The Barefoot Queen

  Men. They were the cause of the bitterest fights between women in a society where women who were single, widowed or abandoned outnumbered the married by thousands. He told himself often that it wouldn’t be hard to recognize a Negro woman among them. He saw several; some he ruled out from a distance, others he followed limping until he was sure of his disappointment. On feast days and holidays, almost one hundred a year thanks to ecclesiastical zeal, he saw the women of Madrid leave their homes smiling and proud, all spruced up and dressed in the Spanish style: narrow waists and generous necklines, mantillas and combs, and he followed them to the Migascalientes copse, to the Corregidor plain or the fountain of La Teja, where they flirted with men and snacked, sang and danced until the men got into quarrels and started throwing rocks at each other. He didn’t find his morena there either.

  However, it was at night when Melchor searched most. He was looking for prostitutes.

  “You are lovely,” he would flatter them. “But …” he pretended to hesitate, “I’m looking for something special.”

  Before they insulted him or spat at him as some had done, Melchor showed them his money.

  “Like what?” they would respond once they’d seen the coins.

  “A virgin girl …”

  “You’ll never have enough money for that.”

  “Well … a black girl. Yes, a black girl. Do you know of any?”

  There were some. They took him around, to dark alleys and squalid rooms. On every occasion, he squandered on the matchmakers the few coins he had been able to gather with his hustling.

  “No! A real Negro,” he then insisted if he sensed that the woman might be able to help him. “I want a black, black girl. Young, beautiful. I’ll pay whatever it takes. Find her for me and I’ll pay you well.”

  Money. That was his biggest problem. Without money he couldn’t sustain the greed of the various women of the night whom he had sent in search of Caridad. His sustenance was taken care of by the Church, but it had been some time since he’d smoked a cigar or drunk a good jug of wine. I must really love you, morena! he told himself as he passed the many taverns and bars without stopping. When he was hungry he would join the long lines of indigents at the doors of a monastery waiting for the watery slop that was handed out daily at most of them. He also kept an eye out for the bread and egg patrol that left the church of the Alemanes every night to attend to the needy. Three brothers from the Brotherhood of the Refugio—one of them a priest—along with a servant who lit up the street with a lantern, alternated neighborhoods in their rounds to pick up the dead, take the sick to hospitals, offer spiritual comfort to the dying and feed the rest: a piece of bread and two hard-boiled eggs; big eggs as was to be expected of a prestigious brotherhood, because the little ones, those that fit through a hole that the brothers had made in a wooden board to check their width, were rejected.

  He stole, and everything, except for a knife he decided to keep, was used to pay for the search for Caridad. He remembered the way Martín had freed him and he slipped into the rows of rosary singers on the streets, just as the boy had, until he managed to trick two of them into fighting with each other, one from San Andrés, and the other from the monastery of San Francisco, as they crossed each other in the little square at the Moros Gate. In the chaos of the fight he managed to make off with several objects that he later sold. He used a similar trick with a group of blind people. Melchor felt drawn to that army of the sightless that roamed Madrid’s streets and plazas; Spain was a country filled with the blind, so many that some foreign doctors laid the blame for it on the practice of bleeding to flaunt pale skin or to rebalance the body’s humors. The blind went around in groups offering to recite stories, play music and sing, always with a string of sheets pinned to a cord printed with the lyrics of the songs or the text of the works they recited, which they produced in small secret workshops, without authorization, without paying the royal taxes or censoring them. They sold the pages at a very low price to those who listened to them, and the humble folk bought them from them; they spoke of themselves, of the manolos in the capital, extolling their gallantry, their customs and their valor in keeping alive the Spanish spirit while mocking and disdaining everything that was the least bit Frenchified. The blind were distrusting by nature, and all it took was passing them a fake coin for the canes and then the fists to start flying. The gypsy pulled it off on a few occasions, when he took advantage of the ruckus to steal all he could, but the third time it was as if the blind could smell him and they shouted insults at him before he could even get close.

