The Barefoot Queen (68 page)

“Barman!” he shouted as he crashed the jug violently against the table, splashing the others. “Either serve us some quality wine or I’ll slice you open right here!”

“
LA DESCALZA
—
THE
Barefoot Girl.” That was the nickname the groundlings at the Coliseo del Príncipe ended up giving Milagros. The gypsy refused to wear the dresses that Celeste and the other women in the company wore.

“How do you expect me to dance in that?” she claimed, pointing to the corsets and crinolines. “You have trouble breathing,” she said to one actress, “and you can barely move with that hoop skirt,” to another.

She did, however, agree to switch her simple garb for the attire of the
manolas
of Madrid: a yellow bodice that was close-fitting at the waist—with no boning—tight sleeves, a white skirt with green flounces that almost reached her ankles, an apron, green handkerchief knotted at the neck and a net pulling her hair back. No one could convince her to wear shoes. “I was born barefoot and I’ll die barefoot,” she declared over and over again.

“What difference does it make?” Don José said to the magistrate, trying to put an end to the discussion. “Isn’t there already a strip at the edge of the stage so the public can’t see the actresses’ ankles? So why would it matter if she’s wearing shoes or not?”

Milagros soon lost her awe of that imposing theater, which had managed to paralyze her muscles the day of the premiere, and she lost it because, except for the censors and the magistrates, no one else seemed to have any. The audience shouted and stamped. She found out about the rivalry between two Madrid theaters: the Príncipe and the Cruz, which weren’t far from one another. There was a third theater, the Caños del Peral, where they performed popular lyrical compositions. The people who liked the Príncipe Theater were called
polacos
and those who preferred the Cruz were the
chorizos.
They didn’t only fight each other, but they would also regularly attend the rival theater to wreck the show and mercilessly boo the comic actors and singers.

And she not only understood that, no matter how well she sang, no matter how much passion she put into her songs and her dances, there would always be some
chorizo
fan who would dress her down, but she also discovered that there were players in the company who didn’t put much effort into their work. A simple white curtain at the back of the stage and another on each side was all the set there was for the daily comedies, although other performances such as the elaborate comedies or the liturgical dramas, whose ticket prices were higher, enjoyed a somewhat more sophisticated set design. Between the curtains, there was merely a table with some chairs around it and a well or a tree as decoration to set the scene.

When she wasn’t on stage in the main show, Milagros watched it from one of the benches of the front rows. Just like any other audience member, she was disappointed with the reciting by the members of her company: their gestures and movements bombastic and affected; their
voices monotonous and even unpleasant. Behind the scenery she saw the prompter’s shadow and the glow of the lamp that helped him read, as he moved incessantly from one side to the other to whisper the text the actors had forgotten or simply didn’t know. It wasn’t unusual to hear the prompter’s words over the voice of the actor repeating them. The spectators tolerated the tedium of a low-quality repertoire, or one of the infinite revivals of the illustrious Calderón, with actors who didn’t even make an effort to identify with their characters: Greek philosophers wearing waistcoats, knee-breeches and green stockings; mythological goddesses with panniers and feathered hats …

They were bored until they reached the intermissions, which featured
sainetes
and
tonadillas.
That was when both the audience and the actors enjoyed themselves. The
sainetes
were short, funny, popular parodies of social and family relationships. In them, the comic actors played themselves, their friends, relatives or acquaintances; most of the spectators saw themselves reflected and carried the players through the entire one-act with their shouts, laughter, applause and whistling.

