The Barefoot Queen (87 page)

“Gypsy,” she then blubbered.

They melted in an embrace and silenced the thousands of words in their throats with a thousand kisses.

After leaving the apartment over the silversmiths’, Fray Joaquín pulled Milagros to a house on Pez Street, a road crammed with buildings filled with proud, haughty Madrileños, just as in Lavapiés, Barquillo and the capital’s other districts. The priest, fearing rumors, didn’t even dare go to a secret guesthouse, so he negotiated the rent of a couple of dingy rooms from the widow of a soldier who slept by the hearth and didn’t ask questions. Along the way, he told Milagros about his conversation with Blas.

“Well, then let’s go to Triana,” she said quickly, grabbing him by the sleeve to stop him as they went up Ancha de San Bernardo Street.

The crowd went happily in the opposite direction, toward Alcalá Street and the bullring.

“Pedro would kill you,” the priest objected as he examined the buildings and side streets.

“My daughter is there!”

Fray Joaquín stopped. “And what would we do?” he asked. “Go into the San Miguel alley and kidnap her? Do you think we have even the slightest chance? Pedro will get there before us, and as soon as he does he will spread all sorts of malicious lies about you; the entire gypsy settlement will consider you a …” The friar stopped there, his words hanging
in the air. “You wouldn’t even get as far as … we wouldn’t even get across the pontoon bridge. Come on,” he added tenderly a few seconds later.

Fray Joaquín kept walking, but Milagros didn’t follow him; the flood of people seemed to swallow him up. When he realized, the friar retraced his steps.

“What does it matter if I get killed?” she murmured between sobs, tears already running down her cheeks. “I was already dead before …”

“Don’t say that.” Fray Joaquín was about to take her by the shoulders but he stopped himself. “There has to be another solution, and I will find it. I promise you.”

Another solution? Milagros frowned as she clung to that promise. She nodded and walked beside him. It was true, she admitted to herself when they turned down Pez Street: Pedro would defame her, and Bartola would obediently confirm all the slander the bastard could think up. A shiver ran down her spine as she imagined Reyes, La Trianera, vilifying her. The Garcías would enjoy publicly repudiating her; the Carmonas would do it too, their honor offended. Milagros had broken the law: there were no gypsy prostitutes, and all the gypsies would turn against her. How could she show up in the San Miguel alley in those circumstances?

However, the days passed and Fray Joaquín didn’t fulfill his promise. “Give me time,” he asked her one morning when she insisted. “The marquis will help us,” he assured her the next day knowing that he wouldn’t be able to go to his house. “I wrote a letter to the prior of San Jacinto, he will know what to do,” he lied the third time she reminded him what he had promised.

Fray Joaquín was afraid of losing her, of her getting hurt or killed; but to avoid facing up to her questions he left her alone in a filthy room with a rickety bed and a broken chair as its only furnishings. “You shouldn’t go out, people know who you are and Pedro will have the Garcías looking for you.” Echoing his excuses, with the laughter of her little girl ringing constantly in her ears, Milagros gave in to her tears. She was sure that the Garcías would mistreat her. The images of her daughter in the hands of those heartless people were too much for her. Sober, she couldn’t bear them … She asked for wine, but the widow refused to give her any. She argued in vain with her. “You can leave if you like,” the woman replied. “Where?” Milagros asked. Where could she go?

He always came back with something: a sweet; white bread; a colorful
ribbon. And he would chat with her, cheering her up and treating her with affection, but that wasn’t what she needed. Where was his gypsy pluck? Fray Joaquín was unable to hold her gaze the way the men of her race could. Milagros sensed that he followed her with his eyes the entire time they were together, but when she faced him, he pretended he hadn’t been. He seemed content with her mere presence, with smelling her, brushing past her. Her nights were filled with bad dreams: Pedro and the parade of nobles attacking her. Yet she began to reject the idea that Fray Joaquín could act like them.

