The Barefoot Queen

  They both laughed.

  Caridad was walking behind Melchor, her bare feet sinking into the mire. For a moment she thought she wouldn’t have the strength to continue through the mud; she was tormented by fever, her throat smarted and her chest burned. Had that man asked anyone for her water yet? She had heard him talk but she couldn’t understand a word of the exchange about the donkey. The gypsies were speaking in their tongue.

  “Melchor!” shouted a woman who was nursing a baby, both breasts bared. “There’s a black, black Negress following you. Christ, is she black! I hope my milk doesn’t sour.”

  “She’s thirsty,” was all the gypsy answered.

  A couple of huts further on, warned of his arrival, a group of men was waiting for him.

  “Brother,” Melchor greeted a younger man as they grabbed each other by the forearm.

  An almost naked little boy had run over to grab his two-pointed staff, which he was already flaunting to the other kids.

  “Melchor!” The gypsy returned his greeting, squeezing his forearms.

  Caridad, feeling herself about to faint, watched how the man she had followed greeted the gypsy men and women and tousled the hair of the children who came over to him. What about her water? A woman noticed her.

  “And that Negress?” she inquired.

  “She wants to drink.”

  At that moment Caridad’s knees gave in and she collapsed. The gypsies turned and looked at her, kneeling in the mud.

  Old María, the woman who had asked about Caridad, snorted.

  “It looks like she needs something more than a drink, Nephew.”

  “Well, she only asked me for water.”

  Caridad tried to keep her vision focused on the group of gypsies; her sight had clouded over; she couldn’t understand what they were saying.

  “I can’t lift her,” said Old María. “Girls!” she shouted toward the youngest ones. “Give me a hand picking up this Negress and getting her inside!”

  As soon as the women surrounded Caridad, the men washed their hands of the problem.

  “A bit of wine, Uncle?” a young man offered Melchor.

  Melchor put an arm over the gypsy’s shoulders and hugged him. “The last time I drank your wine …” he commented as they headed to the next hut. “The salt and vinegar they used to treat our wounds in the galleys went down easier than that brew!”

  “Well, the donkeys like it just fine.”

  They entered the hut amid peals of laughter. They had to bend down to get through the doorway. It was a single room that was used for everything: the bedroom for the young man’s family, kitchen and dining room; there were no windows and just a simple hole in the roof for a chimney. Melchor sat down at a chipped table. The older men sat in other seats or benches and the rest stood; more than a dozen gypsies filled the space.

  “Are you calling me a donkey?” Melchor picked up the thread of the conversation when his nephew passed a few cups around the table. The invitation was only for the older men.

  “You, Uncle, are a winged steed at the very least. The other day, in the Alcalá market,” continued the gypsy as he poured the wine, “I managed to sell that gray donkey you saw last time you visited, remember? The one that was in such terrible shape.” Melchor nodded with a smile. “Well, I gave it a bottle of wine and you should have seen how the poor beast ran—looked like a purebred colt!”

  “You’re the one who must have been running out of that market as fast as you could,” interjected Uncle Juan, seated at the table.

  “Like a bat out of hell, Uncle,” admitted the nephew, “but with some good money, which I won’t be giving back, not even to the devil, no matter how fast he makes me run.”

  Melchor lifted his glass of wine and, after the others had joined him in his toast, drank it down in one gulp.

  “Watch out!” said a voice from the door. “We wouldn’t want Uncle Melchor to run off like a colt.”

  “We could sell him for some good money!” replied another.

  Melchor laughed and gestured to his nephew to serve him up some more wine.

  After a couple of rounds, more jokes and comments, only the older men remained: Melchor, his brother Tomás, Uncle Juan, Uncle Basilio and Uncle Mateo, all bearing the last name Vega, all dark-skinned, each with a face run through with deep wrinkles, thick brows that came together over the bridge of his nose and a penetrating gaze. The others were chatting outside. Melchor unbuttoned his short blue jacket, revealing a white shirt and a sash of shiny red silk. He searched in one of his inner pockets and pulled out a bundle of a dozen medium-size cigars that he placed on the table, beside the jug of wine that his nephew had given them.

