The Barefoot Queen

  The friar stationed himself there. He only wanted to see her and help her if necessary. He banished from his mind his worry about what he would do when that happened … if it happened. He didn’t want to get his hopes up, as he had that day he ran after her in Triana. The problem he came up against was that there were three buildings marked with the number four in Amor de Dios Street.

  “There’s no way of knowing,” answered a parishioner he asked. “Look, Father, the thing is when they numbered the buildings they did it going around the blocks, so a lot of numbers are repeated. It happens all over Madrid. If they had done it linearly, by street, like in other cities, we wouldn’t have that problem.”

  “Do you know … do you know which one the Barefoot Girl lives in?”

  “You aren’t saying that a religious man like you …?” the man reproached.

  “Don’t jump to conclusions,” Fray Joaquín defended himself. “I beg of you.”

  “That was where the sedan chairs stopped to take her to the theater,” grumbled the man, pointing to a building.

  Fray Joaquín didn’t dare go up to the house, or ask a couple of the neighbors who entered or left the building. Really, what am I after? he asked himself. He was still pacing up and down the street when night fell. It was a mild night yet he closed the neck of his habit and took refuge in the facing doorway. Perhaps he could see her the next day … He was thinking that when he saw two men head toward the building. One was a constable, with his truncheon tapping on the ground; the other, Pedro García. He had no trouble recognizing him. More than once he had been pointed out by a pious parishioner in Triana because of those love affairs that his grandfather, El Conde, then had to rush to fix. Milagros’s husband, he lamented. He could do little with him there. How had he allowed his wife to prostitute herself? Was that what he would say to him if he stepped out into his path? Both men entered the building and the friar priest remained waiting, not really knowing why. Some time later, an old woman emerged, loaded down with a straw mattress and two bundles. She was also a gypsy, he could see her face in the light of the moon and her dark skin gave her away. It seemed they were getting ready to leave, moving out of the house. Fray Joaquín was nervous. His hands were sweating. What was going on up there? Soon he saw the constable leave the building.

  “Get away from that beast or he’ll kill you too!” he heard him warn the old gypsy woman.

  He’ll kill you too?

  Suddenly, Fray Joaquín found himself in the middle of the street.

  “He will kill her?” he stammered before the constable.

  “What are you doing here, Father? At this time of night …”

  But the friar had already started running up the stairs. He will kill her echoed frenetically in his ears.

  “Halt!” he ordered, gasping for breath. He had just stuck his head through the only open door and found Pedro about to slit a woman’s throat.

  The gypsy turned his head and was surprised to recognize Fray Joaquín.

  “You’re very far from Triana, Father,” he spat, releasing Milagros and facing him, knife in hand.

  The sight of Milagros’s naked body distracted Fray Joaquín for a moment.

  The gypsy drew closer to him.

  “You like my wife?” he asked cynically. “Enjoy her because she’ll be the last thing you see before you die.”

  Fray Joaquín reacted but he didn’t know what to do against that man: strong, armed, oozing hatred from every pore. In a split second his testicles shrank and a cold sweat soaked his back.

  “Help!” he then managed to scream as he backed up toward the landing.

  “Shut up!”

  “Help me!”

  The gypsy launched a first stab. Fray Joaquín stumbled as he dodged it. Pedro attacked again, but Fray Joaquín managed to grip his wrist. He wouldn’t be able to hold it for very long, he realized.

  “Help!” He used the other hand to aid the first. “Help me! The patrol! Call the patrol!”

  Pedro García was kicking him and beating him with his free hand, but Fray Joaquín was only focused on the one that held the knife near, already brushing his face. He continued screaming, ignoring the beating he was getting.

  “What’s going on?” was heard from the stairs.

  “Call the patrol!” exclaimed a woman.

  Fray Joaquín’s screams in the night were joined by the neighbors in the building and even the buildings opposite, men and women sticking their heads out over their balconies.

  Footsteps and more shouting were heard on the stairs.

  “There!”

  “Here!” Sensing that help was on the way gave Fray Joaquín the strength to continue screaming.

  Someone reached the landing.