In a couple of weeks they were out of money to pay the exorbitant rent charged by the widow to guarantee her silence.

“I never thought we would need it,” said the friar, contrite, as if he had failed her.

“And now?” she asked.

“I will find—”

“You’re lying!”

Fray Joaquín wanted to defend himself, but Milagros didn’t allow him to.

“You lie, you lie and you lie,” she shouted with her fists clenched. “There’s nothing, isn’t that right? No marquis, no letters to the prior, nothing.” The silence confirmed her doubts. “I’m going to Triana,” she decided then.

“That would be crazy.”

Milagros’s decision, the need to leave those squalid rooms before the widow threw them out or, even worse, denounced them as adulterers, the lack of money and, above all, the mere possibility that she would leave him, made Fray Joaquín react.

“This is the last time I’m putting my trust in you. Don’t let me down, Father,” she relented.

And he didn’t. The truth was that he did nothing else for the next few days except think about how to resolve the situation. It was a preposterous idea, but he had no alternative: he had been dreaming about Milagros for years and he had just given up everything he had for her. What could be more preposterous than that? He went to a secondhand clothing shop and exchanged his best habit (of the two he owned) for coarse black women’s clothes, including gloves and a mantilla.

“You want me to put that on?” Milagros tried to refuse.

“You can’t walk along the roads as a gypsy without papers. I’m just trying to keep us from getting arrested on our trip … to Barrancos.” The clothes slid from Milagros’s hands and fell to the floor. “Yes,” he said before she could speak. “It’s not that far out of our way. It’s just another road, a few days more. Remember what the old healer woman said? She said something like if there was any place your grandfather could be found, it was Barrancos. The day we spoke, you told me that you didn’t make it there after the roundup, and things haven’t changed much since then. Perhaps …”

“I spat at his feet,” Milagros then said, reminding him of the rage she had shown toward her grandfather. “I told him—”

“What does it matter what you did or said to him? He always loved you and your daughter has Vega blood. If we can find him, Melchor will know what to do, of that I’m sure. And if he isn’t there anymore, maybe we can find some other family member who wasn’t arrested. Most of them deal in tobacco and we can probably find news of someone.”

Milagros was no longer listening. Thinking of her grandfather filled her with both hope and fear. She hadn’t heeded his warnings, or her mother’s. They had both known what would happen if she gave herself to a García. The last thing she had heard about her grandfather was that he had been captured in Madrid and had managed to escape. Maybe … yes, maybe he was still alive. And if anyone could face up to Pedro, it was Melchor Vega. But …

She knelt down to pick the black clothes up off the floor. Fray Joaquín stopped speaking when he saw her. Milagros didn’t want to think about the possibility that her grandfather had disowned her and would refuse to help her out of spite.

“
HAIL MARY
, full of grace.”

“Conceived without sin,” said Milagros, downcast, to the young maid who opened the door to the house. She knew what she had to do next, the same thing she had done a league back, in Alcorcón: intertwine the fingers of her gloved hands, showing Fray Joaquín’s rosary that she carried between them, and murmur what she could remember of those prayers Caridad had taught her for her baptism, which the friar repeated insistently along the way.

“Alms to send this poor, miserable widow to the Dominican convent in Lepe,” begged Fray Joaquín, lifting his voice over her chanting.

Through the black mantilla that covered her head and hid her dark face, the gypsy looked at the maid out of the corner of her eye. She would respond like all the others: refusing at first only to end up opening her eyes incredibly wide when Fray Joaquín revealed the beautiful face of the Immaculate Virgin he was carrying. Then she would stutter, tell them to wait, close the door and run in search of her mistress.

