The Barefoot Queen (26 page)

“Well, you should do something. The settlement is a rumor mill. Think of your granddaughter …”

“The girl knows we haven’t done anything. I’m sure of that. I would be able to tell.”

And that was true. Milagros, like all the gypsies in the settlement, knew about the deal her grandfather had struck with the old couple, who complained to anyone who’d listen about how little Melchor had paid them to have their bed to share with the
morena.
Who had ever heard of a Negress sleeping in a bed with legs? Milagros couldn’t stand the idea of her grandfather and Cachita … Three days passed before she made up her mind and went in search of Caridad, and found her alone in the hut, working the tobacco.

“You are fornicating with my grandfather!” she rebuked her right from the doorway.

The smile Caridad had greeted her friend with faded on her lips. “No …” she managed to say in her defense.

But the gypsy girl didn’t let her speak. “I haven’t been able to sleep thinking that you two were there: fucking like dogs. You, my friend …! I trusted you.”

“He has not mounted me.”

But Milagros wasn’t listening to her. “Don’t you realize? He’s my grandfather!”

“He has not mounted me,” repeated Caridad.

The girl furrowed her brow, still enraged. “You haven’t …?”

“No.”

Would she have liked him to? That was the question that crossed Caridad’s mind. She enjoyed Melchor’s touch; she felt safe and … did she want him to mount her? Beyond the physical contact, she felt nothing when men did that. Would it be the same with Melchor? As soon as he’d taken his hand off her leg that first night and asked her to sing, Caridad again felt the spell established between them to the rhythm of the Negro songs, their souls united. Would she like him to touch her, to mount her? Perhaps yes … or no. In any case, what would happen afterwards?

Milagros misinterpreted her friend’s silence.

“Forgive me for having doubted you, Cachita,” she apologized.

She didn’t ask again.

Which was why Melchor could maintain to Tomás that his granddaughter knew he wasn’t having sexual relations with Caridad. No explanations had been necessary on any of the many occasions that the gypsy came to see her.

“I’m stealing her from you,” he would announce to Old María when he entered the hut where they were working with herbs; then he would take the girl by the arm, paying no mind to the healer’s complaints, and they would stroll by the riverbank or the Triana lowlands, mostly in silence, Milagros afraid her words would break the spell surrounding her grandfather.

Melchor would also ask her to dance when he heard some handclapping, he would treat her to wine, he would surprise her when she and Caridad hid to smoke at dusk and he would join them—“I don’t have the friar’s cigars,” he would joke—or he would go with her and the old gypsy healer to gather herbs.

“These weeds won’t cure anybody,” grumbled the old woman on those occasions. “Get out of here!” she would shout at Melchor, shooing him off with her hands. “This is woman’s work.”

And he would wink at his granddaughter and move a few paces away until he was beside the gypsies Tomás had ordered to watch over the women. They were already familiar with the healer’s crankiness and bad temper. But before long Melchor would be close to Milagros again.

They were returning from one of those strolls when they heard the news of young Dionisio Vega’s death.

THERE WAS
a place in Triana that Melchor hated; there gathered, all mixed and crowded together, pain, suffering, impotence, rancor, the smell of death, hatred for all of humanity! Even when he was walking around Seville, near the Gold Tower, with the wide Guadalquivir in between, the gypsy turned his face toward the city walls to avoid seeing it. However, that spring dusk, after the dramatic wake for young Dionisio Vega, an irrepressible impulse led him there.

Dionisio hadn’t even been sixteen. Surrounded by the relentless cries of grief from the women of the settlement and the San Miguel alley, all gathered to bid their final farewell to the boy, Melchor remembered the
liveliness and intelligence in his dark penetrating eyes and his always smiling face. He was the grandson of Uncle Basilio, who endured the gathering with composure, trying to keep his gaze from meeting Melchor’s. When, at the end of the ceremony, Melchor headed over to his relative, Basilio accepted his condolences and for the first time in that day faced him. Basilio said nothing but the accusation floated through the settlement:
It’s your fault, Melchor.

And it was. Those two men El Gordo had sent, the ones Ana had told him about, had disappeared. Maybe because they saw that Melchor was never alone, maybe when they saw the security measures. But over time, the vigilance Tomás had ordered ceased. How could they think that El Gordo would forget the offense? Spring came and one day, young Dionisio, with two friends, left the settlement and went onto the fertile plain of Triana in search of a hen to steal or some iron scraps to sell to the blacksmiths. Two men cut them off. The boys were obviously gypsies from their dark faces, their colorful clothes and the trinkets that hung from their ears and around their necks. Not a word was exchanged before one of the men stuck a dress sword through Dionisio’s heart. Then the same man addressed the other boys.

“Tell that coward, El Galeote, that El Fajado does not forgive. Tell him to stop hiding among his people like a frightened woman.”

Stop hiding among his people like a frightened woman.
The boys’ words, repeated thousands of times since they appeared at the settlement with Dionisio’s corpse, stuck like red-hot needles in Melchor’s brain while many of the gypsies avoided his eyes when they passed him.
They think the same thing!
Melchor tortured himself with the thought. And they were right: he had hidden like a coward, like a woman. Was he getting old? Was he like Antonio, who for a mere coin had given up his prized bed so Melchor could sleep with the
morena
? The wake lasted three days, the women howling incessantly, tearing their dresses and scratching at their arms and faces. Melchor kept apart even from Milagros and Ana, who couldn’t keep the recrimination out of their eyes; he even came to believe he saw scorn on his own daughter’s face. Nor did he have the courage to join the parties of gypsies who, fruitlessly, went out in search of El Gordo’s men. Meanwhile he tormented himself over and over with the same question: had he turned into someone like old Antonio, a coward who
could cause the death of boys like Dionisio? Even his own daughter tried to avoid him!

