The Barefoot Queen (16 page)

“You killed a Vargas,” the oldest of the gypsies managed to articulate.

The men looked at each other, as if weighing that threat. Inside the workshop, the potter tried to reload his blunderbuss with trembling hands.

“Let’s finish them off!” suggested one of the artisans.

“Yes. That way nobody will find out!” added another.

The Vargas boys kept their knives extended, surrounding Milagros, beside Alejandro’s corpse, facing the men who were standing in a semicircle around them. A couple of them shook their heads.

“They are just boys. How are we going to …?”

“Run!”

The oldest gypsy boy took advantage of their indecision: he grabbed Milagros and forced her to run right toward the man who had expressed his doubts, and Alejandro’s brother joined them. They bumped into the tentative potter, who fell to the ground, and they leapt over him even before he had finished his sentence. A man pointed his blunderbuss at the boys’ backs, but the man beside him pushed his barrel up into the air.

“Are you trying to wound one of our own?” he asked, pointing out the proximity of the curious onlookers who had begun to appear.

When they looked again, the gypsies were already lost in the darkness of the night. In silence, they turned toward the corpse lying in a puddle of blood in front of the door to the workshop.
We killed a Vargas,
they seemed to be saying to each other.

Tomás Vega had signed up for the party of gypsies led by his brother Melchor that was on its way to the coast near Málaga to receive the tobacco from Gibraltar. The two of them led the march, chatting, apparently carefree yet with all their senses alert to the slightest sign of patrols of soldiers or members of the Holy Brotherhood. Behind them were four young men from the Vega family leading some horses by their halters, which were fitted out with pack harnesses for the load: packsaddles, surcingles and breast-straps; the King had prohibited using horses for transport—it could only be done with donkeys, mules or billy-goats with bells—but he had exempted Seville from that prohibition. The young men joked and laughed, as if their uncles’ presence guaranteed their safety. Caridad brought up the rear, walked drenched in sweat beneath her dark cape and hat, constantly worried about revealing a single stitch of her red dress, just as Melchor had warned her before they set out.
It must be the red color,
thought the woman, because the gypsies wore their colorful garb with no problems. She walked uncomfortably in the old sandals with thin leather soles that Melchor had got for her from the settlement beside the Carthusians; she had never worn anything on her feet before. They had been walking for four days and had already entered the Ronda mountains. On the first day, during a break, Caridad had untied the leather straps that held the soles to her ankles, to keep them from
rubbing. Melchor, seated on a large rock beside the road, watched her and shrugged when their eyes met, as if giving her permission to do without them. Then he drank a long sip from the wineskin they were carrying.

The gypsy’s attitude didn’t shift when the next day, after spending the night out in the open, Caridad changed her mind and tied on the sandals before beginning the day’s walk. She knew how to walk barefoot. In Cuba, especially after the sugar harvest, she was careful not to step on any of the sharp edges of the canes that remained hidden, but those Sevillian paths were nothing like the Cuban plantations and fields: they were rocky, dry, dusty and during the dog days of an Andalusian summer they were burning hot, so much so that it seemed few people had much interest in traveling along them, and the trip went off without a hitch.

Despite Melchor taking the rough goat paths, the ascent into the mountains gave them a rest from the heat, and, more important, allowed the two Vega brothers to relax from the tension of the countryside. An encounter with the authorities along the way would have meant the confiscation of their weapons and horses and surely their imprisonment, but the mountains were theirs; they were the territory of smugglers, bandits, criminals and all types of fugitives from justice. There the gypsies moved freely.

“Negress!” shouted Melchor as they ascended in single file through the thickets, without even turning toward her. “You can show your colors now, maybe it will scare off the bugs.”

The others laughed. Caridad took the opportunity to take off the cape and hat and breathed deeply.

“I wouldn’t let the Negress go around showing off that marvelous dark flesh,” Tomás commented to his brother, “or we’re going to have problems with the other men.”

“In Gaucín we’ll cover her up again.”

