The Barefoot Queen (27 page)

Devastated by the unbearable summer heat, city life passed languidly. Those who could had already moved their furnishings, clothes and essentials from the upper floors of their homes to the lower ones, where they tried to fight against the heat and the wind from the east. The rest, who were most of the population, moved closer to either of the Guadalquivir’s banks, the Seville side or the Triana side, where at least they could find a glimmer of life in the people bathing in the river, looking to cool off a little, beneath the watchful gaze of the guards sent there by the city council to avoid the frequent deaths by drowning. The people were whiling away the day when a rumor began to spread through them: the army was taking the city. It wasn’t constables or the chief justice of Seville, but the army! Suddenly, armed soldiers stationed themselves at the thirteen gates and in the two side doors of the capital’s walls and warned those people who were outside the city walls to get inside. Swimmers, merchants, seamen and dock workers, traders, women and children … The crowd hastened to obey the orders of the military men.

“We’re going to close the gates of the city!” shouted corporals and sergeants heading armed detachments.

But beyond the warnings, none of the officers gave any other explanations; the soldiers used their rifles to push away the Sevillians crowded around the gates, asking what was going on. The agitation reached crisis
point when someone shouted that the army had the entire city surrounded. Many looked toward Triana and saw that it was true: there on the other side of the river, they saw people running among the white soldiers’ uniforms, and the pontoon bridge was a throng of horses rushing back and forth, incited by the soldiers.

“What’s going on?”

“Is it war?”

“Are they attacking us?”

But instead of replies the people got shoves and blows—because the soldiers didn’t know why either; they had merely received the order to force the inhabitants inside and close the gates to the city. Only two were to be left open: Arenal and Carne.

“Go home!” shouted the officers. “Go to your homes!”

Various patrol units had been giving the same order on the streets inside Seville and Triana, an order that on that July 30, 1749, was proclaimed through the entire length and breadth of Spain in a meticulous secret military operation devised by the Bishop of Oviedo and Don Gaspar Vázquez Tablada, President of the Council of Castile, and the Marquis of Ensenada, who a few years earlier had toughened the sentences for gypsies arrested outside of their hometown: death. By virtue of that new proclamation of 1749, that same day, the royal troops took every city in the kingdom where they knew gypsies lived.

After a few hours, the gates of Seville had been shut except for the Arenal and Carne gates, which were heavily guarded. Triana had been besieged by the army; the good citizens ran to take refuge in their homes and the pickets stationed themselves strategically on certain streets. That was when the soldiers finally received direct instructions from their superiors: arrest all gypsies as dangerous and despicable persons, regardless of their gender or age, and confiscate all their assets.

Previously they had dispatched the pertinent secret official letters to the Chief Magistrates of all the towns in the kingdom where the census data registered gypsies, so Seville’s chief justice, as the city’s highest-ranking magistrate, had already pointed out to the military authorities the homes and places where they should proceed with the arrests.

As was happening all over Spain, the gypsies were in shock as they witnessed the vile measure being implemented: in Seville they were arrested without opposition, as were the blacksmiths of San Miguel alley
and those who lived on La Cava and the surrounding area in Triana. Those in the settlement of La Cartuja had better luck, however; many of them managed to escape, leaving behind their meager belongings. Two were shot and killed by soldiers as they fled, another was wounded in one leg and a fourth drowned in the river while his wife looked on impotently, his small children wailed and the contemptuous troops did nothing.

Close to 130 gypsy families were arrested in Seville in the massive raid of July 1749.

INSIDE THE
shack, Caridad heard the shouts of army officers rising above the tumult.

“Arrest them all!”

“Don’t let them get away!”

She stopped working Fray Joaquín’s tobacco. Frightened by the commotion of gypsies and soldiers running, the shrieks of children and women and the occasional shot, she got up from the table and rushed toward the door just as Antonio and his wife ran limping in the other direction, helping each other.

“What …?” she tried to ask them.

“Out of the way!” The old man pushed her.

She stood there, frozen, transfixed, watching as the soldiers pounced on women and threatened men with rifles. Many managed to escape and ran fearlessly through the line of soldiers surrounding the settlement. She looked all around for Milagros without success, and saw how Uncle Tomás was distracting a group of soldiers so that one of his sons could flee, taking his family with him. There was no trace of Milagros. Some gypsies escaped by jumping over the roofs of shacks in order to fall behind the monastery’s garden wall and start a frenetic race toward freedom. Antonio and his wife pushed her again as they left the hut. Caridad followed them with her gaze: the old woman was dropping tobacco and cigars that she had stolen. She watched them run with difficulty toward … the soldiers! One of them laughed as he saw them approach, old and bumbling, but his face changed when Antonio brandished the large knife in his hand. A blow with the rifle butt in the old man’s stomach was enough to get him to drop the knife and fall to the floor. The soldier and his two companions laughed as if they considered the fight over just as the old woman dropped
her bag and surprised them, leaping with an astonishing strength and agility born of hatred and rage, her claw-like hands as her only weapon, on the soldier who had hit her husband. The men were slow to react. Caridad saw some furrows of blood on the soldier’s face. They struggled to subdue the old woman.

“What are you doing here?”

Absorbed in what was happening to Antonio and his wife, Caridad hadn’t realized that the operation was almost finished and that the rest of the soldiers were already entering the shacks. The arrested gypsies were in groups on the street and surrounded. She lowered her gaze before the soldier who had addressed her.

“What are you doing here, Negress?” he repeated when Caridad didn’t reply. “Are you a gypsy?” Then he looked her up and down. “No. How could you be a gypsy? Hey!” he shouted to a corporal who was passing by on the street. “What do we do with this one?”

