The Barefoot Queen (13 page)

PEOPLE REFUSED
to abandon the San Roque district and the field where the festivities were held. Here and there guitars were heard, along with castanets, tambourines and songs; men and women, no matter their gender or age, danced joyfully in groups around the bonfires.

“Where is Milagros?” the friar asked Caridad as they both wandered through the crowd.

“I don’t know.”

“She didn’t tell you where …”

Fray Joaquín stopped himself. Caridad was no longer beside him. He turned and saw her a few paces behind, stock-still in front of a sweets stand. He approached her, full of confusion: this black woman, dressed in red with her shirt hugging her body, was the object of lustful glances and comments from those around her, and yet to the friar’s eyes she was like a large girl whose mouth watered at the scent and sight of the sweets: doughnuts, sugar-dusted fritters, sweet biscuits, cinnamon custards …

“Give me some
polvorones,
” ordered the friar, pointing to the crumbly shortbread biscuits after glancing at the selection. “You’ll see, Caridad, they’re delicious.”

Fray Joaquín paid and they continued strolling, in silence. The friar watched, out of the corner of his eye, as Caridad savored the oval biscuits of almond, lard, sugar and cinnamon, afraid to interrupt her obvious pleasure.
Had she ever tried them before?
he wondered. Probably not, he concluded as he watched her reaction. It made him recall when Melchor had appeared at the monastery with Caridad in tow, that time with the brother doorman’s permission, who had let them through out of sheer fright at the rage oozing from the gypsy’s eyes. “You cheated us!” he shouted as soon as he saw Fray Joaquín. “This tobacco isn’t pure Cuban!” The friar tried to calm the gypsy and took Caridad to the basement that they used as a larder and storehouse. Behind some logs, he hid a couple of leather bags of tobacco leaf—one of them belonging to Melchor as payment for his work—from the incursion they had just made to the place in Barrancos, over the Portuguese border.

Melchor violently cut the ropes that tied one of the bales and, still swearing, indicated to Caridad that she should go over and examine the tobacco. Fray Joaquín remembered that moment: instinctively, Caridad let her eyelids drop and licked her lips, as if she were about to savor a delectable feast. Inside the leather bag, the tobacco was tied up in bunches, but at first glance Caridad saw that the leaves weren’t bound with
yaguas,
the flexible royal palm leaves used in Cuba. She had the gypsy cut the cord around the bundle and delicately picked up one of the leaves; both men were surprised by her long, skilled fingers. Caridad examined the tobacco leaf carefully; she held it up to the light of the candle carried by Fray Joaquín to observe its pigments: dark, light or red, matured, light
or dry. She stroked it and delicately felt for its texture and moisture; she chewed on the leaf and smelled it, trying to figure out, through its flavor, aroma and the taste of the nicotine, how many years earlier it had been harvested. Melchor hurried Caridad with increasingly agitated gestures, but the friar was spellbound watching the ritual the woman carried out, and the sensations reflected in her face and the pauses she took after smelling and touching the leaf, sure that the passing moments would offer her the solution.

That same ritual was the one that now, walking close to the Tagarete, he slyly observed in Caridad as she ate the
polvorones
: she stopped chewing, half closed her eyes and let some time pass, bringing her lips together, salivating before nibbling on another.

It wasn’t pure Havana tobacco, not pure and not mixed, he remembered Caridad declaring that day. Where was it from? She wouldn’t know, answered the gypsy with an unusual tranquillity, as if the contact with the tobacco leaves had made him confident; she only knows the Cuban. It’s a young tobacco, she declared, slightly fermented, perhaps … maybe six months, at most a year. And too blond, with little sun.

Fray Joaquín watched how Caridad brought a new crumbly sweet to her mouth, delicately, as if it were a tobacco leaf …

“Cachita!”

Milagros’s voice surprised them both. They hadn’t even worked out where the voice was coming from when she started to pressure them, “You are Cuban! You know about tobacco …”

“Milagros,” mused the friar, trying to make her out among the people, in the dark.

