The Barefoot Queen (11 page)

“Go to Uncle Inocencio’s house and borrow a chair,” Ana ordered her daughter, interrupting her thoughts of the pontoon bridge Caridad wanted to cross and the Brotherhood of the Negritos that she wanted to reach.

“A chair? For whom? Who …?”

“Go get it,” insisted her mother. She didn’t want to tell her daughter about Alejandro’s visit beforehand, knowing it would surely lead to an argument.

At lunchtime, Milagros realized why Alejandro was there and received the guest sullenly. She didn’t hide her dislike for him—he was timid and danced clumsily—although only Ana seemed to notice her rudeness. José addressed him as if neither of the women existed. The third time the girl used a curt tone, Ana’s expression twisted, but Milagros endured the censure and looked at her with her brow furrowed.
You already know
which boy I like!
her look said. José Carmona laughed and banged the table as if it were an anvil. Alejandro tried to keep up, but his laughter came out shy and nervous. “It’s impossible,” was Ana’s almost inaudible refusal. Milagros tightened her lips. Pedro García. Pedro was the only boy she was interested in.… And what did she have to do with her grandfather’s and her mother’s old quarrels?

“Never, my daughter. Never,” her mother warned her through her teeth.

“What did you say?” her husband asked.

“Nothing. Just—”

“She says I won’t marry this …” Milagros moved her hand toward Alejandro; the boy’s mouth was agape, as if shooing away an insect. “Him,” she finished her sentence to avoid the insult that was already on the tip of her tongue.

“Milagros!” shouted Ana.

“You will do what you are told,” declared José gravely.

“Grandfather—” the girl began to say before her mother interrupted her.

“You think your grandfather is going to let you get anywhere near a García?” spat out her mother.

Milagros got up abruptly and threw the chair to the floor. She remained standing, flushed, with her right fist tightly closed, threatening her mother. She stammered out some unintelligible words, but just as she was about to start yelling, her gaze fell on the two men staring at her. She growled, turned around and left the room.

“As you can see, she’s a filly who badly needs to be tamed,” she heard her father laughing.

What Milagros didn’t hear, slamming the door with Alejandro’s stupid giggle behind her, was Ana’s reply.

“Boy, I’ll rip out your eyes if you ever lay a hand on my daughter.” The two men’s faces shifted. “On my honor as a Vega,” she added, bringing her fingers in the shape of a cross to her lips and kissing them, just as her father did when he wanted to convince someone.

CARIDAD WALKED
stiffly, her gaze fixed on the bridge keeper who was collecting the tolls at the entrance to the pontoon bridge: the same man who had kept her from crossing the last time.

“Come on,” Milagros had called to her shrilly from the corridor, at the entrance to the small courtyard.

Caridad obeyed instantly. She jammed her straw hat on her head and grabbed her bundle.

“Leave them!” The girl hurried her along when she saw her efforts to organize Old María’s wineskin, now empty, the colorful blanket and the mattress. “We’ll be back later.”

And now she was again approaching the busy bridge, walking behind a girl as silent as she was determined.

“She’s with me,” Milagros proffered, pointing behind her, when she saw the bridge keeper about to address Caridad.

“She’s not gypsy,” stated the man.

“Anyone can see that.”

The man was about to turn on her for her impertinence, but he thought better of it. He knew who she was: the granddaughter of Melchor “El Galeote”—the Galley Slave. The gypsies had always refused to pay the toll—why would a gypsy pay to cross a river? Many years earlier the owner of the rights to the pontoon bridge had been paid a visit from several of them, grim-faced, armed with knives and willing to work out the problem their own way. There was no room for discussion, because really it didn’t matter much if a few mavericks crossed from Triana to Seville and vice versa among the three thousand on horse- or muleback each day.

“What do you say?” insisted Milagros.

All gypsies were dangerous, but Melchor Vega more than most. And the girl was a Vega.

“Go ahead,” he conceded.

Caridad released the air she had unconsciously been holding in her lungs and followed the girl.

A few paces on, amid the bustle of sheep and mules, muleteers, porters and merchants, Milagros turned and smiled at her in triumph. She forgot about the argument with her parents and her attitude shifted.

“Why do you want to go to the Negritos?”

Caridad lengthened her stride and in a few paces she was beside her. “The nuns said they would help me.”

“Nuns and priests, they’re all liars,” declared the gypsy girl.

Caridad looked at her in surprise. “They aren’t going to help me?”

“I doubt it. How can they? They can’t even help themselves. Grandfather says that before there were a lot of dark-skinned folk, but now there are only a few left and all the money they get they waste on Church nonsense and the saints. Before there was even a Negro brotherhood in Triana, but it didn’t have enough members and it folded.”

Caridad again fell behind as she turned the girl’s disappointing words over in her head, while Milagros continued past the bridge and resolutely southward along the wall on the way to the district of San Roque.

At the height of the Torre del Oro, the girl stopped and turned suddenly. “What do you want them to help you with?”

Caridad opened her hands in front of her body, confused.

“What is it that you think they’ll do for you?” insisted the gypsy girl.

“I don’t know … The nuns told me … They are Negroes, right?”

“Yes. They are,” answered the girl resignedly before taking up the path again.