The corporal approached and asked her the same questions. Caridad still didn’t answer or even look at them.

“Why are you in the gypsy settlement? Are you the slave of one of them?” He himself rejected the idea, shaking his head repeatedly. “You ran away from your masters, right? Yes, that’s what it must—”

“I’m free,” Caridad managed to say in a reedy voice.

“Are you sure? Prove it.”

Caridad entered the hut and returned with her bundle, which she rummaged through until she found the documents that the notary on
The Queen
had given to her.

“It’s true.” After examining and handling them, as if he could recognize by touch that which he was unable to read, he accepted them as valid. “What have you got there?”

Caridad handed him the bundle, but just as had happened in the seaport of Cádiz, the soldier stopped looking as soon as his hand came across the rough, worn blanket she used to protect herself from the cold in winter and just weighed up and shook the bundle to see if something inside jingled, but the contents—the blanket, her red clothes, some cigars that Fray Joaquín had given her in payment for her work and the straw hat that was tied to it all—didn’t weigh much or jingle.

“Get out of here!” he shouted at her then. “We’ve got enough problems with this scum.”

Caridad obeyed and started walking toward Triana. She lingered on the street when she passed the arrested gypsies. Was Milagros among them? The soldiers took their weapons and their jewels and beads while a new army, this time of notaries, tried to write down their names and their belongings.

“Whose is this mule?” shouted a soldier with the tether of a scrawny mule in his hand.

“Mine,” screamed one of the gypsies.

“Shut up, liar!” spat out a woman. “That belongs to a laborer from Camas!”

Some gypsies laughed.

How can they laugh?
thought Caridad, astonished, as she continued searching for Milagros among them. She saw Uncle Tomás, and Basilio and Mateo … most of the older Vegas. She also saw Antonio and his wife, hugging each other. But she didn’t see Milagros.

“OK,” said the soldier with the mule, holding his ground, “who does it belong to?”

“To him,” answered someone, pointing to the first gypsy.

“To the guy from Camas,” said another.

“Mine,” was heard from somewhere in the group.

“No, it’s mine,” laughed another voice.

“No, the other one is yours.”

“No, that’s the one that belongs to the guy from Camas.”

“The guy from Camas had two mules?”

“It’s the King’s!” added a young man. “The King’s,” he repeated to the soldier’s exasperation. “It’s the one we save for him to ride when he comes to Triana!”

The gypsies burst into laughter again. Caridad widened her lips in a smile, but her eyes still expressed her concern over Milagros.

“They didn’t arrest her,” shouted Uncle Tomás, imagining what was worrying her. “She’s not here,
morena.
”

“Who’s not here?” rudely interrupted the same corporal who had interrogated Caridad; he’d now come over to the chaos.

Caridad stammered and lowered her eyes.

“The King’s mule, captain,” Tomás then answered with mock seriousness. “Don’t let them trick your excellency: really the mule the guy from Camas has is the King’s.”

“Laugh!” shouted the corporal, addressing all those arrested. “Laugh now, because you won’t be laughing where you’re headed to. I promise you that!” Then he turned to Caridad. “And you, didn’t I tell you to—”

“General,” he was interrupted by a voice from the group, “where we’re headed, can we bring the King’s mule?”

The corporal turned red and, amid the laughter and mocking, Tomás silently urged Caridad to escape.

TRIANA WAS
also seized by the royal army. A large part of the troops were in the San Miguel alley and on Cava Nueva, places with primarily gypsy populations, but there were still patrols going through the streets in case anyone had escaped or hidden in some
payo
’s house. The King had foretold grave consequences for those who helped them, and anonymous denunciations, both founded and unfounded, began as a result of old quarrels between neighbors.

Caridad could only think of one place to go and she headed there: the monastery of preachers at San Jacinto. But the churches and monasteries were also under surveillance by the soldiers. So she tried entering Triana along Castilla Street and passing in front of the church of Our Lady of O. Caridad always carefully watched that sober church: she didn’t know of any Orisha personified by the Virgin of O, but Fray Joaquín had imbued her with the affection that he himself felt for that temple: “It was built exclusively with alms collected by the brotherhood,” he commented to her one day. “That is why she is so beloved in Triana.”

Caridad evaded the patrol of soldiers stationed in front of the main façade of the church, and she heard an officer heatedly arguing with a priest. The same thing was happening in the parish of Santa Ana, and in Sancti Espiritus, and in Remedios, and in Victoria, at the Minims, the Martyrs and San Jacinto. The King had managed to get a papal bull that allowed the soldiers to remove the gypsies who were taking sanctuary, so all those who had fled and sought their salvation in ecclesiastical asylum were being removed, not without vehement arguments with the priests who were defending the privileges of that atavistic institution the gypsies resorted to so often.

The situation at San Jacinto was worse than at the church of the Virgin of O. Given its proximity to the San Miguel alley and to Cava Nueva, there were several gypsies who had taken asylum in that church
before the troops entered. Almost all of the twenty-eight friar preachers who made up the community were huddled together with their prior, determined to impede access into the temple under construction to a lieutenant who kept showing his order from the King. Fray Joaquín soon noticed Caridad’s presence, since her old straw hat stood out amid the crowd waiting to see how the dispute was resolved. The young clergyman left his brothers and ran toward her.

“What happened in the gypsy settlement?” he asked even before reaching her. His features were pinched with worry.

“The soldiers came … They were shooting. They arrested the gypsies …”

“And Milagros?”

His shout attracted people’s attention. Fray Joaquín grabbed Caridad by the arm and pulled her a few paces aside.