The Barefoot Queen (6 page)

What is a potter?
wondered Caridad, trying to make him out in the darkness. She only wanted …“Will you give me money to cross the bridge?” she inquired.

The man saw the hesitation on her face. “Come with me,” he ordered.

That she understood: an order, as when some Negro grabbed her by the arm and took her out behind the hut. She followed him toward Cava Vieja. At the height of the Inquisition Castle, without turning around, the potter questioned her.

“Are you a runaway?”

“I’m free.”

In the castle lights, Caridad could see the man nodding his head.

His was a small workshop, with a living space on the upper floor, on the street of the potters. They went in and the man pointed to a straw mattress in one corner of the workshop, beside the woodpile and the kiln. Caridad sat down on it.

“You’ll start tomorrow. Sleep.”

The warmth of the kiln’s embers eased Caridad, frozen stiff from the Guadalquivir’s dampness, into slumber, and she slept.

SINCE THE
Muslim period, Triana had been known for its fired-clay production, especially for its glazed low-relief tiles; the masters sank a greased cord into the fresh clay and achieved magnificent drawings. However, some time ago that artisanal ceramic work had degenerated into repetitive, charmless pieces, which now had to compete with English flint stoneware and people’s changing tastes, which leaned toward Oriental porcelain. So the trade was in decline in Triana.

The next day, at dawn, Caridad began to work alongside the man from the night before, a young man who must have been his son and an apprentice who couldn’t take his eyes off her. She loaded wood, moved clay, swept a thousand times and took care of the ashes in the kiln. The days passed that way. The potter—Caridad never saw a woman emerge from the upstairs floor—visited her at nights.

“I have to cross the bridge to get to the church of Los Ángeles, where the Negroes are,” she wanted to say to him one night, when the man, after taking her, was preparing to leave. Instead she just stammered, “And my money?”

“Money! You want money? You eat more than you work and you have a place to sleep,” answered the potter. “What more could a Negress like you want? Or would you rather be on the street begging for alms like most free Negroes?”

In those days, slavery had almost completely disappeared from Seville; the economic and demographic crisis, the 1640 war with Portugal (which was the major supplier of slaves to the Sevillian market), the bubonic plague that the city had suffered a few years later (which showed no mercy to the black slaves), along with the constant manumissions ordered
in the wills of pious Sevillians: all contributed to a significant decline in slavery. Seville was losing its slaves at the same rate it was losing its economic strength.

You eat more than you work
echoed in Caridad’s ears. She then recalled what Master José’s overseer on the plantation always used to say: “You don’t work as much as you eat,” was his accusation before letting the whip fall onto their backs. Not much had changed in her life; what good had being freed done her?

One night, the potter didn’t come down the stairs. The next night he didn’t show up either. On the third night, when he did come down, he headed toward the door instead of toward her. He opened it and let in another man, then pointed him over to Caridad. The potter waited by the door while that man satisfied his desires, charged him and then bade him farewell.

From that night on, Caridad stopped working in the shop. The man locked her up in a miserable little room on the lower floor, with no ventilation, and he placed a straw mattress and a chamber pot beside some debris.

“If you make trouble, if you scream or try to escape, I’ll kill you,” the potter threatened the first time he brought her food. “Nobody will miss you.”

That’s true,
lamented Caridad as she listened to the man turn the key in the door again: who was going to miss her? She sat on the straw mattress with the bowl of thin vegetable stew in her hands. She had never before had her life threatened: masters didn’t kill slaves; they were worth a lot of money. A slave was useful for its whole life. Once trained, as Caridad was as a girl, Negroes reached old age on the tobacco plantations, in the sugar mills or cane factories. The law prohibited selling a slave for more than it had been bought for, so no master, after having taught them a trade, would get rid of them; they’d lose money. One could mistreat them or force them to work to the point of exhaustion, but a good overseer knew his limits and usually stopped short of death. There were those slaves who took their own lives; sometimes at dawn, the light would gradually, unexpectedly, reveal the silhouette of an inert black body hanging from a tree … or perhaps several who had together decided to escape their lives once and for all. Then the master would get very angry, as he did when a mother killed a newborn to free it from a life of slavery or when a Negro injured himself to avoid work. The following Sunday, at mass, the priest
from the sugar mill would shout that it was a sin, that they would go to hell, as if a hell worse than that existed. Die?
Maybe,
thought Caridad,
maybe the time has come to escape this world where no one will miss me.

That same night it was two men who enjoyed her body. Then the potter closed the door again and Caridad was left in the most absolute darkness. She didn’t think about it. She sang softly through what was left of the night, and when the first rays of light made their way through the cracks in the planks of the miserable little room, she searched among the junk until she found an old rope. This could work, she concluded after pulling on it to test its strength. She tied it to her neck and climbed onto a rickety box. She threw the rope over a wooden beam above her head, pulled it taut and knotted the other end. There had been times when she’d envied those black figures hanging from the trees, interrupting the landscape of the Cuban tobacco plantation, freed from their suffering.

“God is the greatest of all kings,” she called out. “I only hope not to become a lost soul.”

She leapt off the box. The rope held her weight, but not the wooden beam, which cracked and fell on top of her. The noise was such that the potter soon appeared at Caridad’s cell. He put her in irons and, from that day on, Caridad stopped eating and drinking, begging for death even as the potter and his son force-fed her.

The visits from men off the street continued, usually one, sometimes more, until one night an old man who was clumsily trying to mount her got up and off her with shocking agility.

“This Negress is burning up!” he shouted. “She has a fever. Are you trying to give me some strange illness?”

