The Barefoot Queen (42 page)

As for her friends, many of them had come back from the prison in Málaga, all of them dirty and without their adornments. Their clothes were in rags and sadness had taken hold in their souls. None of them laughed anymore. There was no place for parties in the alley or for gatherings or adventures with girlfriends; the only thing that interested them, just like their mothers, sisters, aunts and cousins, was the thought of getting their hands on some money.

The countess wouldn’t see her. Old María waited out on the street. They had decided that Caridad would not go with them, and Milagros had trouble getting into the palace through the tradesman’s entrance.

“The daughter of Ana Vega? Who is Ana Vega?” a servant girl asked her after looking her up and down peevishly.

After much insisting, someone finally recognized the gypsy who read their palms and they allowed her into a hall that led to the kitchens. The countess was getting dressed, they told her. Wait? It would take hours; the hairdresser hadn’t even arrived!

They left her there, and Milagros was forced to dodge the constant flow of servants and suppliers coming in and out. Her stomach growled over the baskets filled with meats and vegetables, fruits and cakes that passed by her: they could eat for an entire year with all that food! Finally, someone must have complained about the barefoot, dirty little gypsy who was getting in the way, and then someone else must have remembered her
and talked to a third, who in turn spoke to a butler so that, in the end, the count’s secretary appeared, grim-faced, as if she were a minor irritation that had to be dealt with rapidly. It was a cutting, quick conversation, right there in the hall, although no one dared to pass by while it was going on. “Their excellencies have already interceded on behalf of the gypsies,” affirmed the secretary after listening to Milagros nervously struggle to keep her tone of voice even. For whom? He didn’t know, he would have to review the correspondence and he was unwilling to do so, but there had been several letters, he had prepared them himself, he commented indifferently. “Two more? Your parents? Why? Friends of the countess?” he repeated incredulously.

“Friends … no,” rectified Milagros at the scornful sneer with which the man dressed head to toe in black received the idea. “But they have been in her private drawing rooms, telling fortunes to her and the little counte … her excellency’s daughter and her excellency’s friends, and they danced for the count and countess and their guests in Triana, and they rewarded them with money—”

“And if they’ve enjoyed such privileges from their excellencies,” said the secretary, interrupting the girl’s hurried speech, “why weren’t your parents freed along with the rest of the gypsies?”

Milagros hesitated and the man sensed her indecision. She remained silent and the man in black insisted again.
What does it matter?
thought the girl.

“They weren’t married by the Church,” she said.

The secretary shook his head, failing to hide his smug expression at being able to get the lords out of the petitions of another detestable beggar.

“Girl, it’s one thing interceding on behalf of gypsies who comply with the kingdom’s laws, that … that is nothing more than a hobby for their excellencies.” He humiliated her by fluttering a hand affectedly. “But they will never help those who violate the precepts of our Holy Church.”

When Old María saw her leaving the palace, enraged, squirming with the desire to cry or burst out in insults against the count and countess, she shook her head. “What did you expect, girl?” she muttered under her breath before Milagros reached her.

They’d thought that the countess was their last chance. Some days earlier, Inocencio, the Carmona patriarch, had snorted when María and Milagros went to him in search of help.

“I think highly of your father,” he conceded. “He’s a good man, but there are still many imprisoned, including several members of our family. We are fighting to get them freed, but it is becoming more and more complicated. The authorities keep putting up obstacles. It seems … it seems as if they don’t want to release anyone else. Despite the recommendations we made at the elders’ council meeting, there are many gypsies all over Spain who are demanding the return of their goods, and that worries the King, who is unwilling to pay. It’s as if he salved his conscience enough with the first releases. Please understand,” he then said, his voice growing cold, “we have very little money to buy favors, and as head of the family I have to put all my efforts into those who have a real chance of getting out. Your father has very little.” He accompanied those final words with an even colder look at María, obviously implying that José’s situation was a result of marrying a Vega who had refused to be wed by the Church.

