The Barefoot Queen (76 page)

On one occasion about fifty of them managed to escape. The alderman, enraged, ordered all the gypsy women to be sent to the gallery basements, which had no windows to the outside. There was no money for bars; there was no money, despite what Ensenada had promised, to
feed that ragtag army; there was no money to provide them with beds—they shared in threes—or food, or blankets, or even plates and bowls for eating.

And the situation blew up. The gypsies complained about the execrable slop they gave them and the conditions of the basements they were crammed into: damp and unventilated, gloomy and unhealthy. No one paid attention to their demands and they took it out on everything around them: they destroyed the cots and threw them along with the straw mattresses into the two blind wells at the House of Mercy. The poor health that followed the obstruction of the well began with a scabies epidemic that tormented the women. The itching kept them from sleeping and began between their fingers and toes, moved to elbows, buttocks and especially their nipples, and turned into scabs of dried blood due to the scratching, beneath which hid thousands of mites and their eggs. The scabs had to be ripped off in order to treat them with a salve made of sulfur that the doctor used to try to stop the disease; they also tried bloodletting, but the gypsies refused. Months later, the scabies reappeared. Some old women died.

Ana Vega was not one of those who fled that jail. Each day, morning and night, she tried to catch a glimpse of Salvador when, with other gypsy children and street kids, they took him to work on the properties owned by the House of Mercy. They left Saragossa to grow grain and take care of the olive groves and gather the olives to make oil. Despite the fact that all contact was banned, Ana and other gypsy women got as close as they could to the line of children heading off to the fields. They were punished for it. Some stopped, but she continued to do it. They punished the children; and they warned the women that they would do it again, saying: “Yesterday they had bread and water because of you.” Although the others stopped, Ana refused to be convinced: something compelled her to dodge the sentry and approach them time and again. Salvador rewarded her by widening his mouth into a splendid, proud smile.

One morning the sentry who accompanied the children didn’t flail his arms at Ana as he usually did to get her away from them. She was surprised, and even more so when she heard laughter in the line. She searched for Salvador. One of the boys pointed to him hidden among the other laughing lads and moved aside so she could see: Salvador wore a wooden collar that wrapped around his entire neck and forced him to
walk upright, with his chin grotesquely raised. The boy avoided meeting her eyes. Ana managed to see the boy’s gritted teeth between trembling lips that clenched at the others’ mocking.

“You can take it off him,” she managed to say to the sentry with a trembling voice. The tears she hadn’t shed over her whippings and the thousand other punishments ran down her cheeks.

Frías, the grim-faced and pot-bellied sentry, addressed her. “Will you stop coming over?”

Ana nodded.

“Do you promise?”

She nodded again.

“I want to hear you say it.”

“Yes,” she yielded. “I promise.”

Humiliation became the worst of the punishments that the cultured authorities of the period imposed on the minors. The gypsy girls who had been sent to the House of Mercy’s sewing workshops refused to work when they didn’t receive the food they were allotted. The alderman’s response was to take away the clothes and shoes they had been given and send them out with the others. Dozens of young gypsy girls suddenly found themselves naked in courtyards and galleries, ashamed, trying to hide their bodies, their montes pubis and their breasts, budding in some and turgid in others, from the gazes of their mothers and the other prisoners. After a few days the government council canceled the measure, but the damage was done.

Ana Vega, like many others, suffered during those days not only for the girls’ disgrace but her own. Those young bodies, the modesty with which they defended their honor, led her to think about herself.

“What have they done to us?” she lamented over her flaccid, dry breasts, the hanging skin of her belly, neck and forearms, marked by lash welts and the effects of the scabies.

“I’m still young,” she told herself. It had been less than four years since her gait caught men’s eyes and her dancing aroused their passions. In vain, she tried to relive the sparks of vanity she’d felt at those impertinent looks when she passed by; or at the whooping, clapping and shouting of the audience after a voluptuous shake of her hips; at the quick breathing of some man when they danced together and she brushed her breasts against him. She looked at her peeling hands. She had no mirror.

“What is my face like?” she suddenly asked, uneasy, in the basement where they were packed, without addressing anyone in particular.

They were slow to answer.

“Look at mine and you’ll know.”

The reply came from a gypsy from Ronda. Ana remembered her from Málaga: a beautiful woman with blue-black hair and bright, inquisitive, slanted eyes the same color. She didn’t want to see herself reflected in that woman’s face, in her wrinkles, in her dark teeth and jutting cheekbones, in the purple circles that now encircled her dulled eyes.

“Swine!” she cursed.

Many of the gypsies who found themselves near her looked at each other, recognizing themselves in the other women, sharing in silence the pain over the beauty and youth that had been taken from them.

“Now look at me, Ana Vega!”

It was a wasted old woman, almost bald and toothless. Her name was Luisa and she belonged to the Vega family, like about twenty of the gypsies who had been arrested in the La Cartuja settlement. Ana looked at her.
Is that my fate?
she wondered. Was that what old Luisa was trying to tell her? She forced herself to smile at the old woman.

“Take a good look at me,” insisted the woman. “What do you see?”

Ana opened her hands in a gesture of incomprehension, not knowing what to respond.

“Pride?” asked the old woman as a reply.

“What good does it do us?” Ana asked with a disdainful shrug.

“It makes you the most beautiful woman in Spain. Yes,” affirmed Luisa at the indifference with which Ana received the compliment. “The King and Ensenada can separate us from our men so we stop having children. That is what they say they are trying to do, right? Finish off our race. They can beat us and starve us to death; they can even steal our beauty; but they can never take away our pride.”

The gypsies had stopped feeling sorry for themselves and held their heads up high as they listened to the old woman.

