The Barefoot Queen (84 page)

“Pretty name.” Fray Joaquín’s words were accompanied by a sincere, kind expression on his face. “We will find her.”

The gypsy girl collapsed at the simple promise. How long had it been since anyone had shown her affection? Lust, greed; they all wanted her body, her songs, her dances, her money. How long had it been since they had offered her comfort? She sought support in the window frame. Fray Joaquín took a step toward her, but he stopped. Behind him appeared Francisca, who passed him without even a glance and approached Milagros.

“What are you planning on doing with her, Father?” she asked in annoyance as she escorted the gypsy to the bed.

Fray Joaquín stifled an impulse to help the old woman and watched how, with difficulty, she managed to lie Milagros down.

“Are you OK?” he asked.

“She’d be better out of this house,” replied Francisca.

Milagros dozed for what was left of the day. Although her body needed it, she was tormented by dreams that didn’t let her sleep. Pedro, knife in hand. Her girl, María. Her body in the hands of noblemen, abused. The groundlings at the Príncipe booing her … However, when she opened her
eyes and realized where she was, she calmed down and her senses grew drowsy until she fell asleep again. Francisca watched over her.

“You can rest for a while if you’d like,” offered the friar to the old woman after a few hours.

“And leave you alone with this woman?”

FROM HER
room, Milagros heard the voices of Fray Joaquín and Francisca, arguing.

“Why?” he repeated for the third time.

She hadn’t seen him once the entire morning. “He’s out,” was all Francisca answered before going to mass and leaving her alone. Milagros had heard them both return, but when she was about to go into the hallway, the voices had stopped her. She knew that she was the reason for the argument and she didn’t want to witness it.

“Because she’s a gypsy!” the old washerwoman finally exploded at the priest’s insistence. “Because she is a married woman and because she’s a whore!”

Milagros dug her nails into her hands and clenched her eyes shut.

She had said it. If Fray Joaquín hadn’t heard about it before, he knew it now.

“She is a sinner who needs our help,” she heard him answer.

Fray Joaquín knows about it!
thought Milagros. He hadn’t denied it, his words showed no surprise: a “sinner” was all he had said.

“I’ve treated you well,” Fray Joaquín proffered. “This is how you thank me for it, abandoning me when I need you most.”

“You don’t need me, Father.”

“But she … Milagros … And you, where will you go?”

“The priest at San Miguel promised me …” confessed the old woman after a few seconds of silence. “It is a sin to live under the same roof shared by a prostitute and a man of religion,” she offered as an excuse.

The parish of San Miguel was where Francisca went to mass every day. The old woman begged him with a weary gesture to let her leave and Fray Joaquín stepped aside to let her pass.

Don Ignacio, the Marquis of Caja, had not been exaggerating at all.
Every door in Madrid will slam in your face,
he had warned him when the
friar insisted on continuing to live with Milagros. Luckily, the nobleman had taken care of the denunciation.

“I can intercede before the ministers of His Majesty and the High Court,” he had told him, “but I can’t silence the rumors that the neighbors and the constables have spread …”

“There is nothing sinful in my behavior,” he said in his defense.

“I am not the one judging you. I think highly of you, but people’s imaginations are as vast as their ability to slander. Maliciousness will bar your access to all those people that up until now rewarded you with their friendship or simply with their company. No one will want to have any link to the Barefoot Girl.”

How right he had been! But it wasn’t only the nobles. Not even Francisca, the washerwoman he had saved from certain death on the streets of Madrid, accepted the situation.
You are ruining her life, Father,
Don Ignacio warned him.

The house fell silent when Fray Joaquín closed the door. He looked toward the room where Milagros was. Was he sure that there was nothing sinful in his behavior? He had just given up the marquis’s chaplaincy for that woman. He’d lost a chapel benefice over a gypsy woman … Suddenly, Francisca’s betrayal had turned the marquis’s warnings into a painful reality and he was overcome with doubts.

