The Barefoot Queen (31 page)

“Don’t say anything,” he begged her. “It’s not important.”

“I’m sorry. It just could never be,” she declared anyway.

They had been on the road for four days, rationing the water and salted pork that Fray Joaquín had given them before they left. Even Old María doubted whether the preacher could have been right about his gods and devils when, after they decided to flee to Portugal, they drew up their itinerary along with a downcast Fray Joaquín who, nonetheless, insisted on helping them as if it were a way to purge the mistake he had made.

“There are two main routes you should avoid,” he advised, “the Ayamonte road, toward the south, and the Mérida one to the north. These have the most traffic. There is a third one that forks off the Ayamonte road near Trigueros to head to Lisbon through Paymogo, near the border. Search for that, the one that crosses the Andévalo, always heading west; go around the mountain range toward Valverde del Camino and then further west. There you’ll have fewer possibilities of running into the constables or soldiers.”

“Why?” asked Milagros.

“You’ll see. They say that when God created the earth, he was tired after the effort of making the Andalusian coasts and decided to rest, but so as not to interrupt creation he let the devil continue his work. And that was how the lands of the Andévalo were born.”

And indeed they did see.

“Why couldn’t your friar’s God have had just a little more energy,
girl!” Old María complained yet again, dragging her feet—bare just like those of the other two—along the dry, barren paths beneath the August sun.

They avoided the roads and towns and walked without a single tree beneath which to take shelter, for the flocks of sheep and goats and the herds of pigs gathered where the holm-oak woods and cork oaks grew, and they were watched over by shepherds, and the women didn’t want to run into anyone.

“Of all the luck! We had to get a lazy God!” muttered the old woman.

But except for those pastures, most of the fields that weren’t near towns were fallow: large stretches of uncultivated land. Beyond Seville there were only a few occasions when they had spotted a laborer from a distance, who would always lean on his hoe, using his hand as a visor, wondering about those who walked by—but never came near.

They traveled in the early morning and at dusk, when the suffocating heat seemed to lessen. Four or five hours each stretch, which wasn’t nearly enough time to cover the four or five leagues they’d set out to, but they had no way of knowing that. Walking through those barren fields, alone and without points of reference, they began to be somewhat discouraged: they didn’t know where they were or how long it would be until they arrived; they only knew—this Fray Joaquín had told them—that they had to cross the Andévalo heading west until they reached the Guadiana River, whose course marked most of the border with Portugal.

They walked in single file; Milagros headed the march. At one point, when Caridad was trying to match her pace, she had ordered her: “Take care of María,” pointing back with one of her thumbs.

Milagros didn’t have a chance to regret the tone she used or notice the disappointment her friend was unable to hide. Her thoughts were too full of her parents, separated from each other, separated from her … she was afraid to even imagine where they were and what they were doing. And she cried. She picked out the paths with her eyes flooded in tears and she didn’t want anyone to bother her in her pain. Forced labor for the men, Fray Joaquín had said. She didn’t know what they did in the arsenal of La Carraca in Cádiz. What were they forcing her father to do? She remembered the last time he had forgiven her, like so many other times throughout her life! “Until you get every gypsy in this settlement to kneel before your charms,” he had demanded. And she had danced in search of
his approval, moving her body to the rhythm of the pride sparkling in her father’s eyes. And her mother? Her throat tightened and her legs seemed to refuse to go on at the mere thought of her, as if she were betraying her by fleeing. A thousand times she thought of going back, turning herself in, searching for her and throwing herself into her arms … but she didn’t dare.

When the sun beat hard or when night fell, they searched for somewhere to take shelter. They ate salted pork, they drank a few sips of hot water and they smoked the cigars that Caridad still had in her bundle. Then, exhausted by the heat, the girl would sob in silence; the others respected her grief.

“Fray Joaquín must have been right: this land could only have been the work of the devil,” she commented with disgust at the end of that day as she pointed to a lone fig tree silhouetted against the sunset.

From behind, the old woman groaned. “Girl, the devil has tricked us: he was reincarnated into the friar who set us off on his paths. May that damn priest rot in his own hell!”

The girl didn’t respond; she had quickened her step. Caridad, behind her, hesitated and turned toward the healer: she was limping and hunched over, cursing under her breath at every step. She waited for her.

Old María, exhausted from the effort, slowly reached Caridad, stopping with an exaggerated groan and tilting her head to one side. She looked up at the worn straw hat Caridad wore.

“
Morena,
with that mat of hair you’ve got on your head, I don’t know what you want with a hat.”

Caridad took it off and held the hat in front of her grayish dress of coarse burlap, along with her bundle.

“You are so dark!” exclaimed the healer. “Were you sent by the devil, too?”

“No!” she quickly replied, with fear in her face.

A sad expression crossed the old woman’s face at Caridad’s denial: the
morena
was obviously innocent. “Of course not,” she tried to reassure her. “Help me.”

María went to offer her her forearm, but Caridad put her hat back on and, before the old woman could protest, she lifted her up in the air, held her in her arms like a little girl and started marching behind Milagros, who was substantially ahead of them by that point.

“Do you think the devil would carry you in his arms?” asked Caridad with a smile.

Old María smiled and nodded.

“It’s not a litter in the style of the great Sevillian ladies,” commented the old woman once she’d recovered from Caridad’s sudden lift. She had run an arm around the black woman’s neck and even got comfortable. “But it’ll do. Thank you,
morena,
and as that deceitful friar would say, may God reward you.”

María kept talking and complaining about the state of her feet, her old age, the friar and the devil, the
payos
and that rough, fallow land until Caridad stopped suddenly several paces from the fig tree. María felt the tension in Caridad’s arms.

“What …?”

