The Barefoot Queen (91 page)

“Leave, Father,” Rafael García threatened him, “this is a matter between gypsies.”

Fray Joaquín was surprised by the hatred and rage reflected in many of their faces. Yet his fear turned into anxiety when he saw Milagros beside Melchor, with her head down. What had become of the promises he had made to her?

“No,” replied the friar. “This is a matter for the King’s justice, like everything that happens in his lands, whether or not gypsies are involved.”

Several of them ran toward him.

“I am a man of God!” Fray Joaquín managed to shout.

“Halt!”

Rafael García’s order stopped the men. The patriarch squinted his eyes and sought the opinion of the heads of the other families: the Camachos, the Floreses, the Reyeses … Some shrugged indifferently; most shook their heads. It was unlikely that anyone in the alley would break gypsy law and speak about Melchor, Milagros or even Caridad, El Conde thought then, and if they did, the authorities wouldn’t say a word. They’d just conclude it was another gypsy scuffle. But detaining a clergyman was different. Perhaps one of the women or the children might let it slip, and then there would be terrible consequences for them all. They had worked hard with the Church; the young folk went there to learn their prayers,
and almost the entire alley attended mass with feigned devotion. The brotherhood was up and running. Less than a year ago the archbishop had approved the rules of the Gypsy Brotherhood and there were already quite a few problems. They hadn’t been able to establish it at the monastery of the Holy Spirit in Triana and they were still trying at Our Lady of Pópulo. They wouldn’t achieve their goal if the Augustinians found out about this. They needed to maintain good relations with who those who could jail them. No. They couldn’t risk offending the Church through one of their own.

Rafael García gestured to the men and they moved away from the friar priest. But he wasn’t planning on doing the same for those Vegas …

“Release them,” Fray Joaquín interrupted his thoughts.

El Conde shook his head stubbornly and then Reyes came over and whispered in his ear.

“She,” the patriarch pointed to Milagros after his wife stepped aside, “stays here with her husband, which is where she belongs. Or am I wrong, Father?”

Fray Joaquín went pale and was unable to answer.

“No. I see that I’m not wrong. As for the other two …”

Reyes was right: who could know about or prove the murder of José Carmona besides the gypsies? No one had reported it to the authorities; they’d buried him in an open field and the crime had been dealt with in the privacy of the council of elders. How could
payo
law intervene?

“As for them,” he repeated smugly, “they will remain with us until the officers of the King whom your reverence spoke of come looking for them. You understand,” he added, pleased with himself, as some of the gypsies in the crowd smiled, “we are making sure they are safe. Someone could hurt them.”

“Rafael García,” threatened Fray Joaquín, “I will come back for them. If anything happens to them …” He stammered; he knew that he would achieve nothing alone, that he needed help. “If anything happens to them, the full weight of the law and divine justice will fall on your head. On all of your heads!”

“They’ve gone,” announced Rafael García.

“What …?” shouted Fray Joaquín angrily, waving his arms wildly.

But he kept quiet after an order from the prior of San Jacinto.

“When did they leave?” asked the friar priest.

“Shortly after Fray Joaquín left,” responded Rafael García as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He stood at the entrance to the smithy, beneath his apartment, where his large family continued working, completely unconcerned at the visit of the five friars, including the prior of the San Jacinto monastery, who accompanied Fray Joaquín.

The gypsies who wandered through the alley didn’t seem interested in the scene either. Only Reyes, above them, hidden behind a window on the first floor, perked up her ear to listen in on the conversation.

“They said they were going to look for you,” added Rafael, looking directly at Fray Joaquín. “Didn’t they find you?”

“No! You’re lying!” accused the friar, who fell silent again at the request of his superior.

“And why did you let them go?”

“Why wouldn’t I? They are free; they’ve committed no crime. I don’t know … they can come back whenever they want.”

“Fray Joaquín maintains that you were holding them with the intention of killing them. And—”

“Reverend Father …” El Conde interrupted him, showing the palms of his hands.

“And I believe him,” said the prior before he could go on.

“Kill them? How barbaric! It goes against the law, against the divine precepts! We wouldn’t harm anyone, your eminence. I don’t know what to tell you. They just left. Ask around.” Rafael García then indicated to several of the gypsies on the alley to come over. “Isn’t it true that El Galeote, his granddaughter and the Negress left?” he asked them.

“Yes,” two of them answered in unison.

“I heard them say they were going to San Jacinto,” added an old, toothless gypsy woman.

The prior shook his head, as did two of the friars who accompanied them. Fray Joaquín’s face was still enraged, his fists clenched.

“Your reverences can search the alley,” El Conde then suggested. “Every house if you wish! You will see that they are not here. We have nothing to hide.”

“Would you like to start with my house?” offered the old gypsy woman with feigned earnestness.

Fray Joaquín was about to accept her offer when the prior’s voice stopped him.

“Rafael García, the truth always comes out, keep that in mind. I will be watching, and you will pay dearly if anything happens to them.”

“I already told …”

The prior lifted one hand, turned his back and left him with the words still on his lips.

THAT NIGHT
, guitars were heard in the San Miguel alley. The weather was splendid; the temperature, mild; and the gypsies, mainly the Garcías and the Carmonas, were in the mood for celebrating. Men and women sang and danced fandangos,
seguidillas
and
zarabandas.

“Just kill them,” La Trianera urged her husband. “We’ll bury them far from here, beyond the lowlands, where no one can find them,” she added at Rafael’s silence. “No one will ever know.”

“I agree with Reyes,” declared Ramón Flores.

