The Barefoot Queen (2 page)

They walked over to the Sea Gate: Don Damián laden with a small trunk, Caridad with her little bundle and her hat in her hands, not taking her eyes off the chaplain’s sandals.

“Make way for a man of God,” demanded the priest to the sailors crammed in front of the gate.

Gradually the crowd moved aside to grant him passage. Caridad followed behind him, dragging her bare feet, black as ebony, her eyes still downcast. The long, grayish shirt of thick coarse burlap that she wore as a dress couldn’t hide the fact that she was a strong, shapely woman. She was as tall as some of the sailors, who looked up to take in her thick black curls, while others gazed at her large, firm breasts and voluptuous hips. The chaplain kept walking and merely lifted a hand when he heard whistles, impertinent comments and even the occasional bold invitation.

“I am Father Damián García.” The priest introduced himself, holding out his papers to one of the commanders once he’d got through the seamen. “Chaplain of the warship
Queen,
of Your Majesty’s Armada.”

The commander looked through the documents. “Father, will you allow me to inspect your trunk?”

“Personal effects …” answered the priest as he opened it. “The goods are duly registered in my paperwork.”

The commander nodded as he rummaged around in the trunk. “Any mishaps on the journey?” asked the officer without looking at him, weighing up a small roll of tobacco in his hand. “Any encounters with enemy ships or ships outside the fleet?”

“None. Everything went as planned.”

The commander nodded. “This your slave?” he inquired, pointing to Caridad after finishing the inspection. “She’s not listed in the documents.”

“Her? No. She’s a free woman.”

“She doesn’t look like one,” declared the commander, planting himself in front of Caridad, who clung even tighter to her little bundle and her straw hat. “Look at me, Negress!” muttered the officer. “What are you hiding?”

Some of the other officers, who were inspecting the seamen, stopped their work and turned toward the commander and the woman who remained before him with her eyes downcast. The sailors who had let them through came over.

“Nothing. She’s not hiding anything,” answered Don Damián.

“Silence, Father. People who avoid a commander’s eyes are always hiding something.”

“What could this poor wretch be hiding?” insisted the priest. “Caridad, show him your papers.”

The woman rifled through her bundle in search of the documents the ship’s notary had given her, while Don Damián continued talking.

“She embarked in Havana with her master, Don José Hidalgo, who planned to return to his native land before he died but passed away on the voyage, God rest his soul.”

Caridad handed her wrinkled documents to the commander.

“Before he died,” continued Don Damián, “as is customary on His Majesty’s vessels, Don José made a will and ordered that his slave Caridad be freed. There you have the manumission document.”

Caridad Hidalgo
—the notary had written, taking the dead master’s last name—
also known as Cachita; Negro slave the color of ebony, in good health and of strong constitution, with curly black hair and some twenty-five years of age.

“What have you got in that bag?” asked the commander after reading the documents confirming Caridad’s freedom.

She opened up the bundle and showed it to him. An old blanket and a felt jacket … everything she owned. Master had given her the jacket last winter and the blanket two winters back. Hidden among them were several cigars she’d been rationing on the journey after stealing them from Don José.
What if they find them?
she thought, terrified. The commander made a motion to inspect the bundle, but when he saw the old fabric his expression soured.

“Look at me, Negress,” he demanded.

Everyone witnessing the scene saw the trembling that ran through Caridad’s body. She had never looked directly at a white man when addressed.

“She’s afraid,” intervened Don Damián.

“I said look at me.”

“Do it,” pleaded the chaplain.

Caridad lifted her round face with its thick fleshy lips, flattened nose and small brown eyes that tried to look past the commander, toward the city.

The man furrowed his brow and searched, in vain, for her elusive gaze.

“Next!” he said, suddenly giving in, breaking the tension and triggering an avalanche of sailors.