Milagros, after protesting to the patriarch without success, swore that she would appeal to the chief justice officer of Seville, the archbishop and the King himself if it came to that. But Inocencio Carmona convinced them that her begging for José’s freedom wasn’t a good idea.

“Don’t do it, girl,” he advised her, obviously sincere in his concern. “You don’t have documents. You aren’t listed as one of those arrested in the July roundup, nor as imprisoned in Málaga and freed. For them you are a gypsy on the run. The new royal decree obliges you to present yourself before the authorities within thirty days. And, given your parents’ circumstances … it wouldn’t be surprising if they put you in jail. Are you baptized?”

Milagros didn’t answer. She wasn’t. She reflected for a few seconds. “At least I would be with my mother,” she whispered then.

Neither María nor Inocencio doubted that the girl was seriously considering making the sacrifice.

“No.” Inocencio’s words disappointed her. “They haven’t sent any women to Málaga for some time now. After the first expeditions, the others were jailed right here, in Seville. They would jail you far from her, Milagros: in Triana, among the other gypsies, you go unnoticed, you’re just one more, and they’ll think you are one of the freed, but if you make a mistake, if they catch you on the roads, they’ll arrest you and you won’t even be able to get them to take you to where your mother is.”

The Carmonas, her family, wouldn’t defend them. The count and countess wouldn’t either. Fray Joaquín had disappeared and their hands and feet were tied. If Grandfather were here … what would Grandfather do? He would surely free his daughter, even if he had to burn down all of Málaga to do it.

Meanwhile they were hungry.

Milagros and Old María were returning from the Count of Fuentevieja’s palace. They turned onto Cava Nueva at San Jacinto and went along it silently as they headed to the San Miguel alley. María was the first to see her: black as jet in the late autumn sun, with her straw hat pulled down to her eyebrows and the tails of her grayish shirt tucked up, rummaging through the garbage accumulated in the trench that had once been a defensive ditch for the area. The old woman stopped and Milagros followed her gaze just as a vagrant grabbed something out of Caridad’s hands that she had just found. She didn’t even threaten to fight over the treasure; she hung her head, submissive.

Then Milagros allowed the tears she hadn’t cried as she left the palace come rushing to her eyes.

“Morena!”
Old María tried to call Caridad but her voice was choked. Milagros turned toward her in surprise, her eyes flooded. The old woman tried to wave it off, cleared her throat a few times and shouted again, this time in a strong voice, “
Morena,
get out of there before they mistake you for a black mule and eat you!”

Hearing María’s voice, Caridad, in the ditch, lifted her head and looked at them from beneath the brim of her hat. Sunk in the garbage up to her calves, she smiled sadly.

THEY SOLD
the little they had—colored ribbons, bracelets, necklaces and pendants—for a pittance, but that wasn’t the solution, and Milagros knew it. If they had at least had the pearl necklace and gold medallion that Melchor had given them … But those jewels had been left in the settlement, for the soldiers to steal. Surely they hadn’t been inventoried but just ended up in one of their bags. The days passed in that house without furnishings or even basic essentials, just the bedspread, Caridad’s threadbare blanket and the tent cloth spread out for sleeping. Caridad would
glance mournfully at the bundle that rested in one corner. Inside it were her red clothes and the lodestone that Melchor had given her, the only thing she had ever owned in her life, and she was loath to sell it.

Hunger continued to drive them on. Their earnings from their last sale of a beaded necklace and a little silver bracelet had been used not for food but for a dark, mended skirt for Milagros. Only Caridad’s old long shirt from when she was a slave seemed to withstand the passage of time; the gypsies’ clothes frayed and tore. María decided that the girl couldn’t go around showing her thighs through her ruined skirt and petticoats, and her breasts seemed about to burst out of a shirt that just a few months earlier had seemed loose. Her torso could be covered with the old woman’s large tasseled scarf, but her legs, the focus of so much gypsy desire, no. She needed a skirt, even at the risk of going hungry.