Milagros heard the friar head toward the room that overlooked the San Miguel Plaza, on the extreme opposite side of the narrow dwelling. She thought she could sense the feelings overwhelming the friar priest in the slowness of his steps. Fray Joaquín knew about her life; she had spent the whole morning speculating about the sudden, unexpected appearance of the friar and she couldn’t explain it … She thought she heard a sigh. She left the room; her bare feet muffled the sound as she went down the hall. She found him seated, downcast, his hands intertwined across his chest. He sensed her presence and turned his head.

“It’s not true,” professed Milagros. “I am no whore.”

The priest smiled sadly and invited her to sit down.

“I have never given myself willingly to any man that wasn’t my husband …” she began to explain.

They didn’t even eat; their hunger disappeared as Milagros’s confessions spilled out. They drank water as they spoke. He observed her first sip with
some suspicion; she was surprised to taste a drink that didn’t scratch her throat or dry out her mouth. “Cachita,” Fray Joaquín whispered nostalgically when she told him about her father’s death. “Don’t you cry,” scolded the gypsy, her voice choking as she told him about her first rape. The darkness surrounded them, seated facing each other. He tried to find, in that face marked by hardship, a trace of the sauciness of that girl who stuck out her tongue or winked at him in Triana; she explained herself, her gaunt fingers flying in front of her, allowing her to cry unafraid as she regurgitated her grief. When there was silence, Milagros didn’t lower her gaze; Fray Joaquín, perturbed by her presence and her beauty, ended up looking away.

“And you?” She broke the silence, surprising him. “What brought you here?”

Fray Joaquín told her, but he kept quiet how he’d tried to free himself of her memory by flagellating himself during the missions, in the darkness of the churches in remote Andalusian towns, or how little by little he ended up taking refuge in her smile, or how eagerly, when he reached Madrid, he went to the Coliseo del Príncipe to listen to her and see her perform. Why was he hiding his feelings? he admonished himself. He had dreamed of that moment for so long … And what if she rejected him again?

“That’s my life up to now,” he declared, burying his doubts. “And yesterday I gave up my benefice at the marquis’s chapel,” he added as an epilogue.

Milagros straightened her neck when she heard the news. She let a second pass, then two …

“You gave it up … for me?” she asked after a little while.

He half closed his eyes and allowed himself the trace of a smile. “For me,” he declared categorically.

THEY BOTH
agreed that Blas, the constable, was the person who’d come with Pedro when he tried to kill Milagros. Fray Joaquín told her about the old gypsy woman he’d seen leaving the building with a straw mattress and some bundles.

“Bartola,” said Milagros.

“She was moving out of the apartment,” maintained the priest. He also told her about the constable’s words that had alerted him as to what was going on upstairs.

“Blas. It must have been him,” said Milagros, although she didn’t even remember him being there. “He is always with Pedro. If anyone knows where my husb—where that rogue is,” she corrected herself, “it’s Blas. He has to know where my daughter is.”

The next morning, early, after buying freshly baked white bread, some vegetables and mutton in the Plaza Mayor, and paying an Asturian from the Puerta del Sol to escort him back home with a large pitcher of water, Fray Joaquín was finally ready to set out in search of the constable. Milagros was in the doorway. “Go on!” she ordered to put an end to his list of warnings:
Don’t go out; don’t open the door to anyone; don’t answer
 …

“Get going for once and for all!” shouted the gypsy, expecting to hear his footsteps fading into the distance.

Fray Joaquín rushed downstairs like a naughty boy caught red-handed. The bustle of Mayor Street and urgency of finding the constable, of helping Milagros, of making sure that the spark he saw in her eyes when he solemnly promised to find María didn’t go out, made him banish all doubt. Not so for Milagros, who paced through the house from the room that overlooked San Miguel Plaza, where Fray Joaquín had slept, to the one over the silversmiths’, where she had lain down.

During the night she hadn’t been able to fall asleep. And he, was he sleeping? she’d asked herself over and over again as she lay in bed. It must have been the first time in her life that she’d spent the night without the company of one of her kind, and that made her nervous. After all, the friar was a man. She trembled at the mere thought that Fray Joaquín … Cowering in her bed she let the hours pass, aware of any movement in the hallway, as the faces of the noblemen who had forced themselves on her paraded before her eyes. Nothing happened.