DON DAMIÁN
, with Caridad close on his heels, entered the city through the Sea Gate flanked by two battlemented towers.
The Queen,
the third-rate ship of the line with more than seventy guns they’d sailed in on from Havana, stayed behind in the Trocadero alongside the six merchant ships it had escorted, their holds stuffed with products from the Indies: sugar, tobacco, cacao, ginger, sarsaparilla, indigo, cochineal, silk, pearls, tortoiseshell … silver. The journey was a success and Cádiz had received them with ringing bells. Spain was at war with England; the treasure
fleets, which up until a few years earlier crossed the ocean guarded by ships from the Royal Armada, had ceased operating, so the trade was done with register-ships, private merchant vessels that acquired a royal permit for the voyage. That was why the arrival of the merchandise and the treasure, so needed by the Spanish tax office, had sparked a festive atmosphere in every corner of the city.

When they reached Juego de Pelota Street, having passed the church of Our Lady of Pópulo and the Sea Gate, Don Damián stepped out of the floods of sailors, soldiers and merchants, and stopped, turning toward Caridad after he’d put his trunk down on the ground. “May God be with you and keep you safe, Caridad,” he blessed her.

She didn’t respond. She had pulled her straw hat down to her ears and the chaplain couldn’t see her eyes, but he imagined them focused on the trunk, or on his sandals, or …

“I have things to do, you understand?” he said in an attempt to excuse himself. “Go look for some work. This is a very rich city.”

As he spoke, Don Damián extended his right hand, brushing Caridad’s forearm; then it was he who lowered his gaze for a second. When he looked up he found Caridad’s small brown eyes fixed on him, just as on the nights during the crossing, when after her master’s death he had taken responsibility for the slave and hidden her from the crew by order of the captain. His stomach churned. “I didn’t touch her,” he repeated to himself for the millionth time. He had never laid a finger on her, but Caridad had looked at him with expressionless eyes and he … He hadn’t been able to stop himself masturbating beneath his clothes at the sight of such a splendid female.

Shortly after Don José’s passing, the funeral rite was carried out: they said three prayers for the dead and his corpse was thrown overboard in a sack with two earthenware jugs filled with water tied to the feet. Then the captain ordered that the makeshift cabin be taken down and that the notary inventory the deceased man’s assets. Don José was the only passenger on the flagship, Caridad the only woman aboard.

“Reverend,” said the captain to the priest after giving the notary his instructions, “I am placing you in charge of keeping the Negro woman away from the crew.”

“But I …” Don Damián tried to object.

“It’s not hers, but you can feed her with the food Mr. Hidalgo brought on board,” declared the officer, ignoring his protest.

Don Damián kept Caridad locked up in his tiny cabin, where there was only room for the hammock he hung from one side to the other, which he took down and rolled up during the day. The woman slept on the floor, at his feet, beneath the hammock. The first few nights, the chaplain took refuge in reading the holy books, but gradually his gaze began to follow the oil lamp’s beams that, as if of their own volition, seemed to stray from the pages of his heavy tomes to illuminate the woman who lay curled up so close to him.

He fought against the fantasies that waylaid him when he caught a glimpse of Caridad’s legs that had slipped out from under the blanket that covered her, or of her breasts, rising and falling to the rhythm of her breathing, or of her buttocks. And yet, almost involuntarily, he started to touch himself. Perhaps it was the creaking from the timbers the hammock hung on, perhaps it was the tension gathered in such a small space, but Caridad opened her eyes and all the light from the oil lamp settled inside them. Don Damián felt himself growing red and he remained still for a moment, but his desire multiplied with Caridad’s gaze upon him, the same expressionless gaze with which she now listened to him.

“Heed my words, Caridad,” he insisted. “Look for work.”

Don Damián grabbed the trunk, turned his back and resumed his path.

Why do I feel guilty?
he wondered as he stopped to switch the trunk to his other hand. He could have forced her, he’d said to himself whenever he was tormented by guilt. She was only a slave. Maybe … maybe he wouldn’t have even had to resort to violence. Weren’t all Negro slaves dissolute women? Don José, her master, had admitted in confession that he’d slept with all of his.

“Caridad bore my child,” he revealed, “maybe two—but no, I don’t think so; the second one, that clumsy stupid boy, was as dark as her.”

“Do you regret it?” the priest asked him.

“Having children with the Negro women?” the tobacco farmer replied angrily. “Father, I sold the little half-breeds at a nearby sugar mill owned by priests. They never worried about my sinning soul when they bought them from me.”