  “Pure Havana tobacco,” he announced, and gestured for each man to take one.

  “Thank you,” some of them replied.

  “To your health,” murmured another.

  In a matter of minutes, the hut filled with an aromatic, bluish smoke that overpowered all the other smells in the small dwelling.

  “I have a good shipment of powdered tobacco,” commented Uncle Basilio after expelling a mouthful of smoke into the air. “From the factory in Seville, Spanish, very finely ground. Interested?”

  “Basilio …” Melchor reproached him with a weary voice, dragging the syllables.

  “It’s excellent quality!” said the other in his own defense. “You can get a better price for it than I can. The priests will be snatching it from your hands. They really squeeze us on the prices. What do you care where it comes from?”

  Melchor laughed. “I don’t care where it comes from, just how it got here. You know that. I don’t want to sell tobacco that someone has been carrying hidden in their arse. Just thinking about it gives me chills …”

  “It’s well wrapped in pig intestine,” insisted his brother Tomás in defense of his business.

  The others nodded. They knew he would give in; he always did, he never refused a request from the family, but first he had to complain, drag the discussion out, make them beg.

  “Even still. They carried it in their arses! One day they’re going to get caught—”

  “It’s the only way to get around the guards at the factory,” Basilio interrupted. “At the end of every work day, they strip several workers, at random.”

  “And they don’t look up their arses?” laughed Melchor.

  “Can you imagine one of those soldiers sticking his finger up a gypsy’s arse to see if he’s carrying tobacco? They can’t even imagine doing such a thing!”

  Melchor shook his head, but the obliging way he did so showed them that the deal was coming to a close.

  “One day one of them is going to burst and then …”

  “The payos will discover another way to use snuff,” declared Uncle Juan. “Sniffing it up their arse!”

  “I’m sure plenty of them would like that better than up their nose,” ventured Basilio.

  The gypsies looked at each other over the table for a few seconds and burst into laughter.

  The conversation went on long into the night. The nephew, his wife and three little kids came in when the murmurs from the street began to ebb. The children lay down on two straw mattresses in one corner of the hut. Their father noticed that the jug of wine was empty and went to fill it.

  “Your Negress has drunk—” the woman started to say to him from the mattresses.

  “She isn’t mine,” interrupted Melchor.

  “Well, whatever, you’re the one who brought her here,” she continued. “Aunt María gave her a potion of barley boiled with egg whites and her fever is going down.”

  Then the couple lay down alongside their children. The men continued chatting, with their wine and their cigars. Melchor wanted to know about the family, and the others filled him in: Julián, married to a Vega, a traveling blacksmith, had been arrested near Antequera as he was repairing the tilling tools of some farmers. “He wasn’t carrying any identification!” muttered Uncle Juan. The gypsies couldn’t work as blacksmiths,
nor leave their homes. Julián was jailed in Antequera and they had already begun the steps to free him. “Do you need anything?” offered Melchor. No. They didn’t need his help. Sooner or later they’d release him; he was eating for free and there was nothing that irked the royal officials more. Besides, they had sought out the help of a nobleman from Antequera and he had committed to intercede on his behalf. Tomás smiled, as did Melchor: there was always some nobleman who gave them a hand. They liked to protect them. Why did they do it? They had discussed it on numerous occasions: it was as if their favors made those men of noble birth feel somewhat gypsy, as if they wanted to show that they weren’t like most people and they shared the darker race’s lust for freedom; as if they were taking part in a way of life and a spirit denied them in their routine and rigid customs. Someday they would ask for the favor to be repaid, asking them to sing and dance for them at a party in some sumptuous palace, and they would invite their friends and peers to boast of their illicit connections.

  “We’ve had news that about a month ago,” interjected Uncle Mateo, “near Ronda, the brotherhood confiscated El Arrugado’s animals …”

  “Who’s El Arrugado?” asked Melchor.

