The Barefoot Queen (20 page)

Caridad kept her gaze lowered, her injured lip burning as she bit it. She thought that … she thought that … She felt Melchor grab her by the chin and force her to lift her head.

“Don’t worry,” he tried to reassure her. “It wasn’t your fault. But you can already get started with twisting the tobacco. When I return I expect to find you’ve multiplied our profit.”

Caridad remained still as his sky-blue jacket disappeared into the night.
When I return,
he had said. He would come back …

“
Morena,
are you coming or not?” urged Tomás.

The group was already far ahead.

When dawn had broken, Caridad crossed the pontoon bridge with Bernardo and three of the Vega nephews pulling the geldings; the tobacco had crossed the river a couple of hours earlier, by boat, with Tomás and the most strapping of the boys. The bridge’s toll collector, like many of the Sevillians and Trianeros who came and went, was surprised to see her covered with the cape in such weather, but what could she do? The man’s brazen expression brought her back to reality. How would she dress from then on? she thought, again feeling the torn fabric brush against her beneath the cape that hid it. Milagros would help her, surely. She smiled, overcome with the desire to see her friend. She quickened her step, thinking of the imminent reencounter and remembering their conversations. She could tell her so many things now. Once she got past the toll collector she found Triana just starting to bustle. The imposing Inquisition Castle was to her right.

“Morena!”

Caridad stopped short and turned her head, confused. She had passed Altozano Plaza and, absorbed in her thoughts, she’d continued straight along the street that led to San Jacinto on her way to the San Miguel alley. However, Bernardo and the gypsies, with the horses, had turned on the street that bordered the castle, heading to the settlement by the Carthusians. They were separated by several paces, and people were crossing between them.

“Go home if you want,” shouted one of the nephews to her, “but remember what Uncle Melchor told you.” The boy mimed rubbing his hands together, with a slight space between them, as if he were twisting tobacco. “Come by the settlement at La Cartuja to work.”

Caridad nodded and watched spellbound as the gypsies raised their hands in farewell and went on their way. People passed by her, some giving her strange looks because of her attire, just like on the bridge.

“You’re going to roast under that cape,
morena,
” said a little boy who passed her.

“Out of the way!” shouted a cart driver behind her.

Caridad jumped to one side and sought refuge beside the wall of a
building.
Go home,
the gypsy had said to her. Did she have a home? She didn’t have a home … or did she? Hadn’t her feet led her toward the San Miguel alley? Milagros was waiting for her there; Melchor lived there. She had spent months in that alley, twisting cigars by night. They fed her and she went to San Jacinto to pray to the Virgin of Candlemas, to visit Oyá, to offer her pieces of tobacco leaf, and they had given her clothes, and she went out with the gypsies, and … and Milagros lived there. She felt a strange, pleasurable sensation travel up her body, a lovely tickle. She had a home, the gypsy had said so, although it was only that wretched space in front of the latrine. She peeled her back off the wall and mingled among the people.

JOSÉ CARMONA
stormed out of the forge as soon as he found out that Caridad was back.

“What are you doing here, Negress?” he shouted at her in the courtyard. “How dare you? You have ruined us! And Melchor? Where is that crazy old man?”

Caridad wasn’t able to answer any of those questions, nor the ones he keep spitting up at her, endlessly. Even if she had wanted, she wouldn’t have been able to: the gypsy was beside himself, the veins on his neck about to burst, sputtering out each word as he shook her.

“Why are you wearing a black cape in the middle of August? What are you hiding, Negress? Take it off!”

Caridad obeyed. Her torn clothes were revealed when she removed the cape.

“Good lord! How can you go around like that, you dirty Negro? Get dressed! Take off those clothes before they arrest us all and put on the ones you came with.”

José kept silent as she stripped off her clothes until she was completely naked, revealing her firm breasts, her voluptuous hips, her flat stomach above a pubis that the gypsy focused his attention on shamelessly. Only her back lined with scars broke the charm of Caridad’s sensual body, which she finally sheathed in her old long shirt, there in the small courtyard with the latrine. The man’s panting, which she thought she had heard as she stood nude before him, turned back into shouts as soon as she was covered with her slave shirt.