She was silent as she looked toward the tree: against the reddish light that was already falling on the fields, Milagros’s figure was silhouetted in front of another taller one, a man’s, surely, who was grabbing her and shaking her.

“Put me down on the ground,
morena,
slowly,” she whispered as she searched in her apron pocket for the knife she used to cut plants. “Have you ever fought?” she added, now standing with the knife in her hand.

“No,” answered Caridad. Had she fought? She thought of the times she had been forced to defend her smoke or her daily ration of cod gruel from the other slaves: simple quarrels among the hungry. “No,” she reiterated, “I haven’t.”

“Well, now’s the time for you to learn,” said the old woman, handing her the knife. “I no longer have the strength or the youth for such things. Stab him in the eye if you have to, but don’t let him touch the girl.”

Suddenly Caridad found herself with the weapon in her hand.

“Hurry up, demon Negress!” screamed the old woman, gesticulating wildly at the man, who was already pulling the girl toward him.

Caridad stammered. Stab him in the eye? She had never … but Milagros needed her! She was about to take a step when María’s scream alerted the girl to their presence. Then she freed herself from the man, lifted an arm and greeted them with a wave.

“Wait!” called the healer, seeing how calm the girl was. “Maybe today is not the day you’ll have to … prove your valor.” She dragged the last few words out.

He was a gypsy named Domingo Peña, an itinerant blacksmith from the Puerto de Santa María, one of the towns where many gypsies had been arrested, and he had spent a couple of weeks shoeing horses and fixing farm tools in the Andévalo region.

“Except for the big towns, of which there aren’t many,” explained the gypsy, as they all sat beneath the fig tree’s large leaves, “the blacksmiths have disappeared, even though they are essential to the work in the fields,” he added as he pointed to his tools: a tiny anvil, an old bellows made of ram’s skin, some tongs, a couple of hammers and some old horseshoes.

The healer was still watching him with some suspicion.

“What was that man doing to you?” she had accused Milagros in whispers as soon as she was close enough.

“He was hugging me!” the girl said in her defense. “He had been in the Andévalo for some time and knew nothing about our raid. He was crying over the fate of his wife and children.”

“Even so, don’t let men hug you. It’s not necessary. Let them cry on your shoulder.”

Milagros accepted the reprimand and nodded, her head bowed.

Beneath the fig tree, Domingo questioned them about the gypsies’ arrest. They were speaking in Caló, the gypsy tongue that Caridad had started to understand in the settlement. Yet what caught her attention was the desperate gesturing and the anguished expression on the face of the man; he was as gaunt as he was sinewy, with a smith’s strong arms with long veins that swelled in the tension of the moment. Domingo had left behind three boys over seven, the age at which, according to what the women had just told him, they would be separated from their mother and destined to forced labor. “Juan,” he enunciated in a thin voice. María and Milagros, cringing, let him speak. “The youngest, a lively lad. He liked to hit the iron scraps against the anvil and sometimes he would even softly sing something like a
martinete
to the rhythm marked by the hammer. Francisco, ten years old, introverted but intelligent, cautious, always aware of everything around him; and the oldest, Ambrosio, just a year older than his brother.” His voice cracked. The boy had fallen from a crag and his legs were deformed from the accident. Had Ambrosio also been separated from his mother and sent to forced labor in the arsenals? Neither the old woman nor the girl dared to respond, but Domingo insisted, obliviously repeating the question: Were they capable of that? And when
he was answered by silence again he brought his hands to his face and broke out in sobs. He cried in front of the women without trying to hide his weakness. And he howled up at the already starry sky with screams of pain that split the warm air around them.

“
I WILL
turn myself in,” Domingo said at dawn. He didn’t see himself capable of traveling through the towns to continue smithing in exchange for a meager coin knowing that his children were suffering. He would search for them and he would turn himself in.

Caridad sensed in the gypsy’s tone of voice and expression what he meant.

“I don’t know if I should do it, too,” admitted Milagros.

Old María wasn’t surprised by her confession: she’d had a feeling it was coming. Four days crying incessantly over her parents’ arrest was too much for the girl. She had heard her at night, when Milagros thought they were sleeping; she had noticed the stifled sobs in the long hours of the day when they took shelter from the heat and she had observed, as she walked behind the girl, how her shoulders trembled and her body shook. And it wasn’t the desperation and the implacable pain that comes from the death of a loved one, the old woman said to herself; suffering over this separation could be remedied: by turning oneself in.

“I can’t stop thinking—” Milagros started to add before the blacksmith interrupted her.

“Don’t do it, girl,” the gypsy urged her. “I wouldn’t want my children to turn themselves in. I’m sure your parents don’t want it either. Keep your freedom and live; that’s the best thing you can do for them.”

“Live?” Milagros opened her hand to include the arid fields that were already threatening to burn their feet over the course of another day.

“Leave the Andévalo region and go down to the coast, toward the flat lands …”

“They’ll arrest us!” objected the girl.

“What could we do there?” interjected the old woman with interest.

“You’ll find gypsies there. Maybe the King arrested everyone who lived in towns and cities, but there are many more, those who walk the roads; they haven’t found them. There are also many settled in towns where gypsies weren’t allowed to reside, they must have all left those
places. They’ll be in the flat lands, I know it. It’s a richer land than the Andévalo.”

“We are headed to Barrancos.”

The gypsy arched his eyebrows toward Milagros. “Why?”

“We trust we’ll be able to find my grandfather there.”

María was half listening. There were gypsies in the flat lands and Domingo knew where. It was what she had been wanting all those days on the road: to meet up with her people. Despite the decision they’d made in Triana, the old woman was wary of going to Barrancos. She had had four long days to think on it: Melchor might not show up or not for a long time, which would leave them just as alone to face the dangers that threatened them as they were now.