The Barefoot Queen (83 page)

It surprised the men as well. They stopped. They didn’t pull out any weapon—maybe they had none—although Caridad saw that they carried rough walking sticks. It pained her to drop the packet of candied almonds but she did; then she grabbed the chair and held it between her and the men, slightly raised, threatening. The beggars looked at each other.

“We only wanted something to eat.”

Their shift in attitude emboldened Caridad. Hunger was a sensation she knew well.

“Throw those sticks aside. Far,” she demanded when the others were about to obey her. “Now you can come closer,” she added, still holding fast to the chair.

“We don’t mean to do you any harm, Negress, we just …”

Caridad looked at them and felt strong. She was well fed and had been working hard in the fields, plowing and planting many, many furrows. She let go of the chair and knelt to pick up the almonds.

“I know you won’t harm me,” she then asserted, turning her back to them. “Not because you don’t wish to, that I can’t know, but because you can’t,” she added, to erase the smile she found when she turned to face them again.

Servando and Lucio were the names of those beggars Caridad fed with the leftovers of her stew.

The following night she bolted the door; they banged on it and begged, and finally she let them in. The day after they didn’t even wait for her to finish her work in the attic of the sacristy: they were loitering around her house when she arrived.

“Out!” she shouted at them from a distance.

“Caridad …”

“For God’s sake …”

“Get gone!”

“One last time …”

By that time she had reached them. She was about to threaten to call for the constable, which was what Fermín had suggested she do when he found out who they were, but she noticed a small ember in Servando’s hand.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to it.

“This?” the man asked in turn, showing her a cigarette.

Caridad asked him for it. Servando handed her a small tube of ground tobacco rolled in thick, rough paper, which Caridad examined with curiosity. She was familiar with
tusas,
thin cigars like that, but rolled with cornhusks. Nobody wanted to smoke them.

“It’s cheap,” Lucio put in. “That’s what people buy when they can’t afford cigars like the ones you smoke.”

“Where do they sell them?” she asked.

“Nowhere. It’s illegal. Everyone makes their own.”

Caridad took a drag on the cigarette. It was hot. She coughed. Disgusting. In any case … she thought, she had plenty of tobacco scraps that, when she had time, she ground up and rolled into cigarettes that not even Don Valerio would accept anymore. That night, Servando and Lucio came back to eat stew. That night and many more. They brought her paper, anything they could find, and Caridad cut it up into small rectangles and filled it with the cut tobacco. She gave them the first cigarettes on credit. They paid her when they came back for more. Soon, Caridad had to start choosing the worst tobacco leaves, which she had used to make cigars before, to grind up and wrap in little paper rectangles. She continued to make the cigars for Don Valerio and the Jesuits, choosing the highest quality leaves; she also kept her own smoke aside, of course, but the rest went into the cigarettes.

The day came when Fermín had to go all the way to Madrid to exchange two sacks filled to bursting with
reales de vellón
and
maravedís
into a few marvelous gold doubloons. The sacristan didn’t approve of Caridad’s activities and he warned her.

However: “I don’t know why but I’ve grown fond of you,” he admitted after scolding her and handing her the gold doubloons.

“Because you are like that old woman I told you about when we first met: grumpy, but a good person.”

“This good person won’t be able to do anything for you if you get arrested—”

“Fermín,” she interrupted, stretching out the last vowel. “They could also arrest me for making cigars for Don Valerio, but you didn’t warn me about that.”

The old sacristan lowered his eyelids.

“I don’t like those two you’re working with,” he said after a little while. “I don’t trust them.”

It was Caridad who was silent then for a few seconds. Soon she smiled and, though she didn’t know why, Melchor’s face came into her mind. What would the gypsy have answered?

That spring night, as she watched the wind-up toy spin, Caridad remembered the reply she had given the sacristan.

“They didn’t fail me today. Tomorrow … we’ll see.”

“Call the patrol.”

“What happened?”

Many of the neighbors in the building milled around the friar. A couple of them carried oil lamps. “Are you hurt?” repeated a woman who kept touching him. Fray Joaquín was panting, flushed, trembling. He couldn’t see Milagros inside the apartment. Yes, she was there: she had slid down the wall and remained crouched down, naked. He managed to see through the faint light, the people crowding the landing. “Did that ruffian hurt you?” insisted the woman. “Look,” he then heard. He was filled with anguish when he saw how most of the people turned and focused their attention on the young woman. They shouldn’t see her naked! He shook off the impertinent woman who was feeling his arms and he managed to shove his way through the crowd.

“What are you looking at?” he shouted before closing the door behind him.

He could hear the sudden silence and looked at Milagros. He wanted to go over to her, but instead he remained by the door for a moment. The gypsy girl didn’t react, as if no one had come in.

“Milagros,” he whispered.

She continued to look off into the distance. Fray Joaquín went over and knelt down. He fought to keep his eyes from dropping to her breasts or …

“Milagros,” he hastened to whisper again, “it’s Joaquín, Fray Joaquín.”

She lifted an empty, blank face.

“Holy Mother, what have they done to you?”

He wanted to hug her. He didn’t dare. Someone knocked on the door. Fray Joaquín looked around the room. With one hand he picked up the gypsy’s torn shirt from the floor. Her skirt … They knocked harder.

“Open up in the name of the law!”

He couldn’t let them see her naked, although he didn’t dare to dress her, or touch her …

“Open up!”

The priest stood up and took off his habit, which he placed over the gypsy girl’s shoulders.

“Stand up, I beg of you,” he whispered to her.