  Pedro García knew that he had lost. He let go of the knife just as the friar released the grip he couldn’t hold any longer, at which point the gypsy pushed him and ran down the stairs, knocking down the people on their way up.

  All that she needed to heat the small single-story house on the outskirts of Torrejón de Ardoz was a couple of logs. It was just a dining room beside a hearth and a bedroom. In the silence of the night, the smell of burning wood mixed with the scent of the tobacco Caridad exhaled in long spirals. Alone, seated at the table, she put the cigar down on a little clay plate to wind the tobacco plantation toy again. The repetitive, tinny music she knew so well filled the room as soon as Caridad let go of the little key she had turned as far as it could go. She picked up the cigar, pulled hard on it and released a slow mouthful of smoke over the little figures that spun around the ceiba, the sacred tree, and the tobacco plants. On the other side of the world, beyond the ocean, many Negroes would be cutting and loading tobacco at that very moment. The Jesuits at the Casa Grande in Torrejón had assured her that the hours were reversed, that when it was night here, it was day there, but no matter how many times they tried to explain the reason to her, she still didn’t understand it. Her thoughts flew to the slaves she had shared her suffering with: to María … María was the third of that row of tin figures that spun and spun; she thought she could see a resemblance, although she barely remembered her friend’s features by this point. She ended up identifying little Marcelo with the boy who turned ceaselessly, loaded down with a leather bag. When Marcelo passed by the overseer who lifted and lowered his arm with the whip, Caridad closed her eyes. What has become of my boy? she sobbed.

  “All the Negroes love him; he’s always laughing,” she had commented to Father Luis, one of the Jesuits of the Casa Grande, one day when she brought over a shipment of fine tobacco.

  “Caridad, if he’s anything like you at all, I have no doubt,” he declared.

  Father Luis promised her that he would bring her news of Marcelo, “as long as you keep bringing me tobacco,” he added with a wink.

  The Company of Jesus, like other religious orders, owned those sugar mills worked by Negroes. She felt irritated listening to the Jesuit proudly list some of their names: San Ignacio de Río Blanco, San Juan Bautista de Poveda, Nuestra Señora de Aránzazu and Barrutia … Why would someone who believed that slavery was good take an interest in the fate of a little black boy?

  “Is something wrong, Cachita?” asked Father Luis, noticing the sudden change of expression on Caridad’s face.

  “I was thinking of my boy,” she lied.

  But she did remember him, along with many others like Melchor and Milagros, while she watched the wind-up toy in that little house that, through Father Valerio, she rented from the Jesuits. The silence and loneliness of the long Castilian nights made her sad. So, despite its high price, she’d decided to buy the toy she had seen in the little cave in the Puerta del Sol that made her feel closer to her loved ones, to the Negroes and those who were no longer with her. After all, what did she want money for?

  Caridad had been living in Torrejón de Ardoz for less than a year when Herminia ran off with her cousin Antón. She did it one night, without even saying goodbye to her. Instinctively, Carida
d shut off the hurt. Another person disappearing from her life! She poured herself into her work with the tobacco, and when she went home she was always tense, always on watch for what might happen, because of Rosario’s shouting and anger over her husband’s betrayal. For a few days, Herminia’s aunt and uncle didn’t know what to do with Caridad, who at that point still lived in the shed attached to the house. It was the public prosecutor of the War Council, Cristóbal’s father, who decided for them. After he found out from the town authorities what had happened to Rosario, the man showed up unannounced, with a doctor, a secretary and a couple of servants. Without paying much attention to little Cristóbal, wrapped like a cocoon in his white linens, he demanded that everyone who lived there present themselves and, right then and there, shooting insolent glances at Caridad all the while, the doctor subjected the wet nurse to an exhaustive examination. He inspected her body, her hips, her legs and her large breasts, which he weighed approvingly in his hands. Then he focused on her nipples.

  “What do you use on them?” he inquired.

  “Virgin wax, sweet almond oil and whale blubber,” Rosario answered solemnly, as she handed him a bottle of salve, which the doctor smelled and touched. “Then I wash them with soap,” explained the wet nurse.

