’t answer. Melchor shrugged it off and continued. “I have to get them to free my daughter. Only Ana will be able to bring that girl into line. Marrying a García! The grandson of El Conde! You’ll see, morena, everything will be the way it was as soon as Ana appears …”

  Caridad stopped listening to him. Everything will be the way it was. The tears clouded her image of the gypsy pulling the mule in front of her.

  “And if the friars don’t like it,” said Melchor, “they can come looking for me. They can join up with the Garcías, who will be after me too. No doubt about it, morena. By this time the council of elders will already have gathered to pass our death sentences. Maybe you’ll get lucky, but I doubt it. I can imagine the smug smiles on the faces of Rafael and his bitch of a wife. They will hide the corpse so that the King’s justice doesn’t intervene and they will set gypsy justice in motion. Shortly every gypsy in Spain will find out about our sentence and any of them could carry it out. Although not every gypsy obeys the Garcías and the elders of Triana,” he added after a while.

  They went through towns without stopping. They bought tobacco and food with the money from the friars and they slept out in the open, always heading northeast, toward the Portuguese border. At n
ights, Melchor would light one of the cigars and share it with Caridad. They both inhaled deeply until their lungs were filled; they both let themselves be carried away by the pleasant feeling of lethargy the tobacco gave them. Melchor didn’t ask her to sing again and she didn’t.

  “Milagros will get over it,” she heard Melchor declaring one of those nights, suddenly, breaking the silence. “Her father was not a good gypsy.”

  Caridad remained quiet. Day after day, in silence, in utmost privacy, she again felt Milagros beating on her breasts and her dreams were disturbed by the young woman’s angry face insulting her and screaming out that she never wanted to see her again.

  They reached the Aracena mountain range. Melchor avoided the outskirts of Jabugo and took a detour to reach Encinasola and from there to Barrancos, in that no-man’s-land between Spain and Portugal that the blacksmith—the one they had met as they fled through the Andévalo—had told them about.

  The gypsy was kindly received by the owner of an establishment that provided tobacco to Spanish smugglers.

  “We’d given you up for dead, Galeote,” said Méndez after greeting him affectionately. “El Gordo’s men told us of your wound—”

  “It wasn’t my time. I still have things to do around here,” interrupted Melchor.

  “I never liked El Gordo.”

  “He stole two leather bags of my tobacco on the beaches of Manilva, then he ordered the killing of my cousin’s grandson.”

  Méndez nodded pensively.

  That was how Caridad found out about the death of the captain of the smugglers’ party who had tricked her on the beach, causing such trouble and problems. She noticed that Melchor was looking at her out of the corner of his eye when Méndez asked him about the woman armed with a blunderbuss who had challenged an entire party of men and shot a smuggler, and the two large dogs that had killed El Gordo in their jaws, and how that woman had fled with what everyone assumed was his corpse.

  “She saved your life,” declared Méndez. “You must be grateful.”

  Caridad perked up her ears. Melchor sensed her interest and gave her another sidelong glance before answering.