That was what had happened in Alcorcón and in Madrid as well, before they went through the Segovia Gate. Fray Joaquín decided to alleviate their poverty by joining the army of pilgrims and alms-seekers who carried saints through the streets of Spain. The former dressed in capes adorned with shells, sackcloth, staffs taller than they were, gourds and hats for supposed pilgrimages to Jerusalem or countless other foreign locations. The latter were friars, priests or abbots asking for a mite for all sorts of pious works. The people gave alms to the pilgrims in exchange for kissing their relics or scapulars that they claimed came from the Holy Land. With those who carried saints, they prayed before the images, stroked them, kissed them and drew them close to children, the elderly and especially the sick before dropping a few coins into their almsbox or bag.

And of all the sacred images, there was none like the Immaculate Virgin that Fray Joaquín unveiled to the shock of the maids in the wealthy homes. As Milagros had foreseen, the same thing that had happened in Alcorcón happened again in Móstoles, little more than three leagues from Madrid. Soon after, the lady of the house opened the door, spellbound before the beauty and opulence of the statue of the Virgin, and invited them in. Milagros did so cowering, as Fray Joaquín had instructed her, murmuring prayers and hiding her bare feet beneath the long black skirt that dragged along the floor.

Once inside, the gypsy sought out the furthest corner from the makeshift altar where Fray Joaquín placed the Virgin, while he introduced her as his sister who had just been widowed and had promised to enter the convent. They didn’t even look at her; all eyes were on the Immaculate Virgin. “Can she be touched?” they asked cautiously. “And kissed?” they added excitedly. Fray Joaquín led prayers before allowing them to do so.

And while they made enough money to continue their journey, eat and
sleep in the inns or in those same houses if there were none—Milagros always separated from the rest, taking refuge in her supposed vow of silence—their progress was slow, irritatingly slow. For safety they always looked for someone to travel with, and sometimes they had to wait, as when the ladies of the house insisted on demanding the presence of their husbands, children and, on occasion, even the village’s parish priest, with whom Fray Joaquín would converse until he had convinced him of their good intentions. The shows of devotion and the prayers dragged on endlessly. When they needed money they spent entire days showing the Virgin, like in Almaraz, before crossing the River Tagus, where they were well paid for allowing the statue to protect a sick man in his room.

“And what if he doesn’t get better?” Milagros asked Fray Joaquín when he brought her food to eat in the room they had given her so she could remain in her self-imposed silence.

“Let Our Lady be the one to decide. She will know.”

Then he smiled and Milagros, surprised, thought she could make out a hint of mischievousness in Fray Joaquín’s face. The friar had changed … or was it she? Perhaps both, she told herself.

Milagros found the nights particularly hard; she was abruptly awoken by nightmares, sweaty, confused, short of breath: men forcing themselves on her; the entire Coliseo del Príncipe laughing at her; Old María … Why was she dreaming of the old healer so many years since last seeing her? While her nights were torturous, during the day the mere possibility of seeing her grandfather again gave her the courage to tolerate those coarse black clothes that chafed her skin. The tedium of the prayers and the hours spent alone in homes and inns, so their hosts wouldn’t discover their lies, became time to fantasize about Melchor, her mother and Cachita. She often had to make an effort not to launch into singing those prayers that Caridad had taught her to the rhythm of fandangos. How long had it been since she had sung? “As long as it’s been since you last drank,” Fray Joaquín had answered her, ending the conversation when she brought it up. The sun and her yearnings managed to keep the bitter, torturous dreams at bay, as if enclosed in a bubble, and the hope of being reunited with her family opened out before her. That was the only thing that really mattered: her daughter, her grandfather. The Vegas. In the past she hadn’t understood that, although she consoled herself by using
her youth as an excuse. Sometimes she also remembered her father. What had the Camacho told her when he came back from talking with her mother in the makeshift jail in Málaga?
He knew what the deal was: his freedom for your engagement to the García boy. He should have refused and sacrificed himself. Your grandfather did what he had to do.

When she recalled those words, Milagros struggled to banish the memories and think about her grandfather again. Only with his help could she get her little girl back and, with her, her joy in life. Each town they passed brought her a little closer to that goal.