Tomás shook his head. “You can start already, right now even a blind man could see her.”

“That would be a nice first sight,” joked his brother.

“The men will be all over her. She knows about tobacco, but was it so important to bring her?”

Melchor was silent for a few seconds. “She sings well,” was all he said when he finally spoke.

Tomás didn’t answer and they continued their ascent, yet Melchor heard him grumble under his breath.

“Sing, Negress!” he then yelled.

Sing, Negro!
Caridad remembered. That was the overseers’ shout in the sugar mills before cracking the whip against their backs.
If a Negro is singing, he’s not thinking,
she had heard the whites say on numerous occasions, and the slaves were always singing: they sang in the cane fields and in the sugar factories at the request of the overseers, but also when they wanted to communicate with each other or complain about the master; they sang to express their sadness and their rare joys; they sang even when they didn’t have to work.

Caridad intoned a monotone, deep, hoarse, repetitive song that blended with the beating of the horses’ hoofs against the stones and struck a chord in the spirits of the gypsies.

Tomás nodded as he felt his legs trying to match the rhythm of that African song. One of the young men turned toward her with a surprised expression.

Meanwhile,
Sing, Negress,
thought Caridad. It wasn’t the same order that the overseers used in Cuba. The gypsy seemed to enjoy her voice. Those nights when he went to the apartment to sleep and found Caridad working the tobacco on the plank, he would drop down on his mattress after taking off his clothes and ask her:
Sing, Negress,
in a whisper. And without pausing in her work under the candlelight, cutting the tobacco leaves and rolling them one over the other, Caridad would sing with Melchor lying behind her. She never dared turn her head, not even when the man’s snores and slow breathing indicated that he was sleeping. What was that gypsy thinking about when he listened to her? Melchor didn’t interrupt her, he didn’t sing along; he just remained attentive, still, soothed by Caridad’s sad lullaby. He had never touched her either, although on a few occasions she had perceived something similar to the lust so many others showed in their eyes when they ran them over her body. Would she have liked it if he did, if he touched her, ended up mounting her?
No,
she answered to herself. He would have become just one more. Now he was the first man she had ever known, that she’d had dealings with, who had never laid a hand on her. Throughout her entire life, since they’d ripped her from her homeland and her family, Caridad had worked with tobacco, and yet on those nights when she did so with Melchor lying behind her, the aroma of the plant took on subtleties that she had never noticed before. Then, listening to herself and watching her long fingers handle the
delicate leaves, Caridad discovered feelings that had never surfaced in her before, and she breathed deeply. Sometimes she had even stopped her labors until her hands ceased trembling, seized by anxiety in the face of sensations she was unable to recognize and understand.

“Freedom,” declared Milagros one day, reflecting briefly after Caridad explained it to her. “That’s called freedom, Cachita,” she reiterated with a seriousness that was unusual in her.

“
LOOK, NEGRESS
, that is the land where you were born: Africa.”

Caridad looked down on the horizon, toward where Melchor was pointing, and made out a blurry line beyond the sea. She covered herself with the cape and the slouch hat pulled down to her ears while the gypsy beside her shimmered in the sun in his sky-blue silk jacket and his silver-edged trousers. In his right hand he held a flintlock musket he had taken out of the saddlebags of one of the horses as soon as they arrived in Gaucín after three days of walking along paths and treacherous cattle tracks.

“And that rock there, by the sea”—Melchor pointed with the barrel of the shotgun, addressing them all—“is Gibraltar.”

The stately burg of Gaucín, nestled on the King’s Highway from Gibraltar to Ronda, was an important enclave in the mountain range. It had close to a thousand inhabitants, and above it, on a hard-to-reach cliff, rose Águila Castle. Caridad and the gypsies enjoyed the view for a few minutes, until Melchor gave the order to head toward the Gaucín inn, a league away from the town, beside the road: a single-story construction erected on an open field and provided with stables and haylofts.