“And now get out of here!” José shouted at her. “I don’t want to ever see you again as long as I live!”

She knelt to stuff the torn clothes into her bundle. And Milagros? Where was Milagros? Why hadn’t she come to her aid? On her knees on the floor, she turned her head toward José.
And Milagros?
she wanted to ask him, but the words refused to emerge from her mouth.

“Get lost!”

She left the building with tears in her eyes. What had happened? Milagros’s father had always looked at her like an overseer on the plantation: with scorn. Perhaps if Melchor had been there … She grimaced: she was still a slave; the only thing she had in the world was a piece of paper that said she was free. How could she have got her hopes up over having some place that was like a home? With those thoughts she left behind the smoke and the sound of hammers beating on anvils that filled the alley.

Come by the settlement of La Cartuja to work,
she remembered one of the gypsies had said to her. Why not? Besides, the Vegas would give her news of Milagros.

AFTER ALEJANDRO
’
S
death, Milagros was dragged to the house where the party was being held. She didn’t want to go, but the Vargas boys pulled her there, blindly, bewildered, running through the streets of Triana as if trying to escape a monster on their trail. She managed to get free of their hands and their pushing; she wanted to think, she needed to focus, but all attempts were stifled by the haste and the shouts that broke the night. They killed him! He’s dead! They killed Alejandro!

And with each shout she quickened her pace and she ran as fast as the Vargas boys did, without wanting to, stumbling, getting up with their hurried assistance, stuttering, complaining, always with the image of Alejandro’s bloody corpse treading on her heels.

The party hadn’t ended, but it was winding down. When the boys burst into the home, the count and countess and their guests had left their chairs and were strolling through the garden chatting with the gypsies; the guitars were strumming faintly, as if saying goodbye; no one danced or sang.

“They killed him!”

“They shot him!”

Milagros, behind the Vargas boys, panting, her heart about to burst, closed her eyes when she heard those heartrending words and kept them squeezed tightly shut, hidden behind the hand she used to cover her face, when all the gypsy men, women and children thronged around her.

Questions and answers, all rash, all urgent, swirled around her.

Who? Alejandro! Alejandro? How? Who did it? One of the potters. Dead? A hair-raising howl rose above the other voices.
His mother?
wondered Milagros. The count and countess and their guests, after hearing the first words, hastily left the house. The boys struggled to respond to the thousand questions that rained down on them. The women’s shrieks could be heard all over Triana. Milagros didn’t need to see them: they pulled at their hair until it came out in handfuls, they scratched at themselves and tore their shirts, they shouted at the heavens with their faces contorted in anguish, but meanwhile the men continued their interrogation and she knew that at some point …

“Why? Why did you go to the potters’ quarter?” asked one of them.

“I told you not to do it.”

Her mother’s recrimination, whispered in her ear with icy breath, kept her from hearing the answer, but she caught the questions that followed.

“Milagros? El Galeote’s granddaughter?”

“Why?”

Milagros tried not to heave.

“Open your eyes!” muttered her mother as she elbowed her in the ribs. “Face up to what you’ve done!”

The girl uncovered her face to find that she had become the focus of all eyes, her father’s serious, barbed gaze among them.

“Why did Milagros take you to the potters’ quarter?”

“To settle a score with someone who had forced himself on a woman,” answered the eldest Vargas.

Even some of the hysterically screaming women were suddenly quiet. A gypsy woman had been raped? That was the worst offense a
payo
could commit against them. The boy who had answered sensed the misunderstanding that his words had provoked.

“No … it wasn’t a gypsy woman,” he clarified.

The questions came tumbling out again. “Why? What did you care if she wasn’t a gypsy? What were you hoping to achieve—you’re just
boys
?” Several of them, however, were asking the same question. “What woman?”

“The Vega grandfather’s Negro woman.”

Milagros felt herself fainting. The silence with which the gypsies took in the revelation stretched out for several seconds, and she saw her father heading toward her.

