The Barefoot Queen

  “A lot of people are suffering these days.”

  “Yes, but she’s different. She’s … she’s older than me and yet she seems like a child who doesn’t know or understand anything. When she speaks … when she cries or sings, she does it with such feeling … You yourself say she sings well. She was a slave, you know?”

  Melchor nodded. “I guessed.”

  “Everybody has treated her so badly, Grandfather. They separated her from her mother and her children. They even sold one of them! Then—”

  “And what will she live off?” interrupted Melchor.

  Milagros remained silent. They walked a few steps, the gypsy squeezing his granddaughter’s shoulder.

  “She’ll have to learn how to do something,” he conceded after a little while.

  “I’ll teach her!” The girl was bursting with joy, turning toward her grandfather to hug him. “Give me time.”

  Five months passed before Caridad returned to the church of Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles and saw the elder of the Negritos brotherhood again. It was on the eve of the patron saint’s day, August 1, 1748. At dusk on that day, among a large group of boisterous gypsy women, including Milagros and her mother, jubilant kids and even some men with guitars, Caridad crossed the pontoon bridge to head toward the San Roque district.

  She still had her old straw hat with which she tried to protect herself from the blazing Andalusian sun, despite its many holes and rips. But she hadn’t worn her faded gray burlap dress in some time. Grandfather had given her a red shirt and an even redder wide skirt, the color of fiery blood, both of percale, which she took very good care of and wore proudly. The gypsy women didn’t know how to sew; they bought their lovely clothes, although none of them ruled out the possibility that these ones had been left behind by one of Grandfather’s lovers.

  Ana and Milagros couldn’t hide their admiration over the changes Caridad had made. Standing before them all, timid and embarrassed but with her little brown eyes shining in the red reflection of her new clothes, the smile on that round face and those fleshy lips was pure gratitude. Still, it wasn’t Caridad’s smile that evoked the gypsy women’s admiration; it was the sensuality that emanated from her; her shapely curves; her large breasts that pulled the shirt tight exposing a thin line of ebony flesh above the skirt …

  “Father!” recriminated Ana when she realized that Melchor was spellbound by that line of flesh.

  He turned. “What …?”

  “Wonderful!” was Milagros’s contribution to the discussion, applauding enthusiastically.

  “All of Seville will be gathered today on the Los Ángeles esplanade,” Milagros had explained to Caridad. “There will be many opportunities to sell tobacco and tell fortunes; people have a lot of fun at that festival, and when they are entertained … we make good money.”

  “Why?” asked Caridad.

  “Oh, Cachita,” answered the girl, using the nickname Caridad had told her they’d called her in Cuba, “today they’ll run the geese!” Caridad looked at her with a puzzled expression, but her only response was, “You’ll see.”

  As she headed toward the church, towering over the gypsy women surrounding her, because of her height, which was accentuated by the old hat she refused to get rid of, Caridad watched Milagros at the forefront with the young women. “This goose tourney must be a really good party,” she then thought, since the girl was laughing and joking with her friends. Milagros had been overwhelmed by sadness for the last month, ever since José Carmona had announced her engagement to Alejandro Vargas for a wedding in a year’s time. Melchor, who wanted his granddaughter to marry someone from the Vega family, had disappeared for more than ten days, returning in such a deplorable state that Ana was very worried and sent word to Old María to come and tend to him. Even so, not even Ana herself supported Melchor in that matter: it should be the girl’s father who made the decision.

  As they surrounded the city’s walls and entered the various gates, floods of boisterous Sevillians joined the group of gypsies. When they were getting close to the field between the Tagarete stream and the Negritos’ church, their pace slowed, chatting and laughing in groups as they waited for the party to begin. Here and there, men and women were singing and dancing in circles surrounded by spectators. One of the gypsies, still walking, began strumming his guitar. Several women took some joyful dance steps amid whistles and the applause of those around them, and the gypsies continued playing as they walked. Caridad looked from one side to the other: water sellers and wine merchants; vendors selling ice cream, doughnuts, fritters and all types of sweets; sellers of the strangest merchandise, some shouting out to advertise their products, others more surreptitious, keeping a close eye on the officers and soldiers who passed; tightrope walkers; acrobats; dog tamers entertaining the crowds; friars and priests, hundreds of them …

  “Seville is the kingdom with the most clergy,” Caridad had heard said on more than one occasion, and some of them took part in the festivities by drinking, dancing and singing without the least decorum; while others preached sermons to people who paid them no mind. Almost all of them went about sniffing their tobacco powder as if it were the road to eternal salvation. Caridad also observed some fops wandering through the crowd: mannered young men who dressed in the French court style, delicately covering their mouth and nostrils with embroidered handkerchiefs as they sniffed tobacco.