  The most important, however, was the milk. The doctor, as if it were a complex operation, extracted a glass bottle with a long neck from his satchel and heated its base on the fire. He grabbed the bottle with a rag, introduced a nipple into the mouth of the neck and pressed up against the breast so no air would enter. As the bottle cooled, Rosario’s milk poured into it.

  With the prosecutor by his side, the doctor held it up to the light, stirred it, sniffed it and tasted it.

  “It doesn’t smell,” he commented while the other man nodded, “it is creamy and sweet; bluish white and not too thick.

  “Come closer. Over here,” he then ordered Rosario’s oldest son, who didn’t come forward until he was pushed by his grandfather. The doctor pulled the boy’s head back, opened one of his eyes and spilled a few drops of milk into it. “It isn’t an irritant, either,” he declared after a few minutes.

  Based on the doctor’s recommendation, the prosecutor allowed Rosario to continue nursing Cristóbal.

  “His excellency will not consent to his son living with a Negress,” his secretary added rudely when the others were already on their way to the door.

  Don Valerio quickly came to her aid and offered her the little house: he wasn’t going to allow Caridad to have any problems. Her dedication and seemingly tireless hard work had achieved excellent results. The parish priest trusted her, letting her do things her way, and Caridad modified the entire system that Marcial and Fermín had been using up until her arrival. She chose the seeds and planted the seedlings. Throughout the month they took to grow she prepared and plowed the earth thoroughly in order to transplant the seedlings she thought were the best. Day after day she watched over the tobacco’s growth; she used a short hoe to weed the plot; she topped the plants and removed suckers so the leaves would grow more and better, and they even saw her hauling buckets of water when she felt the crop needed it. She harvested leaf by leaf, as they did in Cuba; she handled them, smelled them and sang constantly. She urged old Fermín to get her good cujes and, with the sacristan, she sealed the slits in the attic beams so the smell of the incense wouldn’t seep in from the church. She patiently took care of the drying, curing and fermentation, and when it was still young, unlike the tobacco they worked with in Cuba, she made cigars right there in the attic. While they didn’t completely satisfy her, their quality and look were far better than the ones Herminia had given her after freeing her from La Galera.

  Don Valerio praised her work and proved himself generous. Suddenly Caridad found herself with money and living in a house where no one bossed her around. You are free, Negress, she often said aloud to herself. What’s the point? was her immediate retort. Where were her people? And Melchor? What had become of the man who had shown her that she could be a woman and not just a slave? She often cried at night.

  The inhabitants of Torrejón de Ardoz—there were more than a thousand of them—had two hospitals with a couple of beds each as a refuge for pilgrims, the sick and the strays; likewise they had a church, a butcher’s shop and a fishmonger’s that also sold oil, as well as a haberdashery, tavern and three inns. There were no more businesses; they didn’t even have a bakery. Those, like Caridad, who didn’t knead their own at home, bought it from the vendors who brought bread from the nearby towns each day. In that closed environment, Caridad was forced to expand her horizons a bit. The protection of Don Valerio and the kindness of the Jesuits guaranteed her freedom of movement, but most of the town’s women were suspicious of her, and those who weren’t found her to be a woman of few words who didn’t seek out anyone’s company and who, for all that she had changed, still instinctively kept her gaze on the ground when a strange white man addressed her. As for the men … she was aware of the lasciviousness with which many of those rough farmers watched her walk. A new world opened up for her and it was old Fermín who accompanied her in her progress: he taught her how to shop and use those coins whose value she was unfamiliar with.

  “Herminia told me that it cost a lot of money,” said Caridad when she found out that the sacristan was going to Madrid and, to the man’s consternation, gave him all she had and asked him to buy her the wind-up toy.