“You—willful idiot!” he insulted her, and gave her a look, his eyes shot through with blood. “You can’t even imagine the consequences of what you’ve done.”

From that point on, the gypsies argued heatedly amongst themselves, but not for long: after a few minutes, several of the Vargas men left crying out for revenge with their knives already in their hands and accompanied by the oldest of the boys.

They didn’t find the potter or his son; they had fled, leaving the workshop open. In front of the open doors lay a large puddle of blood and Alejandro’s destroyed corpse. A couple of gypsies searched the building, others grabbed the boy’s body and headed toward the San Miguel alley, and the rest remained standing in the street, facing the terrified gazes that came from the rest of the houses.

Someone handed a lit torch to Alejandro’s father, who entered the workshop and threw it onto the dry firewood prepared for the ovens that would never be used again. The fire was soon blazing.

“Tell that son of a bitch child-killer,” he then shouted from the middle of the street, diabolically illuminated by the tongues of fire that began to rise from the building, “that there is no place in Spain where he can hide from the vengeance of the Vargas family!”

When the gypsies left, the potters poured out onto the street with all kinds of buckets and containers filled with water to tame the fire that threatened to spread to the surrounding houses; no local magistrate, no constables, no patrols showed up in the neighborhood that night.

RAFAEL GARCÍA
, El Conde, seated in the tallest chair with the other members in a circle around him, presided over the council of elders charged with dealing with Alejandro’s death. Among the parade of witnesses and accusers that came before the gypsy tribunal, El Conde ran his gaze over the courtyard packed with gypsies despite the twisted pieces
of iron stored there; then he looked up at the upper floors, on whose railings, with clothes hung out to dry and pots of wilted flowers, many more jostled to follow the trial from the adjacent halls that opened onto the courtyard. That was the gypsy courtroom, the only one that should judge the members of their race according to gypsy law. Rafael García, as representative of the community, had been forced to argue with governors and justices about Alejandro’s death. The potter and his son had fled. The gypsies had passed a sentence of death on him, and the order to execute it if anyone found him had been spread by the various families. However, rumors of what had happened also spread throughout Triana, and El Conde had to fight with the authorities to get them to forget about the matter; no
payo
had reported the altercation.

The Vargas family attacked Milagros mercilessly before the elders’ council. She shouldn’t have put a gypsy boy’s life in danger over a simple Negro, they accused her; she had tried to take advantage of the gypsy people to benefit a
paya,
they shouted; she hadn’t asked her elders for permission to take revenge. And what if Alejandro had killed the potter? All the gypsies would have suffered for it!

The Carmonas found no arguments to defend her. Without Melchor or Tomás (who was out on a smuggling run), the Vegas designated Uncle Basilio to convince the elders, although his speech faded into stammering when he realized how little influence the gypsies from the settlement of La Cartuja had in a council dominated by blacksmiths. The members of the other families supported the Vargas family. The father of the girl, standing behind the elders like many other men, calmly witnessed a trial that extended throughout an endless evening; her mother, unable to submit herself to such an ordeal, waited along with other members of her family in the San Miguel alley, at the door to the cluster of apartments where El Conde lived and in whose courtyard the council meeting was being held. Ana withstood the passing hours with her face clenched and tense, trying to hide her true feelings. Milagros was confined to the house.

Rafael García listened to the opinion of what seemed to be the last witness while sprawled out in his chair, occasionally sketching a half-smile with his lips. Melchor’s granddaughter, the thing the old man loved most in the world. El Galeote wouldn’t be able to blame him. All the families agreed; it wouldn’t even be he who’d have to suggest the punishment; she would be expelled, undoubtedly, and with her …

A commotion at the entrance to the courtyard where they were gathered interrupted his thoughts. The man who was speaking fell silent. Attention centered on the two boys who stood watch and tried to keep the curious out.

“What’s happening?” shouted El Conde.

“Old María Vega, the healer,” explained one of the gypsies who was closest to the door. “She wants to come in.”