Of course not!
she told herself in the morning, after Fray Joaquín left; the sunlight erasing suspicions and nightmares.
Fray Joaquín is a good man. Isn’t that right?
she asked the Immaculate Virgin who presided over the room; she ran a finger over her blue and gold robe. The Virgin would help her.

María was the only thing that mattered to her now. But what would she do after getting her girl back? Fray Joaquín had made her a proposition years back, but she couldn’t be sure of his intentions now. Milagros hesitated. She felt a deep fondness for him, but …

“Why are you looking at me?” she addressed the statue again. “What
do you want me to do? He’s the only thing I have; the only person willing to help me; the only one who …” She turned her head toward the straw mattress. A cloak, a headscarf, the sheet … She pulled on it and covered the image. “When I get María back I will decide what to do about my relationship with Fray Joaquín,” she declared to the wrapped statue in front of her.

You see that, girl?
Then the words of Santiago Fernández when they were walking through the Andévalo echoed in her ears, as if he were beside her, as if those vast stretches of arid land opened up before her as the old patriarch pointed to the horizon.
That is our route. For how long? What does it matter? The only important thing is the present moment.

“The only thing important is the present moment,” she told the Virgin.

FRAY JOAQUÍN
had trouble finding the constable. “He patrols Lavapiés,” Milagros had assured him, but that day they were opening Madrid’s new bullring, built beyond the Alcalá Gate, and people had taken to the streets expecting a great bullfight. The priest walked along the streets of Magdalena, La Hoz, Ave María and many others until, once again in the Lavapiés plaza, he saw a couple of constables dressed in their black suits with ruffs and with their truncheons. Blas recognized him and, before the friar could reach them, he excused himself and went over to Fray Joaquín.

“Congratulations, Father,” he exclaimed once he was standing before him. “You did what I didn’t dare to.”

Fray Joaquín stuttered. “You admit that?”

“I have been thinking a lot about it, yes.”

Were his words born of his fear of being denounced or were they sincere? The constable imagined what was going through the friar’s head.

“We all make mistakes,” he tried to convince him.

“You call a woman’s murder a mistake?”

“Murder?” Blas feigned ignorance. “I left the gypsies in an argument between husband and wife …”

“But on the street you warned the old gypsy woman to be careful, that he would kill her too,” the friar interrupted him.

“A figure of speech, a figure of speech. Was he really trying to kill her?”

Fray Joaquín shook his head. “What do you know of Pedro García?”
he asked, and immediately waved his hand to silence the constable’s excuses. “We have to find him!” he added firmly. “A mother has a right to see her daughter.”

Blas snorted, pursed his lips and looked at the point on the ground where he rested his truncheon; he remembered the little girl’s sadness.

“They left Madrid,” he decided to confess. “Just yesterday they got on a wagon headed to Seville.”

“Are you sure? Was the girl with him?”

“Yes. The girl was with him.” Blas looked the friar in the eyes before continuing. “That gypsy is a bad person, Father. There was nothing more he could get out of Madrid, and after you intervened, he was sure to have problems. He is going to take refuge in Triana, with his people, but he will kill the Barefoot Girl if she dares to go anywhere near, I assure you. He will never allow her to reveal to the others what happened these past few years and ruin his life.” He paused and then added seriously, “Father, make no mistake about it: before getting on that wagon back home, Pedro García will have paid one of his relatives to kill the Barefoot Girl. I know him; I know what he’s like and how he behaves. I’m sure of it, Father, sure. And they will follow through. She is a Vega and no longer of any use to anyone. They will kill her … and you along with her.”

Triana and death. With his stomach clenched and his heart beating wildly, Fray Joaquín rushed back home. It was public knowledge that he had taken Milagros in: Francisca, the priest at San Miguel, the constables, they all knew; the marquis had warned him about that. What would whoever wanted to know her whereabouts do? They would start by going to the neighbors and from there anybody could find out where she was living. And what if someone was bursting into the house in that very moment? Desperate, he raced back. He didn’t even close the door behind him when he ran up to Milagros’s room, shouting her name. She received him standing, worry reflected in her face at his scandalous entrance.