As for the
tonadillas
 … half of Madrid was now flaunting, as a sign of admiration for Milagros, green ribbons tied or sewn onto their clothes, the same color as the handkerchief she always wore around her neck! Don José’s advice had been hammering in her ears for days: “Restrained passion, restrained passion.” And Milagros had been running it over and over in her head until one evening, standing on the stage, before starting to sing, when her gaze met that of a dirty, poorly dressed man, the kind that spent the six quarter-reals that he couldn’t afford on a stalls ticket, probably before returning to his town near the capital—maybe Fuencarral, Carabanchel, Vallecas, Getafe, Hortaleza or some other … where he would brag about having gone to the theater to become the object of envy and attention from his neighbors. The farmer, because he had to be a farmer, perhaps of muscatel wine grapes in Fuencarral, was watching her, captivated. Milagros took a few steps forward while holding the man’s gaze, as he followed her gypsy stride with eyes like platters and mouth agape. Then she stood in front of him and gave him a faint smile. The man, entranced, was unable to react. The music of the two violins that came from behind one of the side curtains, where the meager orchestra hid, composed of those violins, a cello and two oboes, repeated
itself waiting for Milagros to begin. But she delayed it a few more seconds, enough to run her gaze along the groundlings in the pit and find some other faces similar to the vintner from Fuencarral’s. Someone encouraged her to sing, other shouted compliments of “beautiful!” and “lovely!” Many asked her to begin. Finally she did, aware of their admiration and desire without needing to overstate her sensuality. Her dark skin, so different from the paleness that ladies insisted on even when it cost them their health; dressed as a
manola,
with clothes that symbolized the stubborn, silent fight against customs imported from France; proud like the Madrileños, just as haughty as those people who soon began to exalt her as a representative of the people.

“Restrained passion.” She finally understood it. She sang and danced feeling beautiful, not revealing herself, rising above the entire theater like a goddess who had nothing to prove. She understood that a sigh, a wink or a droop of her eyelids toward the first few rows or the pit, a flutter of her hand in the air, a simple twist of her waist or the glow of the drops of sweat running from her neck to her breasts could ignite desire even more than cheek and effrontery.

“Neither the men nor the women want that,” explained Marina, a slight blonde who was the third lady, when Milagros confided in her one night about her worries. “They need inaccessible idols; they need an excuse for not being able to win you over. If you go down to the pit and mingle with them, you will be of no use to them; you’ll be just like any of the women they know in real life. If you are coarse, they’ll compare you with the prostitutes who offer themselves on the streets and you will lose their interest.”

“And the women in the upper balcony?” inquired Milagros.

“Them? It’s simple: they envy all that attracts their men more than they do.”

“Envy?” Milagros was surprised.

“Yes, envy. An itch that will make them do everything in their power to be more like you.”

Milagros not only learned to control her sensuality; she also knew how to give the public the repartee they expected from a good comic player. She left the orchestra’s musicians disconcerted, although they gradually, blinded behind the side curtain but warned by the indications of Don José
himself, got used to the gypsy girl’s pace and the confusion she caused. Milagros would take her cue from the lyrics of the
tonadas
she sang and danced to.

“Where is that sergeant?” she asked on one occasion, interrupting a stanza that lamented a soldier’s fruitless wooing of a countess. “Is there a sergeant of the glorious armies of the King here in the house?”

Don José indicated to the orchestra that they stop playing and a couple of hands came up from the groundlings.

“Don’t worry,” she then said to one of the military men, “why aspire to a lady of noble birth when all those beautiful women up in the balcony are yearning for you to show them how you use your … sword?”

The magistrate shook his head as Don José, with an authoritative gesture, ordered the musicians to launch into the next bar to get Milagros to start singing amid all the lewd offers that were coming from the balcony.

She sang for the common folk. She talked to them. She laughed, she shouted, she cried and she acted out tearing her hair over the hard luck of the less fortunate. To the rhythm of her countless popular songs, she boldly pointed to the noblemen and the rich in their boxes while hundreds of pairs of eyes followed her accusatory finger toward her chosen victim, and she interrogated them about their habits and their excessive luxuries. Amid laughter, she joked about the wooing of ladies and about the friars and idle clerics who sought sustenance in the company of women of means. The whistles and boos from the pit and the balcony accompanied her scorn toward the mannered fops who, imperturbable, as if nothing could affect them, responded to her mocking with disdainful gestures.

In those moments, as the audience applauded, Milagros closed her eyes; when she did the entire theater vanished and in her mind all she saw were those she wished to see among the audience. “Cachita, María … look at me now,” she would whisper amid the cheers and praise. She was gripped by a strange anguish though, when she thought of her mother and her grandfather.

SUCCESS BROUGHT
more money. The Theater Board decided to double her wage and include her among the company members who received a salary. Don José was surprised by the gypsy’s reaction when he told her of their decision.