“Pascual Carmona has to kill them,” stated Rafael, who still remembered the rage and violence with which Pascual, the head of the Carmonas
since old Inocencio’s death, had burst into his house after Melchor’s escape in Madrid. He shook him and threatened him, and if it weren’t for the intervention of his own relatives, he would have hit him. “I’d like to do it myself, I would pay to execute El Galeote, but the revenge belongs to the Carmonas; it is theirs by right of blood. It was a Carmona El Galeote killed, Pascual’s brother in fact. We should wait for his return. I don’t think he’ll be long. Besides …” El Conde pointed with his chin past the dancing gypsies, where Fray Joaquín remained leaning against the wall of one of the buildings. “… what’s he still doing here?”

Fray Joaquín had refused to return to San Jacinto with the prior and the other friars. He stayed in the alley, asking everyone he met and always getting the same answer.

“Father,” complained a gypsy women when he grabbed a boy by the shoulders and shook him after he answered him with hesitation in his eyes, “leave the little one alone. I already told you what you want to know.”

He went into some of the apartments clustered around the courtyards. The gypsies allowed it. He walked through them with children and old ladies observing him closely. He inspected the squalid rooms and, desperate, even shouted out Milagros’s name: his words echoed strangely in the courtyard. Someone started tapping a hammer to mock the impertinent friar’s heartbroken screams. The incessant, monotone banging of the hammers accompanied some verses that urged the friar to leave. “I won’t go,” he decided nonetheless. He would remain there, in the alley, alert, for as long as it took: someone would make a mistake; someone would tell him where to find them. He began to pray, contrite, repentant at turning to divine help that he didn’t believe he deserved after having run off with Milagros and having used the Virgin to cheat people.

“The friar?” spat La Trianera. “We’ll see if he stays there once Pedro comes back.”

Hearing the name of La Trianera’s grandson, Ramón Flores made a face that didn’t go unnoticed to Rafael, who in turn shook his head, his lips pursed. He had sent a couple of boys to try to find him and let him know about Milagros’s arrival. He told them to search for him in the many inns and bars of Seville where he whiled away the hours and spent the plentiful money he had brought back from Madrid, wine and women flowing.
Where had he got so much money?
El Conde wondered. The boys had come back in the mid-afternoon with no news. Rafael insisted, sending
two young men who could continue searching by night, but they still didn’t know where he was.

“Melchor Vega is a lucky man,” pointed out La Trianera, interrupting her husband’s thoughts. “He survived the galleys. For years he’s been smuggling tobacco and the patrol hasn’t caught him, and he even escaped from the Garcías in Madrid. It seemed impossible, but he did it. I wouldn’t wait another minute before finishing him off.”

Rafael García turned his gaze to Fray Joaquín again. He was wary of his presence, the prior of San Jacinto’s threat still present in his memory.

“I told you that Pascual is the one who should kill him. We will wait for him.”

THE DAWN
found Fray Joaquín sleepy, sitting on the ground and resting against the wall, in the same place he had been standing until well into the early hours, when the gypsies went back to their homes. Some even wished him a sarcastic good night; others mocked him with a greeting in the morning. The friar didn’t answer in either case. He felt as if he hadn’t slept a wink, but he had; enough to not realize that Pedro García had returned. The darkness was almost absolute. Pedro had looked at him in shock, sprawled out there. He didn’t see his face, so he couldn’t be sure it was him. He thought about kicking him, but decided against it and headed toward the apartments.

“Is that friar who I think he is?” he asked his grandfather after waking him up rudely.

“It’s Fray Joaquín, from San Jacinto,” he answered.

“What’s he doing here?” Pedro wanted to know.

La Trianera, who was sleeping beside her husband, closed her eyes tightly after seeing her grandson’s nervousness. Although Bartola consistently backed his story, and the García and Carmona families insulted Milagros and repudiated her, La Trianera had doubted Pedro as soon as she saw him show up with that pretty gypsy girl from Madrid, little María … and his purse filled with money. “He must have stolen it from the whore when he found her out,” answered her husband when she revealed her doubts. But La Trianera knew that wasn’t the case. After escorting her to all those performances and parties, she knew the Vega girl … and she never would have prostituted herself voluntarily; she had been raised
with gypsy values. Days after their arrival, she questioned Bartola, just the two of them; her evasive answers were enough to convince her.

“Where is Milagros?” asked Pedro before his grandfather had finished explaining.

Rafael García violently shook off the hand his grandson had around his arm and got up from the straw mattress with surprising agility. Pedro almost fell to the floor.

“Don’t you dare touch me,” El Conde warned him.

Pedro García, his balance regained, took a step backward. “Where is she, Grandfather?” he repeated without hiding his anxiety.

Rafael García turned his head toward La Trianera.

“The pit in the forge,” guessed Pedro, “that’s where you’re keeping them, right?”

A simple hole in the ground, covered with planks where the Garcías hid goods and chattels, especially stolen goods, in case a constable came into the forge. It wasn’t the first time they had used it to hide someone, they’d even tried it during the big roundup, but they had crammed so many in that the King’s soldiers had laughed when they arrested them.

Milagros lifted her head as she heard the planks moving. The faint light of an oil lamp revealed the three of them sitting on the ground, hands and feet tied, packed together in the meager pit. Above, she could make out the shapes of three men arguing. The oil lamp made one of their jackets glitter and Milagros screamed. Caridad could see the terror in her friend’s eyes before she pulled her knees to her chest and tried to hide her head between them. Then she looked up toward where Melchor was: the argument was getting worse and the men were starting to tussle. It took them a while to recognize Pedro, who got free of the others and jumped into the pit with a gleaming knife in his hands.

“Don’t kill her!” they heard Rafael García say.

“Whore!”

Pedro’s shouting was lost amid Caridad’s and Melchor’s.

One of the gypsies leapt in and managed to grab Pedro’s wrist just as he was about to stab his wife. A moment later there were two more holding him back.