“Tell them that these cigars are pure Havanas!” the young gypsy urged. “Come!”

It was Fray Joaquín who first noticed the colorful ribbons in the gypsy girl’s hair and the scarves on her wrists twisting in the air as she gestured wildly amid a group of men.

“How dare you say that they aren’t Havanas?” complained Milagros, loudly. “Come, Cachita! Come over here!” Fray Joaquín and Caridad both did. “They are trying to take advantage of a girl! They want to cheat me! Tell them that they’re Havanas!” she demanded as she handed her one of the cigars that Caridad herself had crafted with that blond tobacco that
the friar was hiding in the monastery. “Tell them! She knows about tobacco! Tell them it’s Cuban!”

Caridad hesitated. Milagros knew that it wasn’t Havana! How could she …?

“Of course it’s Havana, gentlemen.” Fray Joaquín came out to rescue her. No one noticed, in the darkness only broken by the faint glow of a nearby bonfire, the complicit smile exchanged between him and the gypsy. “I myself bought a couple this morning …”

“Fray Joaquín,” whispered one of the men gathered when he recognized the famous preacher of San Jacinto.

The five men who surrounded Milagros then turned toward the friar.

“If Fray Joaquín says they are Havanas—” another began.

“Of course they are Havanas!” interrupted Milagros.

At that moment, the flickering light of the fire flashed on the features of the man who had last spoken. And Caridad shivered. And the cigar in question slipped from her hands and fell to the floor.

“Cachita!” scolded Milagros as she was about to kneel to pick it up. But she stopped when she saw Caridad shaking, her eyes lowered and her breathing erratic. “What …?” Milagros began to ask, turning her head toward the man.

Even in the weak light, Milagros could see the man frown and tense up, but then he shifted his gaze toward the friar and contained himself.

“Let’s go!” he ordered his companions.

“But …” one of them complained.

“Let’s go!”

“Cachita.” Milagros put her arms around her friend as the group of men turned and disappeared into the multitude. “What’s happening to you?”

Caridad pointed to the man’s back. It was the potter from Triana.

“What’s wrong with that man?” asked Fray Joaquín.

Caridad gently freed herself from the girl’s embrace and, with tears streaming down her face, knelt to pick up the cigar that was still on the ground. Why did she always have to cry there, near the Tagarete, in San Roque?

The gypsy and the friar looked at each in puzzlement while Caridad wiped off the dirt that had stuck to the cigar. When they realized that
the sobbing woman was now cleaning off sand that only existed in her imagination, the friar urged Milagros with a gesture.

“What happened with that man?” inquired the girl tenderly.

Caridad continued stroking the cigar with her long, expert fingers. How could she tell her? What would Milagros think of her? The gypsy girl had spoken to her about men on many occasions. At fourteen, she had never been with a man and she wouldn’t until she was married. “We gypsies are chaste and then faithful,” she had affirmed. “There isn’t a single gypsy prostitute in the entire kingdom!” she had later said proudly.

“Tell me, Caridad,” insisted Milagros.

And what if she left her? Her friendship was the only thing she had in this life and …

“Tell me!” the girl ordered, making Fray Joaquín jump.

But this time Caridad did not obey; she kept her gaze on the cigar she still held in her hands.

“Did that man hurt you?” asked Fray Joaquín tenderly.

Had he hurt her? She finally nodded.

And that was how, question by question, Fray Joaquín and Milagros learned the story of Caridad’s arrival in Triana.

Milagros missed Caridad. A few days after the goose tourney, Grandfather had received a visit from a galley slave who had rowed with him for several years. The man, like all the convicts who managed to endure the appalling torture of the galleys, appeared as frail as Melchor and, again like all those who survived, knew the ports and peoples of the sea who were like them: traffickers, smugglers and all types of criminals. Bernardo, for that was his name, told Grandfather about the arrival of a substantial tobacco shipment from Virginia into the port of Gibraltar, a rock on the Spanish coast that was under English rule. There, boats with English, Venetian, Genoese, Ragusan or Portuguese flags unloaded tobacco, fabrics, spices and other merchandise on various points of the coast that extended from the rock to Málaga, by night, when the wind blew hard, to avoid being discovered by the Spanish patrol boats. Bernardo had already made a deal for a good shipment of Virginia tobacco, he just needed funds to pay for it and runners to carry it off the beaches.