“Aren’t you pleased?”

Milagros thanked him in a stutter that failed to convince the director.

Her success took Pedro further away from her. It wasn’t much money, but enough for her husband to take on the streets of Madrid. “Where’s Pedro?” she would ask at lunch- or dinnertime, when she came back from the theater to the rooms they had rented. “We should wait for him.” Sometimes Bartola’s expression soured and she looked at her as if she were a stranger. “He’s off doing his thing,” she would often answer.

“He’s a man,” was Bartola’s excuse for him. “You’re the one who is never at home. What do you want, your husband to sit around knitting like an old woman? Well, stop singing and take care of him and your daughter!”

Then Milagros could see the García blood in that woman who defended Pedro’s excesses even when they suffered real hardship because he squandered the money she earned. Bartola was like Reyes, La Trianera, and El Conde, like the entire family, who never hid their animosity toward her.

“We were better off in Triana,” she heard the old woman grumble. “So many men fluttering around you with their green ribbons as a sign of … of …” Bartola gestured, unable to find the right word. “How do you think your husband must feel?”

Milagros tried to find out, struggling against sleep and waiting up for Pedro, who almost always returned home as the sun was coming up. Most nights she couldn’t manage to stay up, but the few times she did succeed in overcoming her weariness, and the drowsiness brought on by a silence broken only by the rhythmic breathing of her daughter and Bartola’s snores, she received a man who staggering in reeking of alcohol, tobacco and sometimes other odors that could only fool someone who, like her, was willing to ignore them.

How did Pedro feel about the men who wore green ribbons on their clothes? She soon found out.

“None of your admirers give you gifts?” he asked her one night, as they both lay on the straw mattress, naked, after he had taken her to the heights of ecstasy once more. The pleasure, the satisfaction, that twinge of hope of recovering him for herself that she felt when he took her vanished even before he had finished his question. Money. That was the only thing he wanted! All of Madrid was taken with her, she knew it, men
declared their love for her at the theater and in the streets when they crowded around her sedan chair. They sent love letters to her dressing room, which, since she couldn’t do it herself, Marina read to her: propositions and all sorts of promises from noble and rich men. She had soon decided to tear them up right away and return the presents. Of course they gave her gifts, but she knew if she accepted them, Pedro would turn them into more nights of loneliness. Comic actresses had the well-earned reputation of being frivolous and promiscuous; most of them were. Some changed Milagros’s nickname from “The Barefoot Girl” to “The Aloof Girl.” All of Madrid desired her and the only man whom she gave herself to willingly just wanted her money.

“They try to,” answered Milagros.

“And?” he asked in the face of her silence.

“You can be sure I would never put your honor and your manhood in question by accepting gifts from other men,” she replied after a few seconds of hesitation.

“And what about the parties and private performances that the company gives? They are well paid; why don’t you do them?”

He could have imagined the parties, but how had Pedro found out about the private performances that the companies gave in the parlors and small theaters of the large mansions?

“Here …” she responded, “here your family isn’t around to defend me. In Seville my honor is safe; your cousins and your grandmother make sure of that. Madrid isn’t like the inns and palaces in Andalusia. I know because they tell me about them. Who can oppose the desires of a grandee? Do you want your wife’s name to be on everyone’s lips, like Marina or Celeste?”

Bartola’s snores tore through the room for a good long while as she held her breath waiting for his reply. None came. Shortly after, Pedro murmured something unintelligible, turned his back and went to sleep.

Something changed that night for Milagros. Her body, usually exhausted after reaching climax, now remained tense, her muscles clenched, all of her restless. She couldn’t fall asleep. The tears soon began to flow. She had cried, many times, but never like on that night when she understood that her husband didn’t love her. She, who had thought that she would save her marriage in Madrid, realized that the big city was even worse than Triana. There, Pedro chatted with other gypsies on the alley
and moved in known circles, while here … Milagros knew that there were gypsies from his family. Pedro had found his García relatives; he had told her about it with his features twisted in rage. One of them had been beaten up by members of a brotherhood for insulting the Virgin on Almirante Street and had died. The rest of the family, men and women, were locked up in the Inquisition dungeons for crimes against the faith.