He crouched and took her elbow. The door burst open at a constable’s violent shoulder slam just as Milagros was docilely obeying and getting to her feet. With trembling hands, ignoring the people who were entering the room, the friar buttoned the hook and eye on his habit over Milagros’s breasts and turned to find a pair of constables and the neighbors from the landing, who were watching the scene, perplexed and disconcerted, although the closed cassock fell plumb to the floor and kept them from seeing the woman’s body. Suddenly Fray Joaquín realized that they weren’t looking at her, but at him. Stripped of his habit, all he wore was an old shirt and some simple threadbare underwear.

“What is this scandal?” inquired one of the constables after looking him up and down.

The priest was embarrassed by the way they were staring at him.

“The only scandal I can see”—he turned on them as if he could get the upper hand that way—“is that you have broken the door.”

“Reverend,” replied the constable, “you are in your underwear with … with the Barefoot Girl,” he dragged out his words before continuing, “a married woman who is wearing your cassock and who seems …” He then pointed to Milagros’s legs, there where the habit opened slightly and revealed the shape of her thighs. “She is naked. Doesn’t that seem like enough of a scandal to you?”

The murmurs of the neighbors accompanied his declaration. Fray Joaquín demanded calm with a motion of his hands, as if that could put a stop to the accusations of those observing him.

“I can explain everything …”

“That is exactly what I asked you to do in the first place.”

“Very well,” he yielded. “But is it necessary that all of Madrid listen in?”

“To your homes!” ordered the constable after a few moments of reflection. “It’s late and tomorrow is a work day. Out!” he ended up shouting to finally get them going.

In the end he didn’t know how to explain it. Should he denounce Pedro García? He hadn’t injured her; no one would take it into account. The gypsy would come back.… On the other hand, if they believed the denunciation, what would then happen to Milagros? Sometimes witnesses were jailed until the trial, and Milagros.… she had already had enough problems with the law. What was he, a friar, doing there in the Barefoot Girl’s house? the constable asked him again with his eyes still on Milagros, who stood there in the cassock, indifferent to what was going on. Fray Joaquín kept thinking: he wanted to be with Milagros, help her, defend her …

“Who attacked you on the landing?” the constable wanted to know. “They neighbors said …”

“His Excellency the Marquis of Caja!” improvised the priest.

“The marquis attacked you?”

“No, no, no. I mean that the marquis will give you all the references you need about me; I hold the benefice at his private chapel … I am … I was his wife’s tutor, the marchioness, and I—”

“And her?” The constable pointed to Milagros.

“Do you know her story?” Fray Joaquín pursed his lips as he turned toward the gypsy. He didn’t see the constables, but he knew they had both nodded. “She needs help. I will take care of her.”

“We have to inform the High Court about this incident, do you understand?”

“First speak with his excellency. I beg you.”

SHE WAS
awoken by the bustle of Mayor Street; it was strange, different to Amor de Dios Street. The light that came in through the window hurt her eyes. Where was she? On a rickety old bed. A narrow, long room with … She tried to focus her vision: a statue of the Virgin presided over the room. She shifted on the bed. She moaned when she felt she was
naked beneath the blanket. Had they forced themselves on her again? No, it couldn’t be. Her head wanted to burst, but gradually she began to remember Pedro running the knife-point over her body, her neck, and her husband’s murderous gaze. And then, what had happened then?

“Are you awake at last?”

The imperious voice of the old woman didn’t match her slow, pained movements. She approached with difficulty and dropped some clothes onto the bed; her own, Milagros saw.

“It’s almost noon, get dressed,” she ordered.

“Give me a bit of wine,” Milagros asked.

“You can’t drink.”

“Why?”

“Get dressed,” the old woman repeated brusquely.

Milagros felt unable to argue. The old woman walked wearily to the window and opened it wide. A stream of fresh air entered along with the noise of the merchants coming and going and the carriage traffic. Then she walked toward the door.

“Where am I?”

“In Fray Joaquín’s house,” the woman answered before leaving. “It seems he knows you.”

Fray Joaquín! That was the missing link she needed to connect her memories: the fight, the screams, the friar kneeling beside her, the constables, the people. He had shown up and saved her life. It had been five years since they had last seen each other. “I told you he was a good person, María,” she mumbled. Flashes of happy times in Triana forced a smile to her face, but she soon remembered that when the friar burst into the house she had been naked. She saw him again kneeling before her when she was naked and drunk. The burning in her stomach rose up to her mouth. How much more did he know about her life?

It calmed her to learn from Francisca that Fray Joaquín had gone out earlier. “To the house of the marquis, his protector,” the old woman added. Milagros wanted to see him, but at the same time she was afraid of doing so.

“Why don’t you take advantage now?” the old woman interrupted her thoughts after bringing over a bowl of milk and a piece of hard bread; the gypsy was already dressed.

“Take advantage … to do what?”

“To leave, go back with your people. I’ll tell the friar that …”

Milagros stopped listening to her; she felt incapable of explaining that she had no one and no place to go to. Pedro had tried to kill her in her own home, so she couldn’t go back there. Fray Joaquín had saved her and, even though she couldn’t find an explanation for his presence there, she was sure that he would help her.

“I have to find my daughter.”

With those stammering words, she received the friar priest. She was standing waiting for him, with her back to the window that overlooked the street of the silversmiths. She heard the door to the house open and Fray Joaquín whispering with Francisca. She looked at her clothes and carefully smoothed the skirt with one hand. She heard him walk through the hallway. She smoothed her rough, spiky hair too.

He smiled from the door to the room. Neither of them moved.

“What’s your daughter’s name?” he asked.

Milagros closed her eyes tightly. Her throat was seized up. She was going to cry. She couldn’t. She didn’t want to.

“María,” she managed to articulate.