  Some prostitutes also began to recognize him. “You still stuck on your black girl?” one of them let fly. “Don’t bother me!” shouted a second. “Go tell your lies to someone else, imbecile!”

  How long had he been searching for the morena? The summer and part of the autumn had passed; the cold got worse and he had even had to seek shelter at night in one of the many hospitals in Madrid. He missed the temperate climate of Triana. Sometimes they refused to admit him, claiming that it was already full, and he had to head to the large hospital run by the Alemanes, where the bread and egg rounds started, which took up an entire block between the Corredera Baja de San Pablo and Ballesta Streets.

  Caridad wasn’t there, he had to admit to himself one day that dawned leaden and cold. Every once in a while he would interrupt his search to find out about the procedures for freeing his daughter; he went to Carlos Pueyo’s office so often, at the arcade on Mayor Street where secondhand clothes were sold, that the notary refused to see him and sent him to a dour clerk who got rid of him rudely. One day he received him to tell him that the fixer wanted more money, dashing Melchor’s hopes. The gypsy protested. The other shrugged. Melchor shouted.

  “We can just leave it at that and not continue, if you prefer …” interrupted the notary.

  Melchor pulled out his knife. The notary’s clerk saw him and got behind him and aimed a musket at him.

  “That’s not the way, Melchor,” Carlos Pueyo cut in calmly. “Officials are greedy. They demand more money, that’s all.”

  “You’ll have it,” spat the gypsy as he put his knife away and weighed whether he should threaten him or not. He didn’t. “Give me time,” he asked instead.

  He had all the time in the world. What was left to him? He hadn’t found Caridad despite having traveled all over Madrid and its brothels again and again. He had been yearning more and more strongly to see his daughter free—it had reached the point of obsession, and he was dependent on that notary who was bleeding him dry, sheltered behind a fixer he hadn’t even ever met. That day he spent his last few reals on cigars and wine, and drank with his face exposed, without any blanket covering him, with his right leg tickling him constantly, freed from the pressure of the planks that had kept it straight for months. Tobacco, he concluded to himself as he turned an empty jug of wine round and round in his hands; that was the only way to get the money the notary demanded of him. Later, with his senses dulled, far from the bustle of people, he crossed the city toward the Segovia Gate. He didn’t have anything to gather for his trip, no one to say goodbye to. He was alone. Before crossing the bridge over the trickling Manzanares River, he looked back at Madrid.

  “I didn’t pull it off, morena,” he whispered in a hoarse voice. The royal palace under construction rose on a hill above him, blurred by the tears that came to his eyes. “I’m sorry. I really am, Cachita.”

  Caridad was just finishing the first year of her sentence at La Galera, Madrid’s royal jail for women.

  That morning, as they both worked seated on the floor of the gallery where they slept, Frasquita shifted her attention from the sheet to focus on Caridad. Frasquita, who was over fifty, felt a twinge of tenderness seeing that woman absorbed in the garment, her agile fingers sewing ceaselessly. She had been among those who’d tried to humiliate her when they sent her back to La Galera after the sentence handed down by the High Court. Each morning, in the line that formed for the chamber pot,
she would cut right in front of Caridad so she would have to empty her stools. And Caridad did it, without complaining, until her patience managed to soften Frasquita up. And the day that Frasquita decided to put an end to the humiliation and take a different spot in the queue, Caridad called her over to the place where she had stood day after day. Perhaps with another prisoner she would have responded angrily, but that round face as black as jet smiled at her without the slightest trace of bitterness, mockery or challenge. She went to where Caridad had indicated, urinated and threw the liquid out of the window herself, to the shout of “Gardy loo!” Many of the other prisoners were pleased by her decision; in the end, they said in silence, they were all equal: women sharing the same misfortune.

  And yet … Caridad didn’t seem unhappy; she had confessed that some time ago, when Frasquita had to explain to her the reasons behind some of the women’s complaints.