  “The one who’s always hunched over, Josefa’s son, the cousin of—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” interrupted Melchor.

  “They took a horse and two donkeys from him.”

  “Has he got them back?”

  “Not the little donkeys. The soldiers kept them and then sold them. They sold the horse too, but El Arrugado followed the buyer and got it back the next night. They say it was pretty easy: the payo who bought it let it loose in a pen, all he had to do was go in and get it. El Arrugado liked that horse.”

  “Is it that good a horse?” asked Melchor after a new sip of wine.

  “No way!” answered his brother. “It’s a miserable nag that walks stiff as a board, but since they’re two of a kind, all hunched over … well, he’s comfortable with it.”

  Other family members, they explained later to Melchor, had taken sanctuary in a chapel on the road to Osuna more than seven days earlier. They were being chased by the Chief Magistrate of Málaga because some payos from Málaga had informed on them.

  “Now, as usual, they’re all fighting and arguing,” reported Uncle Basilio. “The magistrate wants them for himself; the Holy Brotherhood has showed up at the chapel claiming the gypsies are theirs; the priest says he doesn’t want to get involved; and the vicar, whom the priest called, alleges that the law cannot take them from the sanctuary and that they should take the matter to the bishop.”

  “It’s always the same,” commented Melchor, remembering the times he himself had taken refuge in churches or monasteries. “Are they going to take them out?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” answered Uncle Basilio. “For the moment they’re letting them argue among themselves. They all have cold immunity, so they’ll plead that when they come out and they’ll have to set them free again. They’ll lose their weapons and their animals, but not much more.”

  It was already dawn. Melchor yawned. The nephew and his family were sleeping on the straw mattresses and the gypsy settlement was silent.

  “Should we continue in the morning?” he suggested.

  The others nodded and got up. Melchor just placed one foot on the table and pushed backward until the chair, on just two of its legs, rested against a wall of the hut. Then he closed his eyes as he listened to his relatives leaving. Cold immunity, he smiled to himself before sleep overtook him. The payos always fell into the same traps, which was the only way his people, so persecuted and vilified throughout the country, were able to survive. When a gypsy who had taken sanctuary knew that, if he were removed, the sentence would be little or nothing, he would sometimes get the magistrate to remove him by force, thus violating church asylum. From that point on, if the magistrate or the constables didn’t return him to the same place he had been removed from, he now enjoyed what was known as cold immunity. And they didn’t ever do it. So the next time they arrested him, perhaps for a more serious crime, like simply walking free along the roads, he could claim that the previous time they hadn’t restored him to his asylum, and get out of the sentence that way. “Cold immunity,” repeated Melchor as he drifted off to sleep.

  Melchor spent the next morning in the settlement. He sat smoking on a stool in the street, beside women who were weaving baskets with reeds they’d collected on the riverbanks, absorbed in those expert hands braiding baskets they’d later try to sell in the streets and markets. He heard their conversations without joining in; they all knew who Melchor was. Every once in a while, one would disappear and return shortly with a bit of wine for him. He ate at his brother Tomás’s house, chicken stew that was a bit past its prime, and he leaned the chair back again for a nap. When he awoke, he got ready to return to the San Miguel alley.

  “Thanks for lunch, Brother.”

  “No thanks necessary,” answered Tomás. “Don’t forget this,” he added, handing him the pig intestine filled with powdered tobacco they’d talked about the night before. “Uncle Basilio trusts you’ll make a good profit.”

  Melchor grabbed it with a disgusted expression, put it in one of the inner pockets of his short jacket and left the hut. Then he started down the street that bordered the wall surrounding the lands belonging to the Carthusian monastery. He would have liked to continue living there, among his own, but his beloved daughter and granddaughter lived with the Carmonas, in the alley, and he couldn’t distance himself from the blood of his blood.

  “Nephew!” A woman’s shout interrupted his thoughts. Melchor turned toward Old María, in the door of her shack. “You’re forgetting your Negress,” she added.