“Don’t back down, Ana Vega. You have defended us. You have fought for the others and they lashed your back for it. That is your beauty! Don’t look for any other, girl. Someday they will forget about us, the gypsies, as has always happened. I won’t see it.”

The old woman was quiet for a moment and no one dared to disrupt her silence.

“When that day comes, they shouldn’t have managed to break us, do you all understand that?” she added in a hoarse voice, running her sad gaze over the basement. “Do it for me, for those left behind.”

That same night, Ana ran to see the children who were coming back from working the fields.

“You promised me—” the sentry started to complain.

“Frías, never trust a gypsy’s word,” she interrupted him, as her eyes searched for Salvador among the others.

“We’re leaving.”

It was night; the bells had already sounded the call to prayer. Milagros gave a start and turned toward her husband, who had suddenly appeared in the window opening. When she heard his tone of voice, Bartola, who was whiling away the time sitting lazy and insolent in a chair, hastened to take refuge in the room where the little girl slept.

“Where are you planning on going at this time of night?” inquired Milagros.

“We have an appointment.”

“With who?”

“A party?”

“I didn’t know … what party?”

“Stop asking questions and come with me!”

On the street a carriage pulled by two richly harnessed mules was waiting for them. Its door boasted an engraved coat of arms picked out in gold. The coachman was waiting in the driver’s seat with two liveried footmen standing on the ground with lanterns in their hands.

“And the others?” asked Milagros, surprised.

“They are waiting for us there. Get in.” He pushed her from behind.

“Where …?”

“Get in!”

Milagros sat on a hard seat upholstered in red silk. The mules began to trot as soon as Pedro closed the door.

“Who’s throwing this party?” she insisted as Pedro settled into the seat in front of her.

He remained silent. Milagros searched in the gaze her husband fixed on her and a strong shiver blended in with the carriage’s jolting; it was an inexpressive gaze, which didn’t show hatred, bitterness, excitement or even ambition. A few days had passed since their argument about the Marquis of Torre Girón. Pedro had stopped sleeping at home and she fantasized even more frequently about the attentions of that nobleman who had treated her with such courtesy when the puppeteers were performing. Marina encouraged her, day after day.

“Aren’t you going to answer me?”

Pedro didn’t.

Milagros saw that they were crossing the Plaza Mayor; from then on the carriage turned again and again through the dark, silent network of narrow, tortuous streets that surrounded the royal palace under construction. The carriage stopped in front of a large house whose side door was lit up by one of the servants when she stepped out. What she could clearly see, as soon as she set her bare foot on the ground and looked up, was that there wasn’t going to be any sort of party celebrated there: the place was deserted and in silence, the house gloomy with no lights in the windows.

She was struck by panic. “What are you going to do to me?”

The question was drowned in a sob when Pedro pushed her inside and shoved her behind a servant with a candelabrum through hallways, passing rooms and going up stairs; only the men’s footsteps and Milagros’s muffled crying broke the silence that enveloped the mansion. Soon they stopped in front of a door; the candlelight reflected in shards on the hardwood panels.

The servant knocked delicately on the door and, without waiting for a response, opened it. Milagros could make out a luxurious bedroom. She waited for the servant to enter, but he moved aside to let her in. She tried to do the same so that Pedro would precede her, but he pushed her again.

At that moment the impassive look her husband had been giving her over the entire journey took on hair-raising meaning; Milagros understood the error she had made in following him: Pedro wasn’t going to allow her to go to the arms of the marquis. He thought that one day or
another she would become his lover and stop singing for other noblemen; then he would lose control of her … and her money. Foreseeing that, her husband had anticipated the events. He had sold her!

“No …” she managed to implore, trying to back away.

Pedro shoved her violently and closed the door.

“Don’t be afraid.”

Milagros shifted her gaze to the immense canopied bed on the opposite side of the room where, on an armchair, beside a fireplace of delicate lines in pink marble, sat a large man, with a pearly face and straw-like hair, dressed in a simple white shirt, britches and stockings. She knew him from some parties. How could she forget those cheeks that seemed to shine? He was the Baron of San Glorio. The man placed a pinch of snuff on the back of one hand, sniffed, sneezed, wiped his nose with a handkerchief and invited her with a simple gesture to sit on the armchair in front of him.

Milagros didn’t move. She was trembling. She turned her head toward the door.

“You can’t do anything,” the nobleman warned her with a calmness that frightened her even more. “You have a husband who is too greedy … and a spendthrift. A terrible combination.”

While the baron spoke, Milagros ran toward a picture window and threw open the heavy drapery.

“We’re three stories up,” he warned. “Would you prefer to orphan your daughter? Come here with me,” he added.

Milagros, cornered, looked around the huge room.

“Come,” he insisted, “let’s chat for a while.”

She turned to inspect the door.

The baron sighed, got up in annoyance, headed over there and opened it wide: a couple of servants were posted behind it.

“Shall we sit down?” he suggested. “I would like …”

“Pedro!” Milagros managed to shout between sobs. “For your daughter!”

“Your husband is kissing his gold,” spat out the baron as he closed the door. “That is the only thing he cares about and you know it. Wasn’t he the one who brought you here?”

The little hope that Milagros had been able to maintain about Pedro vanished at the crudeness of the baron’s words. Money! She knew it. Still,
hearing it from the mouth of an aristocrat was like being stabbed with a knife.

“Barefoot Girl,” the baron interrupted her reflections, “my servants would pounce on you like animals in heat, and your husband is nothing more than a vulgar ruffian who sells you like a whore. In this house, the only man who is going to treat you gallantly is me.” He let a moment pass. “Sit down. Let’s drink and chat before …”