  “When they were sentenced they were given an indefinite jail term. They have spent years locked up without knowing when they will be set free.” Caridad nodded as if that were normal; for someone who had been a slave, it wasn’t so strange. “But even if you have a release date,” continued the other, “if you don’t have a respectable man who takes responsibility and vouches for you, they don’t let you out anyway.”

  Caridad looked up from her sewing.

  “It’s true,” interjected Herminia, a slight, blonde woman who had taught Caridad how to sew.

  The other two exchanged a glance when they saw that Caridad took up her sewing again as if trying to console herself with it.

  “Do you have anybody out there?” asked Herminia.

  “No … I don’t think so,” she responded after a few seconds had passed.

  In her life she had only had her mother, some siblings and her first Cuban baby whom they had taken away from her, then Marcelo, Milagros and Melchor … It had been a year since she’d heard from him. Sometimes her gods told her that he was alive, that he was fine, but she still had her doubts. Every once in a while her stomach would clench, but the tears that ran down her cheeks brought back happy memories. After all, what could a Negro slave expect? How could she have been so naive as to fantasize about a happy future?

  “I’m fine here,” she murmured.

  Yes. That was her way of life, what she knew and befitted her, what the white men had taught her with their whips: sleep, wake up, hear mass, breakfast, work, lunch, pray … Fulfill a series of daily routine obligations. She had no great worries. Sometimes she could even smoke. Saturdays, the inmates could sew for themselves and earn some money, a pittance, but enough for the sentry or the demandera, who ran errands for them outside of La Galera, to get them some tobacco.

  Besides, since Frasquita had started throwing her own waste out of the window, most of the other prisoners seemed to have accepted Caridad.

  “Don’t go near certain people,” Frasquita warned her one day as they walked through the central courtyard; when there was good weather they let them do that before going to bed. Then she pointed to an inmate who was standing alone, with a bad-tempered expression and gaze. “Isabel, for example. She is not a good woman: she killed her newborn son.”

  “In Cuba many mothers kill their children. They aren’t bad people; they do it to save them from a life of slavery.”

  Frasquita analyzed her words. Then she spoke slowly and deliberately, as if she had never thought about it that way before. “Isabel says something similar: the father didn’t want to take responsibility, she couldn’t support the child, and in the foundling hospital eight out of every ten orphans dies before the age of three. She says she couldn’t bear imagining her son sick and neglected, dying a slow death.”

  Despite everything, Caridad avoided Isabel and two other inmates who had done the same thing. But she couldn’t avoid a prostitute whom Frasquita had also warned her against. One morning the woman happened to be behind her in mass, surrounded by other whores with whom she formed a feared group within the prison. Caridad heard them whispering openly until the priest yelled at them; then they laughed under their breath and, after a few seconds, started up their chattering again. Who was that Mary Magdalene, who the father called them to imitate in sermon after sermon? thought Caridad. In Cuba they didn’t talk about her.

  “Sinners!”

  The shriek echoed in the small chapel where the forced faithful were packed in. Startled by the shouts of the priest demanding penitence, repentance, contrition and a thousand other sacrifices, Caridad jumped when she felt someone put a hand on her shoulder. She didn’t dare look behind her.

  “They say you were condemned as a whore,” she heard.

  She feared that the priest would notice and shout at her. She didn’t answer. The woman shook her.

  “Morena, I’m talking to you.”

  Frasquita wasn’t with her. That morning she’d arrived late and was in one of the rows at the back of the chapel. Caridad lowered her gaze, fearful, sorry she hadn’t waited for someone who could protect her.

  “Leave her alone,” the inmate next to her spoke up in her defense.

  “You stay out of other people’s business, bitch.”

  Another of the prostitutes pushed the woman who had interfered—hard. The woman went flying into those in front of her, who staggered in turn.

  The priest stopped the sermon at the commotion; the sentry made way through the women to come over to them.

  “Exotic black whores like you are the ones who steal our customers,” Caridad heard the one who had grabbed her shoulder accusing her, indifferent to the truncheon that the sentry used to open a path in the crowd. “Tell me how much they pay you for sleeping with them.”