He witnessed the burial, in a nearby open field, crouched among the other gypsies. He saw how the boy’s father, accompanied by Uncle Basilio, put an old guitar in Dionisio’s limp arms. Later, in a heartbroken voice, addressing his son’s lifeless body, he cried out, “Play, son, and if I have done wrong, let your music deafen me; but if I have acted correctly, be still and I will be absolved.”

In the earsplitting silence, Basilio and his son waited a few moments. Later, when they turned their backs on the corpse, the other men buried him along with his guitar. When the earth completely covered the simple pine coffin, Dionisio’s mother went over to the head of it and carefully piled up the dead boy’s few personal possessions: an old shirt, a blanket, a knife, a small silver horn that he had worn around his neck as a child to ward off the evil eye and an old two-cornered hat that the boy had loved and which his mother kissed tenderly. Then she set fire to the pile.

As the flames began to die out and the gypsies leave, Melchor went over to the bonfire. Many stopped and turned their heads to watch El Galeote take off his sky-blue silk jacket, pull the money out of its pockets and put them in his sash, and throw the jacket onto the fire. Then he offered his hand to Uncle Basilio with the heavens as his witness.

Pain, anguish and guilt led his feet to the Triana bank of the Guadalquivir. He needed to be there!

“Where’s he going?” Milagros asked her mother in a whisper.

The two women, and Caridad with them, hastened to follow Melchor as soon as he bowed his head to Basilio with a resigned expression and headed off toward Triana. They did so at a distance, making sure he didn’t see them, not imagining that Melchor wouldn’t have noticed their presence even if they were walking right beside him.

“I think I know,” answered Ana.

She said no more until Grandfather passed the pontoon bridge and the bank and stopped in front of the church of the old Seafarers’ University, where they taught boys about the sea and took care of sick seamen.

“It was there,” whispered the mother, keeping a close eye on the silhouette of her father set against the last lights of the day.

“What was there?” inquired Milagros, with Caridad behind her.

Ana was slow to respond.

“That is the church of Our Lady of Bonaria, the patron saint of seafarers. Look …” She began to address her daughter, then corrected herself to include Caridad as well. “Look at the main entrance. Do you see the uninterrupted balcony looking onto the river above it?” Milagros nodded; Caridad said nothing. “From that balcony, on days of precept, they said mass to the boats in the river; that way the seamen didn’t even have to disembark …”

“And neither did the galley slaves.” Milagros finished the sentence for her.

Ana sighed. “That’s right.”

Melchor continued to stand tall before the door to the church, his head lifted toward the balcony and the river almost licking the heels of his boots.

“Your grandfather never wanted to tell me anything about his years in the galleys, but I know, I overheard some conversations he had with the few others who survived that torture. Bernardo, for example. During the years that Grandfather was at the oars, there was nothing that hurt him more, of all the hardships and disasters he had to endure, than being chained to the galleys listening to mass docked at Triana.”

Because Triana was freedom incarnate and there was nothing more precious to a gypsy. Melchor endured the lashings of the slave driver, suffered thirst and hunger covered in his own excrement and urine, with ulcers all over his body, rowing through exhaustion.
So what?
he wondered in the end.
Wasn’t that the gypsies’ fate, be it on land or on sea? To suffer injustice.

But when he was there before his Triana … when he could smell, practically touch, that air of freedom that naturally drove the gypsies to fight against all the ties that bind, then Melchor ached from all his wounds. How many blasphemies had he repeated in silence against those priests and those sacred images from the other side of freedom? How many times right there, on the river, in front of the retablo of Our Lady of Bonaria flanked by paintings of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, had he cursed his fate? How many times had he sworn that he would never again lift his eyes toward that balcony?

Suddenly, Melchor fell to his knees. Milagros wanted to run toward him, but Ana held her back.

“No. Leave him be.”

“But …” the girl complained. “What is he going to do?”

“Sing,” Caridad whispered behind them, to their surprise.

Ana had never heard her father sing his “galley lament.” He had never sung it once he was free. Which was why, when the first long, doleful wailing flooded the dusk, Ana fell to her knees just like him. Milagros felt all the little hairs on her body stand on end. She had never heard anything similar; not even the heartfelt
deblas
of La Trianera, El Conde’s wife, could compare to that lament. The girl shivered, searched out her mother and rested her hands on her shoulders; Ana grasped them. Melchor sang without words, weaving moans and whimpers that sounded deep, cracked, broken, all tinged with the taste of death and misfortune.

The two gypsies remained cowering inwardly, aware how that profound and indescribable song, marvelous in its melancholy, cut them to the quick. Yet Caridad was smiling. She knew it: she was sure that everything the grandfather was incapable of putting into words he could express through music; like her, like the slaves.

The galley lament lasted several minutes, until Melchor ended it with a final mournful cry that he let die on his lips. The women saw him get up and spit at the chapel before starting to walk downriver, away from the settlement. Mother and daughter remained still for a few more moments, drained.

“Where is he going?” asked Milagros when Melchor vanished into the distance.

“He’s leaving,” Ana managed to choke out, her eyes flooded with tears.

Caridad, with the laments still echoing in her ears, tried to keep the gypsy’s back in sight. Milagros felt her mother’s shoulders convulse with sobs.

“He’ll come back, Mother,” she tried to console her. “He’s not … he’s not carrying anything; he has no jacket, no musket, not even his cane.”

Ana didn’t speak. The murmur of the river’s water in the night surrounded the three women.

“He’ll come back, won’t he, Mother?” added the girl, her voice now cracked.

Caridad perked up her ears. She wanted to hear yes. She needed to know that he would come back!

But Ana didn’t answer.