Don Damián headed toward the Santa Cruz Cathedral, on the other side of the narrow spit of land on which the walled city was perched, closing off the bay. Before turning on to a side street, he looked back and caught a glimpse of Caridad as the crowd passed: she had moved to one side until her back was up against a wall where she stood immobile, disconnected from the world.

She’ll find a way,
he thought, forcing himself to continue and turn the corner. Cádiz was a rich city where traders and merchants from all over Europe met and money flowed in abundance. She was a free woman and now she had to learn to live in liberty and work. He walked a long way and when he reached a point where he could clearly make out the construction for the new cathedral near the old one, he stopped. What kind of a job could that poor wretch find? She didn’t know how to do anything, except labor on a tobacco plantation; that was where she’d lived since she was ten years old, after English slave traders had bought her for five paltry yards of fabric from the kingdom of the Yoruba in the Gulf of Guinea, in order to resell her in the bustling Cuban market. That was how Don José Hidalgo himself had explained it to the chaplain when Don Damián asked why he’d chosen her to accompany him on the voyage.

“She is strong and desirable,” added the tobacco farmer, winking at him. “And it seems she’s no longer fertile, which is always an advantage once you’re off the plantation. After giving birth to that idiot boy …”

Don José had also told him that he was a widower and had an educated son who’d taken his degree in Madrid, where Don José was headed to live out his last days. In Cuba he’d owned a profitable tobacco plantation in the lowlands near Havana that he worked himself, along with some twenty-odd slaves. Loneliness, old age and the pressure from the sugar growers who wanted to acquire land for their flourishing industry had led him to sell his property and return to his homeland, but the scourge attacked him twenty days into the journey and fed viciously on his weak, elderly state. He had fever, dropsy, mottled skin and bleeding gums, and the doctor declared him a lost cause.

Then, as was mandatory on royal ships,
The Queen’
s captain ordered the notary to go to Don José’s cabin to bear witness to his last wishes.

“I grant my slave Caridad freedom,” whispered the sick man after ordering a few bequests for the Church and arranging for the entirety of his assets to be given to the son he would now never see again.

The woman didn’t even curve her thick lips in a glint of satisfaction at learning she was free, recalled the priest, who had now stopped in the street.

She didn’t say a word!
Don Damián remembered his efforts to hear Caridad amid the hundreds of voices praying at the Sunday masses on deck, or her timid whispers at night, before sleeping, when he forced her to pray. What could that woman work as? The chaplain knew that almost every freed slave ended up working for their former owners for a miserable wage that barely allowed them to cover their necessities, which as slaves they’d been guaranteed. Or they ended up forced to beg for alms in the streets, competing with thousands of mendicants. And those had been born in Spain: they knew the land and its people; some were clever and quick. How could Caridad find her way in a big city like Cádiz?

He sighed and ran his hand several times over his chin and the little hair he had left. Then he turned around, snorted as he lifted the trunk again and prepared to retrace his steps.
What now?
he wondered. He could … he could arrange a job for her in the tobacco factory, she did know about that. “She’s very good with the leaves; she treats them right—affectionately and sweetly—and she knows how to choose the best ones and roll good cigars,” Don José had told him, but that would mean asking for favors and making it known that he … He couldn’t risk Caridad talking about what had happened on the boat. Close to two hundred cigar makers worked in those factory rows, constantly whispering and finding fault with others as they rolled the small Cádiz cigars.

He found Caridad still up against the wall, unmoving, defenseless. A group of unruly youngsters were making fun of her and the people coming and going did nothing to stop them. Don Damián approached just as one of the boys was about to throw a rock at her. “Halt!” he shouted.

Another boy stopped his arm; the young woman removed her hat and lowered her eyes.

CARIDAD DISTANCED
herself from the group of seven passengers who had embarked on the ship about to head upstream along the Guadalquivir River to Seville. Weary, she tried to settle in among a pile of luggage on board. The boat was a sleek single-masted tartan that had arrived in Cádiz with a shipload of valuable oil from the fertile Sevillian lowlands.