  A couple of those dandies noticed Caridad’s interest in them, but they only commented on it among themselves as if it were nothing more than a mild irritation. Caridad looked away quickly, embarrassed. When she looked again she realized that the gypsies had scattered among the crowd. She looked from one side to the other, searching for them.

  “Here I am,” she heard Milagros saying from behind her. Caridad turned toward her. “Enjoy your festival day, Cachita.”

  “What—?”

  “The men from the brotherhood,” the girl interrupted her, “the ones who treated you with such arrogance. You’ll have the last laugh today.”

  “But …”

  “Come, follow me,” she indicated, trying to make her way through the most tightly packed part of the crowd that had settled in front of the church. “Sirs!” shouted Milagros. “Excellencies! Here is a Negress who’s come for the festivities.”

  People turned their heads and made way for the two women. When they reached the front rows, Caridad was surprised at the number of Negroes gathered there.

  “I have to go,” said Milagros in farewell. “Listen, Cachita,” she added, lowering her voice. “You aren’t like them. You are with me, with Grandfather, with the gypsies.”

  Before she had a chance to respond, the girl disappeared into the crowd and Caridad found herself alone at the front row of a throng that was piled against the back façade of the parish church of San Roque. Between her and the platforms they had set up behind the church there was a wide stretch of open ground. What were these festivities? Why had Milagros whispered that she wasn’t like the others? The people began to grow impatient and there were some shouts to hurry it along. Caridad directed her attention toward the platforms: noblemen and the illustrious of Seville, lavishly dressed, members of the cathedral council, adorned in their finery, stood chatting and laughing, unaware of the common people’s discontent.

  A good while passed and the complaints of the Sevillians intensified until a drum roll was heard behind the parish church of San Roque, where the Negritos’ church was located. Those who had been distracted with dancing and fun piled up behind those who were already waiting, as the soldiers and officers struggled to keep the multitudes from breaking through the unstable wood fences.

  When a pair of riders, to the sound of fifes and drums and applause from the crowd, came around the corner of San Roque, Caridad felt people pushing to try to get to the front row. Five more pairs of riders followed the first, each one composed of a black rider on the right, the preferential spot, uncomfortably dressed in luxurious clothes, with white sleeves a
nd magnificent feather plumes in their hats. The horses the Negroes rode were also tacked up with pageantry: a fine saddle, bells and colored ribbons in their manes and tails. On the other hand, the riders accompanying the Negroes paraded in common apparel: floppy Vandyke collars and ordinary hats. Their horses trotted along without the slightest decoration.

  After greeting the authorities, the pairs of riders began to gallop in a circle around the open field. Caridad recognized the elder of the brotherhood in the third couple; he was struggling to stay in the saddle, like the others of his race. The people laughed and pointed at them. Men and women shouted taunts at them while the Negroes swayed dangerously while trying to maintain their dignity and composure.

  The music continued to play. At one point, the rider accompanying the elder brother, a man with a carefully trimmed white beard who rode with bearing and skill, gave the Negro a hand to keep him from falling.

  “Let him fall!” shouted a woman.

  “Darkie, you are going to leave your teeth on the ground!” added another man.

  “And your black arse!” howled a third spectator, setting off laughter throughout the crowd.

  What does this buffoonery mean? wondered Caridad.

  “They are knights from the Equestrian Society.” The answer came from behind her back.

  Caridad turned and found a smiling Fray Joaquín. He had come over to her when he recognized her red outfit in the crowd. She hid her gaze.