“In a few days we will go out in search of a tobacco shipment,” Melchor had announced to Caridad after closing the agreement with Bernardo at Joaquina’s tavern, over a jug of good wine.

Caridad, who was in the gypsy’s room, sitting in front of a wobbly board on which she continued making cigars with the blond tobacco
stored by the friar, just nodded, still rolling her hand over the one she was absorbed in creating.

It was Milagros who seemed surprised as she watched her friend work with the tobacco leaves.

“Are you taking Cachita?” she asked her grandfather.

“That’s what I said. I want to get the best tobacco, and she knows how to recognize it,” he answered in the gypsy dialect.

“Won’t … won’t it be dangerous?”

“Yes, girl. It always is,” declared the gypsy, already in the doorway, preparing to leave the room; three people didn’t comfortably fit inside.

They looked at each other.
Didn’t you know that?
Melchor seemed to be asking his granddaughter, who hid her eyes in shame, aware that the next thing her grandfather’s penetrating eyes would ask her was:
When have you ever asked me that?

Melchor had no problems getting backpackers and carriers: the Vegas and his relatives in the settlement at La Cartuja were always willing to accompany him; they were tough, bold gypsies and, above all, loyal. He had no problems getting the money either: Fray Joaquín got it for him immediately. What most delayed his shipment, as was often the case, were the pack animals: he needed docile, quiet geldings that didn’t whinny in the night at the scent of a mare. But the Vega family set their mind to it and in a few days, with a couple of raids into the meadows around Seville, they made off with enough horses.

“Be careful, Cachita,” said Milagros when it was time to leave. The two women were in the settlement beside the Carthusian monastery, standing slightly apart from the men and the horses.

Caridad shifted uncomfortably beneath the long, dark man’s cape that Melchor had dressed her in to hide her red clothes. She had bartered her straw hat for a black slouch hat with a round crown and wide, floppy brim. From her neck hung a lodestone tied with a string. Milagros extended her arm and weighed the stone. The gypsies believed in its powers: smugglers, traffickers and horse thieves swore that if soldiers’ patrols showed up, those lodestones would conjure strong dust and sand storms to hide them. What the gypsy girl didn’t know was that the Cuban slaves also believed in the powers of lodestone: “Christ came down to Earth with the lodestone,” they claimed. Caridad would have to baptize it and give it a name, as was the custom in her homeland.

Milagros smiled; Caridad replied with a grimace on her face, all sweaty from the implacable summer heat of Seville. It got hot in Cuba too, but there she never wore so much clothing.

“Stay close to Grandfather,” advised the gypsy girl before approaching to give her a kiss on the cheek.

Caridad seemed startled at the girl’s sudden display of affection, yet her thick, fleshy lips widened, turning the initial forced smile into one of sincere gratitude.

“I like to see you smile,” declared Milagros, and she kissed her on the other cheek. “It’s not something you do often.”

Caridad rewarded her by widening her lips again. It was true, she admitted to herself: she had been slow to open up to her friend, but little by little she was putting down roots with the gypsies, and as her anxiety and worries faded, she trusted in her more and more. In the end, the real cause of the change was none other than Melchor. He was the one who had put her in charge of working with the tobacco. “You don’t have to go with the girl and her mother to sell it on the streets anymore,” he said in the face of Milagros’s insistence on teaching her to do something to contribute to her upkeep. “I’d prefer you to roll what they sell.” And Caridad felt useful and grateful.

“You be careful, too,” she advised her friend. “Don’t fight with your mother.”