  “She’s not mine,” he answered wearily; he had already told her that several times.

  “She’s not mine either,” complained the woman. “She’s taking up my mattress, and her legs stick out the bottom. What do you want me to do with her? Take her with you! You brought her, you take her.”

  Take her with me? thought Melchor. What was he going to do with a Negress?

  “No—” he started to say.

  “What do you mean no?” Old María interrupted him, her hands on her hips. “I said she’s going with you and she’s going with you, understood?”

  Several gypsies whirled around them when they heard the ruckus. Melchor looked at the little old woman, gaunt and wrinkled, planted in the door of the hut in her colorful apron, challenging him. He … he was respected by everyone in the settlement, but this was Old María before him now. And when a gypsy woman like Old María puts her hands on her hips and skewers you with her gaze …

  “What do you want me to do with her?”

  “Whatever you like,” answered the old woman, knowing she had won.

  Several women smiled; a man sighed loudly, another made a face as he tilted his head to one side and a couple of others grumbled under their breath.

  “She couldn’t move …” argued Melchor, pointing to the mud of the street. “She fell here …”

  “She can now. She’s a strong woman.”

  Old María told him that the black woman was named Caridad and she handed Melchor a wineskin with the rest of the barley and egg mixture that she was to take until the fevers went away completely.

  “Bring it back next time you come round,” she warned. “And take care of her!” exhorted the old woman as they set off.

  Melchor turned toward her in surprise and questioned her with his eyes. What did she care? Why …?

  “Her tears are as sad as ours,” said María, anticipating his question.

  And that was how, with Caridad noticeably better behind him and the wineskin hanging from his staff, which was slung over his shoulder like a pole, Melchor arrived at the San Miguel alley, which was flooded with smoke and the ringing of hammers on anvils.

  “Who’s that woman?” his son-in-law José asked harshly when he saw her enter the courtyard. He still had a hammer in his ha
nd and wore a leather apron over his bare, sweaty chest.

  Melchor stood up tall with the wineskin still hanging over his back off his staff, Caridad motionless behind him, unable to understand the gypsy tongue. Since when did he owe any explanations to surly José Carmona? The challenge lasted a few seconds.

  “She sings well,” was all he finally said.

  The Carmona family’s blacksmith shop was located on the lower level of a cluster of apartments in the San Miguel alley. It was a three-story rectangular building built around a tiny courtyard with a well in the center. The workshop and the families who lived on the upper floors all made use of its water. However, getting to the well often proved a difficult task, since both the courtyard and the corridors that surrounded it were used to store the coal for the forge and the iron scraps the gypsies gathered to work with: a ton of twisted and rusty pieces piled up because, unlike the Sevillian payos who had to buy their raw material in Vizcaya, the gypsies weren’t subject to any ordinances or the inspectors who controlled product quality. Behind the courtyard with the well, through a narrow corridor covered by the roof of the first floor, was a small courtyard with a latrine and, beside that, a small room originally used as a laundry; that was the room Melchor Vega had taken as his own when he returned from the galleys.

  “You can stay there.” The gypsy pointed Caridad to the floor of the little courtyard, between the latrine and the entrance to his room. “You have to keep drinking this remedy until you are cured. Then you can go,” he added, handing her the wineskin. “The last thing I need is for Old María to think I didn’t take care of you!”

  Melchor went into his room and closed the door behind him. Caridad sat on the ground, with her back resting against the wall, and organized her scant belongings carefully: the bundle to her right, the wineskin to her left, the straw hat in her hands.

  She was no longer trembling and her fever had subsided. She vaguely remembered the first moments of her stay in the hut in the gypsy settlement: first they gave her water, but they didn’t allow her to sate her burning thirst. They put cold compresses on her forehead until Old María knelt beside the mattress and forced her to drink the thick concoction of boiled barley. Behind her, two women prayed aloud, speaking over each other, entrusting themselves to countless virgins and saints as they drew crosses in the air.