It was midday, and the smell of roasted young goat reminded them how long it had been since they’d eaten; a long column of smoke rose from the chimney of a large oven bulging out of one of the building’s walls. A couple of brats ran from the stables to take care of the horses. The nephews grabbed their belongings, handed over the horses to the boys and hastened to join Melchor, Tomás and Caridad, who were already crossing the inn’s threshold.

“I was starting to worry that they’d stopped you on the road!” The shout came from one of the rough tables.

Light streamed into the inn. Melchor recognized Bernardo, his galley mate, seated in front of a nice plate of meat, bread and a jug of wine.

“Haven’t seen you around here for a while, Melchor,” greeted the innkeeper, extending a hand that the gypsy squeezed tightly. “They told me you preferred to work on the Portuguese border.”

Before answering, the gypsy glanced around the inside of the inn: only two other tables were occupied, both by several men who were eating with their weapons on the tabletops, always close at hand: smugglers. Some greeted Melchor with a nod, others scrutinized Caridad.

“May God be with you, gentlemen!” said the gypsy. Then he turned to the innkeeper, who was also examining the woman. “You work where you can, José.” He raised his voice to get his attention. “Yesterday it was with the Portuguese, today it’s with the English. Your family well?”

“Growing.” The innkeeper pointed to a woman and two girls who toiled in front of the large wood stove.

The gypsies, Caridad and the innkeeper walked toward the long table where Bernardo was waiting for them.

“Are they arriving already?” asked Melchor, seeing the women’s bustling around the stove and the scarce guests for all that was roasting there.

“They were spotted passing Algatocín a little while ago,” answered José. “A league away. They’ll be here before long. Eat and drink now, before everything’s turned upside down.”

“How many are they?”

“More than a hundred.”

The gypsy frowned. That was a significant group. Still standing beside the table, he questioned Bernardo with a look.

“I told you that several boats had arrived at the rock,” he explained, turning over the goat leg he was holding, as if he gave it no importance. “There’s a lot of merchandise. Don’t worry, our part is guaranteed.”

Before taking a seat, looking toward the entrance, Melchor placed his long musket across the table, banging it perhaps harder than he should have, as if he wanted to make clear that the only thing that could guarantee his business was weapons.

“Sit down next to me, Negress,” he indicated to Caridad as he hit the bench that surrounded the table.

The innkeeper, curious, lifted his chin toward the woman.

“She’s mine,” declared the gypsy. “Make sure everyone knows that and bring us some food. You,” he added to Caridad. “You heard it: here you are mine, you belong to me.” Caridad nodded, remembering Milagros’s
words:
Don’t leave Grandfather’s side.
She noticed the tension in the gypsies. “Stay well covered, but you can take off your hat. And as for the rest of you …” At that moment the gypsy smiled at Bernardo and served himself a brimming glass of wine that he downed almost entirely in a single gulp. “The rest of you be careful with the wine!” he warned, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. “I want you alert when the men from Encinas Reales arrive.”

Encinas Reales, Cuevas Altas and Cuevas Bajas were three small towns close to each other and deep in the old borderlands, beside the Genil River, some thirty leagues from Gaucín. The three towns had become a refuge for smugglers who acted with total impunity. Most of their inhabitants were in that business—primarily with tobacco—and those who weren’t were either harboring them or profiting from it. In those towns, the women and clergymen collaborated in the business, and the authorities, for all their efforts, couldn’t impose order in those enclaves of rough, violent, hardened men among whom the laws of silence and mutual protection ruled. The people of the three towns organized constant smuggling parties, sometimes to Portugal, along the route of Palma del Río and Jabugo, in order to cross the border toward Barrancos or Serpa, and on other occasions to Gibraltar, through Ronda and its mountain range. They sought safety in these large groups, bringing together backpackers and other criminals from Rute, Lucena, Cabra, Priego, and put together small, fearsome armies that were larger in number and strength than any patrol of royal soldiers, who were mostly corrupt, and often poorly paid, old or crippled.