At least, the old woman tried to console herself, they weren’t being charged rent. No one had ever tried to collect rent for those homes in the San Miguel alley. And that wasn’t because of the inhabitants’ race: it was just that no one knew whom they really belonged to. This was a situation that was repeated throughout Seville, where neglect by the proprietors, most of them institutions—from charities to schools—had led to their true ownership being forgotten over time.

Nevertheless, as the days passed they ran out of bread. Milagros didn’t know how to beg, and María wouldn’t have allowed her to. Caridad didn’t know either, but if she had she would have done so, rather than keep going to La Cava to sift through the rubbish. The healer, who was only called in to ply her trade for extremely serious cases, found herself unable to demand payment when it was clear the gypsies were penniless.

Finally, the old woman was forced to accept the suggestion Milagros had made some time back, remembering the coins that she’d occasionally earned with the Fernández family.

“You will sing,” she announced to her one morning, after waking up and finding they had nothing for breakfast.

Milagros nodded with a couple of joyful claps in the air, as if she was already getting ready. It had been some time since she’d sung. Guitars were no longer heard in the alley for the simple reason that nobody had one. Caridad sighed in relief: she thought of her bundle, still in a corner. It was the last thing left to sell, and her efforts to obtain scraps of food on La Cava were turning out to be entirely useless.

However, neither of the two women imagined how difficult it had been for María to make that decision: the Sevillian nights were extremely dangerous, even more so for a girl like Milagros and an exuberant Negress like Caridad, who were looking to inflame men’s desires so they would loosen their purse strings and give them some coins. When the girl had sung on the roads with the Fernández family, far from constables and justices, they were protected by gypsies willing to stab anyone who went too far, but in Seville … Besides, the gypsies were forbidden to dance.

“Wait for me here,” she told the other two. “And you,” she added, pointing to Caridad with her atrophied finger, “stop going through the rubbish or they are really going to eat you.”

Instinctively, Caridad brought a hand to her forearm and hid the bite marks she’d received from a vagrant when she tried to defend a small bone with something resembling meat stuck to it. All she’d done in return, however, was to naively turn her back on him. The beggar bit her, Caridad dropped her find and he got what he wanted.

The inn stood in a small neighborhood outside the city walls in front of the Arenal Gate, between the Resolana, the Guadalquivir River and the Baratillo, where they were building Seville’s bullfighting arena. The Arenal Gate was the only one of the thirteen in the city’s walls that remained open at night. On the other side of it was the old brothel, where, despite the ban, they continued plying their trade. It was a humble community, with people who worked in the port, farmers passing through and all kinds of ruffians. Its moldy buildings showed the damage caused by the frequent flooding from the river, against which they had no defense. She didn’t like to, but María had to ask for favors; she was owed quite a few.

Bienvenido, the innkeeper, was as old, skinny and shrunken as she was. His expression soured when he heard the old woman’s request and his wife, a big woman who was his third or fourth—María had lost track—slid silently toward the kitchen.

“What do you give them?” asked the old woman, pointing to his wife in a vain attempt to please Bienvenido, who ignored the compliment.

“Do you know what you are asking me?” he replied instead.

María breathed in the foul air of the inn. It was still morning, and unemployed sailors and port laborers drank among tired prostitutes who were trying to extend their shift from the night before, which perhaps hadn’t been as lucrative as they would have liked.

“Bienvenido,” answered the gypsy after a pause, “I know what I can ask you for.”

The innkeeper avoided María’s eyes; he owed her his life.

“A young gypsy girl,” he then murmured. “And a Negress! There will be fights. You know it. And I guess that, as always, they will come accompanied by gypsy men. I …”

“Of course we’ll come with men,” interrupted María, thinking about which ones she should bring, “and we’ll need a guitar at least and …”

“María, for God’s sake!”

“And all the saints!” she said to silence him. “The same ones you put yourself into the hands of when you had fevers. Did they come to your aid?”

“I paid you.”

“That’s true, but I told you then: it wasn’t enough. You had spent everything you had on doctors, surgeons, masses, prayers and who knows what other dumb stuff, do you remember? And you agreed. And you told me that I could count on you.”

“I can’t pay you now …”