  Fermín also taught her how to cook stew, and Caridad, happily singing to herself, would indiscriminately toss in all the ingredients she had and that, along with the bread and some fruit, became her regular diet. Still, what pleased her the most were the candied almonds made by the cloistered nuns of San Diego in Alcalá de Henares, which could only be bought through the convent turntable. Don Valerio, and even Don Luis or any of the other Jesuits, would give her those delicious sweets after they’d gone to the neighboring town for whatever reason, and on those occasions, when her work was done, she would sit at night in the doorway of her house with the vast wheat fields, the moon and the silence as her only company, and savor them. Those were moments of calm in which her loneliness ceased to torment her and Melchor, Milagros, Old María, Herminia and her little Marcelo vanished as she tasted the syrup on her tongue and constantly debated whether she should save some of the candied almonds for the next day. She never did.

  On one of the nights when Caridad was distracted by her treat—just like a little girl—a man’s voice made her jump.

  “What are you eating, Negress?”

  Caridad hid the packet of candied almonds behind her back. Despite the silence that reigned, she hadn’t heard them coming: two men, dirty, dressed in rags. Beggars, she said to herself.

  “What did you just hide?” one of them asked.

  Fermín had warned her. So had Don Valerio and Don Luis. “A woman like you, alone … Bolt your door.” The beggars approached. Caridad stood up. She was taller than them. And she must be stronger, she thought as she looked at those haggard bodies devastated by hunger and misery, but there were two of them, and if they were armed, there was little she could do.

  “What do you want?” The forceful tone of her voice surprised her.

  It surprised the men as well. They stopped. They didn’t pull out any weapon—maybe they had none—although Caridad saw that they carried rough walking sticks. It pained her to drop the packet of candied almonds but she did; then she grabbed the chair and held it between her and the men, slightly raised, threatening. The beggars looked at each other.

  “We only wanted something to eat.”

  Their shift in attitude emboldened Caridad. Hunger was a sensation she knew well.

  “Throw those sticks aside. Far,” she demanded when the others were about to obey her. “Now you can come closer,” she added, still holding fast to the chair.

  “We don’t mean to do you any harm, Negress, we just …”

  Caridad looked at them and felt strong. She was well fed and had been work
ing hard in the fields, plowing and planting many, many furrows. She let go of the chair and knelt to pick up the almonds.

  “I know you won’t harm me,” she then asserted, turning her back to them. “Not because you don’t wish to, that I can’t know, but because you can’t,” she added, to erase the smile she found when she turned to face them again.

  Servando and Lucio were the names of those beggars Caridad fed with the leftovers of her stew.

  The following night she bolted the door; they banged on it and begged, and finally she let them in. The day after they didn’t even wait for her to finish her work in the attic of the sacristy: they were loitering around her house when she arrived.

  “Out!” she shouted at them from a distance.

  “Caridad …”

  “For God’s sake …”

  “Get gone!”

  “One last time …”

  By that time she had reached them. She was about to threaten to call for the constable, which was what Fermín had suggested she do when he found out who they were, but she noticed a small ember in Servando’s hand.

  “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to it.

  “This?” the man asked in turn, showing her a cigarette.

  Caridad asked him for it. Servando handed her a small tube of ground tobacco rolled in thick, rough paper, which Caridad examined with curiosity. She was familiar with tusas, thin cigars like that, but rolled with cornhusks. Nobody wanted to smoke them.

  “It’s cheap,” Lucio put in. “That’s what people buy when they can’t afford cigars like the ones you smoke.”

  “Where do they sell them?” she asked.

  “Nowhere. It’s illegal. Everyone makes their own.”

  Caridad took a drag on the cigarette. It was hot. She coughed. Disgusting. In any case … she thought, she had plenty of tobacco scraps that, when she had time, she ground up and rolled into cigarettes that not even Don Valerio would accept anymore. That night, Servando and Lucio came back to eat stew. That night and many more. They brought her paper, anything they could find, and Caridad cut it up into small rectangles and filled it with the cut tobacco. She gave them the first cigarettes on credit. They paid her when they came back for more. Soon, Caridad had to start choosing the worst tobacco leaves, which she had used to make cigars before, to grind up and wrap in little paper rectangles. She continued to make the cigars for Don Valerio and the Jesuits, choosing the highest quality leaves; she also kept her own smoke aside, of course, but the rest went into the cigarettes.