  “Caridad,” scolded the young friar. “I’ve told you on many occasions that we are all children of God, you don’t have to lower your eyes, you don’t have to humble yourself before anyone …”

  In that moment Caridad lifted her head and gestured toward the Negroes who continued galloping amid the taunts and gibes of the spectators. Fray Joaquín understood.

  “Perhaps they,” he answered, raising his eyebrows, “claim to be something they aren’t. The Royal Order of Knights of the Equestrian Society of Seville sponsors the Brotherhood of the Negritos; they do it every year. On days like this, Negroes and noblemen, the highest and the humblest classes in the city, exchange positions. But the brotherhood makes some money with the geese that the order gives them.”

  “What geese?” asked Caridad.

  “Those ones.” The friar pointed.

  The six pairs of riders had stopped their display and gathered in front of the authorities. A bit further on, at one end of the open field, where Fray Joaquín had pointed, some men struggled to hang a rope between two large stakes placed on the edges of the field. In the middle of the rope, head down and tied by its feet, a fat goose shook violently. When the men finished hanging the goose, Seville’s chief justice officer, nestled in an armchair on the platform, ordered the first Negro to gallop toward the animal.

  Caridad and Fray Joaquín, amid the deafening shouts of the crowd, watched the clumsy galloping of the Negro who, as he passed beneath the goose, tried to grab the animal’s wriggling neck with his right hand, and failed. He was followed by the equestrian knight who was paired with him. The nobleman spurred on his horse, which took off at a full gallop with its rider howling and standing in the stirrups. When he passed beneath the goose, the knight succeeded in grabbing it by the neck and ripped its head clean off. The Sevillians applauded enthusiastically and cheered while the goose’s body shook on the rope. Few noticed, but the chief justice and some of the other noblemen seated on the platform made a chastening gesture to the rest of the knights: they only had six geese and they had to entertain the people.

  With those instructions, the goose tourney lasted into the evening to the crowd’s delight. None of the Negroes managed to decapitate the animal. One of them was able to grab it by the neck, but not with enough speed, and the goose defended himself by pecking him on the head, which gave rise to the most ignominious taunts from the audience. The six Negroes all fell at some point, as they galloped on the backs of increasingly agitated horses, or when releasing one of their hands and leaning over in the stirrups to grab the goose. As for the geese, they perished each time the chief justice made a signal to the equestrian knights.

  “Later the Negritos will sell them and the brotherhood will keep the money,” Fray Joaquín explained to her.

  Caridad was absorbed in the spectacle, yet full of contradictory feelings as she watched those clumsy Negroes trying to decapitate geese amid the spectators’ shouts. She had found no camaraderie of race in the eyes of the brotherhood’s elder, none of the solidarity, compassion and understanding that all Negroes in Cuba shared with their blood brothers.

  With the final parade, after the last of the geese died, the people began to scatter and the nobles and religious men who presided over the festivities got up from their seats. You aren’t like them, Milagros had told her. You are with the gypsies, she’d added with that pride that always showed on their lips when they spoke of their race. She was with the gypsies? She was with Milagros. The friendship and trust that the girl showed her had been sealed when she had told her she could stay with Melchor and strengthened when Milagros’s father announced her engagement to Alejandro. From that point on, Milagros tried to share the pain she was feeling with Caridad, as if she, who had been a slave, could understand it better than anyone. But what did Caridad know of thwarted love? José Carmona, Milagros’s father, looked at her from a distance, as if she were a bothersome object, and Ana, her mother, put up with her as if she were some fleeting whim of her daughter’s. As for Melchor … who could tell what he was thinking or feeling? He could just as easily give her a red skirt and shirt as pass by her without even glancing, or not speak to her for days. Initially, at the urging of his granddaughter, Melchor allowed Caridad to remain in the corner of the small courtyard, and over time she became the only person who had free access to the grandfather’s sanctuary.