The potter came over to Caridad and put his hand on her sweaty forehead. “Get out of here!” he ordered, pressuring her with a foot in the ribs as he struggled to force open and recover the chains that held her captive. “Right now, this minute!” he yelled once he had managed to free her. Without waiting for her to get up, he grabbed Caridad’s bundle and threw it out onto the street.

WAS IT
possible that he had heard a song? It was just a murmur mixed in with the sounds of the night. Melchor pricked up his ears. There it was again!

“Yemayá asesú …”

The gypsy remained still in the darkness, in the middle of the fertile lowlands of Triana, surrounded by garden plots and fruit trees. The murmur of the Guadalquivir’s waters reached his ears clearly, as did the whistle of the wind among the vegetation, but …

“Asesú yemayá.”

It seemed like a dialogue: a whisper sung by the soloist who then responded like a chorus. He turned toward the voice; some of the beads that hung from his jacket jangled. It was almost completely dark, except for the torches from the Carthusian monastery, a bit further on.

“Yemayá oloddo.”

Melchor left the path and entered an orange grove. He stepped on rocks and fallen leaves, he stumbled several times and even loudly cursed all the saints, and yet, despite his shouts echoing like thunder in the night, the sad soft singing continued. He stopped in a patch of trees. It was there, right there.

“Oloddo yemayá. Oloddo …”

Melchor squinted his eyes. One of the persistent clouds that had covered Seville during the day allowed a faint glimmer of the moon to come through. Then he could make out a grayish form on the ground, before him, just a few paces away. He approached and knelt until he could make out a woman as black as the night dressed in gray clothes. She was sitting with her back against an orange tree, as if seeking refuge in it. Her gaze was vague, unaware of his presence, and she continued singing softly, in a monotone, repeating the same refrain over and over again. Melchor noticed that, despite the cold, her forehead was beaded with sweat. She was shivering.

He sat down beside her. He didn’t understand what she was saying, but that weary voice, that timbre, the monotony, the resignation that impregnated her voice revealed immense pain. Melchor closed his eyes, hugged his knees and let himself be transported by the song.

“Water.”

Caridad’s request broke the silence of the night. Her singing could no longer be heard; it had died out like an ember. Melchor opened his eyes. The song’s sadness and melancholy had managed to take him back to the galley benches. Water. How many times had he asked for the same thing? He thought he could feel the muscles of his legs, arms and back tensing,
just as when the galley master increased the pace of the rowing to chase some Saracen ship. His torturous whistle goaded their senses as his whip tore off the skin on their bare backs to get them to row harder and harder. The punishment could last hours. Finally, with all the muscles in their body about to burst and their mouths bone-dry, from the rows of benches there arose a single plea: Water!

“I know what it is to be thirsty,” he murmured to himself.

“Water,” begged Caridad again.

“Come with me.” Melchor got up with difficulty, numb from an hour sitting beneath the orange tree.

The gypsy stretched and tried to orient himself to find the road to La Cartuja—the Carthusian monastery. He had been heading toward its gardens, where many of the Triana gypsies lived, when the soft singing had attracted his attention.

“Are you coming or not?” he asked Caridad.

She tried to get up, grabbing on to the orange tree’s trunk. She had a fever. She was hungry and cold. But, more than anything, she was thirsty, very thirsty. Would he give her water if she went with him, or would he trick her like so many others had over the course of her days in Triana? She walked behind him. Her head was spinning. Almost everyone she’d met had taken advantage of her.

A series of lights coming from a cluster of shacks on the road lit up the gypsy’s sky-blue silk jacket. Caridad struggled to keep up with him. Melchor didn’t pay her special attention. He walked slowly but erect and proud, leaning just for show on the two-pointed staff that marked him as the patriarch of a family; sometimes he could be heard speaking into the night. As they approached the settlement, the beads on Melchor’s clothes and the silver edging on his socks shone. Caridad took the shimmering gleam as a good omen: that man hadn’t laid a hand on her. He would give her water.

That night, the partying in the San Miguel alley went on for a long time. Each of the smithing families insisted on demonstrating their talents at dancing, singing and playing the guitar, castanets and tambourines, as if it were a competition. The García family was there, along with the Camacho family, the Flores family, the Carmonas, the Vargases and many more of the twenty-one surnames that inhabited that alleyway. All the traditional gypsy songs were heard—
romances, zarabandas, chaconas, jácaras,
fandangos,
seguidillas
and
zarambeques
—and they danced in the glow of a bonfire fed by the women as the hours passed. Around the fire, sitting in the first row, were the gypsies that made up the council of elders, headed by Rafael García, a man of some sixty years, gaunt, serious and curt, whom they called El Conde.

The wine and tobacco flowed. The women contributed food from their homes: bread, cheese, sardines and shrimp, chicken and hare, hazelnuts, acorns, quince jam and fruit. These parties were for sharing; when they sang and danced they forgot about the bickering and the atavistic enmity, and the elders were there to guarantee that. The smithing gypsies of Triana were not rich. They were still those same people who had been persecuted in Spain since the time of the Catholic Kings: they weren’t allowed to wear their brightly colored clothes or speak in their dialect, walk the roads, tell fortunes or deal in horses and mules. They were banned
from singing and dancing, they weren’t even permitted to live in Triana or work as metalsmiths. On several occasions the non-gypsy guilds of smiths had tried to keep them from working in their simple forges, and the royal proclamations and orders had insisted on it, but it was all in vain: the gypsy smiths guaranteed the supply of the thousands of horseshoes essential for the animals that worked the fields of the kingdom of Seville, so they continued smithing and selling their products to the same non-gypsy smiths who wanted to stop them but were unable to meet the enormous demand.