  “Herminia, come with me!” ordered the man when he reached them.

  “I don’t …”

  “Silence!” shouted the priest from the altar.

  The truncheon pointing at her was enough for Herminia to give in and she prepared to go with him. Caridad shot her a grateful look. That woman had tried to defend her and she felt indebted to her.

  “I don’t steal,” Caridad spat at the prostitute. “They never paid me anything!”

  Her surprise grew when she turned and saw a docile woman opening her hands toward the sentry in a gesture of innocence.

  “Morena, you come with me as well,” she heard him say.

  “Stupid darkie.”

  The prostitute’s insult behind her back blended in with the priest’s words, who continued his mass.

  That was how Caridad became friends with Herminia: sharing a week of bread-and-water punishment with her.

  “Who is Mary Magdalene?” she asked her new friend one day.

  “Which one?”

  Caridad looked confused.

  “Here we have two Magdalenes they insist on lecturing us about,” explained Herminia.

  “The one in mass, the one the priest is always talking about.”

  “Oh! That one!” Herminia laughed. “A whore. They say she was Jesus Christ’s lover.”

  “Jesus!”

  “The very same. It seems she ended up repenting and they made her into a saint. That is why they use her as an example day in and day out. They didn’t tell you about her in Cuba?”

  “No. There they didn’t ask us to repent for anything, they just told us that we had to obey and work hard because that was what the Lord wanted.” Caridad let a few seconds pass. “And the other Magdalene?” she asked finally.

  Herminia snorted before answering.

  “She’s worse than the first! Sister Magdalene of San Jerónimo”—she uttered the words in disgust—“a nun from Valladolid who created women’s prisons more than a hundred years ago. Since then all the kings have followed her instructions with fervor: equal punishment to men and severe discipline until they break us; humiliation, cruelty if necessary; hard work to pay for our maintenance. Did you notice that we can’t see the street because the windows are so high?”

  Caridad nodded.

  “That was this Sis
ter Magdalene’s idea: isolate us from the good people. And along with all that, mass and sermons to convert us and make us useful as good maids … That is our fate if we ever get out of here: service. God save us from the Magdalenes!”

  But except for those who had decided to cut short their children’s sad, sure fate, the group of prostitutes and the odd other violent and nasty criminals, most of those 150 women were locked up there as a result of minor mistakes made out of ignorance or necessity.

  She found out what Frasquita had been condemned for: immodest living, declared the magistrates.

  “They arrested me one night strolling with a shoemaker,” she explained to Caridad. “A good man … We weren’t doing anything! I was cold and hungry and just looking to sleep indoors. But they caught me with a man.”

  Frasquita pointed out many other women toiling in La Galera for their crimes against morality, a catalogue as extensive as it was vague. They condemned them for being wanton or being scandalous, layabouts, libertines, dissolute, lecherous, unbridled, harmful to the State … Since, unlike men, they couldn’t be sent to the army or to public works, they ended up in the women’s prison.

  The only crime Herminia, the small blonde who came from a nearby town, had committed was trying to sell a couple of strings of garlic on the streets of Madrid. She needed the money, she confessed to Caridad with resignation. There were many peddlers like her among the prisoners: women who were only trying to make a living by selling vegetables, which was against the law.

  Caridad met two other women. A simple quarrel without real consequences had brought them to La Galera. Insults and fighting were also prohibited, as were frequenting inns or walking alone at night. They locked them up for not having a known job or address; for being poor and not wanting to work in service; for begging …

  One Saturday, the day they divided up the week’s tasks among the inmates—scrubbing, mopping, lighting or putting out the oil lamps, serving the food—Caridad got the job of handing out the stale bread. They paired her with a young woman who still had the glow and vigor of her youth. Caridad had noticed the girl: she seemed even more timid and defenseless than she herself did. They were both waiting beside the breadbasket for the sentry to authorize them to distribute it to the others.