  One afternoon in May, when spring had flowered all over Triana, the gypsy had found himself near the well, in the entrance courtyard, hidden among old twisted pieces of iron, smoking a cigar and passing the time, lost in those inscrutable worlds where he took refuge. Caridad passed by him on her way out of the main doorway. The scent of tobacco stopped her in her tracks. How long had it been since her last smoke? She inhaled the smoke surrounding the gypsy deeply in a vain attempt to make it reach her lungs and brain. How she yearned to feel the soothing sensation she got from tobacco! She closed her eyes, lifted her head slightly as if trying to follow the smoke’s rising path, and inhaled once more. Just then Melchor awoke from his lethargy.

  “Here you go.” He surprised her by offering his cigar.

  Caridad didn’t hesitate; she grabbed the cigar, brought it to her lips and sucked on it with delight. After a few seconds she felt a slight tickle in her arms and legs and a relaxing dizziness; her little brown eyes sparkled. She went to return the cigar to the gypsy, but he gestured for her to continue smoking with a flick of his hand.

  “From your land,” he commented as he watched her smoke. “Good tobacco!”

  Caridad was flying by that point; her mind was totally relaxed, lost.

  “It’s not a Havana,” he heard her say to herself.

  Melchor furrowed his brow. What did she mean it wasn’t Cuban? He had paid for a pure Havana! That was the first day Caridad entered the gypsy’s room.

  PEOPLE REFUSED to abandon the San Roque district and the field where the festivities were held. Here and there guitars were heard, along with castanets, tambourines and songs; men and women, no matter their gender or age, danced joyfully in groups around the bonfires.

  “Where is Milagros?” the friar asked Caridad as they both wandered through the crowd.

  “I don’t know.”

  “She didn’t tell you where …”

  Fray Joaquín stopped himself. Caridad was no longer beside him. He turned and saw her a few paces behind, stock-still in front of a sweets stand. He approached her, full of confusion: this black woman, dressed in red with her shirt hugging her body, was the object of lustful glances and comments f
rom those around her, and yet to the friar’s eyes she was like a large girl whose mouth watered at the scent and sight of the sweets: doughnuts, sugar-dusted fritters, sweet biscuits, cinnamon custards …

  “Give me some polvorones,” ordered the friar, pointing to the crumbly shortbread biscuits after glancing at the selection. “You’ll see, Caridad, they’re delicious.”

  Fray Joaquín paid and they continued strolling, in silence. The friar watched, out of the corner of his eye, as Caridad savored the oval biscuits of almond, lard, sugar and cinnamon, afraid to interrupt her obvious pleasure. Had she ever tried them before? he wondered. Probably not, he concluded as he watched her reaction. It made him recall when Melchor had appeared at the monastery with Caridad in tow, that time with the brother doorman’s permission, who had let them through out of sheer fright at the rage oozing from the gypsy’s eyes. “You cheated us!” he shouted as soon as he saw Fray Joaquín. “This tobacco isn’t pure Cuban!” The friar tried to calm the gypsy and took Caridad to the basement that they used as a larder and storehouse. Behind some logs, he hid a couple of leather bags of tobacco leaf—one of them belonging to Melchor as payment for his work—from the incursion they had just made to the place in Barrancos, over the Portuguese border.

  Melchor violently cut the ropes that tied one of the bales and, still swearing, indicated to Caridad that she should go over and examine the tobacco. Fray Joaquín remembered that moment: instinctively, Caridad let her eyelids drop and licked her lips, as if she were about to savor a delectable feast. Inside the leather bag, the tobacco was tied up in bunches, but at first glance Caridad saw that the leaves weren’t bound with yaguas, the flexible royal palm leaves used in Cuba. She had the gypsy cut the cord around the bundle and delicately picked up one of the leaves; both men were surprised by her long, skilled fingers. Caridad examined the tobacco leaf carefully; she held it up to the light of the candle carried by Fray Joaquín to observe its pigments: dark, light or red, matured, light or dry. She stroked it and delicately felt for its texture and moisture; she chewed on the leaf and smelled it, trying to figure out, through its flavor, aroma and the taste of the nicotine, how many years earlier it had been harvested. Melchor hurried Caridad with increasingly agitated gestures, but the friar was spellbound watching the ritual the woman carried out, and the sensations reflected in her face and the pauses she took after smelling and touching the leaf, sure that the passing moments would offer her the solution.