The Barefoot Queen (3 page)

From the Bay of Cádiz they coasted to Sanlúcar de Barrameda, to the mouth of the Guadalquivir. They waited off the coast of Chipiona, along with other tartans and the local
charangueros
that plied between ports, for the high tide and favorable winds they needed to cross the dangerous Sanlúcar sandbar, those fearsome shoals that had turned the area into a boat graveyard. The captains would only brave crossing that treacherous bar when every one of several specific conditions came together. Then they would sail upriver, taking advantage of the tide’s momentum, which could be felt up to the outskirts of Seville.

“Ships have sometimes had to wait up to a hundred days to cross the bar,” said a sailor to one elegantly dressed passenger, who immediately shifted his worried gaze toward Sanlúcar and its spectacular marshlands, obviously desperate not to suffer the same fate.

Caridad, seated among some bags against the gunwale, let herself sway with the tartan’s rocking. The sea, though calm, seemed somehow tense, just as the ship’s passengers did, and that same atmosphere prevailed in the other delayed boats. It wasn’t only the wait; it was also the fear of an attack from the British or from pirates. The sun began to set, tinting the water an ominous metallic tone, and the uneasy conversations of the crew and passengers dropped to whispers. The winter revealed its harshness as the sun hid and the dampness seeped into Caridad’s bones, making her feel even colder. She was hungry and tired. She wore her jacket, as gray and faded as her dress and both of rough cloth, in sharp contrast to the other passengers who wore what seemed to her lavish clothes, in bright colors. She realized her teeth were chattering and she had gooseflesh, so she searched in her bundle for the blanket. Her fingers brushed a cigar and she touched it delicately, recalling its aroma, its effects. She needed it, anxious to dull her senses, forget her tiredness, her hunger … and even her freedom.

She wrapped herself up in the blanket. Free? Don Damián had put her on that boat, the first he’d found about to depart the Cádiz port.

“Go to Seville,” he said after negotiating a price with the captain and paying him out of his own pocket. “To Triana. Once you’re there, look for the Minims’ convent and tell them I sent you.”

Caridad wished she’d had the courage to ask him what Triana was or how she would find that convent, but he practically pushed her aboard.
He was nervous, looking from side to side, as if afraid someone would see them together.

She smelled the cigar and its fragrance transported her to Cuba. All she knew was where her shack was, and the plantation, and the sugar mill she went to every Sunday with the other slaves to hear mass and then sing and dance until they wore themselves out. From the shack to the plantation and from the plantation to the shack, day in day out, month in month out, year in year out. How was she going to find the convent? She curled up against the gunwale and pressed her back up to the wood, searching for contact with a reality that had vanished. Who were those strangers? And Marcelo? What had happened to him? And what about her friend María, the mulatta she sang choruses with? And the others? What was she doing in a strange boat at night, in a far-off land, on her way to a city she wasn’t even sure existed? Triana? She had never dared to ask the whites anything. She always knew what she had to do! She didn’t need to ask.

Her eyes grew damp as she remembered Marcelo. She felt around in her bundle for the flint, steel and tinder to start a flame. Would they let her smoke? On the tobacco farm she could; it was common there. She had cried over Marcelo during the voyage. She had even.… She had even been tempted to throw herself into the sea, to put an end to her constant suffering. “Get away from there, darkie! Do you want to fall into the water?” warned one of the sailors. And she obeyed, moving away from the gunwale.

Would she have had the courage to throw herself in if that sailor hadn’t shown up? She didn’t want to replay the scene in her head again; instead she watched the men on the tartan: they seemed nervous. The tide was high but the winds weren’t favorable. Some of them smoked. She skillfully struck the steel against the flint and the tinder soon lit up. Where would she find the trees whose bark and fungus she used to make the tinder? As she lit the cigar and inhaled deeply she realized she didn’t know where to get tobacco either. The first draw calmed her mind. The next two relaxed her muscles and made her slightly dizzy.

“Negress, share your smoke with me?”

A cabin boy had crouched down in front of her; his face was dirty but lively and pleasant. For a few seconds, as he waited for an answer,
Caridad took in his smile. All she could see were his white teeth, just like Marcelo’s when she wrapped her arms around him. She’d had another son, a mulatto born of the master, but Don José sold him as soon as the boy could do without the care of the two old women who looked after the slaves’ little ones while they worked. They all went down that same path: the master didn’t want to support Negro children. Marcelo, her second son, conceived with a black man from the sugar mill, had been different: a difficult birth; a child with problems. “No one will buy him,” declared the master when he began to show signs of clumsiness and defects. He agreed to let him stay on at the plantation, as if he were a simple dog, or a hen or one of the pigs they raised behind the shack. “He won’t live long,” everyone predicted. But Caridad didn’t let that happen, and many were the beatings and whippings she got when they discovered she’d been feeding him. “We provide you with food so you can work, not so you can raise an imbecile,” the overseer said time and again.

“Negress, would you share your smoke with me?” insisted the cabin boy.

Why not?
thought Caridad. He had the same smile as Marcelo. She offered him the cigar.

“Wow! Where did you get this? It’s amazing!” exclaimed the boy after trying it and coughing. “Is it from Cuba?”

“Yes,” said Caridad as she took the cigar back and brought it to her lips.

“What’s your name?”

“Caridad,” she answered amid a puff of smoke.

“I like your hat.” The boy moved edgily on his legs. He was waiting for another puff, which finally came.

“It’s blowing!” The captain’s shout broke the stillness. From the other ships similar cries were heard. The southern wind was blowing, perfect for crossing the sandbar. The cabin boy returned the cigar and ran to join the other sailors.