If they are Negroes, Caridad thought, again following in the footsteps of the gypsy girl, keeping her eyes on the pretty colored ribbons in her hair and the bright scarves that twirled in the air around her wrists, then that place had to be something like the old living quarters where they’d gathered on holidays. There everyone was friends, companions in misfortune even though they didn’t know each other, even when they didn’t even understand each other: Lucumís, Mandingas, Congos, Ararás, Carabalís … What did it matter the language they spoke? There they danced, sang and enjoyed themselves, but they also tried to help each other. What else was there to do in a gathering of Negroes?

Milagros didn’t want to go inside the church with her. “They’d kick me out,” she declared.

A white priest and an old Negro, who introduced himself proudly as the elder brother and the caretaker of the small chapel of Los Ángeles, looked her up and down without hiding their disgust at her dirty slave clothing, so out of place in the pageantry they strove for in their temple. “What did you want?” the elder brother had asked her peevishly. In the flickering light of the chapel’s candles, Caridad wrung the straw hat in her hands and faced the Negro like an equal, but both her spirit and her voice were stifled by the cruel way they were staring at her. The nuns? continued the elder brother, almost raising his voice. What did the Triana nuns have to do with it? What did she know how to do? Nothing? No. Tobacco,
no. In Seville only men worked in the tobacco factory. Yes, women worked in the Cádiz factory, but they were in Seville. Did she know how to do anything else? No? In that case … The brotherhood? Did she have money to join the brotherhood? She didn’t know she had to pay? Yes. Of course. You have to pay to join the brotherhood. Did she have any money? No. Of course. Was she free or a slave? Because if she was a slave she had to have her master’s authorization …

“Free,” Caridad managed to state as she stared into the Negro’s eyes. “I am free,” she repeated, dragging the words, trying in vain to find in his eyes the understanding of a blood brother.

“Well then, my daughter …” Caridad lowered her gaze when the priest, who had remained silent up until that moment, finally spoke. “What is it you expect from us?”

WHAT DID
she expect?

A tear ran down her cheek.

She went running out of the church.

Milagros saw her cross Ancha de San Roque Street and enter the field that opened up behind the parish church, heading toward the Tagarete stream. Caridad ran confused, blinded by tears. The gypsy girl shook her head as she felt a stab in the stomach. “Sons of bitches!” she muttered. She hurried after her. A few steps further on she had to stop to pick up Caridad’s straw hat. She found it on the banks of the Tagarete, where she had fallen to her knees, ignoring the fetidness of the stream that absorbed the entire area’s sewage. She was crying in silence, just like the previous evening, as if she had no right to do so. This time she was covering her face with her hands and she rocked back and forth as she falteringly hummed a sad, monotone melody. Milagros scared off some raggedy little kids who approached curiously. Then she extended a hand toward Caridad’s black curly hair, but she didn’t dare to touch it. A tremendous shiver ran through her body. That melody … Her arm was still outstretched and she watched how the depth of that voice made its little hairs stand on end. She felt tears welling up in her eyes. She knelt down beside her, hugged her awkwardly and sobbed with her.

“
GRANDFATHER
.”

She had been waiting attentively for more than a day before she saw Melchor returning to the alley. She had run all the way to the settlement by La Cartuja to see if she could find him there, but they had given her no news of him. She came back and leaned against the door to the courtyard; she wanted to talk to him before anyone else did. Melchor smiled and shook his head as soon as he heard his granddaughter’s tone of voice.

“What is it you want this time, my girl?” he asked her as he grabbed her shoulder and moved her away from the building, further from the Carmonas who were bustling about.

“What are you going to do with Caridad … with the black woman?” she clarified when she saw his confused expression.

“Me? I’m tired of saying she’s not mine. I don’t know … she can do whatever she wants.”

“Can she stay with us?”

“With your father?”

“No. With you.”

Melchor squeezed Milagros against him. They walked a few steps in silence.

“You want her to stay?” the gypsy asked after a short while.

“Yes.”

“And does she want to stay?”

“Caridad doesn’t know what she wants. She has nowhere to go, she doesn’t know anybody, she has no money … The Negritos …”

“They asked her for money,” he said before she had a chance to.

“Yes,” confirmed Milagros. “I promised her I would talk to you.”

“Why do you want her to stay?”

The girl took a few moments to respond. “She is suffering.”

“A lot of people are suffering these days.”

“Yes, but she’s different. She’s … she’s older than me and yet she seems like a child who doesn’t know or understand anything. When she speaks … when she cries or sings, she does it with such feeling … You yourself say she sings well. She was a slave, you know?”

Melchor nodded. “I guessed.”

“Everybody has treated her so badly, Grandfather. They separated her from her mother and her children. They even sold one of them! Then—”

“And what will she live off?” interrupted Melchor.

Milagros remained silent. They walked a few steps, the gypsy squeezing his granddaughter’s shoulder.

“She’ll have to learn how to do something,” he conceded after a little while.

“I’ll teach her!” The girl was bursting with joy, turning toward her grandfather to hug him. “Give me time.”

Five months passed before Caridad returned to the church of Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles and saw the elder of the Negritos brotherhood again. It was on the eve of the patron saint’s day, August 1, 1748. At dusk on that day, among a large group of boisterous gypsy women, including Milagros and her mother, jubilant kids and even some men with guitars, Caridad crossed the pontoon bridge to head toward the San Roque district.