“Thank you,
morena,
” he said hastily. Many in this new country called her that, since her dark skin was the first thing they noticed about her.

Unlike the other passengers, Caridad didn’t witness the difficult nautical maneuver that required three changes of course in the narrow canal. All along the mouth of the Guadalquivir, both on land and on the barges moored on its banks, fires were lit to guide the boats. She didn’t share the others’ nerve-racking worry about the crossing: if the wind died down
and they were left halfway through, it was likely they would run aground. She remained sitting against the gunwale, smoking, enjoying a pleasant tickle in her muscles and letting the tobacco cloud her senses. As the tartan entered the formidable Canal de los Ingleses, with the tower of San Jacinto illuminating their course on the port side, Caridad began to sing softly under her breath to the rhythm of her memories of the Sunday parties, when after celebrating mass in the neighboring sugar factory, which had a priest, the slaves from the various estates gathered in the barracks of the plantation they’d come to with their masters. There the white men let them sing and dance, as if they were children who needed to let off steam and forget their rough working conditions. But in every song and every dance step, when they hear the
batá
drums speak—the large
iyá
drum, mother of them all, the slightly smaller
itótele
and the littlest
olónkolo
—the Negroes worshipped their gods, disguised in the Christian virgins and saints, and they remembered their African roots with longing.

She continued singing softly, isolated from the captain’s urgent orders and the crew’s busy dashing about, and she sang just as she had sung to put Marcelo to sleep. She believed she was touching his hair again, hearing him breathe, smelling his scent … She blew a kiss. The boy had survived. He still got yelled at and slapped by the master and the overseer but he had won the affection of the other slaves on the plantation. He was always smiling! And he was sweet and affectionate with everyone. Marcelo didn’t know slaves from masters. He lived free, and occasionally looked into the slaves’ eyes as if he understood their pain and encouraged them to free themselves from their chains. Some smiled back at Marcelo sadly, others cried in the face of his innocence.

Caridad pulled hard on the cigar. He would be well taken care of, she had no doubt about that. María, who always sang in chorus with her, would look after him. And Cecilio too, even though he had been forced to separate the boy from her … All those slaves that had been sold along with the land would take care of him. And her son would be happy, she could feel it. But her master … May your soul wander for all eternity without rest, Don José, yearned Caridad.

Seville’s Triana district was on the other side of the Guadalquivir River, outside the city walls. It was connected to the city by an old Muslim bridge built over ten barges anchored to the riverbed and joined by two thick iron chains and various mooring lines stretched from one shore to the other. That outlying district, which had been dubbed the “garrison of Seville” for the defensive function it had always performed, reached its pinnacle when Seville monopolized trade with the Indies; the difficulties navigating the river led to the House of Trade being moved to Cádiz, which meant a considerable decline in population and the abandoning of numerous buildings. Its ten thousand inhabitants were concentrated on a limited stretch of land on the river’s right shore, and bounded on the other side by La Cava, the old trench that, in times of war, comprised the city’s first line of defense and flooded with waters from the Guadalquivir to turn the outlying district into an island. Beyond La Cava one could make out sporadic monasteries, chapels, homes and the extensive fertile lowlands of Triana.

One of those convents, on Cava Nueva, was that of Our Lady of Health, with Minim nuns, a humble congregation devoted to contemplation, silent prayer and frugal living. Behind the Minims, toward San Jacinto Street, on a small dead-end alley named after San Miguel, were thirteen tightly packed clusters of apartments around a central courtyard into
which nearly twenty-five families were crammed. Twenty-one of those were gypsy families, made up of grandparents, children, aunts, cousins, nieces, grandchildren and the odd great-grandchild; those twenty-one were devoted to ironwork. There were other forges in the Triana district, most run by gypsies, the same hands that in India and in the mountains of Armenia, centuries before emigrating to Europe, had turned that trade into an art. However, San Miguel was the nerve center of smiths and tinkers in Triana. Onto the alley opened the old apartments clustered around a courtyard that were built during Triana’s period of splendor in the sixteenth century: some were no more than simple blind alleys of rows of squalid little houses; others were buildings, sometimes elaborate, of two or three stories arranged around a central courtyard, whose upper levels opened onto it through high corridors and wooden or wrought-iron railings. All of them, almost without exception, offered humble dwellings of one or at most two rooms, in one of which there was a small niche to cook with coal, when it wasn’t in the courtyard or passageway itself as a service available to all the neighbors. The washbasins and the latrines, if there were any, were located in the courtyard, for everyone.

Most of these clusters of apartments in Seville were occupied during the day only by women and the children who played in the courtyards, but the smiths in Triana spent their workdays there since their forges were installed on the ground floor. The constant ringing of the hammers on the anvils coming from each of the forges merged in the street into a strange metallic clatter; the coal smoke from the forges, which often emerged from the courtyards or the very doorways of those modest workshops without chimneys, was visible from every part of Triana. Along the length of the alley, surrounded by the smoke and noise, men, women and children came and went, played, laughed, chatted, shouted and argued. In spite of the tumult, many of them were silent and stopped in the doors of those workshops with their emotions running high. Sometimes you could make out a father holding his son back by the shoulders, an old man with his eyes squinting or several women repressing a dance step as they heard the sounds of the
martinete
: a sad song accompanied only by the monotonous pounding of the hammer whose rhythm it matched; a rhythm and song all their own, which had followed them throughout time and everywhere. Then, with the
quejíos
of the blacksmiths, the hammering became a marvelous symphony that made your hair stand on end.